Giving Compass' Take:

• Fatemah Khavari is an Afghan refugee living in Sweden and started the Ung I Sverige (Young in Sweden) movement to stop the deportation of unaccompanied refugee minors. 

• The trend of young people taking action against injustice is not just a trend in U.S. high schools, but also within the refugee community.  How can we start to create global networks of young people who are addressing important issues on hot topics such as immigration and gun control?

• Read about Syrian refugee children that have lost access to basic necessities and any opportunity of receiving an education. 

As a naturally outgoing person, school in Sweden was hard for Fatemeh at first. Fatemeh was silent for the first few months of school as she was unable to speak Swedish. But after six months of dedicated study, Fatemeh began to speak – and she hasn’t stopped since. In 2017, she cofounded Ung I Sverige (Young in Sweden), a social movement that aims to stop the deportation of unaccompanied refugee minors.

Refugees Deeply: How did growing up in an Afghan refugee family in Iran influence your political outlook and interest in influencing policy?

Fatemeh Khavari: I had no rights in Iran. I was an illegal immigrant my entire life. My world was very small. And politics was the reason for all this. Politics determined that we couldn’t move around the country, that I couldn’t go to school, that we weren’t accepted, that we lived illegally. Everything that happened was the result of political decisions. My whole life has been decided by other people.

Refugees Deeply: How did Ung I Sverige begin?

Khavari: I was playing volleyball one night with friends when I received a phone call from an Afghan friend named Ahmad Rahimi.  He was shattered, saying he had worked so long and was about to give up as he didn’t see any of his work making a difference. Lots of Afghans were being sent back at this point.

“They send us back and no one talks about us. We disappear and no one even knows they deported us,” he said to me. I told him, “From this day on I am going to talk about us.” He thought it was a joke, but as soon I left the volleyball match I started calling everyone I knew to get a group together to demonstrate for three days in Stockholm.

Read the full article about deporting unaccompanied refugee minors by Rory Smith at News Deeply