Join writers and advocates Maria Hinojosa and Bill Hing for a discussion of immigration and justice in America, and celebrate their respective books: Hinojosa's memoir Once I Was You and Hing's recent work Humanizing Immigration. 

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About Once I Was You: The Emmy Award–winning journalist tells the story of immigration in America through her family’s experiences and decades of reporting, painting an unflinching portrait of a country in crisis in this memoir that is “quite simply beautiful, written in Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice” (BookPage).

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who, for nearly thirty years, has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media—from tales of hope in the South Bronx to the unseen victims of the War on Terror and the first detention camps in the US. Bestselling author Julia Álvarez has called her “one of the most important, respected, and beloved cultural leaders in the Latinx community.”

In Once I Was You, Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations—charging us with the broken system we have today.

An urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all, this honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth.

“Anyone striving to understand and improve this country should read her story.” —Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road

About Humanizing Immigration: First book to argue that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice; offers a humanitarian approach to reform and abolition. 

Representing non-citizens caught up in what he calls the immigration and enforcement “meat grinder”, Bill Ong Hing witnessed their trauma, arriving at this conclusion: migrants should have the right to free movement across borders—and the right to live free of harassment over immigration status. While ultimately arguing for the abolishment of ICE, Hing advocates for change now.

With 50 years of law practice and litigation, Hing has represented non-citizens—from gang members to asylum seekers fleeing violence, and from individuals in ICE detention to families at the US southern border seeking refuge. Hing maps out major reforms to the immigration system, making an urgent call for the adoption of a radical, racial justice lens. Readers will understand the root causes of migration and our country’s culpability in contributing to those causes.

"Incisive and compelling, reflecting the painful wisdom and knowledge that Bill Ong Hing has accrued over the course of fifty years.... ”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

“Humanizing Immigration is a stirring call to action, urging readers to act from a place of empathy, not fear.” —Booklist

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Maria Hinojosa is the Founder and President of Futuro Media, Anchor and Executive Producer of Latino USA, co-anchor of In The Thick political podcast, and producer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave. She founded Futuro Media, an independent, nonprofit newsroom with the mission to create multimedia content focused on the complexity of an increasingly diverse country and world, in 2010. As the anchor and executive producer of the Peabody Award-winning show Latino USA, distributed by PRX, and as a contributor to MSNBC, Hinojosa has informed millions of listeners about the changing cultural and political landscape in America and abroad. As the first Latina reporter for NPR, Hinojosa was among the first to report on youth violence in urban communities on a national scale. During her eight years as CNN’s urban affairs correspondent, Hinojosa often took viewers into communities rarely shown on television. She is the former Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University in Chicago and is now the inaugural Distinguished Journalist in Residence at her alma mater Barnard College. Hinojosa’s over 30-year career as a journalist includes reporting for PBS, CBS News, WNBC, CNN, NPR, CBS Sunday Morning, and anchoring the Emmy Award-winning talk show Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One. She is an elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has won dozens of awards, most recently, the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, the Public Media Journalists Association Leo C. Lee Award, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools Distinguished Alumna Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award. Maria recently received a Pea Body award Nomination for the Futuro Investigates/Frontline documentary After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas Politics. She is the author of four books, most recently a young readers edition of her critically acclaimed memoir, Once I Was You.

Bill Ong Hing is a Professor of Law and Migration Studies at the University of San Francisco, and Professor of Law and Asian American Studies Emeritus, at U.C. Davis. He founded the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and helps to direct the USF Immigration & Deportation Defense Clinic. Professor Hing teaches Immigration Law & Policy, Introduction to Migration Studies, and Rebellious Lawyering. Throughout his career, Professor Hing has pursued social justice by combining community work, litigation, and scholarship. His books include Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System (2023), American Presidents, Deportations, and Human Rights Violations (2019), Immigration Law and Social Justice (2018); Ethical Borders—NAFTA, Globalization and Mexican Migration (2010); Deporting Our Souls—Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy (2006), Defining America Through Immigration Policy (2004), and Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy (1993). He was co-counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court asylum precedent-setting case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca (1987) and also represented the State Bar of California before the California Supreme Court in In re Sergio Garcia (2014) involving bar membership for undocumented law graduates.

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