Activities will also take place in Mexico City during the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama in the first week of May. The actions will be part of the Migrant Action Days campaign, which will take place from April 16 to May 5, which includes the distribution of videos and photographs, organizers said Tuesday.
In late April, Alejandro Solalinde, the priest and advocate for the rights of immigrants, will make a tour of several U.S. cities, accompanied by relatives of migrants who have been victims of violence, with the intent of arriving in Washington DC to sensitize the authorities of that country regarding changes to immigration policies, said Marco Castillo, president of the Popular Assembly of Migrant Families of Mexico (APOFAM), in a telephone interview with CNNMéxico.
The Solalinde tour will take place while the U.S. Congress discusses immigration reform legislation that could resolve the legal status of millions of people in that country. Castillo claims that 6,600,000 Mexicans would benefit from immigration reform that regularizes their legal status.
"We know the figures say that about a million and a half people have been deported (from the U.S.) in the last five or six years," said Castillo.He also maintains that there are some 30 million Mexicans who have immediate family members in the U.S. whom they have not seen because they have no documents to cross the border legally.
"That is the scale of the humanitarian crisis that we are living in the region," he added.On April 23 there will be a forum in the Mexican Senate where an initiative will be presented, the Ombudsman Act, which seeks to create an institution to review Mexico's immigration policy and provide mechanisms to allow groups or individuals to sue the State criminally when it doesn't apply public policies that protect the rights of immigrants, said the president of APOFAM.
"We believe that it is useless to ask for more programs if there are no mechanisms to make them enforceable." Castillo said.The organizers of the conference are also calling on citizens to mobilize for Obama's visit in order to "give dignity" to the immigrants in the U.S.
"We call on all individuals, organizations and social movements to build together a demonstration for May 3 in Mexico City (...) so that human mobility is never again punished," read the actress Ilse Salas during the press conference presenting the actions.In December 2012, individuals and organizations participating in the Migrant Action Day signed the Declaration for the Rights of Migrants, which contains seven demands, including immediately stopping the criminalization and detention of migrants, stopping criminalizing migrant shelters and houses, and creating a Latin American transmigrant visa to allow free movement of people in the region, among others.
Participants in the press conference for the Migrant Action Days included the Foundation for Democracy, the Popular Assembly of Migrant Families, Fundar (a center for public policy analysis and research), the International Coalition Against Detention, poet and activist Javier Sicilia, actor Daniel Giménez Cacho and singer Roco, among others. Spanish original