Salinas attorney’s work to help immigrants

UPDATED 3/14/17 6:00 PM: A Salinas attorney is hoping that a small card will give local immigrants, documented and undocumented, some peace of mind in the midst of their deportation fears.

Blanca Zarasua says that many immigrants on the Central Coast don’t fully know their rights and are not prepared if they do get detained.

Something she hopes to help change.

“Now I just tell people just assume that you’re going to be detained and therefore you already know what you’re going to do, you have an action plan” said Zarasua.

And that’s exactly what attorney Zarasua hopes to help local immigrants create.

Post offices are just some of the places Blanca hopes to hand the card out at. The cards not only list the rights of undocumented people but also gives a message to immigration officers.

“The red card says that ‘I’d like to exercise my rights under the Fifth Amendment” said Zarasua “that ‘I’d like to exercise my right to remain silent and that the officer, the official for ICE needs to be aware that I know that I know what my rights are and I want to exercise them’ “

The red card isn’t the only tool undocumented immigrants can use.

Blanca, who is an honorary consul for the Mexican consulate says there’s a new service she’s trying to get the word out about.

It’s called Center for Information and Assistance to Mexican Nationals.

“It’s a telephone service that’s open 24 hours a day” Zarasua says of the service. “If you need to locate a relative or you need information about how to get your birth certificate or how to get your child registered as a Mexican national there’s information on all of that.”

Blanca says information on the new phone service is online at the Consulate’s website. She also added that recently, she ordered 1,000 more red cards and plans to hand them out to as many people as she can.

PREVIOUS STORY: A local immigration attorney says many immigrants in the community are not ready in the event that they are detained by Immigration officers. To help get the word out, she’s giving them simple but informative tools that she hopes brings peace of mind.

KION’s Zach Fuentes will have more Tuesday night on how the community is reacting and what immigrants say those tools could mean for them.