Educational Outreach to                Immigrant Communities
 Most outreach presentations are in Spanish, but Letitia Santiago, a Mixteco speaker employed in our Santa Maria office, also appears on radio and television to provide important information in Mixteco which is the principal indigenous language spoken by farm workers from Oaxaca. Every week, IMPORTA also presents a discussion of current immigration topics through Facebook Live.
These presentations are especially important now because many of the restrictions on applications, raised fees, and threats of deportation for denied applications will be reversed by the in-coming Biden Administration, although in some cases this may be a slow process.
One of the main purposes of our Educational Outreach is to encourage immigrants to schedule in-depth interviews. However, the current pandemic has led us to conduct abbreviated interviews by phone. This increases the importance of providing accurate information through other means, including our Facebook and this website. Another important purpose of Educational Outreach is to warn immigrants of the many dishonest and incompetent providers in their communities, mostly so-called "immigration consultants" who are responsible for an enormous number of denied applications and deportations.