Freedom University - as told through the lives of our students Arizbeth and Simi - is profiled in this month’s Atlanta Magazine:

“If this is an ICE setup,” she thought, “I’m going to be so embarrassed.” In January 2014, a volunteer drove Sanchez to her first day of class where, to her shock, students openly discussed their immigration status. “I’d had to carry that inside of me for so long, and then to be in an environment where people were talking about it with no fear and no shame—it was liberating,” she says. “For the first time, I didn’t feel alone.”

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While Soltis wants her students to believe higher education is possible, she says, “I also make sure they know they don’t need a college degree to be worthy of respect—they, and their parents, are deserving of dignity simply because they are human beings.” That means also pushing back against what she calls the narrative of the “exceptional” DREAMer—“the 4.2 GPA valedictorian who deserves to go to college.” Students don’t need to be remarkable to be worthy of education, Soltis says: “They just need to be human.”

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Simi A.—whose family traveled to Atlanta during an economic recession in Nigeria, then overstayed their visas—grew up feeling like “a fugitive in a foreign country.”

“I feel like the system is coming for me on both sides,” he says. He’s a 200-pound, 6-foot-1 Black 20-year-old with locs. “If the police show up, they’re looking at me; because of what I look like, I’m more likely to be targeted. I’m more likely to get arrested because I’m Black, and if I get arrested, I’m likely to get deported.”

[O]ne of the advisers Soltis brought on was civil rights veteran Charles Black, who now chairs Freedom U’s board and says he felt “a commonality with the plight of undocumented students.” When he graduated high school, there was no university in his hometown of Miami that would enroll a Black student. He left his home to pursue higher education and ended up at Morehouse College, a student of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helping desegregate public facilities in Atlanta. “We’re all human beings,” Black says. “We all have rights inherent to our humanity that shouldn’t be legislated in and out of existence.”