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Dulce Aguirre distributes food and information to day laborers outside hardware stores. Photos by Cristofer Garcia/Staff

While bombastic presidential candidate Donald Trump promises to build a wall across the Mexican border, the Border Angels are working to mitigate the damage of the wall we already have.

Dulce Aguirre, 22, a Southwestern College child development major, has become a young but influential leader for the region’s most important human rights organization. She works on public relations, recruiting, fund raising and leading meetings.

Aguirre also helps to connect migrants to legal and health services.

“Border Angels is an organization that I think has really made a difference to all those that have taken advantage of our resources,” she said.

In this toxic new age of Trump and a rise in hate crimes, Aguirre said, it is more important than ever for volunteers to speak up for powerless migrants and represent them.

“A lot of people just judge those crossing the border and they’re not aware of the different steps that a lot of people take,” she said. “That’s why they cross, as a last resource.”

Border Angels serves migrants and underserved Latinos in many ways, Aguirre said. Members place water on desert migrant trails to save lives, provide legal services, assist Central American children, and promote humane, comprehensive immigration reform. They also periodically peal back the great metal border wall itself with transnational events at Border Field State Park.

“There are a lot of people that, because of their immigration status, aren’t able to go to Mexico and there are people in Mexico that can’t come here, so we arrange for them to visit each other after so many years.”

Border Angels also hosts yoga classes for immigrant women, organizes Mass every Sunday at local churches in San Diego County and takes groups to the infamous Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville where more than 700 unidentified migrants are buried in paupers graves.

Aguirre said that perhaps the most prominent contribution Border Angels makes is assisting men and women who work as day laborers, migrants looking for any temporary day jobs, usually near the Home Depot stores. Border Angels volunteers brief day laborers on their rights and advise on ways to stay safe.

“Many immigrants are unaware of their rights,” Aguirre said. “I think just by hearing their stories, a lot of them are afraid.”

Border Angels founder Enrique Morones said he was inspired to start the organization after a young lady from El Salvador told him about Mexican immigrants living in the canyons of Carlsbad, in the shadows of million dollar homes.

“It grew from being just me, and then my family, to being all these volunteers from all over the world,” he said. “At first I thought that my vision to help would last maybe a few months, it’s now been almost 30 years.”

Border Angels is an all-volunteer, non-profit organization that advocates for human rights, humane immigration reform and social justice with a special focus on issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border, Morones said. Aguirre met Morones during one of his visits to SWC and immediately joined his team.

‘‘The most valuable lesson that I have learned since joining Border Angels is to be a lot more understanding to the people,” said Aguirre. “You see a lot of people with a lot of different stories, and just different scenarios and everything that they’ve been going through, so to be able to be a lot more open minded into helping them and being able to have a different perspective is very important.”

Morones said Aguirre has been an important asset to the organization.

“Dulce has really been a superstar with us,” he said. “It’s great to have somebody like her because she knows the situation from family and friends, so she’s very familiar with the issues. She’s just doing an outstanding job.”

Aguirre said she is empathetic with migrants because she is one, too. She was brought over the border as a child and is currently protected by President Obama’s executive order called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which protects students who are productive, law-abiding migrants from deportation. Both Democratic presidential candidates have pledged to extend DACA, while all Republican candidates have promised to end it and begin deporting undocumented immigrants.

Aguirre also identifies as a “Dreamer,” students who long for legal residency under the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.  Originally conceived and sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Il. and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in 2001 the DREAM Act was a bi-partisan effort at immigration reform. Senate Republicans killed the bill. Durbin and Senator Richard Lugar, R-Ind., reintroduced a modified version of the DREAM Act in 2009, but it was also killed by Republican conservatives.

“I’m a Dreamer myself, so I knew that I wanted to educate myself as well as people around me, and be able to gain a lot more knowledge of what being a Dreamer really is,” she said.

Aguirre assists Border Angels volunteers from different cultural backgrounds, states and countries. Mitchell Regter, a university student from the Netherlands, found out about Border Angels through a fellow scholar who had attended SDSU.

“I think what they are doing is really helping a lot of people and I’m glad that I found out about them and that I am helping in some way,” said Regter, who is working on a study of immigrant college students.

Morones said smart, energetic volunteers like Aguirre are the foundation of Border Angels.

“It is great that a talented young woman like Dulce can show others a way to be helpful and to serve the less fortunate,” he said.

For further information about Border Angels visit its website at angelesdelafrontera.org.