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Losing Paradise… Perder el Paraíso

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I’ll be off these next couple of weeks, a bit of repose after a long haul.

Losing Paradise
Perder el Paraíso (Losing Paradise) by Tomás Sánchez, Cuban painter and engraver
https://tomassanchez.net/eng/work/paintings

But we won the asylum case for a young refugee mom with two children from Honduras, so I think I can take a little break before beginning again on a new case: a mother with two children who escaped from the Guatemala/El Salvador border. Her husband and brother-in-law were killed, and themaras — the gangs — tried to kill her son too, but their dog began to bark and saved him.

The maras ran off…

But then the family got here asking for asylum, thinking our government would help after the horrors they had endured. Instead, they were split up and the young son was put in detention hell hole. The entire family is now waiting deportation orders, besides dealing with loan sharking, of course.

Did I tell you how the young man got out of jail? It was to the tune of a $15,000 bond, set why, for what crime, you might ask? Of course he could not pay such an exorbitant fee, but when ICE threatened immediate deportation, he was so frightened, he took a shady deal from a For Profit mercenary working with ICE…

In any case, there’s that old adage that we do not know what we have until it’s gone. So look around you at your freedoms and cherish them please. Take care of them, and help others who aren’t so lucky…

I will be back in a few weeks, with batteries recharged!

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About Ana Maria Fores Tamayo

Ana Maria Fores Tamayo is ABD in Comparative Literature from New York University, though she presently lives in Texas. She never completed her Ph.D. because motherhood got in the way: tenure and parenting do not mix. Thus she switched fields and worked in academic publishing for many years. She missed academia, however, and decided to return, only to find the Ivory Tower inhospitable to most educators. It did not take her long to take up their cause, beginning a petition for adjunct faculty, now with over 10,000 signatures. This grew into a Facebook forum for like-minded individuals to connect and organize. The past few years, Fores Tamayo expanded her work to reach out to those rendered invisible. She is trying to raise awareness of these marginalized peoples in order to erase borders. Her labor naturally grew from her work with students: DREAMers, undocumented students, and eventually asylum seekers from Mexico and Central America. Although this is heart-wrenching work, it is at the same time quite satisfying, being able to help others one to one. Working with diverse populations too, she is trying to make sure the disenfranchised become strong and have their voices heard. Her work can be seen in the Dallas/Fort Worth Refugee Support Network.

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