This weekend a brand new coalition of refugees and immigrants will gather to celebrate their accomplishments in Colorado, and to educate the community against falling for myths and misconceptions about why they are here.
No matter that the group's membership currently only numbers four; they’re hoping to grow with a Launch and Celebration event at History Colorado on Sunday afternoon.
“I will be providing a more national and international perspective on some updates and ways that people can meaningfully engage, as well as just really providing some factual context on what we have been hearing,” said NgaVương-Sandoval, founding president of Refugees + Immigrants United (RIU).
Allegations that members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, have supposedly overtaken parts of Aurora have circulated both locally and nationally in recent months. (While some with alleged gang ties have been arrested in the city, law enforcement says the gang’s presence is dwarfed in size by other gangs originating in the US). And in recent years, numerous Colorado cities, including Aurora, have publicly defined themselves as non-sanctuary cities with no capacity to assist new immigrants.
Vương-Sandoval said the attention to these topics overshadows who individual immigrants and refugees to Colorado are. Her group hopes to interrupt that narrative.
“That message of unity is really important for RIU – to dispel some of the dissension and all of the, I think, fabricated friction that is happening,” she explained.
Her goal for the weekend is to bring “this beauty together so that we are under one umbrella of showing that united front because of why we left, why we're here, and what we hope to do,” she said in an interview on Friday. “We are not just about the traumatic stories and journeys that took us here. We are a lot more than that.”
One thing she hopes will come across at Sunday afternoon’s “Launch and Celebration” event is the moves Colorado has made to honor those born in other countries. The group will uplift the fact that Colorado recently made Lunar New Year an official holiday, one of only a few states in the country to do so.
The event will feature a mix of information and performances from around the world.
“We'll have Japanese taiko drummers. We'll have Vietnamese fan dancers. We'll have a Spanish flamenco guitar player as well as South Asian mudra dancers,” she said.
Helping to bring clarity to what’s happening around immigration and refugee resettlement statewide will be James Horan, President and CEO of the regional branch of Lutheran Family Services, one of the state’s largest organizations working in refugee resettlement.
“[He] will be providing updates as to what we are seeing, what are some of the things that are happening, what should we be expecting of newcomers and influxes and what is LFSRM doing,” she said.
Colorado Supreme Court Justice Carlos A. Samour, who emigrated from El Salvador, will give the keynote speech, and also be honored with an inaugural award.
“I'm really excited about [it] because it shows to others who are from our community and beyond: look at the tremendous accomplishments from our community all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court,” Vương-Sandoval said.
The founding members of the all-volunteer refugee-led group include an immigrant from Senegal; an immigrant from China; a refugee from Burma, and Vương-Sandoval, who said she is a refugee from Saigon, Vietnam.
“We're a small but powerful and dynamic group because we're so new and because everyone in our group has day jobs,” she said. “This is something that we do because we're passionate about it, and because we feel there's such a significant need to bring our perspectives and experiences and expertise to the table.”
