HOPE MUSTAKIM

Baylor graduate Hope Balfa-Mustakim spoke to students about her childhood hardships and how those experiences led her to follow a path to change lives by working for Waco Immigration Alliance on Tuesday evening.

Born in southern Louisiana, Balfa-Mustakim said she had a “pretty tumultuous” childhood. She was raised in a family that had suffered untreated mental health and substance abuse issues, which caused her to take on the “levelheaded, clear-thinking parenting figure,” Balfa-Mustakim said.

After hitting a “personal rock bottom” at age 18, completing two-year discipleship school and taking classes at a community college in Houston, Balfa-Mustakim said she realized that “life isn’t about prosperity” and came to Waco to complete a summer internship at Mission Waco. She said she “fell in love with the side of Waco that not many people get to see.”

“When I came to Waco, I met someone who, his testimony of addiction, recovery, even his conversion to Christianity all preceded him,” Balfa-Mustakim said about Nazry Mustakim, her now ex-husband.

The couple got married, bought a house on 12thstreet and started their life together, but only three short months later everything changed. Balfa-Mustakim was shocked to receive an unsettling knock on her door from men in “several unmarked cars” who said they were there to arrest her husband, a recovered meth addict, because he was supposed to have been deported six years prior.

Her husband was taken to a detention center for a duration of 10 months.

“We were living everyday not knowing when it was going to end,” Balfa-Mustakim said.

She shared her story with the outlets such as the Wacotrib, The Huffington Post, Yale Visual Law Project and many others because “people need to know,” Balfa-Mustakim said.

“The press and media were my best friend,” Balfa-Mustakim said.

She also created her own website, www.freenaz.com, with the slogan “I believe in a changed life.”

With the public being able to hear this story from their own language caused the “full spectrum of who he was” to be seen, Balfa-Mustakim said.

Balfa-Mustakim said the media coverage that “put pressure” on ICE to carefully examine their circumstances was vital to the couple ultimately winning the case.

Robert Darden, a journalism professor at Baylor University, said he first read about Balfa-Mustakim in the newspaper “like a lot of other people” and was intrigued. Later, Darden and his wife became more active in organizations like the Waco Immigrants Alliance and said that Balfa-Mustakim was at the “front-lines” of all of them. “I couldn’t help but admire somebody with that dedication and fearlessness,” Darden said.

Now as executive director at the Waco Immigrants Alliance, she uses the same tactics and strategies that she used to overcome her family’s battle, to “help stop deportations of other community immigrants,” Balfa-Mustakim said.

“My job as a community organizer and an advocate is not to be the voice for the voiceless, it’s to amplify the voices and to carry stories into rooms where they normally aren’t heard,” Balfa-Mustakim said.