Stewart Detention Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in west central Georgia, is not on many Fall Break destination lists. But for some Furman students visiting as part of the Immigration Pilgrimage Through Georgia in early October, it was an emotional and eye-opening visit.<\/p>\n
\u201cA couple of us got to experience that one-on-one with the detainees, actually speaking with them and listening to their stories,\u201d said Edith Olivera-Bautista \u201923. \u201cSome of them hadn\u2019t even committed a crime \u2013 they went through the asylum process, but they got denied because they have no proof, which is really absurd to me. How can you document that you\u2019re being threatened by a cartel or gang?\u201d<\/p>\n
Working with the support organization El Refugio<\/a>, the Furman group, hosted by the Cothran Center for Vocational Reflection<\/a> and the Hispanic Outreach and Latinx Awareness (HOLA)<\/a> student group, helped pack backpacks with clothing and other necessities for the detainees.<\/p>\n \u201cThey only deport them with whatever clothes they have on,\u201d said Olivera-Bautista, a Spanish major minoring in Latin American and Latinx studies.<\/p>\n The senior, whose parents migrated to the U.S. from Mexico one year before she was born, helped organize the tour with Rolyn Rollins, the program coordinator for student initiatives at the Cothran Center. Tour highlights included the Plaza Fiesta<\/a> indoor mall in Atlanta; a talk with Mexican-born artist Yehimi Cambr\u00f3n about several of her murals, including \u201cMonuments: Atlanta\u2019s Immigrants\u201d; and Jubilee Partners<\/a>, a Christian community in Comer offering hospitality to refugees and other immigrants fleeing violence and persecution.<\/p>\n It was the second time the Cothran Center has planned a domestic travel program during Fall Break for students interested in learning about social justice issues, said Rollins. In 2021, a group focused on the history of the civil rights movement traveled through Alabama.<\/p>\n Of the 12 students on the tour, many, like Olivera-Bautista, had personal connections to immigration. Some, however, found themselves viewing the issues from an entirely new perspective.<\/p>\n \u201cI know the textbook things about immigration, but I\u2019m not someone who has experienced the human side of it,\u201d said Caroline Brawley \u201924, who is majoring in Chinese studies and politics and international affairs and minoring in women\u2019s, gender and sexuality studies. \u201cBeing on this trip as the only white female student was a chance to step into other people\u2019s shoes and see the very real human impact.\u201d<\/p>\n Overall, the pilgrimage was \u201cvery emotional but very impactful,\u201d said Olivera-Bautista. \u201cWe came away asking, \u2018What\u2019s next? What can we do to help with this major problem that\u2019s going on?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Brawley, who wants to work in public policy and government after graduating, saw both challenges and opportunities.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m interested in ways we can be more creative and collect data more efficiently to create human-centered policy that helps uplift people,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need to bring some humanity back into the immigration system.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Students, faculty and staff visited several sites in Georgia over Fall Break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":20114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88,16,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cothran-center-for-vocational-reflection","category-modern-languages-and-literature","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}