On June 8, purple-gowned seniors at Riverside High School in Durham, North Carolina, will line up to accept their diplomas as their families look on with pride. But 19-year-old Wildin David Guillen Acosta won’t be among them.
Acosta won’t be absent because he doesn’t care enough, or because he didn’t make the cut. Acosta will miss graduation because he has been locked up in a Georgia jail since January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him on his way to school. (In fact, Acosta cares about school so much that, even while in prison, he asked his teachers to send him his homework assignments. The detention center denied the request.) In an April letter to lawmakers, reproduced in part below, Acosta writes in Spanish:
I want to complete my dreams of graduating from school, so that my parents will feel proud of me, so that my parents can hear my name [be called] and the director of my school can give me my diploma and tell my parents, here is your son that I am proud of. … I am asking you from the bottom of my heart, please free me.
It’s not a legal mistake or a crack in the system that has put Acosta and five other youths from North Carolina who came to America as unaccompanied minors into detention; it’s a policy decision—one that activists and community members argue is categorically unfair.
[For more of this story, written by Tanvi Misra, go to http://www.citylab.com/crime/2...-free-wildin/484463/]
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