What: Stand With Carimer, DACA student targeted by ICE
When: Tues., May 9, 8:30am
Where: outside Federal Building, 970 Broad St., Newark
Carimer
Andujar, a 21-year-old Rutgers junior, has been ordered to appear at
the NJ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters at the
Federal Building in Newark, 970 Broad St., Tuesday, May 9, 9am for a
mandatory meeting with a deportation officer. ICE has provided no
explanation for this meeting with Carimer, a law-abiding social justice
activist and engineering major who is president of UndocuRutgers, an
advocacy organization for hundreds of undocumented students at the State
University of New Jersey. Carimer is working closely with the faculty
union, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, to turn out mass support outside the Federal
Building on May 9 at 8:30am.
Though
Carimer has dutifully filed all paperwork to renew her Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, it expired on April 28, leaving
her vulnerable to the possibility of detention or even deportation.
Carimer
came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic with her family at the age
of four. "No one can tell me that this is not my home and that I don't
belong here,” she told an overflow crowd of 150 students and faculty who
gathered at the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union office for an emergency response
meeting on April 25th. The faculty union and student
activists at Rutgers are mobilizing a #StandWithCarimer solidarity
campaign and mass turnout for her May 9th meeting outside the Federal
Building at 970 Broad St.
Rutgers
AAUP-AFT president David Hughes is concerned that Carimer is being
targeted by ICE for her activism against President Trump’s immigration
and other policies. “The Trump administration is trying to come between
faculty and students, and between students and their own education, and
we don’t accept that,” he said. “That attack on Carimer is an anathema
to the value of Rutgers and the value of higher education altogether, so
we are saying that in order to deport Carimer they are going to have to
come through the faculty, obviously come through the students too.”
Days
after Trump was elected president in November 2016, more than 2,000
students and faculty at Rutgers University walked out of class to demand
the school become a sanctuary campus, and Carimer was among those
leading the largest protest the campus had experienced in decades. Two
months after the walkout for sanctuary, Carimer stood alongside Arab
and Muslim students and professors at another mass rally and march,
demanding "No ban. No wall."
"There
is no other reason for requesting me to speak with a deportation
officer," Carimer said. "The only difference between me and other DACA
students would be that I am outspoken."
Please come Stand with Carimer if you can, Tuesday, May 9, 8:30am, 970 Broad Street, Newark.
