On behalf of the city of Shore View, uh welcome you to this immigration, know your rights and family preparation. Tonight is about information preparation and ensuring that our families and our community feel supported and empowered.

I came to United States as a refugee uh from Vietnam at age five. My family arrived here um seeking the proverbial American dream.

Our goal tonight is to move from fear toward empowerment through knowledge and information.

Our commitment to being a welcoming and safe community for all residents remains steadfast.

We are a legal aid organization. Um, we provide free civil legal help to lowincome people in the east metro and in southern Minnesota. So, our service area does cover Shore View um, as well as many other areas.

We did include on this slide a note um that smiles cannot represent people in their detention or deportation case. Unfortunately um it's due to funding restrictions. That's kind of built into the funding that we receive.

The immigration system is incredibly complex and I try to simplify it for my students by thinking about it as a hotel.

So there's a lot of movement between floors. You can take an elevator up sometimes. Sometimes you have no right to get on the elevator. And that's the biggest problem with the basement. People who've lived here for decades, who came in illegally, there's not a button they can push to get to the other floors.

There's a lot of different kind of barriers and bars. So with this visa bulletin, you might have a category that works and you might have that petitioner and they petition for you and everything is great. But if you've been here or you are here and you violated uh some immigration regulation, you may not qualify even though you have you know waited the 20 years.

Unfortunately, especially kind of in this last thing that we've been through, Metro Surge, we've seen that uh the the cards really don't help like we thought they would. Um, and the rights that we believe we have have not been um respected in the way that we expected to see them.

Not signing anything without speaking to a lawyer that absolutely stands. And the reason that I think that's more important than ever is um one thing that we've been seeing is people are taken to Texas within a very short time after um being taken into custody and they're being handed these documents that are going to get them deported and they're being told, you know, you don't get access to a lawyer and you don't have any rights and you're not going to get status, therefore sign this.

So some of the practical steps would be to make sure you have that person's phone number memorized um because if someone is detained um their cell phone will be taken away and you you know you won't be able to look up contacts in your phone. So, making sure you know you have this trusted person's phone number memorized.

One of the documents that you would want to have in that kind of packet for that person is the DOPA. And it's probably, you know, in a lot of cases going to be the same person, the person that you delegate care of your children to.