c. 2003 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Exhausted from their cross-country journey but filled with enthusiasm, more than 100,000 immigrant workers and their supporters gathered at a spirited rally Saturday to celebrate the final stop of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

Undaunted by a light drizzle, they waved handmade signs and held posters bearing the names of people who disappeared while trying to enter the United States illegally. Some wore shirts declaring, “No Human Being is Illegal.”

The celebration at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens was the largest demonstration against U.S. immigration policy, rally organizers said. Many riders said U.S. rules and laws unfairly place roadblocks in immigrants’ path to citizenship even though they’ve worked in the country for years.

“(Americans) trust us with their most precious things: We watch their babies, we clean their houses and their hotels,” said 26-year-old Rafael Avila, who has been working in the United States without documentation for 21 years. “Give us (a legal) identity. We are the forgotten people, we are left behind.”

Although freedom riders and groups that sponsored the event said it was a success, many stressed the need to continue the fight for immigrant rights long after the last bus rider returns home. The freedom ride involved buses taking off from 10 cities across the country and making their way to Washington to lobby members of Congress, then finishing with Saturday’s rally in New York.

“It’s the start of tomorrow,” AFL-CIO Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson said. “It isn’t the end of the caravan. It’s the beginning of change.”

Chavez-Thompson said she hopes immigration will be a big issue in the 2004 presidential election. The AFL-CIO will support “anyone but Bush,” whose commitment to immigrant rights has waned since his ascent to office, and especially after Sept. 11, she said.

“We have to get an education program up and going, and carry the message everywhere,” she said. “The young people will carry the message when we are gone.”

Nicholas Dimarzio, the Catholic bishop of Brooklyn, said he expects immigration rights reform to accelerate as more undocumented workers expose the injustice of their working conditions.

“Our people is one of a great conscience, and it needs to be informed,” Dimarzio said. “This (freedom ride) is going to inform our conscience.”

Dimarzio said the Catholic church has been fighting for laborers’ rights for many years and will continue to do so. He called the current immigration policy “immoral” and said the U.S. government must welcome as citizens the laborers who are often “ridiculed, exploited and abused.”

“I don’t think we can go on in the situation we are in,” he said.

Brian McLaughlin, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, said he plans to lobby New York City Council members to pass progressive immigration reform bills before the council session closes this year.

The freedom ride will strengthen lobbying efforts because it united labor unions, faith groups and civil rights advocates across the country, McLaughlin said.

Kim Bobo, executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, one of the freedom ride sponsors, said the ride has inspired coalitions to form in 105 cities. The coalitions’ commitment to changing immigration policy “really energized immigrants, who now feel that they have hope and have allies,” Bobo said.

This is especially important in the wake of Sept. 11, which closed many employment opportunities for undocumented laborers and made it harder for people to cross the border illegally as security tightened. Sept. 11 also took center stage in the national policy debate, pushing immigration reform to the sidelines.

“People believed before Sept. 11 that we had a decent chance of getting some kind of change in immigration policy and creating a path to citizenship,” Bobo said. While Sept. 11 ended those immediate hopes, groups believe they now have a good chance of getting immigration reform back on the national agenda.

“We hope within two years that there will be a rational immigration program and that immigration workers will be protected in the workplace,” Bobo said. “If the government wants to do something, absolutely, it can.

“Two years ago, we didn’t have a Homeland Security Department.”

Roger Toussaint, president of New York’s Transportation Workers Union, said the freedom ride signaled that historic changes in immigration rights are on the horizon.

“Immigrants are united behind the demand for justice,” Toussaint said, while the labor movement “is starting to shed its historic conservatism on the stance that immigrants threaten American jobs.”

Standing apart from the chanting, cheering and celebrating throng of riders and supporters, with their variety of languages and cultures, Toussaint said: “This is really what American labor looks like.”

DEA END GABRIEL