Editor's Note: More than 1,200 women from 70 organizations are fasting in 35 states for immigration reform that keeps families together and treats women fairly this month. The month of fasting will culminate April 7-9th, 2014 when 100 women will fast in DC for 48 hours.
Click here to sign the petition urging Speaker Boehner to meet with these courageous women in DC in April.
My name is Dani Moore, and I’m fasting today as a mother, a granddaughter, and as someone active in North Carolina’s immigrants’ rights movement. It is fitting that we are fasting on a holiday celebrating Irish culture and history, since we often do not realize the migration stories of today are not so different than those of past generations.
Both of my grandmothers had roots in Ireland and England, and I celebrate their lives on this St. Patrick's Day. As we work for common sense immigration reform in 2014, let us remember our history as a nation of immigrants. It is a story that included Irish immigrants, many of whom spoke Gaelic and learned English, coming to the American continent seeking a better life.
There are echoes of those past generations in today's immigrant stories. "No Irish Need Apply," yet today, the United States is deporting record numbers of immigrants. I cannot imagine what it would be like to face years of separation from my 11-year-old son. To have missed his first words, or his first day of Kindergarten.
I know it is a privilege to be able to live with him every day, with a roof over our head, clean clothes, plenty to eat, and to be able to watch him grow and build our lives together. There are too many families that I know in North Carolina who don’t have this opportunity. Mothers and daughters who are separated by a broken immigration system, or a border fence that has become overly militarized. Parents who are living with the fear of deportation every time they leave the house to pick up their children from school.
We urge Congress to act. We urge President Obama to use his discretion to slow the deportation machinery.
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