At Brown, a National Conference for Undocumented Students Built From Scratch

“There were times when the work felt like more than the seven of us could handle.” David Felipe told The Latino Newsletter weeks after the Yearning to Breathe Free (YBF) conference at Brown University ended.

For Felipe and the small team behind the conference, the exhaustion came from building a conference many undocumented students say they have rarely experienced in higher education: a national space created by and for them.

In March, more than 200 undocumented and mixed-status students gathered at Brown for a conference that, even weeks later, still feels hard to categorize as just another college conference. Students from more than 30 colleges across the country filled Brown’s classrooms, auditoriums, dorm rooms, and dining halls with conversations about deportation defense, mental health, political organizing, queer identity, and persistence. They came from places as geographically distant as UC Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. Many had never before been in a room with hundreds of other undocumented students. 

But behind the panels, keynote speakers, and community gatherings was a much more difficult reality: a small group of undergraduate students — many undocumented or from mixed-status families themselves — spent more than a year fighting financial barriers, institutional bureaucracy, political fear, and burnout to make an undocu+ conference happen.

The YBF conference was postponed twice over the course of more than a year as organizers struggled to secure funding amid growing political hostility toward immigrant communities and broader university budget cuts.

“We had to postpone the conference twice over the course of a year and a half because we could not find any sources of funding,” said Keidy Palma Ramírez, co-founder of the Brown Dream Team and one of the lead organizers behind the conference. “Even people and places we could always count on turned us away or slowly ghosted us with the excuse that it was too difficult to support immigrants at this moment.”

The financial constraints reshaped the conference long before attendees arrived on campus. Without the resources to secure hotel accommodations, organizers turned instead to Brown students, many of whom opened their dorm rooms and off-campus apartments to more than 150 attendees traveling from across the country.

Palma Ramírez said the process exposed a clear division between public solidarity and material commitment. Undocumented students and students of color, she said, were oftentimes the first to offer housing, food, transportation, and logistical support. In contrast, she noted, many predominantly white activist spaces that publicly aligned themselves with immigrant justice were, for the most part, unwilling to contribute once support required personal sacrifice rather than symbolic endorsement.

Support from Brown, organizers said, rarely arrived in a direct form. Instead, it came through a patchwork of individual advocates, administrative hurdles, and institutional contradictions that forced students to navigate the university largely on their own.

The uneven institutional support also shaped the conference itself. Because organizers were not managed by the university, they were able to implement safety measures tailored to undocumented students’ concerns, including limiting police presence, protecting attendees’ identities, and relying on internal communication systems rather than public-facing infrastructure.

“There were a lot of institutional barriers that we encountered, and bureaucratic processes that made the idea of our conference almost seem impossible,” Felipe said. 

However, organizers also pointed to specific individuals and campus centers that were crucial to the conference’s survival. Brown’s Undocumented, First-Generation, and Low-Income Center, commonly known as the U-FLi Center, repeatedly helped organizers navigate institutional barriers, while a small number of faculty members, administrators, and, eventually, university leadership intervened to expedite logistical approvals.

The result was a conference that reflected both the possibilities and limitations of elite institutions in supporting undocumented students. YBF happened at Brown, but according to its organizers, it succeeded largely because undocumented students and a handful of committed advocates insisted on building it themselves.

For many organizers, the conference began as an attempt to create community. By the end of the weekend, it had evolved into something more politically and emotionally urgent: a space where undocumented students could openly articulate exhaustion, fear, disillusionment, and, at times, uncertainty about whether the pursuit of inclusion within American institutions still felt attainable.

For some organizers, there was a bigger concern. What protocols existed if immigration enforcement officers appeared on campus during the conference? Josué Morales, one of the organizers responsible for outreach, said those conversations fundamentally altered how the team understood the risks attendees were taking simply by showing up.

“What would the protocol look like if ICE is on campus during the conference?” Morales said. “Even with plans in place, we understood students were taking risks by traveling.”

The atmosphere inside the conference often reflected that tension between fear and affirmation. Abigail Orozco-Hugo, one of the conference’s underclassmen organizers, recalled one moment during a keynote by activist Jonathan Jayes-Green that crystallized the emotional weight many students had been carrying throughout the weekend. During the session, attendees collectively recited Rev. Jesse Jackson’s poem “I Am — Somebody.”

“It wasn’t just the words themselves,” Orozco-Hugo said. “It was the power of hearing dozens of voices reclaim their agency in a space that had been so difficult to build.”

Orozco-Hugo began crying during the recitation, she said, overwhelmed by the realization that undocumented students occupying space at an elite university was itself a political statement.

“That collective recitation served as a reminder that our presence at a university level is not just a personal achievement but a communal statement of worth and belonging,” she said.

Yet even as the conference centered on healing and solidarity, many organizers described a growing skepticism toward the traditional language that has historically defined the immigrant rights movement. For years, undocumented activism in the United States often focused on pathways to citizenship and institutional inclusion. Several organizers said the conversations at YBF reflected a younger generation increasingly uncertain whether American institutions are capable of fully delivering either.

During the conference’s opening address, Dr. Oscar Cornejo Casares warned attendees against becoming “transfixed” by the promises embedded in the mythology of American immigration. The speech, organizers said, set the tone for broader conversations about survival, exclusion, and what freedom might look like beyond legal recognition alone.

For some students, the most meaningful aspect of the conference was not a keynote speaker or policy workshop, but the rare experience of existing in public without needing to explain or defend their presence. 

Again and again, organizers and attendees described how undocumented students are still forced to navigate higher education through improvisation: relying on informal networks for housing, hidden institutional resources for financial aid, and student-led organizations for emotional and legal support. Even at one of the country’s most elite universities, many of the systems supporting undocumented students seem to be fragile and dependent on a handful of advocates working quietly behind the scenes.

Whether YBF will return next year is no longer really a question. By the end of the conference, organizers said several universities had already expressed interest in hosting future iterations of the gathering, hoping to continue what many attendees described as one of the first truly national spaces built specifically for undocumented college students in nearly a decade.

For organizers like Abigail Orozco-Hugo and Josué Morales, the conference was not intended to exist as a one-time-only event tied solely to Brown. Instead, they described it as an attempt to revive and expand the legacy of earlier immigrant student movements while building infrastructure that future generations could inherit rather than rebuild from scratch.

“We wanted to provide a proof of concept,” Orozco-Hugo said, “that student-led, immigrant-centered organizing can be professional, impactful, and scalable.”

Henders Aponte is a student passionate about politics and journalism. He writes about culture, politics, immigration, and education. He is also of Venezuelan descent.

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