DACA at Ten Years: Freedom University and the Undocumented Student Struggle for Human Rights
Last week, Freedom University embarked on our annual Atlanta College Tour:
the first stop was Emory University!
Seven of our students joined three staff members for a long, but joy-filled day. Students went on a walking tour of campus, sat in as visiting students in an Advanced Italian course and a Muslim Women’s Storytelling course, relaxed outside in the beautiful autumn weather, and attended an admissions presentation for undocumented students with Emory’s Office of Admissions.
Later that evening, we attended an event organized by the Latino Student Organization in our honor: a lecture and panel titled “DACA at Ten Years: Freedom University and the Undocumented Student Struggle for Human Rights.”
Our director, Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis, delivered a powerful lecture documenting the history of Freedom University’s collective work advancing undocumented students’ human right to education. She also detailed the history of the Freedom at Emory Campaign from 2014-2015, in which she and Freedom University students launched and won a campaign at Emory University that led to Emory’s admission of DACA students with full need-based financial aid, as well as Freedom University’s role in the Emory Sanctuary Campaign in 2017, which successfully expanded equal admission for fully undocumented students.
Her lecture was followed by testimonies of two Freedom University students, Nayelly and Kathy, who courageously shared their stories of becoming undocumented, growing up in Georgia, the discrimination they faced in accessing higher education, and the transformative impact that learning in community at Freedom University has had on their lives.
Dr. Soltis closed the evening with the words of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall: “Unless our children begin to learn together, their is little hope that they will ever learn to live together.”
This is the purpose of educational segregation - to keep people separated for the rest of their lives. But at the conclusion of our visit, when Freedom U and Emory students were laughing together and hugging each other goodbye, it was clear that a future in which we can live all together in peace, and with justice, is possible.
