The Republican Party emerged from the partial government shutdown with record low approval ratings. Now, some analysts say the key to their survival could be their leadership on immigration reform. The strategy House Republicans decide to take on this issue could determine their viability in the next election. But while it’s unclear what their next move will be, news reports indicate they may be less at a standstill than we thought.

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!”

Murillo is one of thousands of veterans who have been charged with a crime and deported. There are no solid figures on how many veterans currently share Murillo’s predicament, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not provide numbers. It is estimated that about 70,000 U.S. residents served in the U.S. military between 1999 and 2008. Deported veterans are not eligible for VA Benefits.

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. 

As Congress begins to discuss immigration reform, immigrant rights groups, DREAMers and their supporters marched in many U.S. cities, begging the question: Do these marches help achieve the goal of legislation beneficial to immigrants or are they counterproductive? "It is ironic that we are asking this question today, May 1, which commemorates an 1886 march of the emerging labor movement in Chicago demanding an eight-hour work day. That march was attacked by police, its leaders were eventually executed, and it was quashed immediately. 

: In early April the Associated Press announced that it would no longer use the word “illegal” when referring to undocumented immigrants. The decision has been hailed by immigrant rights groups and others, who say the term is a pejorative that dehumanizes large swaths of the U.S. population, immigrant and native-born alike. Authors Andrew Lam, Helen Zia and Chitra Divakaruni offer their own views on the term “illegal” through the lens of the immigrant experience.

Silicon Valley has long pressed for change, and this year could bring a fix. Support is growing for a new startup visa that would let foreign-born entrepreneurs work with fewer hurdles. Talks are on in Washington about safeguarding the visa against fraud and phony companies, and ensuring that it would go to startup founders that look solid and might create jobs. Right now, there is bipartisan support for it. But the startup visa would likely get rolled into comprehensive immigration reform, and that path is unclear.

After the first 20 minutes or so, a common thread emerges between each country’s histories: at one point or another, the United States intervened. Time after time, the U.S. would enter into a conflict that was waging within a Latin American country, and “settle” its dispute. The United States would leave the country with a new, American-trained, leader in its stead, with the hopes of improving trade relations with Latin America. 

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city, where the drug war has been exacerbated by a well-documented (and still unsolved) wave of violence directed against women, a growing number of young people are using music as a platform to raise their voice against the culture of violence, fear and apparent impunity enjoyed by the drug cartels and those shadowy criminals responsible for the wave of femicides.

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.