The Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, become what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast we interview leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watched the news, you will be uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.

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Hi and welcome. Today, great.com talks with Lorraine Goodman, who is the executive director at laldef.org, which is the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And if you haven’t heard of them before, they are a grassroots, non-profit organization that are formed to defend the civil rights of Latin Americans and facilitate health care access and education to them in the Mercer County area, which is in New Jersey. So if you haven’t if you’re new here to this podcast and if you haven’t done it already, please consider hitting subscribe, because today we will explore everything Laldef is doing to help Latin Americans in New Jersey.

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Lorraine, hi. So good to have you on.

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Ok, I got this injection of energy just from you saying hi to me before this interview started. So I’m excited to speak with you. But how would you define LALDEF to someone that might not be so familiar with your calls and the challenges that you’re facing?

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Oh, challenges we’re facing. So actually, New Jersey, I think, is the seventh largest home for immigrant populations in the country, which I think people are not. You think Arizona or New Mexico like on the border. But in New Jersey, there’s quite a number of people who are immigrants and oftentimes undocumented immigrants, especially in the Trenton area. LALDEF was originally founded in Princeton and Princeton, Princeton University, it’s also considered a rather wealthy enclave, but it actually has a huge number of people living below the poverty line as well as in Trenton. We have a large number of people, most of whom are immigrants. Let’s see, I have some numbers here. Nearly a quarter are foreign born, 17 percent are non-citizens, including legal permanent citizens like green card holders. Poverty rate is twenty eight percent now. And among Hispanics in Trenton is thirty one point five percent. Another big issue that we have in Trenton among the Hispanic and first generation American families is high school graduation rate is less than 50 percent, while high school graduates getting those degrees less than five percent. So what that does is we don’t we’re an onramp for new people to our country.

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So we see ourselves as providing access to a lot of different types of services. We partner with a lot of other organizations so we can direct people if they come to us towards the food banks, towards the hospitals, towards whatever care they need. But we also provide what I like to group together as education persistence programs. So these are one of our programs, as with the Princeton Area Community Foundation, and it’s to address absenteeism in middle schools.

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Sorry, because what often happens is if the student is bilingual, they speak English, they may also be able to drive a car and have a license, whereas the parents do not.

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So they’ll take the student out of school to be a translator for other siblings, for the parents that they have to go to court or whatever that is. And the student misses school.

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So we provide a case manager, a bilingual case manager who works with the families and takes the place of the students so the student can stay in school. So that’s one of our programs to address, again, educational persistence. Another program we have is Futuro, which focuses on high school juniors and seniors who are promising they have to maintain a 3.0 average in high school. And we provide them with mentoring and tutoring so that and family support so that they will stay in high school and finish high school. We have a one hundred percent graduation rate among our futuro students, which is pretty amazing. In addition, 80 percent of them graduate high school or secondary higher education. So this past year we had twenty seven. We have basically fifteen in each cohort and there are four cohorts; two and Princeton two and Trenton juniors and seniors. Now we have twenty seven graduate last year. And they all got accepted to their top choice in colleges, including a couple of Ivies in there, and they got over two million dollars worth of scholarship money. Wow. Yeah, it’s a very, very it kind of gives us our proudest moments, because these kids are amazing and they want to go forward. So those are education persistence programs. In addition to that, we also provide basic legal immigration services. So immigration law is probably the second most complicated law in our country right after taxes. And a number of the cases that we deal with are things like DACA. They go from simple things like DACA renewals, the DREAM Act, to asylum to what are called CID cased. VAWA cases, U-visas. They’re about nine or 10 of them that we deal with on a regular basis.

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Mm hmm. Well, to address a couple of things you said there, I saw how proud you were when you talked about your graduating students. And I can imagine how grateful they have been for getting the help and support from organizations like yours through this process. And I can also imagine what a sense of relief it must be when you’re new to a country to get the legal help in such a complicated process. So imagine now that me and other listeners from Europe that might not be so familiar with the circumstances in the US. What is it like to be because you used the word immigrant – a noncitizen? Like what does it mean to be a non citizen? How does that affect your life except for the lower probability of finishing high school, like you mentioned?

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Well, I mean, right now, and obviously over the last three and a half years, things have just gotten horrible and especially with the whole covid situation in New Jersey and New Jersey was struck very early on and very hard.

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We’re very close to New York. A lot of the people who are undocumented when they come here getting documentation, oftentimes they have a lot of the people in Trenton area are from Guatemala, which is ravaged by drug wars and violence. And the people who come here, they try to stay under the radar because they did not come here legally. They came here crossing the border in some way.

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And they take jobs as house cleaners, grocery workers, landscapers, because the universities here, there’s a huge demand for that kind of work.

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But those are the people who are out and about and providing the services that we all need while we’re closeted at home trying to quarantine and not get sick. So I know that the number of covid deaths in the New Jersey area is three times for Hispanics than it is for whites. Yeah, so covid has hit incredibly hard. Also, people are not because they’re staying at home. They’re not hiring house cleaners anymore to come in and clean their homes. Right. So those people are out of work.

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A lot of people in various different jobs. If they get sick, they don’t have health insurance. A lot of them live in multi family homes, so one person gets sick, everybody gets sick, they’re afraid to go to a hospital because they don’t have I.D..

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They’re afraid of becoming a part of you know, I can’t think of what’s called, but part of the care that the government is relying on the government for care. And being ID’ed as undocumented and we had we had a futuro student, a high school student who was like a three point five average on a four point zero scale – a good B plus student who was doing really well in the program, get detained by ICE, the immigration, I don’t even remember where the ice stands for, but it’s, I believe it will get better with the new administration, but right now they live in fear that someone is going to get deported or detained and their families are going to get broken up.

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So that’s a big problem, I can imagine the sense of isolation, not feeling like they really belong in a society that must be really, really hard. And I’m curious about what you just mentioned now that we have a new

administration coming in at some point. How is that going to change that outlook for Latin Americans living in New Jersey and in the rest of the US?

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Well, Joe Biden, President elect Joe Biden has already said that he intends to bring Dacca back right now, what is DACA? DACA is the DREAM Act that President Obama implemented with an executive order.

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And what that means is that anybody who’s here who is brought here as a child. So not because they came with their parents, they didn’t come because, you know, they didn’t make the initiative. Their parents brought them here. So it was no, they didn’t make the choice to come here. And this is really the only home they’ve ever known that they have the opportunity to finish their studies and get papers so that they can stay here and work and finish their degree and oftentimes work that towards getting citizenship. So if they complete a certain number of things, don’t get arrested, you know, complete their college out, their college education, and they can stay here permanently. So it’s a path towards citizenship. Under the Trump administration, they stopped offering New DACA applications and they also made it used to be that you had to apply for the DACA renewal every five years. I believe that’s what it was. Now it’s every year and it’s expensive, you know. But hopefully that will change.

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That’s expensive and a headache with all of the admin, I suppose, yeah, hopefully these changes can make circumstances a bit easier for those, especially those who weren’t didn’t choose to go here. Now, from LALDEF’s point of view. What did you hope to accomplish in the next, let’s say, five or 10 years? What is the mission?

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I think the mission is to not need us anymore, right? Whether or not that will ever happen, I doubt. But I know when they founded this organization, it was with the hope that we could make the situation better for all immigrants to our country. I’m not personally an immigrant, but my grandparents of three of my four grandparents were immigrants who escaped from Russia to escape the pogroms in Russia and, you know, making an arduous journey over the sea instead of over land in the desert, but not that different, right? So to make our country more accepting and understanding of people who come here, you know, your huddled masses yearning to be free. That’s that’s right. That’s the poem on the Statue of Liberty. And that’s what we should strive for, I think. So I would love it if our legal immigration law could be simplified and made more welcoming to people who want to come here to make a better life.

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And I think most of the people who come here want to make a better life.

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I think so, too, and.

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Imagine now, then, someone listening to this might be living in the US or outside of the US and would also like to see the states become a more open country. What can they do to help to have some kind of influence on.

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Well, I think there are a lot of things if somebody would like to make a donation to LALDEF we would very much appreciate that. We are a small organization right now and we are going through a number of growing pains. So any support, financial support is always welcome and we have largely forgotten it, so that’s that’s one way you can help. Absolutely. To help LALDEF, I think another way is to support any and all organizations that are fighting for human rights, human rights, women’s rights and. Yeah, I mean, there are a number of them, and the ACLU is a good one, you know, we’re good one, too, but we’re very local. Where the ACLU is certainly national.

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Yeah, I can see how. For some people, supporting something smaller and more local can have a better feeling to it compared to a very big organization where you don’t really know exactly where your money is going. And what can someone do then? Let’s say they are interested and want to just dip their toes in the water and maybe just stay up to date on what you guys are doing. Do you have some kind of newsletter or how can they follow your work?

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Sure. So we are on Facebook, so you can certainly find us on Facebook, which is LALDEF; Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund on Facebook. And we post a lot of stuff there. We do have a newsletter and I believe you can also sign up for our newsletter through our Facebook, as well as on our website LALDEF.org and we do a newsletter about four times a year.

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But we do post a lot on our Facebook page about what’s going on and. That’s pretty much it for those people who are insiders, which means a donation of five hundred dollars or more. We do occasionally, you

know, pre covid, had a number of events where we would like stakeholder events or meet the new ED events, things like that. And not posting those right now, obviously, because of restrictions, but we hope to be able to do those again in the near, near, near future.

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Beautiful, let’s together hope, then, that 2020 has been the craziest year yet that we’re moving into and brighter times. And Lorraine Goodman, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with great.com today. I highly appreciate it.

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You’re quite welcome. Thank you. And thank you to all your listeners. I appreciate your help and support.

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Thank you. And for you listening. If you enjoy this conversation, if you would like to see conversations like this get spread further. It would be really helpful if you went into your podcast app or YouTube and subscribe. That will be great to help us get through the algorithms. Some more people can hear uplifting and positive interviews like the one we just did. And we see you in the next episode.

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