A Dream Derailed: The Dark Side of the Immigrant Experience

Originally from Mexico, Eileen Truax is a journalist and immigrant currently living in Los Angeles. She contributes regularly to Hoy Los Angeles and Unidos and writes for Latin American publications including Proceso, El Universal, and Gatopardo. Dreamers: An Immigrant Generation's Fight for Their American Dream (Beacon Press) looks closely at the situation of approximately twelve million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, as many as two million who came as children. In 2001, US senator Dick Durbin introduced the DREAM Act to Congress, an initiative that would allow these young people to become legal residents if they met certain requirements. More than ten years later, in the face of congressional inertia and furious opposition from some, the DREAM Act has yet to be passed. In Dreamers, Eileen Truax illuminates the stories of these men and women who are living proof of a complex and sometimes hidden political reality that calls into question what it truly means to be American.

Margaret Regan is the author of the award-winning book The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands, a 2010 Southwest Book of the Year. An editor and writer at the Tucson Weekly, Regan has won many regional and national prizes for her immigration reporting, including the 2013 Al Filipov Peace and Justice Award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her latest book, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire  (Beacon Press) is an intimate look at the people ensnared by the US detention and deportation system, the largest in the world. Drawing on years of reporting in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, Regan tells their poignant stories. Regan demonstrates how increasingly draconian detention and deportation policies have broadened police powers, while enriching a private prison industry whose profits are derived from human suffering. She also documents the rise of resistance, profiling activists and young immigrant “Dreamers” who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented. Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire offers a rare glimpse into the lives of people ensnared in America’s immigration dragnet.

Rachèle Magloire was born in Port-au Prince, Haiti, and raised in Montreal, Canada. She earned a degree in Communications from Quebec University. As a reporter, she worked for Télé Haiti, and Haîti en Marche, a weekly published in Miami. She served a brief stint at Haiti National Television as Chief Editor and as News Director. Magloire was a stringer for the Montreal dailies La Presse and Le Devoir and collaborated on Le Point, a Radio Canada TV magazine. Since 1995, she has directed documentaries for Fanal Productions. In The Democratic Republic of Congo, Magloire worked with Radio Okapi, a national radio network founded by the United Nations, in collaboration with Fondation Hirondelle for Freedom of Speech. In addition, she is involved with Sinema Anba Zetwal/ Cinema Under the Stars, a dynamic audiovisual mobile structure that screens movies with social messages to large audiences all over the country. With Chantal Regnault, she directed Deported, a documentary about legal immigrants from Haiti in the United States, whose criminal records led to deportation. In 2011, Vues D’Afrique awarded Magloire and her sister Laurence Magloire, the CIRTEF Prize for Services Rendered to Humanity.