Hunger Strikes Used by Immigration Reform Advocates

June 7, 2010— -- Just a few weeks after graduating from Columbia University, Yadira Alvarez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, is in her seventh day of a hunger strike in front of Sen. Charles Schumer's Manhattan offices.

She is one of a small group of young immigrants who are putting their health on the line, and for some of them, risking the unwanted attention of immigration authorities, in an effort to persuade the lawmaker to push a bill that could finally give some of them -- and many thousands of other young undocumented immigrants -- a path to legal status in this country.

"We can't be spectators anymore," said Alvarez, 22, who came to the United States in 2000 under a tourist visa.

Her group, the New York State Youth Leadership Council, began its hunger strike after failing in a series of tamer tactics, including petitions, phone banking, rallies, vigils and a "die-in" involving lying down on the floor of Schumer's, D-N.Y., offices until they were granted a meeting.

Theirs is just one of a number of hunger strikes being waged by immigration reform activists around the country, frustrated by what they see as unmet promises by President Obama to tackle immigration reform within his first year in office, and frightened by a tough new law in Arizona that would require immigrants to carry documentation and give law enforcement the power to detain anyone suspected of being undocumented.

Among the other recent hunger strikes is one that began in New York's Battery Park near the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island before heading inside a downtown church where about 40 men and women, mostly immigrants, recently fasted for 72 hours in protest and to urge Congress and the Obama administration to take action.

"We are sacrificing," said Ravi Ragbir, an immigrant from Trinidad who now lives in New Jersey, "to show how harsh and how oppressive the laws are."

"We are willing to deny ourselves food, which is life, to continue our fight," he said.

Oswaldo Cabrera, a 42-year-old immigration advocate who practiced law in his native Ecuador before crossing the desert into Laredo, Texas, 20 years ago, has held a hunger strike for more than four weeks in a series of churches in New York and New Jersey. His protest opposes U.S. immigration policies that he said inhumanely rip parents from their children.