Title: Hoyas Spend Summer Advocating for Migrants and Running Summer Camp

The job description for Caroline Vail’s summer internship requires an unusual skill: She has to be able to navigate Washington DC’s narrow streets in a 12-passenger van.

And she’s not alone in the vehicle.

In tow with her are a gaggle of children on their way to a summer camp for migrant youth in northeast DC. Three days a week, Vail picks up campers from two hotels that serve as temporary shelters for migrants and brings them to a local church for camp. 

Vail’s van isn’t quiet, to say the least, as campers joke around and sing along to Spanish reggaeton music on full blast. The kids also never hesitate to “backseat drive,” Vail says, giving pointers in Spanish on how to get to camp the fastest way possible.

“The kids are so excited to see me and I’m so excited to see them,” she said. “This internship is so cool because it allows us to get immersed in the community in a way that just isn’t possible during the school year.”

Over the last few months, Vail has interned with the Summer Immigrant Rights and Advocacy (SIRA) Program through Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice (CSJ). Through SIRA, Vail and her fellow interns have helped migrant families move through the U.S. immigration system and provided their children with a safe space to be kids at camp. The internship is part of CSJ’s summer opportunities to offer tutoring and other programming in partnership with community organizations.  

“Our goal is to help them feel a sense of community and belonging in a country they might not really see a home for themselves in,” said Jessica Lee, associate director for Immigrant Justice Initiatives at CSJ. “We want them to feel safer and more confident and comfortable learning English.” 

As Vail and other SIRA interns discovered, the camp not only offered the interns an inside look into life as a migrant in the United States, but also created a space for the interns to learn from the children and migrant families as well.

Going Deeper With CSJ

Vail grew up witnessing the disparities in education access in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. With parents as educators, Vail was also drawn to pursuing a career in education, but she wanted to dig deeper and learn about education policy and the root causes behind inequality in the classroom.

Double majoring in linguistics and Spanish and Portuguese studies, Vail tacked on a minor in education, inquiry and justice. She wanted a way to put into practice what she was learning in the classroom and discovered the DC Schools Project, a CSJ program that for the last four decades has sent Hoyas into the community to provide English language tutoring to migrant youth.

“The DC Schools Project was the program I was most interested in because it has an ESL (English as a Second Language) tutoring program and is tied to what I’m studying. It just seemed perfect for me,” she said. “I’ve done the program ever since then. I’ve never wanted to do anything else as my job on campus.”

Vail started out as a tutor over Zoom during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and has gone on to tutor at different schools every semester. She’s since become a coordinator with the DC Schools Project, training new tutors and performing behind-the-scenes work that keeps the program of 110 tutors at nine different sites running. Last fall, CSJ began offering tutoring to migrant families, whom the governors of Arizona and Texas had sent to Washington, DC, in buses. The summer camp was a chance to extend the programming offered during the semester to families year-round.

Advocating for Migrant Families in DC

When it came time to search for an internship the summer before her senior year, the decision to continue her work with CSJ was an easy one.

In addition to spending time with and tutoring the children at camp, Vail and her fellow interns engage in advocacy and administrative work that help migrant families move through the legal process of their migration status. Their work supports the work of the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network (MSMAN), a network of organizations and volunteers in the DC area dedicated to supporting migrants in the region.

This includes following up with migrants on their asylum cases and change of venue applications, which, if approved, enable migrants to secure court dates in DC as opposed to the border states in which they first arrived.

SIRA interns also go to weekly respites coordinated by MSMAN, where students, alongside other volunteers, welcome new migrants arriving in DC by serving them meals, giving them a change of clothes and other essential supplies and transporting them to the hotels and other temporary lodging that are used as emergency shelter for migrants.

But at the heart of the internship is running a summer camp Tuesday through Thursday every week for migrant children, who hail primarily from Venezuela and Colombia.

Giving Migrant Youth a Safe Space at Summer Camp

Picking up the children in three vans each morning from their hotels, Vail and her fellow interns drive to the Church of Our Saviour in Brookland, which hosts the camp.

At camp, SIRA interns eat lunch with the campers, conversing in Spanish and sharing laughs over sandwiches and fresh fruit. In the afternoons, the interns and tutors, who are also Georgetown students, help the children practice their English and reinforce concepts they learned in morning programming. On their last day, they wrote self-affirmations to remind themselves of their capability of learning English in the year ahead.

Interspersed throughout the afternoon at camp are spontaneous bursts of dancing to Spanish pop songs and the children rushing out the door for recess, playing baseball and chasing each other around the grass.

“We are trying to create a space where the kids can be kids and experience a fun summer break but also get some supplementary ESL tutoring because they really need it,” Vail said.

Ruhie Rapolu (C’25), another SIRA intern, agreed.

“These kids are being put into these schools and may be placed in fifth grade, but really because of their disrupted learning, they’re at a second or third grade level,” she said. “They’re being put into these environments and are just expected to fail because there aren’t enough resources to support them.”

Rapolu chose to pursue the SIRA internship after a pivotal experience as a student leader in the Kino Border Immersion, an alternative breaks program that immerses students in the communities, cultures and border and migrant issues along the Arizona-Mexico border. Last spring, she traveled to the border in Arizona and the experience inspired her to think differently about her next steps.

“You’re physically seeing the border and the impact it’s had on so many communities, and it was so inspiring because we met with so many local community partners who are doing good work,” Rapolu said. “I knew I wanted to do something past the immersion because you learn everything that’s going on and then you ask yourself, ‘Now what?’”

Rapolu answered that question by making a commitment to learn more about migrant justice through SIRA and spending her summer break working at the camp.

Interacting with migrant families from Latin America has hit close to home for Ulises Olea Tapia (SFS’25), a SIRA intern who is an international student from Mexico.

“Being from Mexico has really set the tone for me in this internship because I connect with every single family, every single kid, every single person that we meet,” Olea Tapia said. “I see myself. I see my family. I see my mom. I see my culture.”

For many of the migrant families, Mexico is familiar territory as most of them had to cross through the country to get to the United States. Olea Tapia recalled how even on the first day of meeting the migrant families, the children immediately recognized his Mexican heritage from his accent.

“It’s really bittersweet for me because most of them know Mexico. Some of them love Mexico, while many of them had really hard experiences in Mexico,” Olea Tapia said. “It’s incredibly sweet when people tell me, ‘I love your country.’ But it was also challenging for me when people also told me, ‘Going through your country was like going through hell.’”

A Bittersweet End to the Summer

On their last day of camp, the interns and tutors worked with the children on their self-portraits. They drew their faces alongside words of affirmation about themselves to take home for the summer, a reminder for the year ahead. Some students wrote, “I am happy,” while others wrote, “I am smart.”

“We’re helping students shift from ‘I can’t do this, this is too hard,’ to ‘I am smart. I am capable. I am hardworking,’” said Lee. “They’re here [in the U.S.] in some way that didn’t have a lot of agency to it, and English in particular is going to carry some baggage. We want to help them feel more confident about learning English.”

Later that afternoon, as they boarded the vans to go back to their families, many of the children cried knowing that summer camp was coming to an end, a camp that, for many, was an escape from the trials they and their families face navigating the U.S. immigration system. For the children, summer camp offered a safe space in a nurturing and formative environment where the campers could experience a typical summer, spending time with friends and running around in the sun.

Coming out of her internship, Vail recognizes how important it was for her to spend a whole summer working full time with members of the community.

“The biggest thing is what it really means to be in solidarity with this community and not just having the perspective of an outsider who comes in for one thing and then just leaves,” Vail said. “It’s so different from like a one-hour, twice-a-week, tutoring session. It’s left me feeling like, how can I stay involved as the school year goes on?”

But while the SIRA interns have given their summers to this migrant community, Rapolu was quick to point out that the children have given just the same amount back.

“They’re able to teach us so much about persistence and moving on, and they help us with our Spanish too,” Rapolu said. “It’s been great to see what I can learn from them and what they’re able to help me with.”

While the summer has come to a close, many of the interns plan to stay involved with CSJ and the DC Schools Project and keep up the relationships they have made with migrant families.

Rapolu hopes to continue going to weekly respites to provide direct services to incoming migrants from the border. Olea Tapia is looking forward to digging deeper into the policies that affect migration.

“For me it is essential that we make the connection between what the people on the ground are living and the policy that we are creating,” Olea Tapia said. “There is a need to create policy and to lobby for policy that actually responds to the needs of these communities and does not respond to the political advantage of the people who are in city council or in Congress.”

As for Vail, she’s looking forward to seeing many of the same kids and their families throughout the school year as she continues her work as a coordinator with the DC Schools Project. She plans to apply her field work to her linguistics senior thesis on learning English as a foreign language. And she’s coming away from the summer even more sure of the importance of this work.

“I’m really convinced of the difference that it makes to be doing this type of work and to come alongside members of the community and be in solidarity with them,” Vail said.