Editor,
It has been over a month of bad news for me.
I have always tried to be exceptional in my school work. I started off as a psychology major and during my second year I decided to start working on a minor in statistics because I want to pursue graduate education.
Aside from trying my best in all my classes, I am currently working as a research assistant in a laboratory and enrolled in El Puente research fellowship. I am also part of the Psychology Honors Program, where I have been working on writing a thesis which I hope to finish sometime in 2018.
With so much on my plate I also make time to do community organizing, activism, and advocating for immigrant rights.
All of these things are very important to me because I am an undocumented immigrant. I feel like succeeding in school is the only way I can give meaning to the sacrifice me and my family made when we came here. My parents had to say bye to everyone in our country of origin not knowing when they would see them again. I will not be able to see the city I was born in until there is a major change in the U.S. immigration law and I am allowed to go back.
I feel the need of organizing and being politically active because me and my family are at risk of deportation every day. These issues that come with anti-immigrant rhetoric are not something I have the privilege to not think about.
This semester feels like I have hit a wall. It all started the day that the new president was inaugurated. When I had to look my parents in the eyes and tell them we were going to be okay, just to calm them down. When I had to listen to my DACA-mented cousin as he cried and told me that he would have to drop out of grad school if DACA gets shut down. When I started seeing the faces of community members, desperate for me to answer, ‘what can we do to protect ourselves?’
Bad news followed quickly during the next few days. The Muslim ban, the construction of the pipelines, the wall, the raids. One after another they kept coming, and even though some of these issues do not affect me personally, I could see the damage they had on my peers. I witnessed how the new administration was becoming more and more powerful and was normalizing the hate against immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ, and against me.
Just a week after the inauguration I found myself protesting at the Milo (Yiannopoulos) event. That is the day when I knew that what was happening nationally was having implications locally. I sat there along with fellow students to listen to a man that does not see me as a complete human being, that labeled me as a criminal and an economic burden. I saw the phone number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on the screen as this man encouraged my fellow students to “purge their local illegals,” to call ICE on me. I have come out as undocumented on different spaces and several media outlets, so any of them could know. Our campus was one of the few places where I felt safe — but not anymore.
The bad news continued. Immigration raids started to happen in Albuquerque. I had to sit down with my parents to draft an emergency plan in case one of us gets deported. I had to educate undocumented families about their civil rights in case ICE tried to target them. I had to help identifying false rumors of ICE raids and real ICE raids to warn my community without causing unreasonable fear.
All of this while going to school.
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I take a look to the news while I am trying to do homework and I see a story about a leaked memo with the intention of deploying the National Guard to round my people up. While having lunch in the SUB, I found out about other immigrant activists who are being deported. I hear about signed executive orders to increase ICE forces while studying in Zimmerman.
Just today as I arrived to school I read a Daily Lobo piece saying that ASUNM is funding two more speakers that are similar to Milo. I can’t take this anymore.
It has been over a month of bad news. We are still in the first half of the semester and I already feel like I will fail most of my classes. I can barely be present at the lab I work in, and I am considering dropping my thesis so I can graduate faster to minimize the risk of being deported before graduating. Because how could I actually keep up with all this work when I have to worry about ICE every single minute?
When I cannot sleep because I have nightmares of my parents being deported. When I do not trust my classmates because I feel like one of them could call ICE on me. When I feel completely alone at school. When I have to worry about being arrested on campus or suffering academic consequences if I keep protesting or speaking out.
How do I explain this to my teachers? That my lack of effort in their assignments is not because I do not care about their classes, but because I cannot focus during their lectures. I can only focus on surviving. If my GPA drops enough to lose my scholarship I am not sure how I will pay for school. At this point I do not even know if I want to keep trying to graduate.
This constant bad news has been toxic to me. The University’s indifference is just making it worse. I just wish UNM would recognize what marginalized students are going through. I wish your messages of solidarity for immigrants would include undocumented students but they are only for the international students. I wish more people would show that they care and be active about it.
The bad news will keep coming, so can we unite for once as the UNM community and take care of each other? Let’s educate ourselves about the issues that every Muslim, black, LGBTQ, Native American, undocumented student will go through, and be there for them.
We cannot stop the national government from terrorizing our communities, but we can create solidarity locally by calling out speakers and organizations that want to spread hate rhetoric, by being involved, investing in resources for marginalized students, creating institutional change to protect all students, and developing much needed empathy.
Felipe Rodriguez
Undergraduate student
Department of Psychology
