Immigrant center names new director

by Loui Gilot, El paso Times.

Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center has selected a young lawyer and longtime labor and community organizer as its new executive director.

Raymundo Eli Rojas replaced Sister Liliane Alam, a Franciscan Missionaries of Mary nun who headed Las Americas for the past six years. Alam was widely credited for pulling the group out of debt, moving it into its own building at 1500 E. Yandell and raising its international profile.

Rebeca B. Robledo, Las Americas board director and an immmigration lawyer in El Paso, said Rojas was well positioned to take over.

"What I like about Ray is that he comes in with a lot of influence. He knows a lot of people in the community," she said.

Rojas, 33, is from El Paso, wento to law school in Kanss and worked as a lawyer and organizer in Colorado, Missouri and Washington, D.C. Before returning to El Paso this summer, he served as director of the nonprofit Kansas City Worker Justice Project, which he founded. He has a bachelor's degree in anthropology from UTEP.

Rojas said he is looking at ways to expand Las Americas' legal and advocacy services.

One of his ideas is to organize people who initially come in for help with their immigration papers and channel them into community improvement projects.

"It's a very big leadership for a person to come and get our help. To let that go would be a waste of leadership. We need to continue to get involced. We need warriors in that movement," he said.

Rojas said he was encouraged to find a lot more community organizing when he came back to El Paso this summer compared to what he remembered.

Last year, Las Americas provided free legal representation for 748 unaccompanied immigrant children, many of them housed in a special detention center in Canutillo. Las Americas' staff of nine employees, including two lawyers, also handles about 50 political asylum cases a year and visa petitions for battered women often referred by the group's volunteer outreach workers. The group's operating budget is $500,000 and comes from grants and private donations.

Robledo said the board was looking at possible adding services such as help with adjustment of status for a nominal fee.

Betsy Allen-Rodriguez started as a volunteer at Las Americas and stayed on as a Board of Immigration Appeals accredited representative. She said Las Americas is a key organization for El Paso.

"Because we're on the border, we have a great need for advocacy for immigrants and immigrant rights. We need to offer good legal representation for immigrants in our community," she said.

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