President Obama, for too long, our immigrant brothers and sisters, documented and undocumented, have lived and worked in fear that at any moment, your Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will raid their homes and workplaces, armed like soldiers, to inspect them and their homes on the suspicion that they may be without proper documentation to be living here with their families.

Throughout America, students read about the desperate experience of Anne Frank, facing house raids by Nazi troops, afraid to make a sound, afraid that her family would be snatched, rounded up like cattle, and placed in prison merely because the government made it illegal to exist as a Jew.

Our modern day detention facilities may not have gas chambers or mass graves, but the fate of immigrants deported from our country to nations decimated by free trade agreements, desperate poverty, and drug violence surely is horrible. We demand that the U.S. government immediately cease the practice of deportations, starting with raids of workplaces and homes.