What does it mean to be an immigrant? What does it mean for a community to include immigrants?
It is impossible to avoid the talk of immigration policies and immigrant crackdowns and it is impossible to ignore the consequences of these things in our communities and our country.
However, while we can turn on the television or go online and see plenty of broad generalizations, we want to provide our readers with a clearer look at these issues closer to home.
We will be spending the next several weeks looking at the stories of various immigrants and also the day-to-day operations of our law enforcement officials who are tasked with overseeing immigration and border laws to get a better understanding of how these two communities — law enforcement and immigrants — interact with one another and how their actions and their presence affects the rest of us. We will be looking at immigrants from Latin American countries, and also immigrants from other places. Immigrants and refugees make up no single group from any single country and we want to include as much of the mosaic as possible.
Our goal is not to put faces and names with these issues and put in real terms abstract policies. To that end, if anyone has questions or suggestions for story ideas or if someone has a story of their own, we urge our readers to get in touch with us and let us know.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our coverage.