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"   The thought of being rounded up by the government and forcibly separated from your children and your country, all under the guise of enforcing the law, sounds like a hyperbolic scare story from a &amp;quot;very special episode&amp;quot; of Law and Order\u2014but it&amp;#039;s a real fear for the more than 11 million undocumented individuals currently living in the country, many of whom are single parents (I&amp;#039;m Here, My Children Are Over There, September 2013). An immigration reform bill passed by the Senate could change the situation\u2014but first it has to get through the Republican blockade in the House. Herewith, VotoLatino CEO and president Maria Teresa Kumar on the politics of the immigration reform debate, and the people behind it. ELLE: There are many cases of parents who get caught and deported because of minor items like traffic tickets. What is there to gain from aggressively pursuing someone whose only infraction might have been a suspended license? Maria Teresa Kumar: You know, if you look at the polls, the majority of Americans actually believe that what&amp;#039;s happening right now with immigration is terrible, and that goes across party lines\u2014Independents, moderates, Republicans, Democrats. But what&amp;#039;s happening is that there&amp;#039;s also an incredible industry behind creating detention centers. Russell Pierce, the senator who drafted the Arizona law [SB 1070, commonly known as the &amp;quot;Papers, Please&amp;quot; Law, passed in spring 2010] wrote it literally in conjunction with these two detention facilities. We point our fingers at what other countries do to their minorities, and to their &amp;quot;lesser&amp;quot; folks, but we are committing some of the most insane human rights violations. For example, in Georgia and in Alabama, if a woman is picked up and is undocumented and she&amp;#039;s pregnant and happens to go into labor while she&amp;#039;s at a detention center, they will chain her by her ankles to give birth because they say that these women are a flight risk. I mean, it&amp;#039;s really gross. It&amp;#039;s shocking. And the rate of rape among detainees is astronomical because there&amp;#039;s very little supervision. ELLE: What political avenues are available to women who are at risk of deportation? What rights do they have? MTK: Well, under the Violence Against Women Act, you&amp;#039;re immune from being deported if you can demonstrate that you have been assaulted. But most women, regardless of their background, don&amp;#039;t even know that [the act] is there to protect them, and more so for immigrant women. And they&amp;#039;re afraid to come forward in any case of injustice toward them, or toward their children, because they&amp;#039;re afraid of the law. For the most part, the best way to get information out to the immigrant community is through schools, because their children will be in school, or through churches. The other one would be their consulate. But it really varies, state by state and community by community. ELLE: What tangible changes would the Senate&amp;#039;s reform bill bring about? MTK: That&amp;#039;s a great question. Right now, once a person leaves the airport we have no way of tracking them, so, for one, we&amp;#039;ll be able to track everyone who comes in and out of the country, which is good for national security. We&amp;#039;re going to militarize the border [to prevent illegal entry into the country]. But it would also bring people out of the shadows: [Undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.] would be able to apply for temporary status, which lasts for 13 years. During that time, they have to demonstrate that they can pay all their taxes, not commit any felonies, that they&amp;#039;re learning English. After 13 years, they can apply for citizenship. Lastly, [the bill] modernizes our visa system so we can get more high-skilled labor [from foreign countries]. ELLE: House Republicans are refusing to bring the Senate bill to a vote right now. At this point, what are the prospects of it becoming a reality? MTK: I think there&amp;#039;s still a chance. I mean, we saw [U.S. House representative of Wisconsin] Paul Ryan saying that there&amp;#039;s a chance it&amp;#039;ll work. On the House side, what they&amp;#039;re going to do is basically split it up and make it into roughly seven bills, so one will deal only with border security, for example. What Boehner&amp;#039;s hoping is if something passes, then they go into conference [a procedure in which the Senate and House attempt to resolve differences between their respective bills], and basically the issues on both sides can be hashed out. I think that there&amp;#039;s a lens of looking at immigration reform as a human rights issue\u2014these individuals could be anyone from coworkers to the people sitting next to us in church, and they have lives that they want to contribute to America. The more we can share that view with Congress, the more powerful [the case for the bill] will be. Ultimately, we&amp;#039;re carving out all our futures. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/interviews/a13860/maria-teresa-kumar-on-the-immigration-reform/?src=global_footer>