By Josh DuBose
May 14, 2018
LOS ANGELES – Jana Ivkovic is a self-professed pessimist. But the 37-year-old immigrants rights activist, herself a former Serbian émigré, doesn’t let skepticism stop her from challenging policies that threaten the city’s undocumented and documented immigrant community.
On a Wednesday night in mid-March, Ivkovic stood at a podium in the packed Culver City municipal auditorium. The city council was set to vote on a license-plate reader system, installed and operated by Vigilant Solutions, a company that’s admittedly shared data with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement through other municipal clients.
“You are an inextricable part of Los Angeles and last year when you passed the sanctuary ordinance, you also took a responsibility,” Ivkovic told councilmembers. “According to federal immigration law, if local law enforcement collects data on someone’s immigration status or even something as simple as place of birth, then that agency must handover the data to the federal government. This city council should unanimously reject any automated license-plate reader program and disentangle from ICE. ”
Four days earlier, on a rainy Saturday, Ivkovic’s activism was less public, though just as important. A group of boomer-aged activists sat in the living room of a stylish Marina Del Rey condo to hear a presentation by an organization that teaches volunteers how to make visitations to Adelanto, a federal immigration detention center with a history of human rights violations. Ivkovic, herself a member of the Marina Del Rey chapter of People Power, helped organize and facilitate the workshop, being equal parts tech-troubleshooter and up to date on pending immigration legislation, as well as current state and federal immigration law.
Driving Ivkovic is a personal history that includes war, living as an undocumented immigrant in Europe and, eventually, getting selected for the U.S. visa lottery program, which brought her to New York in April 2008 with $800 to her name. She moved to Los Angeles in 2012.
Her activist-life didn’t start the moment she moved to New York. Ivkovic first found work as a grocery store cashier. Later, with her education in finance and accounting, she moved into working for nonprofits and described herself during that period as an activist spectator.
“I was aware of a lot of things, but my way of dealing with that was, ‘Let me share this information with you,’ but when Trump took office, I was like, ‘That is not enough,'” she said.
Ivkovic’s story reaches back to 1991, when she was 10 and living in what was then her hometown of Belgrade, Serbia, during the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A federation of six states, including Serbia, Yugoslavia fell into turmoil with wars starting first in Croatia, then Bosnia and later Kosovo. The conflicts lasted until 1999.
Watching the stream of Bosnian and Croatian Serbs flee war and seek refuge in Belgrade had a lasting impact on Ivkovic, who remembers the scene as an endless line, a mass exodus of people carrying, pushing or dragging whatever possessions they could. She also remembers understanding, even as a fourth grader, that societal norms were changing.
“In my neighborhood, everybody’s uncle or dad or brother or somebody you know went to war and came back with some god awful stories about what happened or something that happened to them. Another thing is a lot of people brought back weapons. So we were playing with guns. All the kids had guns. My brother and I would play with my dad’s guns and my dad even had hand grenades. War and violence and weaponry was everywhere,” she said.
When NATO forces bombed Belgrade in March 1999, Ivkovic was 18. It was day 12 of the treaty organization’s Operation Allied Forces campaign against the Yugoslavian Army under President Slobodan Milosević.
A suburban oil refinery, along with a heating plant near her family’s apartment were hit. The explosions rattled buildings and the fire on the horizon cast Ivkovic’s sixth floor apartment in a red and orange glow.
“That’s what I remember,” said Ivkovic, who’s mother, father and older brother gathered in the living room during the bombing. “Then there was this negotiation with my parents, like, ‘What do we do? Do we go somewhere?’ Then, we realize there’s nowhere to go.”
After NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, in May ’99, Ivkovic’s parents, worried for her safety, allowed her to leave.
The only countries accepting Serbians were Russia, which didn’t appeal to her, and Cyprus, though the government would only give Serbs a one-month tourist visa as opposed to three-month visas they gave people from other countries. There, she found work in a restaurant, but didn’t like Cyprus or the Serbian community that had gathered there.
“I felt we were not good guests,” she said. “We were bringing this culture that was so severely damaged, for lack of a better word.”
Though she returned to Belgrade for college, Ivkovic bounced around various countries, always looking for a way out of Serbia that would provide her with legitimate, permanent resident status. That opportunity would come in November 2006, on a brief visit home from Italy, where she’d attended graduate school and was living with immigration documents that were about to expire.
“I had a friend who entered the [U.S. visa] lottery every year. She always said, ‘You have to do it,’ and I always said, ‘Whatever. It’s a scam,'” Ivkovic said.
She filled out the form anyway and remembers it required a photo and not much else.
“Literally, you just enter your name, education, a couple of very basic facts and that was it. I forgot about it. I went back to Rome. I’m just trying to get something going because I don’t have a job. I don’t have any documents. I finished a masters and I don’t know what to do with myself,” she recalled.
Almost five months went by as Ivkovic tried to build some kind of life in Rome. On March 31, 2007, Ivkovic learned she’d received a letter from the U.S. government at her parent’s home in Belgrade. Days later, the letter in hand, she realized there was a chance to live in the U.S. with a green card that would allow her to work. But, first, there was more paperwork and an interview.
” …now you have to fill in this long form that is basically your entire history and it’s a really nerve-wracking process because there’s so many warnings about ‘don’t get anything wrong.’ So, it takes me a while to fill out this form,” she said.
Sitting at a cafe in Westwood almost 12 years later, Ivkovic estimated it took her two weeks to finish the application. Then she shook her head, remembering what happened next.
“It’s the Italian post office. It’s the worst. Everything is falling apart. I give [the application] to the teller. She goes, ‘Okay, do you want fast?’ I said, ‘Please, the fastest and most secure possible,’ and she says, ‘No. Either fast or secure,’ and because I took so long to fill out these forms, my anxiety kicks in and I say, ‘Well, I guess fast.’ She takes the letter and flicks it across the room and it lands on this giant pile of letters and slides down to the bottom. She stamps this piece of paper and gives it to me. I look at her and I look at the envelope that is now sitting on the floor and I said, ‘Oh, lord, what have I done. I missed my opportunity. I missed my chance.'”
These days, Ivkovic, who became a U.S. citizen in December 2013, spends around 30 hours a week working on immigration rights causes and even cut her hours at her job back to accommodate the workload.
Pessimist or not, her personal journey and ongoing activism is something else altogether. It’s work that confronts cynicism and offers hope to those in the community with less of a voice. In the sociopolitical climate that America finds itself in, Ivkovic feels that she has little choice, but to fight.
“It’s almost more effort to not be an activist. Like, you can shut down that part of yourself, but for me the urge to not is stronger than that,” she said.
**Note**
Ivkovic is not Jana’s real name. She agreed to do the profile as long her identity was protected so anti-immigration groups, of which there are several in Southern California, won’t be able to track her through this piece.