Education, Culture, Art, economy

WHAT INFORMED, SAVVY WOMEN NEED TO KNOW NOW
Allegra Love is crisscrossing the Southwest to make sure undocumented children have a chance at a legal future in the only home they’ve ever known

By HEATHER HANSMAN
Allegra Love can change an immigrant’s life in under an hour. When she rides into a town like Farmington, New Mexico, in her turquoise RV turned mobile legal clinic, she and her staff at the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, the outreach program she founded in 2015 to provide free representation to young undocumented immigrants, can quickly determine if someone is eligible for legal residency and get the paperwork rolling. Even half a day in a new town can make a big impact. “There’s nothing like it in the country,” Love, 36, says of the mobile clinic.

When President Donald Trump began his sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration in January, Love and her team decided to spend a lot of 2017 in the RV traveling to “remote and afraid” immigrant communities, which often lack legal resources, around New Mexico and in neighboring states. Love wants to be sure that residents who came here illegally don’t lose their chance to stay, legally, because they don’t have access to a lawyer. It can be simple, but it takes meeting immigrants where they are, and in the new, deportation-focused administration, it’s work that’s more vital and time-sensitive than ever. “You’ve got to think, What would need to be happening for
you to leave your country? What would your neighborhood have to look like?” Love says. “I don’t think Americans know the conditions people are in ... for me, it was something I couldn’t ethically ignore.” It all started in 2007 when Love was teaching third grade in a bilingual classroom in Santa Fe. One day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials conducted a series of raids around the city. Love’s school wasn’t targeted, but the next day, only three students out of her class of 20 showed up—the rest had stayed home, worried about additional raids. Until then, Love hadn’t realized how many of her students lived in fear that they or their loved ones might be deported. “Deportation is a neat legal word,” Love says. “But I don’t think people connect it with tearing families apart.”

Love felt she had to act, so before long she quit her job and enrolled in law school at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “It seemed like the most logical thing I could do to help,” she says. “Being a lawyer is cool, because all of a sudden, people listen to you in ways they didn’t before.”

A year after Love finished law school, in June 2012, President Barack Obama issued an executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows undocumented immigrants who entered the U. S. before they were 16 years old (known as “dreamers”), and who were under the age of 31