Chapter: Northern Kentucky

Last Thursday several organizations, including Black Lives Matter Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky Justice and Peace Committee, Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, local Benedictine Sisters, Sisters of Divine Providence, the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center, Democratic Socialists of America in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center, Supporting Latino Families of Northern Kentucky, Transformations CDC, the Northern Kentucky Women's Network, and the Northern Kentucky KFTC Chapter  came together to host a forum on what was needed to support families being impacted by the recent ICE raids across northern Kentucky.

Heyra Avila, an animated young woman from Florence, addressed a group of us fellow northern Kentuckians on a Wednesday night at the end of long day. Her energy was infectious. Her story made a deep impression. She opened up about a precarious, hard-to-imagine trek that she and her family made over a decade ago between Mexico and the U.S.

Her parents, wanting to give their children a more solid future, had chosen to leave their small, metal sheet roofed home not too far from the U.S. border and try their luck over here. Heyra described herself as “lucky.” The dangerous journey they made across the dessert when she was four was safer than it was for most pursuing the same route. Her family had the good fortune of finding a car, providing them with overnight shelter and preventing them from complete exposure to the desert elements or predators—likely both animal and human.