About 40 leaders of immigration reform advocacy organizations were arrested Thursday on Capitol Hill. The group was there as part of a protest aimed at pressuring the House GOP into passing an immigration reform bill with a pathway to citizenship. Taking a page from young undocumented immigrants, or Dreamers, nine of whom were arrested along the Arizona border last week, the veteran activists blocked traffic along a street adjacent to the Capitol while chanting a slogan popular among Dreamers: “Undocumented, unafraid!”

While immigration reform advances in the Senate, advocates say the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is a different story.The House -- which like the Senate has its own Gang of Eight, a group of four Democrats and four Republicans -- appears to be making progress toward its own comprehensive bill that includes a pathway to legislation. The sticking point in the House now is whether to mandate health insurance for the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are waiting to begin the citizenship process. 

There are  upwards of 11 million people living and working in the United States, in every state and city, who face the perpetual threat of physical exile from their lives and their homes, to be banished to a country they barely know or in which they can barely survive. The only crime most have committed was to cross an arbitrary confine seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Although their plight appears disconnected from ours, this threat involves every American who cares about their country and values their ancestral history.