How 4 Activists at Berkeley Helped Get an Undocumented Student Out of Detainment

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On New Year’s Eve, Juan A. Prieto was celebrating with his family. They had spent the whole day cooking together, the way his family typically rings in the new year. This year was an exception. They had planned to go to the Embarcadero, on San Francisco’s waterfront, to see fireworks.

They never made it.

High spirits and New Year’s Day celebration plans were shattered at 3 p.m. with a Facebook post that said an undocumented student at the University of California at Berkeley had been arrested by Border Patrol agents on December 30 for overstaying his childhood visa.

Luis Mora and his girlfriend, Jaleen Udarbe, were headed home from a party when they missed a turn and ended up at an immigration checkpoint, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. He was detained in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Otay Mesa Detention Center, in San Diego.

Mr. Prieto, who is also undocumented, graduated from Berkeley last May. He said the news silenced his family’s evening with the reminder that because they are undocumented, they are disposable. But the silence was broken by a slew of messages sent to and from his phone to help free Mr. Mora.

“I went on autopilot,” Mr. Prieto said. “Everything that I did needed to be done to get him free, and I couldn’t think of anything else but Luis’s liberation.”

Mr. Prieto works with Stiles Hall, a nonprofit community-service group, as an adviser to student organizers. His tasks include helping them devise campaigns on social issues. Most of the messages he received on New Year’s Eve were from Valeria Suarez, a student at Berkeley and co-chair of RISE, a campus group that aims to support undocumented students.

Members of RISE contacted Ms. Udarbe, who provided information about Mr. Mora’s immigration status and his arrest. They connected him with Prerna Lal, a lawyer at the Undocumented Student Program at Berkeley.

With Mr. Mora’s permission, the next step in the fight for his release was to make it public.

When news of his detainment broke, the four students who would run the campaign for his release were scattered across California for winter break. They never met in person, but that wasn’t necessary to mobilize the digital world.

Within three days, the team had begun a social-media campaign that received national attention with the hashtag #FreeLuis. They urged supporters to call the detention facility on Mr. Mora’s behalf. They collected letters of support from students, community members, California legislators, and university faculty and staff members and administrators. Supporters included the actress Alyssa Milano.

The organizers compiled a packet with 135 letters of support and raised $14,843 to pay for his release on bond.

Sense of Urgency

After 19 days in custody and a bond hearing, Mr. Mora was released on a bond of $1,500.

In detention, Mr. Mora’s biggest concern, his lawyer said, was missing class during his second semester at Berkeley. A political-science major, he spent the first day of classes in the long-term ICE detention center.

Before being transferred there, he spent four days in a Border Patrol temporary holding cell. The conditions were “horrifying”, he told the Union-Tribune. The cell was called a hielera, or icebox, by those within.

Agents at the facility called him “f---face” and “exotic,” the newspaper reported. Two toilets and one working shower were used by about 60 people, who were not given shampoo or toothpaste.

“They refer to us as bodies — ‘How many bodies do you got?’ — as if we were deceased,” Mr. Mora told the newspaper. “You can be alive. You can be a human being, and they will call you a body. It’s shameful.”

Dehumanizing experiences in such facilities were a motivating factor for the sense of urgency to liberate the detained student, Mr. Prieto said.

Ms. Suarez, a leader of the effort, says the organizers know about the conditions because of their involvement with detainment cases in the community.

“Going through the reality of it forces you to know those things,” Mr. Prieto said.

Ms. Suarez, too, is undocumented. She was 16 years old when she came to the United States, leaving behind her parents in Peru.

Mr. Mora, 20, was born in Colombia and came to the United States from Ecuador at the age of 11.

Neither of them qualified for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — DACA — because of when they entered the United States.

At Berkeley, Mr. Prieto said, undocumented students, like Ms. Suarez and Mr. Mora, often fall through the cracks — without eligibility for either DACA or AB 540, a California law that allows undocumented students to pay lower in-state tuition and to qualify for grants.

“When you talk about undocumented students in higher education, there’s this protected category that Dreamers fall into,” said Meng L. So, director of the university’s Undocumented Student Program. “It’s about those who made it to higher education who are worthy of the protection. But the remaining 11 million undocumented people aren’t.”

‘I Didn’t Question It’

Mr. Prieto is part of the protected group as a DACA recipient. He crossed the border from Mexico when he was 8 years old. The only steady income in his town were in foreign-owned maquiladoras, or manufacturing warehouses, offering dollar-a-day wages.

Many people, he said, turned to selling drugs. “My neighborhood became a battleground for a war on drugs,” he said. “There was a lot of violence and police presence, police militarization, and my mom felt that if we stayed there any longer, we would get caught up in it.”

Mr. Prieto used someone else’s name to cross the border to safety in the United States, he said. He doesn’t remember the name he used, but said he remembers not understanding what was happening.

“I just knew that what she was telling me to do was the right thing to do,” he said of his mother. “I felt it in her voice, in her embrace, and I didn’t question it.”

His family landed in Southern California. Years later he applied for DACA while in community college. His only guidance was news from Spanish-language TV channels and online forums where undocumented students shared their experiences with applying.

When he enrolled at Berkeley, Mr. Prieto said, the conversation was different. Undocumented students would fight for, visibility, funds, legal resources, and space on campus. “The fight was much smaller than what RISE is fighting for now,” he said.

The stakes are high, he said, as indicated by Mr. Mora’s detainment.

Psychological trauma among undocumented students has increased, Mr. So said, since the inauguration of President Trump, who campaigned on a promise to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Instead of worrying about school and class, he said, they are “worried about whether they’re going to be detained, deported, or if their mom or dad will be deported.”

A lot of undocumented students are the oldest in their families and the first ones to go to college, Mr. So said. They have to create contingency plans in case their parents are deported. They think about who is going to be the guardian of their younger siblings, take care of the car payment, pay rent, or make the mortgage payment.

“We continuously say we are undocumented first,” said Mr. Prieto, “and then we are students.”

Mr. Mora’s detainment is an opportunity for people at Berkeley to explore what policies and protocols they need to change, Mr. So said.

“His case could be the reason for us to improve, and in the worst-case scenario of this repeating, we will be a lot wiser, efficient and effective in advocating for their release,” he said.

The goal, Mr. So said, is to expand the effort beyond Berkeley to other campuses across California. “Undocumented students don’t just go here,” he said.