Joyce Bennett Alvarado’s favorite part of her work as ILCM’s attorney in Worthington is “seeing my clients get their green cards, their work authorizations, etc. Especially, when they shyly ask if they can give me a hug after I hand them their approvals letters!”

Personal connections have been part of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) practice in Worthington since the beginning. In 2020, ILCM marks the 10th anniversary of our Worthington office. ILCM’s presence in this small town in southwestern Minnesota actually began four years before the office opened.

2006: The Raid

On December 12 2006, immigration agents descended on Worthington’s Swift meatpacking plant in a six-state operation that arrested 1,300 people in six meatpacking plants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surrounded the plant and filled buses with about immigrants brought out in handcuffs. By the time it was over, more than 200 immigrants were taken away.

Fear spread through the town, with families afraid to go home and children left alone when ICE took their parents. Many stayed at churches overnight, with pastors and teachers and social workers scrambling to find some family members left to take them.

Emergency calls went out statewide. ILCM and other immigration attorneys responded, sending staff to Worthington, where they set up temporary offices. Law schools mobilized students to assist in bond hearings.

After the immediate crisis, ILCM continued its Worthington involvement, sending attorneys to see clients there twice a month. With no office, they borrowed space in a community education building to talk with clients.

The need for legal help with immigration matters went far beyond those arrested in the raid. Other residents needed help with visas, forms, hearings, and eventually with naturalization.

City of Immigrants

Worthington is a city of immigrants, with population growing from a low of 9,977 in 1990 to more than 13,000 today. The small city’s population is about 41 percent Hispanic or Latino, ten percent Asian, and 7 percent African or African American, according to U.S. census figures.

In many small towns, vacant storefronts abound on once-thriving main streets and populations decline year after year. Not in Worthington, where immigration has boosted population over the past 30 years and keeps main street thriving. Mexican-American and Mexican workers were among the first to arrive, soon joined by a large Guatemalan immigrant population, as well as Hondurans, Salvadorans, and a few Nicaraguans. Today, Worthington’s Ethiopian community has grown large enough to begin building Tsadkane Mariam Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Other substantial immigrant groups include Karen and Karenni refugees from Burma/Myanmar and Hmong immigrants who came to the United States after the 1970s U.S. war in Southeast Asia.

ILCM Presence in Worthington

In 2009, Kathy Klos moved to Worthington to open ILCM’s first full-time office outside the Twin Cities metro area. The first order of business, she recalls, was to find office space so that she did not have to work out of her apartment. The Hedeen Hughes & Wetering law firm welcomed ILCM to Worthington and rented space in its downtown building. ILCM opened its office in March 2010.

Over the years, ILCM staff in Worthington have included Kathy Klos, Enrique Tellez, Sara Karki, Maylary Apolo, Jess Riemer, Joyce Bennett Alvarado, and Erin Schutte Wadzinski. They have represented immigrant clients in matters ranging from deportation defense to naturalization.

Today, Joyce Bennett Alvarado, originally from Honduras, staffs ILCM’s office. “Working in Worthington has taught me a lot,” she says. “Being a lawyer is so much more than having a degree, doing research, interpreting the law or filing forms. It also means being able to open people’s minds, to communicate, and helping and empowering clients.”

Andrea Duarte-Alonso works half-time in the Worthington office, thanks to a fellowship from the Southwest Initiative Foundation. A Worthington native, Andrea interned at ILCM when she was a student at the College of St. Catherine. She also created Stories From Unheard Voices, a website sharing immigrant stories from Worthington.

“It was a Saturday. A lot of people were killed–within 12 hours more than 424 people were dead. I could hear the bullets. I saw one of my uncles die.”

This is how Oballa Oballa’s immigration story began. He was ten years old on December 13, 2003 in Gambela, Ethiopia. “The government tried to get rid of our whole tribe,” he said. “We were kicked out of our homeland suddenly. But even before that we had been mistreated by the government because of our land and resources.”

After walking nearly seven days, Oballa crossed the border into Sudan to get to Kenya. After some time living in Nairobi, he went to a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya and lived there from 2005-2013. In the camp, food was distributed just twice a month—if at all. There were water shortages too, but throughout it all Oballa and his family remained optimistic.

“Every day the hope is that one day we will be able to leave,” he said. To do that, they had to go through the long, complicated, and often opaque process of refugee resettlement.

“Some people come to a refugee camp and will stay there for more than 20 years without getting an opportunity to resettle. Some people will stay for more than 10 years. Our name was picked after we had been in the camp for about 6 years, but even from there the process was really difficult.

“When your name is finally picked you have hope. Our name was posted in 2008 and every morning I would wake up and go to the post station to see if anything had changed. My mom would ask me for an update and then we would pray that tomorrow something will come up.

“Even once we were chosen for resettlement it took forever before we were granted permission to come to the United States. We had to go through a lot of interviews, and were constantly having to prove to different lawyers that our story was true and that the conditions in our country were as bad as we said they were. It was an exhausting process, and we went almost three years without any real progress. Finally, at the end of 2012, we heard that the UNHCR wanted to send us to the United States.”

Oballa and his family arrived in the United States in December 2013, ten years after the massacre that drove them from their home. Initially, they lived together in Maryland before Oballa moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota for Job Corps training. His mother moved to Austin, Minnesota, and Oballa joined her there after completing his Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) certificate.

“I don’t see myself moving to any other city apart from Austin,” he said. “I want to pay back the help that I got in Minnesota by working here and helping the community that helped me become who I am today.”

Oballa first heard about the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) while interpreting at the Austin Welcome Center. “I liked the website and thought their work was awesome,” he said. Soon after, he met with ILCM staff attorney Sara Karki to become a citizen himself. “Having an attorney translate all the information and talk me through it was really helpful,” he said. “The whole process was really smooth.”

Oballa’s naturalization process lasted around six months. “Sara has been so helpful, and because of her my case was really fast,” he said. “A lot of my friends say to me ‘your case was so fast,’ and some people are sitting here and it takes forever.” Oballa now recommends ILCM to others looking to apply for citizenship.

Oballa has worked at Mayo Clinic since 2015. He is a health unit coordinator and CNA in the psychiatric unit. Though he values his work at Mayo highly, Oballa sees an even greater need in the community for social workers and has discovered a deep passion for social work. He graduated from Riverland Community College last May with an Associate of Arts and Associate degree in Human Service and is now pursuing a bachelor’s degree in social work with the long-term goal of becoming an immmigration social worker. “I like working with refugees when they come here,” he said. “Without the social worker who helped me when I first arrived I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Oballa views immigration as one of the biggest issues of the current day and wants to be a voice for that issue both within immigrant and refugee communities and for the public as a whole.

“People are saying that refugees are only here to bring the economy down. That is not true. I myself did not come to the United States to beg. I came here to work and have a better life. Refugees are boosting the economy of the U.S.A. So if someone who doesn’t know a refugee’s background says, ‘You people make America bad,’ we have to look back—who is saying that? Apart from Native Americans, everyone in this country is either an immigrant or a refugee. So I feel like people shouldn’t make that decision that, ‘We don’t allow you here.’”

Oballa has long been a public voice, even before becoming a citizen. Starting when he was a student, Oballa worked with LeadMN, an organization that represents the 180,000 two-year college students in Minnesota and works with those students to elevate future leaders and overcome systemic barriers to success. In this role, he championed issues including bills to combat food insecurity on campuses and provide open electronic textbooks to bring down the cost of course materials. In both cases, his work involved testifying at the capitol, and thanks to the efforts of Oballa and other student activists, both bills passed.

Oballa also traveled around visiting Minnesota community colleges talking to students in order to take their concerns up with the board of trustees and then the house and senate. Oballa was elected president of LeadMN in 2019, after previously serving as vice president.

Having registered to vote at his naturalization ceremony, Oballa is looking forward to also engaging in different forms of political involvement.

“I am so happy because now I can vote and serve on a jury. I’m excited about jury duty. It is a privilege. Looking at my background even as a citizen I might be less likely to be picked for a jury, but having my voice and being someone who is civically engaged in the community I can volunteer myself. There are a lot of immigrants, refugees, and black people who are being convicted and sent to jail because there aren’t juries who represent them. I am also looking forward to running for office someday to represent my community.”

Oballa believes that “refusing refugees is not what the United States is supposed to be.”

“People need to understand refugees before judging them. Refugees come to the United States for good reasons. They don’t have other places to go and this opportunity is a blessing to them. It is a blessing for me to be here, and there are still refugees with hope that they could come here too. No one should be able to take that away.”

“We see them when they come in for vaccinations for school: young people who ‘just got here’ somehow over the summer. How can we help them?”

“These kids seem super-vulnerable.”

“What are the legal ways we can be helpful to them; first to be safe and then to get them on a path to citizenship?”

When attorneys Kathy Klos and Joyce Bennett offered a workshop to child service workers and public health nurses in Worthington, these were among the concerns raised. The workshop offered an overview of legal issues affecting young immigrants.

The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) has three focus areas: representation of individual clients, education, and advocacy. This workshop is one of many ways that ILCM works to educate immigrant and non-immigrant communities across Minnesota. Other educational presentations focus on crucial current issues, on topics such as becoming a citizen, or on more general overviews of immigration law and policy.

When the Trump administration first proposed its wealth test for immigrants, ILCM worked with Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, Mid Minnesota Legal Aid, and the Volunteer Lawyers Network to put together information on the public benefits/public charge regulation for attorneys. ILCM and others worked over the succeeding months to translate the legal language into plain language for the community. We helped to keep community members up-to-date on legal actions to block the new wealth test, and finally on its implementation.

Lawyers, social workers, immigrants, and non-immigrants need this information: the threat of the new regulation has had a chilling effect on immigrants.  Across the country, citizens and non-citizens alike have abandoned benefits to which their families are entitled. Some, for example, have pulled children out of school lunch programs, although these programs are not covered by the 200+ page regulation.

Regularly scheduled ILCM presentations provide information about naturalization for both lawyers and immigrants. About 46 percent of Minnesota immigrants have already have become citizens. That’s an indication of the high interest in naturalization that brings immigrants to these presentations. ILCM’s pro bono program recruits and trains volunteer lawyers to represent immigrants in the process of becoming citizens.

“What percentage of Minnesota’s population are immigrants?” (8.3 percent)

“Do immigrants pay taxes?” (Yes.)

Questions like these come up in presentations everywhere from college classrooms to church basements. Information and myth-busting go hand-in-hand for ILCM presenters speaking to general audiences concerned about immigration.

For immigrant audiences, presentations may focus on more specific concerns about DACA or Know Your Rights information, or on rapidly and continuously changing immigration policies.

In 2019, ILCM has spoken to lawyers, social workers, immigrants, non-immigrants, religious organizations, unions, activist groups, the VFW, high school and college classes, and more. If you or your group would like to schedule an ILCM presentation, here’s the link to begin the process.

Walk down Tenth Street in Worthington, the southwest Minnesota town’s main street, and you see business after thriving business: restaurants, cleaners, a bank, a repair shop, a Mexican grocery on one block, an Asian grocery on another. In many other small towns, one vacant storefront sits next to another all through their depressed business districts.  Not here: Worthington’s downtown looks busy and healthy.

The town’s population growth, boosted by waves of immigrant arrivals over the past 30 years, maintains this healthy business district. Worthington is a city of immigrants, with population growing from a low of 9,977 in 1990 to more than 13,000 today. The small city’s population is about 41 percent Hispanic or Latino, ten percent Asian, and 7 percent African or African American, according to U.S. census figures.

Mexican-American and Mexican workers were among the first to arrive, drawn by jobs at the Swift meatpacking plant. The plant, and Worthington, made national headlines in 2006, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided six Swift plants and arrested about 1,300 immigrant workers in the largest immigration raids the country had seen. Devastated by the arrests of 200 friends, family, and neighbors, the community rallied to care for children left without parents and to help families who lost loved ones.

In 2007, Swift sold the meatpacking plant to JBS, which still operates the plant and JBS, still employs hundreds of immigrant workers. They include not only the Mexican and Mexican-American workers who were the first arrivals in Worthington, but also many immigrants from Guatemala, as well as Hondurans, Salvadorans, and a few Nicaraguans. Many of the Mexican and Central American immigrants and their children find a church home at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where a few hundred attend a Saturday evening Spanish Mass and more than a thousand may pack the Sunday morning Spanish Mass.

Worthington’s Ethiopian community has grown large enough to begin building Tsadkane Mariam Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Other substantial immigrant groups include Karen and Karenni refugees from Burma/Myanmar and Hmong immigrants who came to the United States after the 1970s U.S. war in Southeast Asia.

While some long-time residents resent that change, many others welcome Worthington’s newer residents. Worthington Mayor Michael Kuhle says that immigration’s benefits to Worthington “far, far outweigh any perceived disadvantages.” In an October 2, 2019 Counterpoint article published in the Star Tribune, Mayor Kuhle writes:

“Immigration has helped to provide badly needed employees for these businesses and the surrounding area. The farming community has benefited from the availability of immigrant workers. Without immigrants moving to Worthington, we would likely be a community in decline.”

Population declines in rural areas of the United States have left many small towns struggling to survive. Worthington is an example of the counter-trend: small towns that are seeing a rebound because of immigration. According to the Center for American Progress, more than a million immigrants have moved to rural counties since 1990, and “between 2000 and 2005, more than 200 nonmetropolitan counties would have lost overall population if new Hispanic residents had not moved to or started families in those counties.”

Immigrants provide a younger workforce and a high degree of entrepreneurship, both of which foster economic growth. Immigrant medical professionals provide desperately needed health care in areas where doctors are scarce. Immigrant children boost enrollment, keeping schools open.

Immigrants come to rural Minnesota for jobs, but also for reasons that will sound familiar to many long-time rural residents, as reported in a Federal Gazette article:

“Abebe Abetew, a native of Ethiopia who lived in Washington, D.C., before moving to Worthington to work at JBS, pointed to the low crime rate and low cost of living as amenities, as well as a short commute time. ‘When I lived in D.C., I spent three hours a day getting to and from work. Now my commute is five minutes,’ he said.”

While most Minnesota immigrants still live in the metro area, Worthington offers a demonstration of rural immigration that works. That demonstration is repeated in rural communities across Minnesota. Immigrants keep Worthington and all of Minnesota growing!