Last year, we highlighted SFDP attorney and native El Pasoan Hector Ruiz about their work with LGBTQ asylum-seekers. This year we shift the focus to SFDP legal assistant and recent UTEP graduate Nora Gonzalez. Nora has written a short blog post about her motivation to assist migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, as well as her experience at SFDP thus far. Here is an excerpt from Nora’s blog:

“…My love for El Paso was blind until my early days at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) when I began to see that not everyone shared the same appreciation for my city. During the 2016 presidential election, the border became a hot topic. It felt like the rest of the country began to chant “Build that Wall”, while most of us on the ground knew it would cause more harm than good. Soon after the president won, Ciudad Juarez and El Paso became ground zero for pilot projects for new immigration policies like family separation, and ‘Migrant Protections Protocols” (MPP), which is more popularly known as the Remain in Mexico program. Witnessing these awful practices happening here made me curious and motivated me to learn and become engaged.” To read more about Nora Gonzalez, please click here: https://bit.ly/2SN1L5p

Santa Fe Dreamers Project provides free legal services to immigrants to promote economic empowerment, community development, family unity, and liberation from detention. Our work is centered around the belief that supporting immigrants makes our whole community stronger. We are committed to representing every qualified immigrant who walks through our doors, to using service strategies that expand vulnerable peoples’ access to legal counsel, and helping to elevate the voices and narratives of immigrants in our community to support positive reform.