A Personal Exploration of Immigration Advocacy

By Frannie Lahey-Teare

My interest in immigration advocacy has developed in two ways: my path to fluency in Spanish and my classes and internship at the University of Denver.  

In 2020, after four years of high-school Spanish classes, I decided to continue my learning experience in Ecuador before starting college. I lived in Cuenca, a small town in the Andes. I took Spanish classes, volunteered at the local elementary school, and lived with a host family. When the COVID pandemic started, I had no choice but to come back to the U.S. Yet my obsession with the Spanish language continued. I spent hours every day that spring and summer practicing on Zoom with my Spanish teacher from Cuenca. When I started at DU in the fall, I loaded my schedule with Spanish classes. While I loved my classes and friends at DU, I was already enthusiastic about my plan to study abroad.  

As a junior, I flew to Valparaíso, Chile. I knew very little about Chile, though I’d heard that Chilean Spanish was considered one of the hardest dialects to understand and speak. At the beginning it was indeed a challenge, but after five months I felt I spoke it well. I found that I loved my life in Spanish. 

Chile was also where I had a very personal encounter with the immigration system and the struggles migrants face across the world. I met my boyfriend during my studies in Chile, where he had lived for about a year after migrating from Venezuela. He was 18 years old when the political and economic situation in Venezuela became too unstable and dangerous for him. Unable to finish university, he left his country in search of work and a brighter future for himself and his family. He traveled to Peru and Argentina before settling in Chile, where he still has no legal status. Because of this, he faces discrimination from the Chilean government and society, and has limited options for education and work.  

I wanted to understand the situation in his home country and the experiences of other migrants who make the journey to the United States or other, more economically stable, countries. I wanted to help the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and others who are forced to leave their homes.  

My education at DU has been a transformative journey. I arrived with dreams of being a journalist at the New York Times and leave with the goal of becoming an immigration attorney. A few months after returning from Chile, I was back at DU in a sociology class with Professor Lisa Martinez called “Deportation Nation.” We studied the history of immigration in the US, various waves of migration, and the social and legal impacts. As a service-learning class, we had the opportunity to volunteer with Casa de Paz, a Denver nonprofit that works to reunite families separated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), either by writing letters to people in detention centers across the country or by visiting individuals at the Aurora ICE Processing Center. This class and others, including “Geographies of Migration” and “Immigration Law,” have given me a solid grounding in the history, policy, and politics of immigration and global migration, and have reinforced my interest in advocating for the rights of immigrant populations. 

It was at Casa de Paz that I met Greg Mortimer, founder of the Colorado Immigrant Justice Fund (CIJF), where I interned last summer with support from a Center for Immigration Policy & Research (CIPR) grant. CIJF is dedicated to providing legal funds and support for detained immigrants in the United States who lack access to legal representation, thereby increasing their chances of achieving a fair outcome in the complex deportation process. During my internship I handled a multifaceted communications role. My responsibilities included managing social media campaigns to raise awareness of immigrant needs in Denver, crafting informative newsletters to keep community members and donors engaged, researching immigration detention trends, updating volunteer training materials, assisting with the letter-writing (called Cartas de Paz) and visitation programs, and writing articles for a weekly newsletter that shed light on the experiences of detained immigrants. This work amplified CIJF’s mission to support detained immigrants and advocate for much-needed change in the immigration detention system. 

Mortimer became a mentor to me while at CIJF and later during a collaborative documentary I produced about his friend Selky Azaah. The four-minute documentary, “Man finds himself imprisoned in Aurora after escaping mass atrocities in Cameroon,” details Azaah’s journey from Cameroon to Denver, his time in the Aurora ICE Detention Center, and his friendship with Mortimer. I researched the conflict in Cameroon and the privately owned ICE Detention Center in Aurora, filmed interviews and b-roll of Mortimer and Azaah, and edited the final cut. The staff of Rocky Mountain PBS critiqued the film and chose to publish it on their website. Another project I enjoyed creating as a CIJF intern was a newsletter highlighting the efforts of Cartas de Paz volunteer Carolina Martinez. She made a website called Voices of Detention to support immigrants in detention centers across the U.S. 

My internship with CIJF taught me how much work it takes to provide legal assistance for detained immigrants. It introduced me to an amazing immigrant advocacy community in Denver. My work with Casa de Paz, my classes with professors such as Lisa Martinez and Tanika Vigil, and my experiences studying abroad are why I seek to continue supporting immigrants, first by working at the border in El Paso, Texas and down the road as an immigration attorney.  

Frannie Lahey-Teare is a senior graduating from DU in November 2023. She is a Journalism and Spanish major and a Sociology minor. She interned at the Colorado Immigration Justice Fund in Summer 2022 with funding from CIPR. Her post-graduate plans include helping immigrant advocacy efforts at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas before finding a job as a paralegal.