“It’s 16 years of nonstop fighting.” Lucy Gellman Photos.
When Selize Mendes was a kid growing up in Danbury, she watched her father, an immigrant from Ecuador, become one of her biggest and most vocal champions. After his sudden passing nine years ago, she vowed that she would fight for him, and the millions of other immigrants in his shoes.
Almost a decade later, and in the eye of a political storm that has targeted immigrants at unprecedented levels, she’s continued that fight as a member of Connecticut Students for a Dream (C4D), a youth-led organizing engine that has become one of the leading champions of immigrant rights in the state since its birth in 2010.
Thursday, C4D celebrated its “Sweet 16” anniversary at Anthony’s Ocean View, in a rare night of breaking bread, song, and dance that foregrounded the deep humanity at the core of immigrant justice work. Throughout the evening, speakers and attendees alike let themselves balance the bitter and the sweet of the moment, lauding the sheer amount of work that C4D has done while not mincing words about the fight ahead.
The evening also became a chance to celebrate Executive Director Tabitha Sookdeo, who has worked around the clock to protect the rights of immigrants regardless of status, particularly young people, for two years. Since September 2024—Sookdeo became executive director shortly before Donald Trump won a presidential election that would return him to the White House—she has grown the organization, pivoted to rapid response, coalition building, and deportation defense.
Executive Director Tabitha Sookdeo receives recognition from State Attorney General William Tong, one of many elected officials to honor her throughout the night.
C4D now steers the Connecticut Immigrant Support Network and The American Immigrant Legal Clinic (TAILC), which have both grown out of the necessity of this social and political moment. Thursday, advocates from National Immigration Law Center President Kica Matos to Attorney General William Tong to faith leaders, educators, and members of the New Haven Immigrants Coalition all pledged their continued support.
“These are some of the most powerful people that you will meet in your entire lives,” Sookdeo said, shouting out members who filled the room, many in ball gowns and flowy pastel-toned dresses. She's among those powerful people: Sookdeo recently completed a graduate degree at the Yale School of the Environment, part of a joint degree program with the Vermont Law School. She and her partner, African American Society (AAS) Founder Jameson Davis, will welcome their first child in October.
When she sees the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, “it’s absolutely unacceptable,” she continued. “These are our community members [getting detained]. These are our folks … when do we say, ‘Enough is enough?’”
Throughout the night, attendees let themselves feel and fête the full weight of the moment, from tables that buzzed with conversation to a dance floor that was vibrating by the end of the night. As she criss-crossed the room in a flowing, rose-colored dress and glittering eye makeup, Mendes said that she was excited to be at the gathering, as a moment to regroup and reset with her community.
Growing up in Danbury, Mendes didn’t exactly choose organizing, so much as it chose her. As a kid, she could see how hard her parents—her mom migrated from Cape Verde, and her dad from Ecuador—advocated for her and her siblings.
Kica Matos, who is currently president of the National Immigration Law Center, has previously praised Sookdeo as a bridge builder.
When she was nine, the tables turned. Her father, who had been her greatest cheerleader, suffered a brain bleed. For years, he had avoided hospitals, afraid to incur medical debt. “He just left it alone,” she remembered, and passed away shortly thereafter. It left her mom alone with three kids, including a 1-year-old daughter who Mendes helped raise.
It was 2017, and CT HUSKY—that’s Connecticut’s Medicaid expansion program—did not yet make provisions for immigrants regardless of documentation status. Coalitions like HUSKY 4 Immigrants, which was born in 2019, did not exist (thanks to years of advocacy, expanded coverage is now available to children, pregnant people, and those in the postpartum period).
The older she got, the more aware she became of a system that shut people out of care simply because they were immigrants. “When I was a kid he fought for me, and now it’s my time to fight for him,” she said.
Mendes first learned about C4D in high school, during a research project for a history class. Then last year, she spotted members at a rally outside Danbury City Hall. Joining just felt instinctively right.
“Tonight, I think it’s celebrating everybody,” she said. “It’s 16 years of nonstop fighting.”
Lorella Praeli (in the black) at a station where people could design their own jewelry, and peruse earrings and bracelets from Hamden-based artist Robert Gribbon. Gribbon donated all of the evening's proceeds to C4D.
It has been. Founded at a Starbucks in New Milford in 2010, C4D is the brainchild of four then-undocumented teenagers—Hafid Dumet, Lorella Praeli, and twin sisters Carolina and Camila Bortolleto—who sat down to share their experiences, and hatched a movement.
It was 2010, and the DREAM Act was up for a vote in Congress, remembered Praeli, who now works as the co-president for Community Change. In Florida, a group of undocumented teens including Gaby Pacheco had organized the “Trail of Dreams,” a walk from Miami to Washington, D.C. meant to bring attention to the struggles undocumented young people faced. Praeli can still remember how amazing it felt to see it unfold.
Around that coffee table, “we talked about the fear we felt, we talked about the fear our families felt,” said Camila Bortolleto as pink lighting made the ballroom glow. In Connecticut, protections for immigrants like the TRUST Act were still three years away. None of them knew it then, but a single conversation would lead to a years-long fight for access to financial aid, healthcare coverage, and legal protections for undocumented students and families.
“When young people organize, we can make real change,” Bortolleto said. In just minutes, she traced the growth of the organization from a small group of galvanized, and sometimes uncertain, students to an organizing locomotive that has pushed real legislative change in the state.
Top: Bortolleto. Bottom: Azhar Ahmed, who came to New Haven as a Sudanese refugee and is now a case manager at the Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants and a member of the Collective for Regufee & Immigrant Women's Wellbeing.
In 16 years, she noted, C4D has made Connecticut a safer and more welcoming place for immigrants whatever their documentation status may be. That work is far from over: it has hit one of the most challenging periods yet as ICE agents increase their activity in the state, driving many families into hiding and creating a culture of fear across the state.
Last month alone, Connecticut saw a precipitous rise in activity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, including nearly 100 arrests that terrorized children and families in Danbury and Bridgeport during the first week of the new school year.
Sookdeo understands the weight and fear of that reality intimately: like many of the young members of C4D, she has a mixed-status family. In previous interviews, she’s spoken candidly about how immediately she sees her parents and siblings in the faces of the youth C4D is fighting for. Holding back tears Thursday, as she spoke about two separate arrests at Tweed-New Haven Airport, she noted that “my dad would be one of those people detained at an airport.”
She doesn’t know when he’ll be able to visit their daughter, his grandchild, for the first time after she is born. She does know, meanwhile, that that’s a reality that so many immigrants face, in Connecticut and across the country.
“I don’t know the next time it will be possible for us to get together,” she said of her family later in the evening, during a rare moment of quiet. On the dance floor, teens tore it up to a remix of Marc Anthony’s “Vivir Mi Vida,” a rainbow of light bouncing off their glow-in-the-dark crowns. A person could feel the heavy exhaustion of the moment, mingling with the joy of it all.
“When I’m gone [on parental leave], I ask that you make sure they’re in good hands,” she had said earlier, and the words echoed through the space.
Greisa Martínez and Hafid Dumet.
Self-described “yelder” (that’s a young elder, although at 38 she is more the former than the latter) United We Dream’s Greisa Martínez said she was thrilled to be there as “an admirer and supporter” that has been with the organization from the jump. A longtime friend of Dumet’s, she can still remember hearing about those first conversations, and rooting the group on from the sidelines as it built membership and started organizing around major policy issues.
Nearly two decades later, she’s seen firsthand—and in many states across the country—how grassroots activism can move the legislative needle. So when C4D announced the gathering, it was a no-brainer for her to travel from Arizona, where her activism is currently based, to be with some of the friends she has grown up with.
Even in a moment of crisis, she added, creating spaces for joy and celebration is a necessity. Thursday’s festivities didn’t negate the weight of families living in fear of, and separated by, the current administration: they gave organizers the fuel to keep fighting.
“This is part of the work,” she said, referring to the gala as attendees tucked into their dinner plates, and conversation rose up against the rattle and clink of glasses and silverware. “It’s not an indulgence. It’s not an exception.”
When people organize, “we can change our realities,” added Dumet. “I believe young people have a hand in shaping the debate around what is needed for them.”
Dumet, like so many of the young people, “yelders,” and seasoned organizers and activists in the room, has lived that firsthand. As a young person, he migrated from Beirut to New Milford, where he was able to finish high school. By then, he had started to understand that “something was wrong” with a system that withheld rights from any group of people because of who they were.
That was especially true when he, initially discouraged because of his status, applied to college a year after completing high school. When he accepted an offer from Western Connecticut State University, he was surprised, then crushed, to learn that his status meant that he would have to pay for out-of-state tuition.
Dumet persevered: he enrolled as a part-time student in accounting, and finished in six years. Even before he was done, he was advocating for in-state tuition for undocumented students at state universities, a legislative change that took place for the first time in 2011, with an expansion in 2015. As it passed, he could see firsthand that sustained activism worked.
Throughout the night, many in the room also urged young people to hold onto hope, even when the moment seems hopeless. Introduced by fiery organizer Melany Yunga, Attorney General William Tong, who attended as the evening’s keynote speaker, acknowledged the number of “near misses” that immigrant families endure to build their lives in the U.S.
His father, Ady Tong, was one of those stories.
To a room that was quiet enough to hear a pin drop—save for waves of laughter at a joke about a pay phone or mailbox—Tong conjured the memory of his dad, a Chinese immigrant who fled the mainland for Hong Kong, and came to the U.S. on a tourist visa. In Hartford, he met Tong’s mother, Nancy, at a Chinese restaurant where he was the dishwasher. By several years later, the two had opened their own establishment on Park Street.
It was hard, round-the-clock work, Tong said. In 1972, an officer from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, which was a precursor to ICE, which was founded in 2003) showed up at the restaurant, bringing with him the threat of deportation for Tong’s father, who had overstayed his visa. Even as his parents considered self-deporting to Canada, “my dad, like many immigrants, wasn’t done fighting.”
“He was like, ‘I’m not gonna go out like this,’” said Tong, who had not yet been born, but has heard the story dozens of times from his family. Scared and unsure as he was, Ady composed a letter to then-President Richard Nixon, who was not known as a particular friend to immigrants. By the time he was done writing, it was six pages.
Tong has never been able to confirm all of the details, but knows from family stories that it got INS to reconsider. His parents worked toward becoming naturalized citizens, which took place five years after his birth. Tong, meanwhile, was granted the same birthright citizenship for which he is still fighting, and sued the Trump Administration over last year.
“So many people share this story,” he said, denouncing the behavior of ICE agents. As a kid, he continued, he sometimes wondered what the thick, sometimes ripe and bright mess on the front of his father’s apron was at the end of the day. He now understands that “he was willing to take anything they threw at him.”
Luis Luna, a longtime immigrants rights advocate, and his mom, Ruth Irizarry.
“I know the fights are hard,” he continued, chronicling a series of lawsuits against the Trump Administration that he has joined and sometimes spearheaded as the state’s attorney general. “But when it’s hard, remember. You can do what the immigrants do. You can fight and never back down.”
That is, of course, what members of the group have done, and are continuing to do, all over the state. In the last 16 years, organizers with C4D have helped shift statewide policy on everything from in-state tuition benefits for undocumented students to expanded protections under the TRUST Act, some as recently as last year.
Under Sookdeo’s tenure—which she made clear was not changing anytime soon—the organization has both continued that advocacy and focused on the Trump Administration’s indiscriminate targeting of immigrants, often regardless of documentation status. In the past two years, C4D has rallied for immigrant neighbors, protested Avelo Airlines, and helped build out a coordinated support network.
“I’m thankful every day that you have chosen us,” Bortolleto said to Sookdeo before the end of the night. It was no surprise that within seconds, the room was on its feet.