Ju Hong’s issue strikes close to home…
Every month, we join immigrant advocates, immigration lawyers, and community volunteers at Swap Meet Justice to help people fill out government forms for citizenship, DACA and green cards renewals, voter registration and selective service.
We are always impressed by our DACA applicants – this group of 800,000 hardworking and well-educated young people brought here as children are estimated to add $460.3 billion in national gross domestic product to the U.S. over the next decade and over 200,000 were essential workers during the worst of the COVID pandemic. These are exactly the people we want as citizens, but our politicians can’t seem to summon the political will to give them a pathway to that status. To continue their life in the only country they call home, they must reapply every two years, for a fee of $495, or face deportation.
Therefore, it makes us sick to learn that even when our DACA applicants do everything right, they are still vulnerable to being taken from their families, due to nothing more that a paperwork backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). “As of March 31, USCIS had a backlog of more than 55,000 pending first-time DACA applications,” in addition to over 44,000 renewal requests. As of March 2021: Less than 800 — or roughly 1.5% of applicants in that period — of 50,000 received between January and March 2021 have been approved.”
So we’re asking everyone to join in and help this one person – Ju Hong, and hope that the strength of our combined voices clears a path for all the others.
(Video of him here from (2012))
“My name is Ju Hong. I serve on Immigrants Rising’s Leadership Council, and I am now facing a major crisis. I need your help.
Continue reading “Becoming a citizen shouldn’t be this hard. Let’s break the DACA logjam for this guy.”
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 