The Associated Press reports that of the 17 guests invited by the White House to sit with the first lady during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night will be Cristian Avila, a 23-year-old “Dreamer,” or undocumented immigrant brought to the country by his parents as a child. The White House says Avila, an immigrant-rights activist who hopes to one day join the Marine Corps, received a two-year stay from deportation through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program created by the president in June 2012 which made an estimated 1.9 million young undocumented immigrants eligible for work authorization and deportation relief.
Avila, of Phoenix, Arizona, began volunteering with Mi Familia Vota, a Latino civic engagement group, as a teenager, and participated in the Fast for Families, a fast undertaken on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. late in 2013 mostly by faith and immigrant-rights groups. In an op-ed published in The Hill shortly after he ended his 22-day fast, Avila wrote that he and his family had come to the United States over 12 years ago. He said the protections extended by DACA had not “removed my fear that my family and millions of others like us can suddenly be separated by deportations under the current system that does not make any sense. We are Americans; this is our home.”
Avila added that the passage of Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which mandated that immigrants carry their proof of legal status with them at all times and greatly expanded police departments’ authority to detain those suspected of being in the country illegally -- and much of which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012 -- had impressed him with “the importance of the Latino vote.”
Other White House guests at the State of the Union will include Carlos Arredondo and Jeff Bauman, who are survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing and Jason Collins, an openly gay former NBA player.
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