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AND THE TRADITION CONTINUES 

The Conference on World Affairs is always one of the year’s highlights for the region. This year will mark the 67th gathering and as always, fans of the conference have been waiting to find out who will be delivering the keynote address to get the ball rolling.

The keynote speech has a long, distinguished history. Past keynote speakers range from Eleanor Roosevelt to Arthur Miller to Henry Kissinger to Chuck Hagel.

The folks at the Conference on World Affairs have just announced that this year’s keynote will be titled “In a Single Garment of Destiny,” and will be delivered by none other than Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. on April 6, at Macky Auditorium.

Pitts is a syndicated columnist and author who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004. According to a press release, the title of the speech was “inspired by a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: ‘All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’”

THE CRY WENT UNHEARD 

Jose Luis Guerrero, the father of four U.S.-born children, small business owner and minister with no criminal record that Boulder Weekly wrote about earlier this year [“A cry for help,” Jan. 1, 2015], has been deported.

Guerrero was detained in August 2014 after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials came to his home looking for someone else. Despite not having a warrant with his name on it, Guerrero and his wife, Sophia, who had been blocking the door, obliged officials and showed them the ID. When ICE ran his information, they found he had a prior deportation and re-entry on his record. ICE came back a week later and, with a gun to his head, arrested him and brought him to jail.

Despite Obama’s executive action on immigration in November that called for discretion amongst local Immigration officials, and asked them to consider things like job status, children, criminal record, etc., the local ICE office in Colorado determined Jose Luis fell under the new enforcement guidelines. 

Then on Friday at 3 a.m., says his wife Sophia via the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, five guards came to Jose Luis’ cell at the GEO Detention Center in Arvada and asked him to sign a voluntary departure form, which ended up being a deportation order. Jose Luis refused to sign the order and asked to speak to a lawyer, but officials allegedly forced him to the ground, cuffed him and forced him to put his fingerprints on his deportation order against his will.

The Guerreros found out Jose Luis had already been shipped to El Paso over the weekend when their lawyer received a letter in the mail detailing what had happened.

As Boulder Weekly was en route to speak with the family on Tuesday evening about the events and what they had planned to keep Jose Luis in the country, we were notified by Brendan Greene of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition that the family had just learned Jose Luis had been deported. They were, of course, unable to speak immediately due to the emotion of the situation, but Boulder Weekly will continue to follow the story.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com