More than 200,000 families have been separated by deportation since July 2010. In case you missed it, last week The Dream is Now released a new music video highlighting the importance of keeping families together and supporting a common sense road map to citizenship for aspiring Americans. 

Check out the video and call your representative to support immigration reform at 1-888-787-9658.

This week Americans will celebrate July 4th and America’s independence. It also will be a time when public ceremonies are held to swear in newly naturalized American citizens. That gives us a chance to reflect on comprehensive immigration reform and think about the economic implications. 

The voting rights of people of color suffered a huge blow last week, hitting Latinos particularly hard.

The same day the Supreme Court invalidated a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that helped protect the right to vote for disenfranchised racial and ethnic minorities in select parts of the country, a top Texas state official made headlines by saying Texas would “immediately” enact a strict voter ID law. A panel of federal judges rejected the law last year, which it referred to as “the most stringent in the country,” adding that it would impose “unforgiving burdens on the poor.” Texas is home to the nation’s second-largest concentration of Latinos (9.5 million).

While Republicans use deficit hysteria as an excuse to make cuts to earned benefit lifelines like Social Security and Medicare, here's a commonsense way to trim the deficit and boost revenue without hurting anyone: immigration reform with a road map to citizenship. 

Worker protections, a road map to citizenship, family unification...these are the priorities of union members and working families this week as the Senate Judiciary Committee continues its markup of the immigration reform bill. 

Today, Republican senators are debating the SAFE Act, which would increase inhumane detentions and harmful policies that tear families apart from each other. 

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka released the following statement this morning on creating a commonsense immigration process:

Working people, including the 12 million members of the AFL-CIO, would like to remind our elected leaders why there is no higher legislative priority than immigration reform, which must include a certain and inclusive path to citizenship and respect the rights of America’s workers.

This week, a California worker center that organizes domestic workers and immigrant women, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, affiliated with the San Francisco Labor Council as part of a growing partnership effort by the labor movement and the larger worker rights’ movement to strengthen advocacy and mobilization efforts for day laborers, domestic workers and all working people.

Take the nation’s fastest growing soccer tournament, add an emphasis on academic success, a dash of workers’ rights and the Texas union movement and you’ve got a recipe for a unique and innovative Latino community outreach opportunity.

That’s what is happening this weekend in Austin, where the Texas AFL-CIO and Texas AFT are partnering with a local Univision personality at the COPA Univision amateur soccer tournament that will include both adult men’s and women’s teams and teams of boys and girls from 6 to 18 years old. They will be hosting players and their parents, as well as event spectators at a special tent on the grounds of Northeast Metro Park, the site of the two-day tournament festival.

New technologies and social media are increasingly important and effective ways to communicate and they can open doors for the labor movement to build stronger relationships with the Latino community. But, says Elianne Ramos, there are several key points to keep in mind when using tech to reach Latino workers—the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. workforce—and the community.

In the third of the AFL-CIO's series of live online discussions on how we build the movement for the future of working people, Ramos, principal and CEO of Speak Hispanic Communications and vice-chair of communications and PR for Latinos in Social Media (LATISM), outlines several of those points.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka released the following statement in response to the Senate Judiciary Committee's immigration bill: 

Today brings to mind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s wise and hopeful words, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” More than 11 million aspiring Americans took a big step toward becoming citizens today with the bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee vote. That reflects an enormous step toward healing an injustice, the deportation crisis that has wrecked families, communities and workplaces for far too long.