150 immigration activists demonstrate at San Diego crossing

Posted Mar 10, 2014

Paul Ingram
TucsonSentinel.com

Around 150 people, many of them with their families, attempted to cross the Otay Mesa Port of Entry near San Diego on Monday morning.

Many of the protestors could have been eligible for the DREAM Act, a proposal to allow young people, illegally brought into the United States as children, to gain citizenship.

The attempted crossing was part of a series of protests against current immigration policy. In July 2013 a smaller group called the "Dream 9" attempted to cross into Nogales, Ariz. but were detained by U.S. authorities. They were later released in August after a widely-publicized hunger strike.

Monday's protest was the third and largest protest of this kind.

In October 2013 a group of 30 attempted a similar crossing in Laredo, Texas. While the entire group from Nogales, Ariz., were allowed to stay pending decisions for asylum petitions, only 11 of the protestors from Laredo were allowed to stay in the country either through humanitarian parole or as part of pending asylum decisions.