Speaker: Elana Gold, J.D. & Organizer
Over the years, thousands of Central American migrants have disappeared en route through Mexico to the United States. This migration crisis has roots in American policies that undermine democracy in countries, like Honduras, and lead to the proliferation of arms across the Southern Border. Migrants who manage to reach the border must contend with the United States’s increasingly inhumane immigration and detention system. This talk, with an organizer who has worked to provide humanitarian relief to asylum seekers and immigrants in Mexico, will examine the imperial roots of Central America’s migration crisis.
Elana Gold, a Temple University undergraduate alumna, has been a supporter of anti-imperialist struggles in Central America, Mexico, and the United States for the past decade. Working on behalf of the National Lawyer’s Guild, she spent the past six months in Mexico providing legal workshops to migrants in caravans journeying to the American border. Ms. Gold studied immigration and criminal law at CUNY Law School. As a law student, she worked alongside a group of undocumented activists in Brooklyn to provide sanctuary for immigrants targeted by ICE. Prior to starting her project in Mexico, she was a staff member of the Water Protector Legal Collective, an organization that provided criminal defense representation to 800 activists arrested at the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.