Amped Students Participate in Largest Immigrant Youth-Led Congress

Thanks to a generous donation by the Foundation for Louisiana, Amped students Hector and Nahomy from McKinley Senior High as well as students from Glen Oaks High School participated in the United We Dream Congress in Miami, FL, the largest youth and undocumented immigrant-led conference in the country. More than 1,500 people attended from over 25 states, reservations, and foreign countries.

Hector and Nahomy attended panels, performances, and community-organizing panels on a wide variety of topics such as the school-to-deportation pipeline, reproductive justice, and environmental racism. For both students, this event represented their first experience of a such a large-scale activist event by and for immigrant populations. Nahomy told me, “We had so many resources...we could talk about any topic and someone knew about it. There are issues I didn’t know how to talk about in school, that were discussed here. We had so many common experiences.” She added that she wanted to influence more people to come at the Congress in 2020 because she felt being an immigrant and/or a person of color shouldn’t make you scared of organizing and finding your voice.

Hector echoed this feeling when he said that he was inspired by the speakers’ incentive to “live unafraid” (UWD’s motto) regardless of immigration status. He said, “I was born in the US but my parents weren’t, and I have friends that weren’t born here, so I can relate to what was being told here. The speakers said ‘We’re not going to go away’ and I feel like it’s true--you can try to kick out undocumented people but people are going to keep coming back. I felt empowered by that message--no matter where you come from, you always have voice, and if you use it you can accomplish whatever you want. I want people to do something with their lives.”

The students also participated in a canvassing effort to encourage Floridians to vote and to educate people on Amendment 4, which would restore the right to vote to felons who have completed their sentences--or 1.6 million voters, nearly 10% of the population in Florida. Hector and Nahomy thought the experience was challenging and weird, because it involved knocking on strangers’ doors, but they also felt like it is important for voters to be educated on such important issues, and they are thinking about ways to implement such techniques in Baton Rouge.

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