Westchester Community for Ethical Culture

“Current Changes in Immigration Policy: President Obama’s Executive Actions” will be the subject of Courtney Snegroff’s talk. Courtney Snegroff has worked as the Outreach and Engagement Manager for the Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians since July 2014. She leads the office’s work on assisting Boston residents to become citizens as well as the outreach efforts on President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Her role includes organizing across city departments and coordinating with community-based organizations, foreign consulates and legal service providers to support the needs of the immigrant community of Boston. Prior to her work at the Mayor’s Office she worked for eleven years at the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ. She began her work at the union as a Representative where she negotiated contracts and organized low-wage mostly immigrant janitors in commercial office buildings and higher educational institutions to fight for just wages and fair treatment. This included organizing the janitors at Harvard University who faced countless injustices but ultimately were able to make huge strides towards a real living wage and full time work. During her time at the union, Courtney traveled to other U.S. cities to help support worker and immigrant organizing including spending several nights in a jail in Houston, Texas where she was part of a large union organizing effort with the all-immigrant, $5 per hour, workforce. Following her time as a Representative, Courtney worked as the union’s Political Director where she advocated for pro-immigrant, pro-worker policies at the federal, state and city levels and ran the union’s field campaigns in support of pro-immigrant political candidates. Courtney has spent time living in Central America and Brazil and is fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese. Courtney will be talking about how the hostility of our current United States Congress towards any kind of positive movement on immigration reform has lead to some individual states passing their own legislation on the federal issue of immigration. She will explain how President Obama was galvanized into making his own executive actions in 2012 and again in 2014 and dive into the details of what these actions entail as well as how the implementation of the President’s 2014 actions has been blocked by 26 states. She will also be sharing her own personal experience assisting the in the reunion of an mixed immigrant status family.