Words by Soren Van Loben Sels PZ ’28, Graphic by Ben Connolly PZ ’26

Since President Trump took office 13 months ago, the federal government has intensified its crackdown on immigrants to levels not seen this century. We have seen videos of the violence perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol agents and pictures of the torturous conditions of detainees plastered across social media. I can speak for myself at least to say that many of us want to support our communities in their time of need, to do something, anything to help, but don’t know where to start. So I asked the people that did.

Among students, there is the Inland Empire Support Network (IESN), an organization that finds volunteers and pairs them with community groups such as the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, who are focused on immigration justice and food insecurity. They also do political education around immigration and activities like calling representatives and making whistle kits in their biweekly meetings. Their food support working group does farm work with local farms and packages groceries with community food vendors, helping vulnerable people in the Inland Empire have greater food security. Its meetings are as pleasant as their subject matter allows them to be, and I’ve always found myself meeting people from across the 5Cs that I might not have otherwise. In the words of steering committee member Lena Schulze PZ ‘26,

“A lot of folks right now have a desire to get their hands on something and feel like they are being productive. I feel like IESN in particular gives folks the chance to go to a safe setting and feel like they are helping their community members. It’s also just a great place to come connect to folks who are of similar political mind. I can say that personally it’s really nice to feel like I have a place to go and do something that’s decently productive and hang out with my friends and feel a little less hopeless than a lot of us feel right now.”

The next IESNmeeting is 7:30-8:30 pm March 3rd in a Skandera classroom. They are having a teach-in on the methods, scope, and impacts of ICE surveillance of communities 6-7:30 pm, March 4th, which does not have a space chosen for it yet.

The Pomona Economic Opportunity Center (PEOC) is a non-profit organization off campus dedicated to supporting day laborers. While they run many programs, the main one that IESN students get involved with is their effort to support immigrants in preparing for citizenship interviews. Students do practice interviews over the phone to help the prospective citizens be better ready to perform well for the actual thing. Unlike many of the other opportunities to get involved, PEOC’s citizenship practice interviews have a much more flexible schedule for volunteers and don’t even require leaving campus.

Among the faculty, Professors Sharilyn Nakata and Sumangala Bhattacharya have created opportunities for students to get involved from an immigration law perspective. The Humane Immigration Clinic class is a Social Responsibility Praxis course taught in the fall in which students assist with the cases of children attempting to get special immigrant juvenile visas. These visas require a lot of paperwork, interviewing, and labor to attempt to secure but in the words of Professor Nakata, “to put a child on the path to status is huge” because of how tough regular asylum rulings have become under this administration. Students assist with this load, doing interviews with the families and helping prepare filings to the different courts involved in the process.

Professor Nakata spoke highly of the achievements of the students in the class. They were able to build rapport and trust with the families they worked with. “In particular, in all three families the moms, they talked about the abuse they suffered at the hands of the child’s dad. They didn’t talk about it the first call, the second call, the third call. But eventually, they felt like ‘okay we can talk about this’. That was really difficult for the students. The class came with trigger warnings. You can’t know what a client is going to tell you.” She also said how they did well at managing “the other component, the tons of paperwork, complicated difficult paperwork. The courts are very picky so you have to have things just so.”

They pair hands-on experience with the immigration system with classroom learning of its history and the other facets of the system they are not interacting with for their clients. This two-prong approach has had a large impact on the students, who are able to get a look at the internals in a way that students are generally not able to unless they go as far as law school. “The students looked very closely at the application process: the forms, the questions, the requirements. They were able to see how the system is really broken,” said Nakata.

Nancy Alvarado PZ ‘28 took the class last semester. “Through the immigration clinic I not only got to learn about the legal processes (and obstacles) that go into the immigration system, but also got to provide real, impactful, pro bono support for a family seeking asylum. Through weekly meetings with the family, learning their stories (of which are often times difficult to process because of how sensitive the topics are), and working with my group of other students, I feel that I’ve deepened my solidarity with the immigrant community. While working on their visa applications, my peers and I also came to realize just how difficult the US immigration system is to navigate; it is unnecessarily long, taxing, and oftentimes inaccessible for the average person to mitigate without the help of a legal professional. With the precarious and ever changing nature immigration law as it is now, I believe it is so important that legal, mental, and economic support for immigrants should be accessible. These are human communities we are talking about, not criminals, or a mere statistic.”

For those not capable of dedicating a high-workload class and the emotional bandwidth, these professors have other events as well. They are currently gathering Spanish language interpreters to assist with a webinar next week for immigrants attempting to get an ITIN number which they need, under new DHS policy, to reunite with unaccompanied minor family members imprisoned by ICE. They asked that those interested in helping email one of them (Sumangala_Bhattacharya@pitzer.edu, Sharilyn_Nakata@pitzer.edu).

It is still bleak thinking about what is happening with these systems around the country but it is comforting in some way to get involved. It helps to try to have agency for the better. It helps to learn the truth about how the system is broken, has been broken. It helps to see your fellow students work and learn. Professor Bhattacharya told me that us students can be magnifiers, that we can take what we learn, what we do, and keep it with us beyond Claremont. To spread what we know, get others involved, and change how the system works, not just reverting the cruel turn it’s taken in the last year but the inhumanity that’s been at its roots for longer than we’ve been alive. If we ever want a chance to make that change, we need to do it with our eyes opened and invigorated by our work to support the community around us.