Students, families, and experts gathered for a town hall meeting on Sept. 3 to voice their support for a new, cohesive immigration policy. The current system has left many families separated by hundreds of miles.While Sen. Kay Hagan was invited to attend the meeting, she was not present.

“All I ask for is that my husband be allowed to return to his children,” Sandra Hernandez said as her son stood next to her, translating her Spanish to English.

Hernandez stood at the podium in the Congressional United Church of Christ to tell her story for a town hall meeting on immigration policy reform. She is a naturalized citizen but she and her husband are separated by hundreds of miles and by the current immigration policy.

When Hernandez first heard the news that there would be a six-month delay until her husband would be able to join her, she thought, “How can it take six months to review a marriage license?” That was in 2006, and now three years later, her husband is still not here.

Hernandez spoke about the strain that this separation puts on her family, “I worry every day that our marriage and our happy home will never be the same.”

It is common for immigrants to have trouble getting their families to join them. Gerard Chapman, an immigration lawyer, explained that some delays can take up to 23 years.

Among the people in the audience, there were other speakers with similar stories, teachers and students affected by the current immigration system.

Sen. Hagan did send a staff member to listen and report back to her. People like Sandra Hernandez came to tell their stories in the hope that Hagan would eventually hear them.

Mike Palmer, an elementary school teacher, told the story of one of his students whom he called Lucia. She was having a bad day in class so Palmer asked her to stay behind and talk with him.

Lucia explained that her parents were taken in the middle of the night. Because Lucia had been born in the United States, she was left behind.

Palmer asked her how, with no parents around, she got to school that day. She simply said that she had gotten up on her own and gone out to wait for the school bus by herself as yet another example of a family separated by the immigration system.

While not all the stories were personal accounts of broken families, it was a central issue to every speaker’s presentation. Andrew Brod, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNCG, who was asked to come and speak about the economics of immigration, even made the argument that it was economically beneficial to allow the families of immigrants to come live with them.

Sen. Hagan’s staffer ended the meeting by reading the notes that he had taken, explaining that he wanted everyone to know exactly what issues would be brought back to Washington. The Senate intends to introduce legislation on the issue in September.