With Amnesty Deadline Past, Immigrant Rights Leader’s ‘Real Work’ Is Beginning

Robin Blackwell counts organization and tenacity as her strongest attributes, and they are precisely the qualities required to run a coalition to help immigrants file applications for legal residency and citizenship.

She has added patience to her repertoire over the past 14 months as head of the Orange County Coalition for Immigrant Rights. The coalition was established to monitor, protect and advocate the rights of thousands of immigrants who have applied for legal residency under the amnesty provisions of the Immigration Reform Act of 1986.

“I’m very tenacious and it has served me well,” Blackwell said. “But I’ve also learned to speak less and listen more.”

The daughter of a well-known Orange County activist, Blackwell, 31, has spent the past year speaking to groups about the plight of immigrants, offering advice and information to undocumented workers, and in general seeking help in protecting their rights.

From a cubbyhole loaned to the coalition by the Orange County Human Relations Commission, Blackwell and her secretary have taken thousands of calls. Some, she said, involved life-and-death situations; others were amusing.

But now that the May 4 deadline for applying for amnesty has passed, Blackwell and her part-time secretary--the only staff the coalition employs--probably will be even busier.

“Now is when the real work starts,” she said. “There is more grass-roots organization to be done to make sure everything gets accomplished.”

And those who did not apply, or those who find they do not qualify, Blackwell predicted, will need even more protection from employers or landlords.

“There has been a sense of urgency all along that is very stressful,” she said. “And it is hard knowing that too many people did not apply for . . . reasons (such as) they had no money or were scared.”

In the last few days before the deadline passed, Blackwell said she received countless calls from frantic immigrants seeking information or help with desperate situations. One was from a young Guatemalan man who is not eligible for amnesty and has been refused political asylum.

“He can’t work. He has nowhere to turn to. There are some calls that just wring your heart out,” she said.

Blackwell is articulate and has a direct yet disarming conversational approach. She came to her activism early in life, learning it from her mother, Jeanne Blackwell, a Legal Aid attorney and member of the Anaheim City School District board of trustees.

Comparisons between mother and daughter were inevitable.

“I didn’t want to be a junior Jeannie Blackwell. She’s a wonderful woman to emulate; but as a career, I want to stand on my own,” her daughter said.

Perhaps the coalition’s most publicized work came earlier this year when it protested the arrest of hundreds of undocumented laborers along Chapman Avenue by Orange police. Those without proper identification were turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol for deportation.

“The impact of that was very divisive in the community and not just for the men on the street corners,” Blackwell said. “To have remained silent would have been wrong. That’s why we had to lend our name to get people organized.”

She recruited family support for the effort. Jeanne Blackwell participated in one protest against the sweeps on Chapman Avenue that her daughter had organized. Robin Blackwell said she even put a sign around her 2-year-old son and marched him in the protest.

“Everything was going fine until someone calls out ‘Go to hell’ to the police. I turned around and it’s my mother. I’m concerned about crowd control and my mother is the one yelling,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Blackwell now hopes to find more grant money to keep the coalition operating at least another year or so, although she does see the organization eventually disbanding.

“I’d like to work in public-private partnerships. I think that’s the way to answer needs in your community. But I’ll never have another job as challenging or exciting as this one.”

Herbert J. Vida is on vacation