MIMS Students Volunteer for Fundacion Caminante Cultural

In October of 2021, an organization called Fundacion Caminante Cultural reached out to Professor Bill Hing because they needed volunteers to help them with their long list of recently arrived asylum seekers in ICE custody. Many of these asylum seekers needed to prepare themselves for their upcoming Credible Fear Interviews (CFI’s) but had no access to anyone to help them prepare. Professor Hing then trained and worked with some students from MIMS Cohort 6 to fill in some of the Fundacion’s needs.

With the CFI training provided, students who volunteered were able to find out what each individual’s situation was and prepare them for either their first or second CFI. Many of the people we helped had similar stories. Most were in custody at the La Salle Detention Facility in Louisiana. We noticed the information being provided to them and the resources they had available were close to none. In our program, we learn about the injustices, discriminatory, and xenophobic policies that affect asylum seekers, but this experience further emphasized to our class that breaking down these barriers requires more advocacy, volunteer work, and collaboration between organizations.

Here is what some students had to say about their volunteer experience:

Ricardo Velazquez: I found this experience to be very humanizing, as we were able to be a resource to folks who needed someone to train them for their upcoming interviews. This type of work is important for communities across the country because no human deserves to be incarcerated for seeking asylum.

Linda Urueña Mariño: I learned a lot from this experience as I recognized that there are enormous irregularities in the way that immigrants are being treated and the law is not being fully respected in the way their cases are managed. Also, their rights are disrespected, they are being revictimized, and their lives are put in danger as they are returned to their countries where they were threatened. Now I feel more motivated to work in defense of immigrants because thanks to this experience I understand that those situations must be denounced and evidence must be collected thoroughly to raise more awareness of what is happening in states like Louisiana and Mississippi.

Augusto Rivero: This experience emphasized for me that incarcerated undocumented humans living in cages and their families in the shadows-is a direct consequence of policies that strip freedom, curtailing identities, education, monetary transactions, health, and movement-in a more insidious way, these policies, bore into the subconscious of the migrant. Living undocumented and imprisoned in the United States morphs the psyche into believing and convincing itself of not belonging, thus leaving the person in a stateless state of mind.