Educational immigration workshop will be offered at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church

Friday, Jun. 13, 2014

SALT LAKE CITY — On Saturday, June 21, Communities United/Comunidades Unidas with ‘Coalición Enriquezcamos a Utah’ are presenting a workshop about immigration and education at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Salt Lake City.

“We partner a lot with the Catholic churches to give this information,” said Diana Paredes, Immigrant Integration Programs Coordinator of Communities United/Comunidades Unidas.

Communities United works a lot in the Glendale/Rose Park community, which means “we have an established relationship, so we thought it would be a good idea to present this workshop at the parish,” said Paredes.

The workshop is only for information; no paperwork will be filled out that day.

“We will guide the people on how to make appointments with organizations that will help them through the immigration process, such as Holy Cross Ministries,” said Paredes.

At the workshop people can expect to hear about the renewal of the Deferred Action for Childhood arrivals, a federal program that helped young immigrants to get work permits.

“We are going to also talk about other immigration laws and updating such as the provisional waiver ‘forgiveness,’ which helps to shorten the period in which the families have to stay away from their relatives if they have entered without papers and they want to put their status in order,” said Paredes.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is open to an estimated 1 million immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children and now are either in school or recently graduated. The first group of immigrants to obtain status in 2012 under this program will have to renew before it expires in September.

“We are also talking about the immigration reform status and how people can support it,” Paredes said. “Our main message is to let people know that nothing has been approved yet, nor there is any new legalization, so they shouldn’t let anyone tell them differently, taking advantage of them. … We tell them where to go and find legitimate help and we also have a person from the University of Utah to give information about the programs that are offered at the university for immigrant students, specifically for Latinos, and how to get scholarships, where to go for orientation and information to enroll in schools and other information,” said Paredes.

Coalición Enriquezcamos a Utah is a group of organizations that promote laws honoring immigrants’ rights. This coalitions is administered by Communities United.