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June 10, 2010, 3:28 pm
Immigrants’ Hunger Strike Ends With ‘Die-In’
By KIRK SEMPLE
¶For 10 days, a group of illegal immigrants had staged a round-the-clock hunger strike in front of the building in Midtown Manhattan that houses Senator Charles E. Schumer’s office, calling on him to take immediate action on a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants.
¶But on Thursday, after several of them had grown weary or ill, they brought the protest to a dramatic close, staging a “die-in” in front of the building and sit-ins in Mr. Schumer’s offices in Washington and Melville, N.Y.
¶The protesters, some of them students, have been calling for Congress to pass the so-called Dream Act, a bill that would offer legal status to illegal immigrant students who were brought to the United States as children. Mr. Schumer has been the target of their activism because, as as chairman of a Senate subcommittee on immigration, he wields large influence over the passage of such legislation.
¶While members of Mr. Schumer’s staff have spoken with the protesters at various times during the strike, the senator has not granted them a meeting.
¶The die-in, which involved several of the protesters collapsing on the sidewalk on Third Avenue, blocking the building’s entrance, ended when the police warned them they would be arrested if they did not move, and the strikers got up and left.
¶The sit-ins in Washington and Melville were still continuing as of midafternoon.
¶Division among lawmakers — about whether to handle the Dream Act as part of an omnibus legislative approach to comprehensive immigration reform or to deal with it separately — has stalled the bill.
¶While Mr. Schumer has championed the idea of the Dream Act, he recently co-authored a detailed blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform that included the bill’s provisions.
¶“Our lives can’t wait, our dreams can’t wait,” Marisol Ramos, one of the protest organizers, told a throng of about 80 supporters and news media gathered near 47th Street and Third Avenue to witness the denouement of the hunger strike.
¶The protest began June 1 with 10 participants, some of them students. Over the course of the strike, several dropped out because of illness but were replaced by others. One woman was hospitalized but released after a day, said one of the protest leaders, Gabriel Martinez, 27, who was forced to withdraw from the strike on Monday due to low blood pressure.