Advocate for immigrants will be honored with city award

Magdaleno Rose-Avila has lobbied on behalf of Kurdish refugees, marched alongside illegal immigrants in Seattle and farmworkers in Sacramento, and worked to help end youth gang violence in El Salvador.

A big man with an even bigger presence, the executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project has never been one to back down from a good fight.

He's confronted police camped outside his agency's offices — "Hey, what are you doing here?" — and immigration officers who came in search of agency clients.

Yet to the sometimes desperate immigrants who seek out his agency's legal help, his booming voice can take on a soothing calm.

Today, the city of Seattle is awarding Rose-Avila, 61 — "Leno" to his friends — its Distinguished Citizen Award for Human Rights, given to individuals and organizations with outstanding records of furthering human rights in Seattle.

It will mark the first time the city's Human Rights Commission and Office for Civil Rights has granted the award to an individual tied to immigration work.

In a career that spans more than four decades, Rose-Avila has railed against racism, protested immigration raids across Washington, spoken out in favor of organized labor and against the presence of the Minutemen along the U.S.-Canada border in Whatcom County.

Rhonda Watson, a program manager with Social Justice Fund Northwest who nominated him for the award, remembers how he introduced himself to a panel she'd convened earlier this year. "He said, 'My name is Leno Rose-Avila and I have a Ph.D. It stands for Public Highway Demonstrations.' "

Watson said she'd known Leno for only a short time, "but I realized pretty quickly that I was in the presence of a giant — a warrior capable of moving people forward."

At the same time, his outspoken advocacy of all immigrants has put him in direct conflict with people who believe that anyone in this country illegally should be removed.

Leon Donahue, secretary of a group called Washingtonians for Immigration Reform, doesn't know Rose-Avila personally, but said people like him "are doing a disservice to this country.

"They're open-border enthusiasts and anti-American," Donahue said.

The city is bestowing the award as part of its Human Rights Day celebration, during which officials will also present a group award to the Transgender Jail Policy Group, which developed guidelines for jailed transgender individuals. A third award, by the United Nations Association of Seattle, will be presented to the Washington State Veterans for Peace chapters.

Angela Tarah, chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission, which selects the winners, said that while the individual nominees were all highly accomplished within their specific areas of expertise, Rose-Avila "has had a broader impact improving the lives of so many people."

An early activist

Born in Colorado to Mexican immigrant parents who lived and worked on a colonia, or farmworker community, Rose-Avila was 11 when he started working in the fields alongside his father.

His early years saw him working with migrant workers and organizing farm-labor groups throughout Colorado and California.

In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Rose-Avila put aside classes at the University of Colorado and spoke out publicly for the first time about discrimination. "King's death changed me in a profound way," he said recently. "It made me think seriously about the responsibility each of us has in ensuring justice for all people."

As a director for Amnesty International in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he worked with Coretta Scott King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council to help build a bridge to the African-American community.

He was director of Amnesty's death-penalty campaign in 1985 when he took a frantic call from Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun and death-penalty opponent.

Prejean, whose book, "Dead Man Walking," is the basis for the movie of the same name, wanted him to bring Amnesty's campaign against the death penalty to Louisiana.

"We're in the death belt here in Louisiana," she had pleaded with him. He obliged her.

Rose-Avila lists Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American labor activist who became the voice of migrant farm workers, as a mentor and hero. Following Chavez's death in 1993, Rose-Avila was asked by Chavez's family to head a foundation in the activist's name.

A father of two, Rose-Avila is married to an activist named Carolyn Rose who lives in Miami, where she is involved in human-rights causes across the Caribbean and Latin America.

"A human-rights issue"

In November 2003, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), the third largest immigration legal-aid organization in the country, hired him as its first nonlawyer executive director. At the time, the 20-year-old organization was in the second year of a budget deficit and threatening layoffs.

Funded largely by a grant from the Legal Foundation of Washington, NWIRP "hadn't done much fundraising," said Janet Lotawa, development director of the organization, responsible for fundraising.

There were other challenges, she said: "He had a staff adjusting to having a nonattorney as director."

Within six months, two development directors quit, objecting, some say, to Rose-Avila's goal of broadening the organization's funding sources.

One of the first things he did, for example, was move NWIRP's annual fundraiser from the Mountaineers Club to the Convention Center, where this year it netted close to $90,000, up from the $5,000 or so it used to draw.

Some saw the move as "selling out" — going after corporate money, he said.

Still, NWIRP's budget has grown from $1.2 million when Rose-Avila first arrived to an estimated $2.1 million for 2007 — including first-time funding from King County.

Lotawa said the director's ability to connect with funding providers has been a critical part of the agency's financial turnaround. "He has this way of breaking the ice, wherever he goes," she said.

Last year, NWIRP, using a federal grant, opened a satellite office in Tacoma to provide educational services to immigrants held at the detention center there.

It relocated from its basement office on Eighth Avenue and Madison to swanky office space, formerly occupied by a law firm, in the Broderick Building downtown.

Neha Chandola, the former legal director of NWIRP and now an attorney at the Seattle law firm of Gibbs, Houston and Pauw, said she believes one of Rose-Avila's greatest contributions has been "bringing the issue of immigration to the forefront — not just as a legal or policy issue but as a human-rights issue."

Hilary Stern, executive director of Casa Latina, which operates a day-labor center downtown, said Rose-Avila sees the struggle over the long haul.

"For him this is not just about immigration or Latin immigration or 2006," Stern said. "He sees how this relates to the civil-rights movement and he knows it's a struggle that won't be won in a day or a week or a year."

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com