This coming week, if Senator Harry Reid keeps his word, Congress may get a chance to vote on the DREAM Act. First introduced in 2003, the bill would allow undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for permanent residence if they complete two years of college or serve two years in the U.S. military. Estimates are that it would enable over 800,000 young people to gain legal status, and eventual citizenship.

    A vote in Congress would be a tribute to thousands of these young “sin papeles,” or people without papers. For seven years they’ve marched, sat-in, written letters and mastered every civil rights tactic in the book to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.

    Many of them have given new meaning to “coming out” — declaring openly their lack of legal immigration status in media interviews, defying authorities to detain them. Three were arrested last May, when they sat-in at the office of Arizona Senator John McCain, demanding that he support the bill, while defying immigration authorities to come get them. They were, in fact, arrested and held in detention overnight. Then a judge recognized the obvious. These were not “aliens” who might flee if they were released from detention, but political activists who were doing their best not only to stay in the country, but to do so as visibly as possible.

    Reid owes his tiny margin of victory in Nevada’s election to an outpouring of Latino votes. Since he announced he’d bring the bill to the floor of Congress, more students have begun a hunger strike at the University of Texas in Austin. They insist they won’t eat until Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson renounces her opposition to the DREAM Act. First their fast spread to campuses across Texas. Then students in other parts of the country announced they too would act when Reid calls the bill up for a vote.

    But the DREAM Act campaigners have done more than get a vote in Washington, no matter how that may turn out. They’ve learned to use their activism to stop deportations. Further, they did this in an era when more people have been deported – 400,000 last year alone – than ever before in this country’s history. To highlight the connection between the bill and their challenge to the rising wave of deportations, four undocumented students walked for weeks from Miami to Washington in protest.

    In the process, they learned the lesson the civil rights movement of the 60s’ taught activists of an earlier generation: Congress and Washington’s political class can be forced to respond to social movements outside the capitol. When those movements grow and make themselves felt, they can win legislation, and even more. People in the streets can change the conditions in their own communities. DREAM Act activists, by stopping deportations even in the absence of Congressional action, have made possible what political insiders held to be impossible.

    Fredd Reyes is living proof. This week he came back to North Carolina for Thanksgiving. He was picked up last September as he was studying for exams at Guilford Technical Community College, and taken first to the North Georgia Detention Center, and then to the Stewart Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Fredd’s parents fled the massacres of Guatemala counter-insurgency war of the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan gave guns to that country’s military, which they then turned on indigenous communities seeking social justice. Fredd was a toddler then.

    DREAM Act students mobilized, and got Fredd sprung loose.

    Jennifer Abreu had her Thanksgiving in Kentucky. She came to the U.S. with her parents when she was 13. She graduated from Lafayette High School in Lexington, where she became an activist, performed Brazilian and Colombian dances at fiestas and dreamt of life as a journalist. ICE picked her up, but a campaign by DREAM Act students and their supporters set her free too.

    And in San Francisco, activists won freedom for Shing Ma “Steve” Li, a nursing student at San Francisco Community College. Immigration authorities detained him on September 15, igniting a lightening effort to stop his deportation. As the DREAM Act moved closer to a vote in Congress, he also became a living symbol for the national campaign to pass the bill.

    Li’s predicament was dramatic and unusual. His parents emigrated from China to Peru, where Li was born. They later came to the U.S., where their petition for political asylum was denied. That made Li an undocumented immigrant, although as he went through San Francisco public schools, he had no knowledge of his status.

    Last year, however, as the net of immigration enforcement was cast more widely than ever, Li and his mother were arrested. She was bailed out of detention, and now awaits deportation to China. But Steve Li was shipped to a detention center in Florence, Arizona, from which he would have been flown to Peru, where he was born. He has no relatives or family connections there at all.

    Without passage of the DREAM Act, “thousands of students are threatened with deportation, which is a tremendous waste of resources,” says Kent Wong, vice-president of the California Federation of Teachers, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, and one of the national organizers of the DREAM Act campaign.

    Many undocumented students, however, can’t get into colleges although they’ve graduated from U.S. high schools with excellent grades, because they’re either barred directly by lack of legal status, or can’t qualify for the financial aid that other students can receive.

    When it was originally written, the bill would have allowed young people to qualify for legalization with 900 hours of community service, as an alternative to attending college, which many can’t afford. However, when the bill was introduced, the Pentagon pressured to substitute military for community service.

    Like many DREAM Act supporters, the California Federation of Teachers has called for reinstatement of the community service provision. But it supports the Act regardless.  “The Federal Dream Act will establish the important principle that undocumented students can no longer be assigned to a second-class, inferior status and must be treated with respect and dignity,” says a resolution adopted by the union in 2009.

    “We have to remember that for every case like Steve Li’s, there are hundreds of other young people who are deported,” emphasizes Local 2121 President Alisa Messer. “These are our students. They’re doing everything we want young people to do.  So we have to fight for their ability to get an education, to support their families, and to participate in society. They’re American kids.”

    Many immigrant rights activists also view the DREAM Act as an important step towards a more basic reform of the country’s immigration laws. It would not only help students to stay in school, but by giving them legal status, give them the ability to work and use their education after graduation. Luis Perez, for instance, the son of working-class parents in Los Angeles, will graduate from UCLA’s law school this year and take the bar exam in January. But after that, without legalization, he won’t be able to work. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act says employers may only hire workers who are citizens or who have visas that give them “work authorization.”

    [T}he DREAM Act students have shown that fighting detention and deportation is possible. As they’ve marched and demonstrated, they’ve pointed out over and over that stopping the enforcement wave and changing immigration law are so connected that one can’t be fought without fighting for the other. In the end, the basic requirement for both is the same – a social movement of millions of people, willing to take to the streets and the halls of Congress.