Chicago and Los Angeles were making headlines for ICE enforcement. Dallas wasn’t, and a friend told Noemi Rios why: nobody was observing immigration court, so nobody was reporting on what happened there. Noemi had a six-month sabbatical and decided to start watching. She wasn’t sure she was allowed in on her first day. She was, since observing hearings is the public’s right. The group that grew from those weeks, Vecinos Unidos DFW, now guides people through a confusing federal courthouse, distributes know-your-rights information in English and Spanish, and supports families after a loved one is detained.

In this conversation, Noemi and George Mason talk about what she saw in those courtrooms, how asylum seekers are being denied the chance to tell their stories, and how ICE’s tactics at the courthouse have changed from last year to this one. She also explains why she believes voting alone will not change the culture, how her religious upbringing taught her to build community person to person, and what she tells new volunteers who want to help without causing harm.

Noemi Rios is a co-founder of Vecinos Unidos DFW, a volunteer-led group formed in 2025 to support immigrant neighbors in Dallas-Fort Worth.

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When Chanda Parbhoo was a teenager in Tyler, Texas, a football coach counting students by race in the school gym had no category for her. “You’re just other,” he said. Decades later, she founded SAAVETX Education Fund to make sure South Asian Texans are seen, counted, and heard.

In this conversation, Chanda and George Mason talk about what being othered has looked like across 48 years in Texas, from the Iran hostage crisis to the political rhetoric aimed at South Asians today. She explains how five moms registering voters grew into a statewide network, why her team teaches civics in temples and mosques, and what it meant when an estimated 8,000 South Asian voters turned out for a Frisco mayoral runoff. Chanda also reflects on her Hindu faith as a sense of duty, the debate within her community over staying quiet or speaking up, and what assimilation should actually mean.

Chanda Parbhoo is the Founder and Executive Director of SAAVETX Education Fund, Texas’s largest South Asian civic engagement group. Born in apartheid-era South Africa, her early experiences with injustice shaped a lifelong commitment to equal representation. Through SAAVETX, she has mobilized hundreds of South Asians across Texas, helping build political power and ensure the community’s voice is heard where decisions are made.

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Lee Michaels was already helping families outside the Dallas ICE field office with hugs, diapers, and rent checks when she decided to reactivate her law license. After years away from practice, she began filing habeas petitions for detained immigrants, only to watch the law change four times in a single case.

In this conversation, she and George Mason talk about what she has witnessed at the weekly vigil and the respite tent, why immigration courts are failing to deliver due process, and how a video call between a detained father and his daughter felt like ministry. Lee also explains how the Holocaust museum’s call to be an upstander became her moral compass, and why she believes anyone can be one, including parents who want their children to learn it.

Lee Michaels is a retired Dallas corporate attorney and former board chair of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. She now handles immigration habeas cases and volunteers at the respite tent behind the Dallas ICE field office, supporting the work led by La Colectiva.

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Hadi Jawad's path into activism began with a phone call. In the late 1990s, his sister in Pakistan told him that relatives from Iraq had shown up at her door, having walked the distance to escape the suffering caused by US and UN sanctions. That call set him on a path that led him to the old Dallas Peace Center and eventually to co-founding Human Rights Dallas, an organization built around a simple conviction: dignity is the foundation everything else rests on.

In this conversation, Hadi and George Mason talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the long push to get Dallas designated a Human Rights City, and why Hadi believes denying people basic rights is ultimately a judgment on their humanity. The conversation turns to the death penalty in Texas, where Hadi lays out the statistics on executions and racial disparities on death row, and closes with a reminder that one person, like Rosa Parks, can shift the world.

Hadi Jawad is a Dallas-based human rights activist and community leader with decades of experience advancing peace and justice. He co-founded the Crawford Peace House during the Iraq War and helped establish the North Texas Civil Rights Project, now part of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is the co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas.

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