Tag: immigrants

Pregnant when she arrived in Clarkston from Afghanistan, Muzhda Oriakhil struggled to navigate the American healthcare system. Now she’s making it easier for refugee women who’ve followed.

A member of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya community, Abu Talib endured a harrowing journey at sea to start a new life in Clarkston. But conditions continue to deteriorate for the family he left behind.

Today, I am a senior refugee referral specialist. Until 2006, I was a case manager, and case managers do everything: come to the rent appointment, help them buy food, help them apply for food stamps, social security card, take them to the health center, to their appointment for the doctor, looking for a job. I cannot tell you how many times I was there at the airport [meeting refugees]. From 1990 to 2000, I only had Saturdays and Sundays not at the airport. Every Friday night, I was in the airport. They called me Mr. Midnight.

In October 2011, activists founded an underground school in response to policies that made it harder for undocumented students to go to college in Georgia. That stopgap—and those policies—have now been in place for a decade.

Daniela Rodriguez organized the Savannah Undocumented Youth Alliance has twice been named one of the 50 Most Influential Latinos in Georgia. Helen Kim Ho founded the Southeast’s first Asian American civil rights nonprofit, now known as Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta.

Venezuelan Carlos Carrasquero dreamed of owning his own bookstore, and in May, he opened BiblioCactus Librería in a strip mall on Grimes Bridge Road in Roswell.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy allows renewable two-year respite from deportation for undocumented immigrants who entered the United States before they turned 16. Roughly 21,000 of them are in Georgia. Here, six metro Atlanta DACA recipients discuss their dreams, setbacks, achievements, survival, and what it’s been like to skirt federal and state laws in pursuit of better lives in America.

Ticonderoga Club's Paul Calvert and Little Tart Bakeshop's Sarah O'Brien are working to rally Atlanta restaurateurs to support the efforts of those trying to help children who have been detained and separated from their families at the U.S. border.

There’s almost no signage for the cozy East Cobb doughnut shop—blink and you might miss it. But every day at 5:00 a.m., Sokcheat Heng and Sophal Chhim hit the kitchen to begin making their from-scratch doughnuts in classic varieties like sour cream and crumb cake, along with seasonal flavors like pumpkin.

Khaled is choking. Khaled, who is alive because he hid under his desk when the men came with their guns, whose family is alive because he convinced them to walk out the front door of their Damascus home while it still stood (and keep walking until they found a way to Jordan).