Trail of DREAMs – Love will Prevail
By Felipe Matos

For four months, we woke up every day with only one thing in mind – liberation. We walked 16-18 miles a day – 1,500 miles from Miami to Washington, D.C. – to reclaim our humanity. As the conditions in our lives continued to deteriorate due to the increased deportations under the Obama administration, we decided to sacrifice our lives and risk our futures because our present had become unbearable. As undocumented students, we have to pay out-of-state tuition fees which, in Florida, cost four times more than our peers’ tuition; we can’t drive or work legally even though we spent most of our lives in the U.S. The Trail of DREAMs was more than a campaign to stop deportations of young immigrants, but a calling to demonstrate the love we hold for the nation where we were raised.

We are asking for a chance to contribute to the only country we know as home. Juan Rodriguez wants to open a nonprofit to empower youth so they can have their voices heard; Carlos Roa wants to be an architect to build the infrastructure of this beautiful nation; Gaby wants to use her bachelor’s degree in special education to give a voice to autistic children and I want to use education in Miami’s inner-cities schools to offset systemic poverty by becoming a biology teacher. But our current immigration status impedes us from fulfilling our dreams.

During this 1,500-mile journey, we have collected the dreams of average Americans and built solidarity with many communities. In Georgia, faced with the prevalent racism of the Ku Klux Klan, we stood in alliance with the NAACP to denounce racially motivated xenophobia. In South Carolina, an angry man approached us, furious with the false impression that immigrants were draining resources rather than benefiting our society. After we talked to him, he hugged us and wished us well on our journey. It proved to us that love could always conquer it all and break through bigotry and racism to show that immigration policies affect real people rather than just numbers in a filing cabinet.

The first leg of our journey is over, but we will continue to speak out about the widespread abuse of immigrants: children orphaned because both parents had been deported; young people driven to suicide from the hopelessness of not having equal access to a successful future; mothers in fear of taking their children to school and getting picked by the local police for driving without a license. The list goes on. It is time for our nation to decide whether we will continue persecuting immigrants in a “witch-hunt style” or if we will implement sensible policies that respect the dignity and humanity of working-class families.