News Item

Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/path-to-green-card-for-illegal-immi...

Family Unity Waiver Would Simplify Process for Close Relatives of US Citizens to Gain Legal Status

ALSO CHECK OUT UNITING AMERICA AT FAMILY FOCUS-AURORA

AN EMERGING DREAM AT CHICAGO CULTURAL ALLIANCE

The spark that led Fanny Diego Alvarez to political activism ignited in Mexico as her father and uncle campaigned in a local election.

During the 1989 race, both men were ambushed by rivals and assassinated. Fearing for their lives, Alvarez and her mother fled and settled in Chicago's Little Village. Here, she became a teenage activist, haunted and inspired by her father's death.

SPRINGFIELD -- A decade ago, Ann Monaco, a teacher at the Merit School of Music in Chicago, contacted U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., about a child prodigy, Tereza Lee.

“She had been accepted at several of the country’s most prestigious music schools,” Durbin said last week of Lee.

Comprehensive immigration reform is not coming any time soon, says Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.). But that doesn’t mean President Barack Obama cannot use his discretionary power to end deportations of young people, he says.

CHICAGO -- Hundreds of silhouettes were planted like garage sale signs on the lawn at St. Xavier University in Chicago, the white writing on the black paper giving only the name and country of an immigrant recently deported or facing deportation.