These are the moving images of a community coming together to support one of her own. Herta might not be American by birth, but her adopted community embraced her and stood by her today at Hope Community Church in Detroit, MI. The speeches, the prayers, the hugs all become stronger because of the immediate urgency of Herta’s case. While the “political moment” remains elusive for a comprehensive reform to be enacted, someone like Herta has to see her dreams go down the drain. Her untimely deportation only becomes a much more bitter fight for all of us as advocates because we continue to hear, day after day, that we are pushing for a sensible piece of legislation, that good public policy always comes after bad politics, that politics is like a sausage and you don’t want to see how it gets made.

But today all that matters for Herta and her community is the fear that for her the good policy might not have made it out in time. Regardless of what happens with the DREAM Act, we will always have stories of dreamers in process of deportation. And in that future day when the DREAM Act does make it out, when immigration reform does happen, when the sausage finally gets grilled — it will still be bittersweet because we lose students every day. We don’t know all of them, they not all know of our movement, but this is happening.

Therefore, while we recognize that our work might never reach every dreamer out there, we are grateful to at least have the opportunity to fight this one with Herta and stand with her family. This past week I’ve been taking some time off, but every time I logged on to my facebook I saw someone else out there who was putting out the word about Herta. And these were people not only in Michigan, but in California, New York, Florida, and other places. We may never feel like we saved all dreamers, but at least we get to fight it out once more and make our voices heard.

Please take time to once again call the Department of Homeland Security today. Talk to people about DREAM students again, even if you feel you have been talking to people about this for ten years now. Gather some friends and start planning an action for September 23. Come back and visit DreamActivist everyday, and get others to read our site as well.

The above video shows Herta talking about her hopes to stay. It also has the DreamAct movement’s most prominent Quaker, making an appearance at 1:16. You can also listen to the radio segment Herta and I did on KPFK Los Angeles, by looking at their archives, and clicking on the link to Strategy Session with Antonio Gonzalez. There is more and more blog coverage all over the series of tubes, thanks to this list of media coverage of Herta that Kyle compiled over at CitizenOrange.

Let’s keep pushing today.