They gave me a chance to prove my mettle at something new. That too, on International Women’s Day. Not that I believe in designated days, but it has to be symbolic of something larger than us.

I will fully dedicate myself to the job and take them to the very top.

Thank you CODEPINK for helping me make my dreams so much more closer to reality. And thank you to everyone who helped me make the right decision not just for me, but for everyone and everything that I have grown to love in the past 10 years.

My law school and Canadian Dreams will be deferred, but you’ll have me around for much longer to pursue our American DREAMs, and our dreams that know no borders, no binaries.

Now I need to go buy pink clothes.

<3

I loved this post at La Frontera Times with the dinosaur metaphor for people who hold the lives of immigrant youth hostage, so go ahead and read the whole thing. Here is the excerpt that drew me in:

Demand the Dream Act! Now that is a reason to march. The Dream Act can pass this session. The votes can realistically be gathered for it. The political realists in this Administration know that there will be electoral hell to be paid this November. They can easily be convinced the Dream Act is a relatively inexpensive but metaphorically powerful down payment on a broken promise. The problem of course may not be them but us. The dinosaurs that have directed the immigration reform lobbying movement for the past decade are committed to the one true bill dogma. The dogma of the one comprehensive immigration reform bill that encompasses all. The one bill strategy has meant that opportunities to pursue the Dream Act as a stand-alone piece of legislation have not been taken. The strategy has relegated a generation of kids to life as fugitives on the margins of society. The dinosaurs will resist, ultimately threatening to take their inestimable and necessary resources home if the plebeians insist on questioning their strategic wisdom and challenging their devotion to the dogma of one comprehensive bill.

So dinosaurs rarely know that they are dinosaurs… if you care about the Dream Act you should tell them forcefully.

If you believe in the one large comprehensive immigration reform bill or NOTHING, congratulations, you are a dinosaur. But you are also on your way to extinction, most likely through natural causes. So it’s not long till human beings will take over–get ready for the “invasion.”

Fortune magazine just ranked FedEx as one of the most admired companies in the world but its voluntary use of E-verify–a program that tracks eligibility to work in the United States and plagued with problems–is anything but admirable.

I just found out that my U.S. citizen uncle was almost fired from his job at FedEx because E-verify employee eligibility program failed to locate him.

He isn’t transgender or undocumented. Seriously, he has been living here since the 1980s as a legal permanent resident and then a citizen of the United States for more than 15 years. This is preposterous.

But it gets worse. Why is he not eligible to work? My uncle was told that he has to inform the Social Security Administration when one becomes a U.S. citizen from a legal permanent resident because USCIS and the SSA do not share information. Wait, does that mean that every former legal permanent resident and now naturalized U.S. citizen who forgets to inform SSA of their change in status may fail E-verify and face the pink slip at work?

In an irony of sorts, if you are undocumented and employed using a different identity as in a borrowed or stolen social security number, e-verify will not detect you.

The White House and Congress continue to play politics by extending ineffective immigration “enforcement” measures over immigration reform. Obama extended e-verify for all federal contractors last September and Congress approved 3 years of funding for it in the Homeland Security Appropriations bill. I do wonder how many people have been falsely targeted and removed from their jobs since then.

#USAFail.

I am not even sure how you get the snow off your vehicle. And people were actually riding bikes on the snow-laden road! And I have never seen dogs walking in snow–I suppose they don’t feel cold.

It was freezing and dangerous for me, but it was also beautiful.

I don’t particularly like engaging journalists–my immigration story is so complicated and infuriating that I don’t like talking or thinking about what I have had to endure and explaining it to others. It’s all available on the web anyway in several different versions. But this might look slightly different.

I let on the greatest irony of my life: I am an immigrant youth leader and organizer who has helped lay the foundation of a national movement to grant undocumented youth legal status in the United States but who would prefer not to spend a single second in this country. So why work so hard and risk my life for something I don’t even want? Maybe it has to do with social justice or maybe the fact that most of my friends are undocumented. But there is some anger here too: if I can work so hard for a cause that I don’t really want to benefit from, why are others sitting on the sidelines, especially those who do want to live in the United States and cannot see their lives elsewhere?

We can’t force the “coming out” process but how do we build and grow as a movement with people who are cowering in fear? I don’t do fear–living on the safe side is so boring and limiting, it stymies your growth and potential. And I absolutely refuse to bow to the multiple systems of oppression that drew a line in the law, thereby separating my parents and my sibling from me. This country broke up my immediate family. So I went and created a much bigger family. But now I want an immediate family of my own.

It’s been a crazy week. From pharmacists harassing me for identification to not being able to afford the right medication for treatment to unsupportive and ignorant (white) people questioning and attacking my right to organize for my communities. I even lost 6 pounds but I am really unhappy because I got banned from going to the gym, which works in a circular fashion because if I cannot work out my frustrations, I am just going to be more unhappy.

The only upside of the week was that I probably made some people smile and laugh, and inspired many more.  And I did have a couple great job interviews with some nice people.

Next week: Decision time

It is not going to be easy moving forward but it’s important to not throw people under the bus when trying to build coalitions for social change and I am glad at least CCC gets it.

Of course, I am not waiting for the National Immigration Forum to apologize for its appalling words at the summit. But this is a win.

I achieved more with a blog and some tweets than we achieved at the summit all day.  Maybe next time I should just stay at home and do this through conference call instead of risking my life in cold climates. Yeah, remind me. Okay, I will go check-in my gigantic ego. We have work to do at DreamActivist and I can’t keep doing free work for Immigration Equality no matter how much I love them. Ralls–you should have just hired me as a consultant

I am going to go chill in San Francisco today and tomorrow and take care of this pneumonia because I am supposedly no good for the movement if I can’t tweet and rant.

Drinks are on me Rachel LaB!

<3

I seriously wonder what some men are smoking sometimes.

Some (straight) men actually think they can email another straight man on my team–one of my friends nonetheless–and ask them to keep Prerna in control and expect him to react in an affirmative. Really? This is the most hilarious thing I have heard all year.

You know you are hitting some nerves as a blogger when you get told to “shut up” by a multi-million dollar coalition and other white male citizens. I am one of the unfortunate few who hits nerves quite a lot but the hateful and mean-spirited messages go to my friends. They never come to me directly with complaints. I think a friend of mine had a more appropriate thing to say about that last night: “COWARDS.”

The LGBT-Immigration summit debacle hosted by Four Freedoms Fund in New York last weekend was heavily tweeted by bloggers and can be seen on the Twitter hashtag #lgbtcir. No one really had anything good to say about the anti-equality Reform Immigration for America campaign. I was one of the first bloggers to actually hammer down what occurred at the summit, along with ways in which the coalition could make some improvements. Several other bloggers followed suit which is archived at the bottom of this post.

The criticism was not taken in stride by several people who hold personal vendettas against me and have threatened to work against me, publicly. One of my straight male friends who is based in DC was told by someone from the RI4A management team and another particular white male blogger something along the lines of “shut Prerna up” and “keep me in check.” I won’t even start with the misogyny of giving a straight male figure that directive. I do wonder if they meant it in terms of violating my freedom of speech or doing some physical damage. Either one is quite bad and well, cowardly.

To be honest, I am not surprised by this response. Were other queer or white bloggers threatened after the summit? I am sure no one sent a message to Mike Rogers from Outrage to tell him not to write anything even though he was the one who told Ali Noorani that “it seems to me that you [RI4A] needs to be pushed harder than Congress” while almost everyone in the room went “Amen.” No, lets try to tell the [loud] woman of color–the lowest hanging fruit–to shutup

I have a message for haters: Don’t tell my straight male friends to shut me up, which is just misogynistic and homophobic and says more about you than anyone else. Do feel free to send your threats directly to me. You have my email: prerna [at] dreamactivist.org . You can also CC the entire team at DreamActivist about how “Prerna makes you look bad” or “Prerna…” Whatever complaints you have, Do it openly–not by hiding in the shadows like some undocumented immigrant. Because that is just pitiful.

Show the world how so-called pro-migrant advocates who speak out against hate crimes and “silencing of migrants” are actually the ones spreading hatred and trying to do the silencing.

I am neither going to be silenced nor will I step back into the closet. Threats only fuel my ego and encourage me to work harder and succeed. I am going to continue standing up for ALL my communities and I will die doing it.

That’s what she said.

If anything does happen to me in the coming weeks, I doubt that pneumonia is completely to blame. Though in all seriousness, I have nowhere to go but up, up and away.

An inhaler and 10 capsules of anti-biotics cost $192. This is WITH health insurance and we are not counting the cost of labs, physician visit and X-rays yet. Mom decided to buy me the Mucinex DM, which was also prescribed. How can I possibly ask her to pay for the rest of my health care at this point especially since I am probably ill due to my work and all the sickening forces around me every time I leave my home?

A fellow in the struggle from Indiana says that stress and trauma also cause and then, prolong illness. It’s probably true–I deal with traumatic things like having to sit through a whole day with mostly white men who could care less about our immigration struggles and then, hear from brown men about how “those gays” don’t get it, before they start ranking oppressions. Enough. I didn’t even get an apology from the organizers, let alone a reimbursement. I wish I could sue someone or take out a petition, but oppression is so institutionalized.

That’s what I get for almost killing myself in New York. So I guess I better make it worth dying for, right? We’ll have a bonfire for the destruction and death of CIR 2010 soon. We hope a phoenix will rise from the ashes–a truly progressive movement that restores fairness and justice in our immigration system and provides family unity for everyone.

Personally, Canada might need to be postponed, which makes me really sad because I am craving to get out of this place. I have some job offers lined up for me and some I am waiting to hear back on soon.  It’s about time someone said “to hell with” and handed me a job like I deserve. I am on my way to the very top and I’ll always remember who supported and helped me through this tough period and who hesitated to come forward even when I was vastly over-qualified for a particular position.

In the meantime, I have multiple diplomas but I can’t afford health care. I’ll have to get refills or new meds on my credit card (funny how they will give me a credit card in this country but not a long-overdue green card). And then I have to try not to worry about finances, the $800 in LLC taxes I need to pay next month and drive myself more ill in the process.

It’s a cycle of destruction and it needs to stop.