By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com
Members of the Grassroots Rally Team of Ohio will gather in Painesville Saturday to bring attention to what they feel will be the next big national issue, immigration reform.
Arzella Melnyk, a spokeswoman for the group, said the team will join with Tea Party Patriots of Cleveland and Geauga County to hold a Tea Party Against Amnesty for Illegal Immigration on the Painesville City Square from noon to 2 p.m.
Melnyk said the rally is being held to coincide with rallies nationwide organized by Americans for Legal Immigration. The political action committee called for the rallies after U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez,D-Ill., announced plans to introduce comprehensive amnesty legislation by the end of November.
Although Congress is pre-occupied with health-care reform these days, Melnyk feels the amnesty issue will be the next hot potato Congress removes from the oven. She said they want to get their information on the street before the table is set for debate.
“My personal opinion is that we have immigration laws and they need to be enforced, our borders need to be secured,” she said. “Our economy right now is absolutely horrible, and yet we hear there are 12 million immigrants here. We could have U.S. citizens working in those jobs. That alone should be a wake-up call for us.”
The plight of Ashtabula County’s undocumented immigrants has been raised by the advocacy group HOLA — Hispanas Organizadas de Lake y Ashtabula — in the past month. The group has accused area police departments of racial profiling Hispanics for traffic stops, then turning over to immigration authorities those who are found to be undocumented.
HOLA’s executive director, Veronica Dahlberg, recently provided numerous examples of families who have been torn apart as a result of the enforcement of immigration laws. When the father and/or mother are deported, the parents face the difficult decision of leaving their American-citizen children behind.
