Immigration

Shennel Douglas is a nursing student at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. She says she hesitated when deciding to study in the U.S. after watching U.S. police shootings of unarmed civilians on television at home in the Caribbean.
 
“Coming to UCA, my main concern was being, what should I say, marginalized? Because not only am I an international student, but also I’m a black international student.”
 
There are now less international students on American college campuses than any time in the last decade.

Children whose families immigrated from the Marshall Islands to Arkansas are eligible for publicly-subsidized health insurance in the state for the first time this year. Healthcare advocates are pushing, uphill at the outset, to get them enrolled.

The extension of healthcare benefits for Marshallese kids is tied to a long history. The United States tested over 60 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It caused long-term health and environmental damage according to some studies.  That's one reason that the Marshallese started to leave the island.

As U.S. Senate Democrats consider blocking budget funding to push for immigration legislation, Arkansas advocates are asking U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to support legislation that would protect young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, so called “Dreamers.”

The Trump Administration announced plans to end the program this fall.

Victims of Hurricane Maria are weighing the possibility of a fresh start in Arkansas this winter.

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is among a handful of schools on the United States’ mainland offering tuition help to Puerto Rican students whose universities were damaged and closed after the storm.

An Arkansas immigrant rights coalition is organizing community meetings, a protest at the state capitol and a 24-hour hunger strike following the federal repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy better known as DACA.

Meanwhile, state officials, from Gov. Asa Hutchinson to U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford (R-1st District) called DACA an unconstitutional executive action leftover from the previous administration of Barack Obama.

A federal program which provides temporary legal status to more than a million undocumented youth will be terminated if a coalition of conservative states prevails in making it so.

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge on Friday announced she has joined with nine other state Attorneys General and the Governor of Idaho formally asking U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to urge the Trump Administration to revoke Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

The program was initiated via executive order by the Obama administration in 2012 after Congress failed to act on sweeping immigration reform. DACA protects youth from deportation by providing temporary legal credentials to law-abiding undocumented youth enabling them to legally work and drive. More than 1.2 million young people have been “DACA-mented."