Christopher Peak Photo
New Haven contingent outside Boston federal building.
BOSTON—“We’re with you,” about two dozen Wilbur Cross High School students cupped their hands and shouted to the top of a federal building in Boston, where their classmate was trying to convince an immigration judge to let him stay in this country.
During an emotional, three-hour hearing on Thursday morning, Mario Aguilar Castañon, an 18-year-old junior at Cross who’s facing deportation, tried to explain why he’s claiming asylum, a special protection for people who have faced persecution in their home country.
CIRA’s Vanesa Suarez leads rally for Mario Aguilar Castañon.
Contributed Photo
Mario Aguilar Castañon.
Mario illegally crossed the border into the United States two years ago to escape from a violent local gang in Guatemala that had roughed him up and threatened to do worse after he refused to join their ranks. His lawyers made the case on Thursday that he felt targeted specifically as an indigenous Mayan, an ethnic minority in the country.
The U.S. Border Patrol initially arrested Mario near the Southwest border in March 2018 and ordered him to appear before an immigration judge. Federal authorities and legal aid lawyers disagree about whether he skipped that court date. U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) picked him up again in September 2019 at the Milford Superior Court, where he’d gone to contest charges that he’d been driving drunk in an unregistered and uninsured car.
ICE is keeping Mario in custody at the Bristol County House of Correction, a local jail in Massachusetts, while the judge figures out what to do. A ruling on his asylum application is expected on Thursday, Dec. 12.
Jesus Morales Sanchez.
In the meantime, students made an early-morning trek to Boston to show that they want to bring their classmate back to New Haven.
“Tomorrow, you’re supposed to be at the Coronation,” Cross’s homecoming dance, Jesus Morales Sanchez, an alumnus of the school, told the students on Thursday afternoon. “Mario should be worrying about that: ‘Hey, do I really want to spend my Friday night that way?’ Instead, we know that his priorities are very different at this point, and the fact that you all are here means that your priorities are probably very different too.”
“You’re here protesting the fact that the federal government wants to deport one of my classmates, one of my friends, one of the community members in my neighborhood,” he continued. “I am happy to see you here, because that means you know this is not normal.”
“This is not the way things should be,” he concluded. “This is not what teenagers should be doing on a Thursday, having to skip class so they can come here and make sure their classmate is safe and reunited with their family.”
Jaidy Gonzalez, Sulemy Cordova and Nayeli Roblero.
After Mario was detained, students at Wilbur Cross mobilized for his defense. They wrote hundreds of letters to the immigration judge, fundraised nearly $1,000 for his commissary in a Massachusetts jail and organized a rally on the steps of City Hall.
One activist pointed out that they’d also taught their own teachers what it’s like to be an undocumented student in New Haven.
Pastor Vicki Flippin.
On Thursday, in the pre-morning dark, a bus filled up with 30 activists, more than half of them Cross students, as television cameras panned over their sleepy faces.
Anthony Barroso, from Connecticut Students 4 A Dream, collected the students’ permission slips. Vanesa Suarez, a Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance organizer, passed around boxes of chocolate Dunkin’ Donuts.
Just before pulling out at 5:45 a.m., Pastor Vicki Flippin, from First & Summerfield Church, gave the group a blessing. She prayed for them to feel safe, valued, strong and peaceful. She wished the same for Mario too, wherever he was at that moment.
“It’s an honor and blessing to be led by the young,” Flippin said. “You all have not become — to use Dr. Martin Luther King’s word — ‘adjusted’ to oppression and evil. It is still shocking to you. It still makes you want to struggle and resist.”
“You will not let him be taken away unnoticed,” she added.
Sandy Martinez-Paz, with Suarez and Stacy Lojano.
Three hours later, after making it through the rush-hour traffic, the bus pulled into downtown Boston right around the same time that Mario’s asylum hearing was set to begin. The students carted off their hand-drawn posters, circled up in front of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, and began chanting through two bullhorns.
“What do we want?” “Mario’s freedom!”
“When do we want it?” “Now!”
“If we don’t get it?” “Shut it down!”
At the urging of Mario’s legal aid lawyers, students stayed out front the whole morning rather than in the courtroom — a decision that activists from Unidad Latina En Acción called a misstep, when supporters could have packed the chamber.
“We want to protect Mario’s privacy and safety, so we want to avoid publicly releasing the details of his testimony and asylum claim,” Dalia Fuleihan, an attorney for New Haven Legal Assistance Association, wrote in an email after the hearing ended.
(Read here about what happened inside the courtroom, as reported by the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary.)
Outside, against near-freezing cold, students kept up the chanting until around 1:30 p.m., trying to yell loud enough so that Mario could hear them.
“No fear, no hate! No ICE in my state!”
“No justice, no peace! We want Mario released!”
At one point, Saurez asked them to face the building and launch their voices skyward with a series of messages for Mario.
“You deserve to be home! You deserve to be free!” they cried. “You are our family! You are our community! We will fight for you! Every single day!”
Stephanie Pacuar.
As lawyers walked by with their briefcases, the students took turns speaking, in both English and Spanish. They spoke of how much Mario’s detention had altered their high school experience, seeing someone who just wanted to study biology and computer science split from his older brother and imprisoned in another state.
Mario “is just like me, trying to get his education. He was just trying to get a better life. He’s an example of a smart, kind and hard-working kid who didn’t give up on his education just because of the work,” said classmate Jaidy Gonzalez. “He’s a human being just like each and every one of us. He has no reason to be in there.”
Anthony Barroso.
The adults, too, talked about how “our identities are used against us,” Barroso said. They recalled their own encounters with immigration authorities, whether being detained for illegally crossing the border or watching their dad get arrested in an ICE raid.
Suarez leads a “teach-in.”
After that, Saurez sat all the students down for a “teach-in.” She talked about the traps set for undocumented immigrants — from the ways police officers and court marshals are implicated in ICE’s work to the lack of public defenders and bail bondsmen in deportation proceedings.
Mary Perez Estrada, a Spanish teacher at Cross.
Meanwhile, up on the eighth floor, a Spanish teacher, a school counselor and an assistance principal from Cross all sat in in Mario’s hearing. Unable to speak to him, they waved and blew kisses. Mario, hands bound to the chains around his waist, smiled back at them. When they rejoined the group outside, they hugged their students and wept.
Mia Breuler, the school counselor who had tracked Mario down in a Massachusetts jail after he’d gone missing for two days, said listening to the asylum hearing was frustrating. At one point, the government’s attorney asked Mario why he hadn’t just moved to another town, which Breuler said failed to acknowledge how much power these gangs have, “when your entire town is taken over or a government is working in cahoots.”
“I cry because — as an educator, as a mother, as a Latina — it breaks me apart,” Breuler said. “How is it that I, as a Puerto Rican, can be here, and my hermanos from another country are being persecuted. Our system doesn’t get it.”
Cross students, along with Assistant Principal Ann Brillante: “We got you.”
Perhaps the U.S. should intervene again in Guatemala? Oh no, that would be bad. Let's just take in everyone from every country that has problems and let Guatemala be Guatemala. That would be bad, too.
Which is the right thing to do?