State of Opportunity from Michigan Radio

Trust between police and the black community has taken a major hit after the spate of recent police shootings of black men around the country. So this week, we're taking a look at how some Michigan cities are trying to rebuild that trust, starting at the neighborhood level. I'm the police, and I'm here to help...and BBQ It’s 10:30 a.m. and Officer Baron Coleman’s cell phone is already blowing up with voice mail messages from Detroit residents. One guy calls about a possible squatter in the

Politicians proclaim it. People argue about it. We hear it often: "Our immigration system is broken." But what exactly does that mean? That’s a tough question to answer. The U.S. immigration system is a complex and often confusing web of policies. Those policies touch everyone from the migrant farm worker to international Ph.D students. For years now, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called for an overhaul of our immigration system.

Throughout your day, you’re likely meeting undocumented workers everywhere you go: the server at a restaurant.The stylist at the salon.The yard worker cutting your lawn. “You can’t really go a single day without encountering one of them,” said Teresa Hendricks, the director and senior litigator for Migrant Legal Aid in Grand Rapids. “Although you wouldn’t know it because they’re living under the radar.” Hendricks works with “mixed families” at Migrant Legal Aid – families who have some members

Much of the national debate about immigration reform focuses on unskilled foreign-born workers. But there’s another side: the highly-skilled foreign-born worker who has the knowledge and skills that businesses so badly need. Tel Ganesan is the CEO and president of Kyyba, Incorporated. It’s an engineering services and software product company based in Farmington Hills. He believes national policies on immigration need to change if the Motor City and the nation are to remain an industrial

Two young immigrants in Michigan caught in the middle of an immigration stalemate are Daniel Lopez and Sendy Lopez. The two friends are not related. Daniel came to the United States from Guatemala when he was seven. Thanks to the 2012 executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Daniel is now among some 700,000 young people who are protected from being deported. Daniel's mother and older siblings, however, still live in fear of deportation. A split decision in the

Highland Park, Michigan was the birthplace of the automotive moving assembly line. The Highland Park Ford Plant produced the Model T, the world's first affordable car. But the small town embedded within Detroit has since fallen on hard times. Schools and the library have closed. Streetlights were removed to save money. And over the past decade, the population has decreased by almost 50%. Shamayim "Shu" Harris lives in a red brick house on the corner of Avalon street and Woodward in Highland

The world hit a grim milestone this year. There are now more than 60 million refugees worldwide. That's the highest number ever recorded. The U.S. will accept 85,000 of them in 2016. The global humanitarian crisis has led to a heated political debate in Michigan, which is one of the top states for refugee resettlement in the country. But advocates say that debate often overlooks the benefits that refugees bring to the communities where they settle. Ingham County accepts more refugees per capita

The following is a transcript of the State of Opportunity documentary Out From the Shadows: Living Undocumented, which you can hear at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. today. Sarahi Nieves’ parents brought her to the U.S. when she was 7. She didn’t have papers, but she grew up here. Then she had a son, a U.S. citizen. And she had to explain what it means to be undocumented in America. “How can you tell a four-year-old, if we don’t do this, if we don’t go through this, we might be taken apart?” she said.

Who gets to volunteer at your kids’ school? Maybe it’s a question you haven’t thought about much. But when we learned that the guy who shot and killed two Berrien County courthouse officers was also a regular volunteer at his daughter’s elementary school despite his sizable criminal record, well, we thought it was time to take a closer look. There’s lots of research that shows when parents are involved at school, their children do better academically. So, who gets to decide which parents are

When you’re in your house, what do you see when you look out your front window? Maybe a big maple tree, a mailbox, your neighbor’s house across the street and the house next to them. Cindy Dorman wishes that's what she saw when she looked out her front window. But instead she sees a whole lot of blight. "Twenty-one abandoned houses" within a one-block radius of her house, to be exact. Dorman lives in Detroit's Brightmoor neighborhood, one of the most blighted areas in the city. She grew up in

Detroit built its public health departments back in the 1800s, when cholera was rampant. But in 2012 the city gutted that department and privatized it. Now, after its historic bankruptcy, public health is back under city management. But it’s a shell of a what it once was. The man in charge of building it back up is Abdul El-Sayed, a 31-year old Arab American born and raised in metro Detroit. I spent a day with El-Sayed to see what goes into rebuilding an entire division whose main purpose is to

On an industrial block on Detroit's east side, there's a big, black building that sits along a stretch of warehouses. The front of the building is covered in glass windows. A banner sprawled across screams: "Welcome to Downtown Boxing Gym!" The building is home to the Downtown Boxing Gym Youth Program. The afterschool program was started by Khali Sweeney in 2007. Here, kids have access to tutors and mentors. They can also take classes in things like cooking, mock trial, or job skills. They eat

Foster care is supposed to be a temporary fix. When a child ends up in state care, the first goal is to reunite them with their birth families. But only about half of the 13,000 children in Michigan’s child welfare system every year end up going home. A small group of parents in Washtenaw County wants to change that. The Parent Partners program is a collaboration between the Dispute Resolution Center, the Washtenaw County Trial Court, and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. The

I went to a workshop last month called "Why in the D?," which was put on by students at Cody’s Academy of Public Leadership. The point of the day was not to talk about schools; it was to talk about something much closer to home: where they live and the outsize role their neighborhoods have on their lives. There were student-led sessions on how neighborhood violence and poverty can lead to PTSD, and what it’s like to live in "the 'hood" (their term, not mine.) Some students even wrote Dear John

It’s been decades since Mr. Rogers invited us to be his neighbor. All were welcomed – rich, poor, black, white, immigrant. But today the reality is...