Laura Minero learned multiplication from the back of a Ritz cracker box when she was in first grade. “My mom wrote the times tables out by hand, 1 through 9, so I could learn them,” Minero said. With just a sixth-grade education, Minero’s mother was motivated to not just teach her daughter math, but also bring her along as she illegally entered the United States from Mexico to rejoin her husband. Two decades later, Minero is a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an outspoken advocate for immigration reform and among more than 750,000 young people nationally given temporary relief from deportation through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Office of Strategic Communication