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Sergio Lara speaks at the Fast for Families Across America Tour's stop at Casa Hogar in Yakima, Wash. on March 5, 2014. The tour is promoting immigration reform in the United States. (KAITLYN BERNAUER/Yakima Herald-Republic)

YAKIMA, Wash. With federal immigration reform seemingly going nowhere this year, a national advocacy group stopped in Yakima on Wednesday as part of its coast-to-coast trek to convince lawmakers otherwise.

Outside of La Casa Hogar, a support center for immigrant women, members from Fast for Families urged residents to ask U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings and other lawmakers to allow a vote on comprehensive immigration reform. Speakers stood in front of a giant bus emblazoned with the groups logo the same bus transporting them to their final stop of Washington, D.C., next month.

We will join communities and together empower the voices and rights of constituents ... and continue to underscore the moral crisis of our broken immigration system, said Sergio Lara, one of the supporters embarking on the weekslong drive.

With the Republican-controlled House leadership saying it likely will not pursue immigration reform in 2014, Fast for Families decided to schedule a bus tour and hold rallies in some of the lawmakers districts.

Two buses left Los Angeles on Feb. 24, each taking different routes. The one that stopped in Yakima will be in Spokane today. By the time the two buses arrive in D.C. in April, they will have covered 18 states and more than 14,000 miles.

Yakima was selected as a stop because of its growing immigrant community and because Hastings is serving his final term, said Los Angeles resident Dae Joong Yoon, one of Fast for Families members and also an executive director of a Korean American rights group.

Yoon, who emigrated from South Korea as a teen more than 20 years ago, is no stranger to activism. In November he made headlines as one of several who fasted for 22 days on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to raise awareness for immigration.

We believe that (Hastings) supports immigration reform, he said, but we wish him to play more leadership, talk within his own caucus and then order the Republican leaders to put a bill on the floor to vote because we believe there is a majority of Congress members who support immigration reform.

Hastings was not in Yakima on Wednesday. In a February interview with the Yakima Herald-Republic, Hastings said he supports stronger borders and an improved guest worker program, but doesnt know if immigration reform is coming in 2014.

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Group presses for immigration reform during Yakima stop in national bus tour

Meet the Fofanasa Baltimore family facing a constant threat of deportation. Their story, which features three distinct immigration battles within one household, shines a light on the complexities of the U.S. immigration system and the challenges facing reform.

Macky Fofana, 21, spends his days flipping pizza dough and his nights searching for news on immigration reform. His soft-spoken brother Mohamed, 14, is a middle-school basketball star. And then theres 17-year-old Ramata, fashionista and high school track athlete, who cooks dinner for her two brothers in their three-bedroom Baltimore apartment every evening while their mother and father work.

Macky was recently granted a permit to work here legally under an Obama administration rule issued last summer. Mohamed is, for all practical purposes, without a legal status. Ramata has permission to stay in the U.S. temporarily, due to a judges ruling that if she were to return to her native country, shed almost certainly be pressured to undergo female circumcision. And this year marks the tenth timebut not the lastthat parents Coumba Konte and Aliou Fofana must reapply for permission to continue raising their three children in the U.S.

For an individual, attaining U.S. citizenship can be like groping through a maze. For the Fofana family, and the 16 million others living in mixed-status families in the U.S., becoming part of the American dream requires navigating several different mazes, the paths of which are constantly changing. The family arrived in the U.S. more than a decade ago, and while each family members goal is the same to achieve American citizenship their roads to get there are strikingly different.

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Defying Tradition

Coumba, 50, remembers the precise moment her daughters secret was discovered. It was 2001. Her mother-in-law was bathing then 4-year-old Ramata, in their rural town in southwestern Mali, when she realized the girls clitoris was still intact.

Her relatives were furious, Coumba says, and accused her of shaming them by going against tradition in a country where more than 80 percent of women across all swaths of social stature and education levels undergo female genital mutilation, most of them at a young age. The most common form involves cutting off the clitoris with a saw-toothed knife, and Coumba, who was circumcised herself as a child and describes the still-lingering pain as unbearable, says she couldnt stand to watch her daughter grow up the same way. Instead, she and her husband lied and said their daughter had the procedure done shortly after her birth.

Ramata sits in her room in Baltimore with her brother Mohamed. Photo by Ruth Tam

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