When you come out to your friends about your status, they will stand behind you and fight with you.

This is the case of Isabel, a 24-year old dreamer who is on her own but building an army of supporters in the least expected of places: Harrisonburg, Virginia. It started with an email to about 40 people she knew, and a meeting at her house. They started a group called “DreamActivists Virginia” and set out to get their city council to endorse the DREAM Act. It would be difficult, but Isabel felt she could eke out the three needed votes for the resolution to be adopted.

They met the council members individually, and rallied people to show up to the meeting. They had been told repeatedly that a particularly conservative member of the council might try to block the vote, and would be nearly impossible to convince.

But Isabel told her story. Coming to the US at age 6, going to college, and finding herself now almost 25 years old and still unable to use her degree in Social Work. She is a magna cum laude graduate stuck working at a restaurant. She is part of Harrisonburg, and her friends are part of her life. She can no longer wait for the broken system in DC to let her know when she will have a chance to be live normally in the only country she knows.

The resolution passed with an unanimous vote, and even the most conservative Council members showed their support.

Local writer Nancy Bondurant Jones, from the Daily News Record, sent a clear message to the men representing Harrisonburg in Congress:

My hope is that citizens of the Shenandoah Valley will also back the DREAM Act by sending their endorsements to Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner and Rep. Bob Goodlatte. Please spread the word to those who have not been made aware of the awesome effort being made to support the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Harrisonburg is part of the 6th congressional district, currently represented by Bob Goodlatte (pictured above). Goodlatte is a Republican who has been increasingly trying to seduce the Tea Party sentiments that will be remembered as the death of the Grand Old Party. He has co-sponsored the capricious bill to do a citizenship check of Presidential candidates, and gets an A+ career grade from NumbersUSA, the numerical contorsionist arm of the anti-immigrant movement. That grade officially converts into an F-, summer school, and remedial English lessons in the DreamActivist grading system.

Yo, Goodlatte, don't just Tea Party, Dream!

When Democrats have been in charge, things have not been much better. Jim Olin, who represented the area between 1983 and 1993, was one of only three dems to vote against the Americans with Disabilities Act. Perhaps because Real Americans don’t have disabilities. Alas, it seems things might be changing in Virginia’s 6th district, starting with the unanimous support of the DREAM Act by the Harrisonburg City Council. Last year, Barack Obama was the first Democrat to visit the city during a presidential campaign since 1860, and the first Democrat to win there since 1944.

There is a changing culture that can be represented by a college town like Harrisonburg, home of James Madison and Eastern Mennonite University. Dreamactivists Virginia is going for the support of their college presidents next, and they can’t stop, won’t stop until Congressman Goodlatte starts building bridges rather than walls by co-sponsoring the DREAM Act.