Community Resource: “Know Your Rights” in Immigration Courts

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Part of Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts’ mission to create equitable, accessible courts includes providing free educational information for legislators, researchers, journalists, and community members as they navigate the opaque court systems of Cook County and Illinois. Our Community Resource hub helps inform the public about how our court system works so they can actively participate in the legal process.

Ivy Hernandez Delgado, our Albert Schweitzer Fellow & Social Work Intern, has recently concluded a county-wide Community Resource project focused on providing information related to peoples’ rights in immigration courts. The immigration landscape is a complex and ever-evolving process; intersections between the federal, state, and local government further complicate the field of immigration. Therefore, tools such as Know Your Rights (KYR) workshops allow dissemination of information in a palatable format, while simultaneously promoting engagement in community-based activism. 

After informally surveying organizations and members of Chicago’s immigrant communities to identify areas of need, several themes of legality around navigating the immigration system were generated. Coupled with mainstream immigration topics that dominated news outlets, we developed the following KYR presentations: 

  1. DACA: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (La Acción Diferida)
  2. Public Charge (Carga Públlica), 
  3. Forms of Legal Humanitarian Relief (Tipos de Ayuda Legal Humanitaria), 
  4. Policies under the Pritzker Administration (Políticas de Inmigración del Gobernador Pritzker), and 
  5. Interactions with Police or ICE (Interacciones con la Policía e ICE). 

We collaborated with immigrant rights organizations in the Chicago neighborhoods of Albany Park, Brighton Park, Little Village, Pulaski Park, Ravenswood, and Downtown, and went as far as the northwest suburbs of Chicago (Mount Prospect), to deliver these presentations in English and in Spanish. Overall, Chicago Appleseed was able to provide Know Your Rights information to a total of 193 participants in and around Chicago.

While we recognize that this is just a small drop in the bucket in reaching Chicago and Cook County’s sprawling, vibrant immigrant communities, we hope that our Know Your Rights (Conozca Sus Derechos) presentations will be of use to others as they navigate legal processes in the future. 

You can find all of our Community Resources at ChicagoAppleseed.org/CommunityResources. If you have any questions, please contact Stephanie Agnew (sagnew@chicagoappleseed.org).