Young Activists Use Art to Fight for the DREAM Act Favorite 

The federal DREAM Act is back. This week Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the longtime champion of the bill, chaired the first ever Senate hearing on the narrow legalization effort that would allow a select population of undocumented youth a pathway toward citizenship.

Though the bill has been around for a full decade, enjoyed bipartisan support, and even passed the House in a historic vote last December, it fell five votes short of a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate.

The immigrant youth movement continues to push aggressively for the DREAM Act and has begun using its considerable muscle to fight back against anti-immigrant state legislation. This week six high school students in Georgia were arrested for civil disobedience while protesting HB 87, Georgia’s new anti-immigrant state law that goes into effect today.

And in the meantime, artists have been documenting the movement and using their work to show solidarity with the ongoing struggle of undocumented immigrant youth to stay in the country. This artwork was created by a group of political artists, including Im:Arte, a progressive artists’ collective, the photographer and comics artist Julio Salgado and photographer Pocho-1. Earlier in June, UCLA held an art show, “Intersecting Realities: Visions of Immigrant Narratives,” to celebrate this work and honor the lives of two DREAMers, Tam Tran and Cinthia Felix, who were tragically killed last year.

By: Stokely Baksh, Julianne Hing