Our co-founders, Francisco Rodriguez and Cam Coval, met each other in the fall of 2016 at Glenfair Elementary School in East Portland.
At that time, Francisco was working at Glenfair as a behavioral specialist, and Cam began serving as an AmeriCorps member in food pantries at schools throughout East Multnomah County. In addition to working together at Glenfair, Cam and Francisco also began working together to coordinate the food pantry at Reynolds Middle School.
On March 26, 2017, Francisco Rodriguez, was arrested by ICE agents without a warrant, becoming one of the first DACA recipients in Oregon to be detained under the Trump administration. Upon learning about the arrest, Cam worked with community leaders to organize a rally to demand Francisco’s immediate release. Within an hour after the demonstration ended, Francisco was released from the detention center. The ACLU credited his release to “the massive public response” that we helped coordinate.
After Francisco returned to schools in East Multnomah County, he and Cam were approached by other immigrants from Latin America whose loved ones had been detained by ICE, and who asked for help securing their release. These people did not have the same ties to the Portland nonprofit community that Francisco had through his work, so they had not received the same outpouring of support and attention. Francisco and Cam sought in vain to find attorneys willing to take on these cases at affordable rates.
It became clear to Francisco and Cam, and it was also later identified in a 2017 Oregon Ready survey of immigration service providers and advocates, that low-cost, language-specific legal representation for people facing detention and deportation was the most glaring gap in services for immigrants in Oregon. Indeed, Francisco and Cam encountered several challenges seeking legal services on behalf of the families that reached out to them. As court hearings and filing deadlines came and went, the inability to find quality, low-cost legal representation jeopardized their loved ones’ ability to mount a strong removal defense. Francisco and Cam realized that the lack of affordable representation for immigrants in Oregon heightened the chance that these families and others would be separated by detention and deportation.
However, Francisco’s experience proved that when people mobilize around a common goal, they can make an impact in a seemingly insurmountable situation. That experience motivated Francisco and Cam to start Pueblo Unido PDX as a community group dedicated to helping people facing deportation navigate legal services in a streamlined manner, and providing financial assistance to help families hire experienced attorneys at a reasonable cost. In this way, Pueblo Unido formed to give people the best possible chance to win their cases against deportation and achieve the legal right to remain in their communities with their families.
The first two families that Francisco and Cam supported through Pueblo Unido won their cases against removal and were released from detention in December 2017. These early successes in reuniting local families reinforced the impact of the work and emboldened Francisco and Cam to establish Pueblo Unido as a nonprofit in February 2018.
Help us prevent detention and deportation, advance Indigenous language justice, and give our communities the tools they need to feel secure, achieve their goals, and thrive.