Unpacking U.S. Immigration Policy: What’s at Stake for Our Communities?
Open to UM Community and friends!
Join the Ford School’s Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) and the Trotter Multicultural Center for Unpacking U.S. Immigration Policy: What’s at Stake for Our Communities? Lunch will be served promptly at 11:45 am.
This event is part of CRJ’s fall 2025 Let’s Unpack That teach in-series. In today’s fast-moving world, the information ecosystem can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to understanding policy issues that shape our lives. Let’s Unpack That is an engaging series of lunchtime teach-ins where U-M leading experts break down the policy issues of the day in a clear, approachable way. Each session will give you the tools to make sense of complex debates and explore why they matter for you, your community, and the world.
About the panelists
William Lopez is a clinical associate professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. His research, teaching, and writing consider the experiences of immigrants in the rural U.S. as they survive and thrive amid the threat of deportation. In Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance, his follow-up to his award-winning first book, he writes about how immigrant communities in the interior of the United States were impacted by and responded to the worksite raids that occurred during the first Trump administration. Raiding the Heartland will be available beginning September 23rd.
Kristina Fullerton Rico is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice at the Ford School. Her research examines the social and emotional impacts of U.S. immigration policies that lead unauthorized immigrants and their families to endure long-term separation. Her current projects focus on the experiences of undocumented Mexican immigrants in New York City who are aging out of the workforce, the experiences of older return migrants who find themselves in Mexico after decades in the United States because they were unable to adjust their immigration status, and the experiences of separated parents and children.
Irene Romulo is the co-founder of Cicero Independiente, an award-winning, bilingual newsroom that reports with and for the majority immigrant community of Cicero, Illinois. She leads the organization’s nationally recognized community engagement strategies and fundraising efforts. Romulo began her journalism career as a reporting fellow at City Bureau in Chicago in 2019. Later, as a 2021 Ida B. Wells Fellow at Type Investigations, she published a year-long investigation into the use of gang contracts to criminalize students. Her work helped equip parents and young people with “know your rights” information. She is also a 2025-2026 Knight-Wallace Fellow.