Immigrant activist fights to give back

Jeannette Porter

Capital News Service

A 26-year-old, bilingual Harrisonburg resident earned a 2007 bachelor’s degree in social work from Eastern Mennonite University (magna cum laude) in just three and a half years while working 30 hours a week.

Today she is working as a waitress, babysitter and sometime interpreter.

Meet Isabel Castillo, undocumented immigrant and immigration rights activist.

“I’ve lived in Harrisonburg since I was 6 years old,” Castillo said.  “Virginia is home. I am an American.”

Castillo wants to earn a master’s in social work and work in the Hispanic community, but she cannot because of her undocumented status.

“Our parents always instilled in us to get an education,” Castillo said. “They worked in a poultry plant, and they would say, ‘You don’t want to do this work. Do good in school and become a professional.’ My grandmother came up from Mexico to see me graduate from college. I am the first person in my family to do that.”

Her father first came to the U.S. as a guest worker in the agricultural industry, and her mother came later. They worked in poultry processing for 10 years.

“That’s a really hard and messy job that a lot of people don’t want to do,” Castillo said. “My parents brought us for better economic opportunity and for better education. Where my mother is from, you could only go to school up to the second grade. My parents wanted a better future for their kids.”

Castillo has spent the past year working to get Congress to pass the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors) Act, which came up five votes short of the 60 needed to break a Senate filibuster in December. It would have opened a path to citizenship for people like Castillo, whose parents brought her to the U.S. illegally when she was too young to understand the implications of her status.

“Most people, when they’re 6 or 5 or 4, they don’t think of those things,” Castillo said. “People say, ‘What part of illegal do you not understand?’ What part of illegal should a 4-year-old understand?”

Now, Castillo is organizing Virginia’s Hispanic community against a slate of immigration bills passed by the House of Delegates and awaiting a hearing in the Senate, including House Bill 1465, introduced by Delegate Christopher K. Peace, R-Mechanicsville. It will require Virginia’s public colleges and universities to have a written policy against enrolling “an individual determined to be not lawfully present in the United States.”

“We’re talking about people who are qualified,” said Castillo, who graduated from high school with a 4.0 GPA in the top ten percent of her class. “We’ve already proved ourselves. We don’t get benefits. We don’t get federal financial aid or in-state tuition.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Castillo said of the bill.  “We want an educated Virginia. An individual with a college degree earns more and pays more in taxes. I like to help people. I want to give back. Why not give me that opportunity? I am not to blame for my parents’ actions.”

Lawmakers on the immigration subcommittee of the House Courts of Justice committee were sympathetic but did not yield.

“Many of us believe we need to address immigration reform in a comprehensive manner,” Peace said in an interview before the subcommittee meeting, “but the federal government is asleep at the switch. We need a bright line.”

“I agree we do have a broken system,” said Delegate C. Todd Gilbert, R-Woodstock, who is the subcommittee chairman. “On an emotional level, it doesn’t make sense to people like me who are rigid on this issue.”

“Isabel’s story breaks my heart,” said Delegate David B. Albo, R-Springfield. “We have limited resources, and one of the hardest things to do in this job is to have to look people in the face and say no … I get letters every year, with language I can’t use here, from people whose children don’t get into George Mason (University), and when they find out that people not lawfully in the U.S. do get in, they are going to freak.”

Nonetheless, Castillo is not deterred.

“Many organizations around the state are working hard to have our voices heard,” Castillo said. “I started doing activism because the issue affected me, but now I do it for the thousands of people like me who are scared to stand up. I have a sense of relief.  I’m not shamed or scared. I’m not a criminal.  I’m no longer going to hide in the shadows. I’m Isabel, and I’m a human being, just like anyone else. I’m not ‘an illegal.’ No human being is illegal, just because they lack a piece of paper.”