CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – Pro-immigrant groups in North Carolina launched a campaign Monday on behalf of a community organizer detained while trying to board a plane at Buffalo Niagara International Airport in New York.Rausel Arista, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, is the father of two U.S.-born children who has struggled to get immigration laws changed since 2006.
He is currently a community organizer with the Latin American Coalition in Charlotte.
“We know that Rausel was returning to Charlotte after a personal visit to New York when he was detained by immigration agents. He is being held at a detention center in Buffalo in the process of deportation, and we’re doing everything possible to get him out of there,” LAC spokesman Armando Bellmas told Efe on Monday.
Arista came to Charlotte 15 years ago from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero in search of a better future and found work in restaurants, factories and construction sites, until 2012 when he decided to dedicate himself entirely to community activism.
He has taken part in national campaigns in favor of immigration reform with the American Friends Service Committee and the Keeping Families Together campaign.
His commitment to the cause of the undocumented led him to get himself arrested last October in Washington with another 200 people, including Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and five other lawmakers, in an act of civil disobedience in support of immigration reform.
The North Carolina immigrant community will meet Monday night for a vigil in a Charlotte church to raise awareness of Arista’s case and to call for having his deportation to Mexico canceled.
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