Mission Statement
The Latino Policy Coalition is a national non-partisan non-profit consortium of the country’s leading Latino research organizations and scholars. The coalition includes: the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute; William C. Velasquez Institute; National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials; National Institute for Latino Policy; Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles; University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality; Program in the Politics of Immigration, Ethnicity and Race; and Diversity Focus/National Community for Latino Leadership. The LPC analyzes, through nationwide public opinion surveys, policy issues affecting the Latino community. Chaired by former San Francisco City and County Supervisor Jim Gonzalez, the LPC seeks to highlight Latino community views on key national issues; and thus stimulate public policy debate among local, state and national elected officials.
Featured Article
Deported Moms With American Children Separated On Mother’s Day
May 11, 2012
By Cristina Costantini
As the rest of the nation celebrates the importance of motherhood Sunday, thousands of young Americans will, for the first time, be without their moms on Mother’s Day.
About 22 percent of all undocumented immigrants deported in the first half of 2011 were parents of U.S.-born children. As part of the Obama administration’s record-setting deportation year, between January and June 2011, 46,486 undocumented mothers and fathers received orders to leave the country and were forced to decide what to do with their U.S.-born children. While in some instances, deported parents decide to bring their children with them, parents thinking it was in their child’s best interest, left them with relatives, neighbors, or friends in the United States.
Ronald Molina, 8, who lives in Stamford, Conn., said he cries almost every day when he looks at a picture of his mother who was detained and deported to Guatemala in 2010. Ronald is one of an estimated 4 million children born in the U.S. to an undocumented parent.
Please read full article by clicking here.
Sign Our Petition
Please help reunite tens of thousands of American children separated from their deported parents by signing our petitions. Our goal is to collect 48,486 signatures – one signature for each parent that was deported at the beginning of 2011.
LPC Launches Project Reunite Families
No one has the right to separate a child from the parent they love. Nobody!
LPC Project Reunite Families aims to reunify the children of deported parents with their mothers and fathers. LPC seeks a Presidential Executive Order to expedite the reunification of the estimated 46,000 children misappropriated by county foster care agencies – due to ICE deportation raids.
Although the Latino Policy Coalition strongly supports several pending bills that attempt to halt current practices whereby United States citizen and immigrant children, become permanently separated from their rightful parents – these legislative initiatives are not enough.
We believe that all federal and state bills on this matter need to acknowledge more forcefully, that these de facto misappropriations of children from their parents violate the fundamental human rights of parents and children; and violate many international treaties of which the U.S. is a signatory.
Latino community leaders need to organize for a national and international process to reunify families that are currently in this deplorable situation.
Future strategies need to contain Habeas Corpus demands and/or the demand for a Presidential Executive Order to expedite the reunification these estimated 46,000 children with their parents. We hope you will join in on this vital mission.
Read LPC complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Council by clicking here.
LPC is chaired by former San Francisco Supervisor, Jim Gonzalez the author of the nation’s first City of Sanctuary Ordinance (1989) to protect immigrant rights.
