- And the next debate between Slotkin and Rogers takes place on Tuesday, October 15th.

Turning now to an upcoming community conversation and resource fair hosted by our partners at Bridge Detroit.

The October 16th event is designed to help refugees and immigrants new to Detroit get housing, social services, IDs and other necessities.

I got details from Bridge Detroit's engagement editor, Bryce Huffman.

(soft music) Give us a little rundown of what the event is and what made you guys decide to be the hosts of it.

- The event is all about, like this title suggest giving resources of all kinds to immigrant and refugees in Detroit and in the Detroit metro area.

The idea really came from us doing our summer conversation series, a series of four events.

One was on voter turnout and election access.

Another was on the fight for reparations in Detroit.

The last one we did was on housing and home repair.

- What's going on at the event?

Who's gonna be there?

What can people expect to see if they do decide to attend?

- As far as speakers go, we're gonna have city council member Gabriela Santiago-Romero from District six sitting on a panel.

We're gonna have Emmesi Mamba, who is the co-founder of Bao Bab Fair, the restaurant right over on Woodward and East Grand Boulevard.

And of course we're gonna have Lydia Rayas from Latino Family Services and moderating the discussion is journalist Martina Guzman.

We're really hoping to get a mix of people from different immigrant populations here to show up and get resources as far as things like housing, education, opportunities.

We're also gonna be signing people up for their Detroit ID cards at the event.

- Can you explain a little bit about why that's kind of a unique thing?

- Getting a Detroit ID is really important for people, specifically people who are under documented or undocumented residents because it allows you to have access to the things that we as US-born citizens might take for granted.

Being able to pay your utility bills, being able to get a library card, it allows you to do so many things that we don't think of on a daily basis as barriers to living a long, happy, healthy life in metro Detroit.

But this card can allow you to kind of break down some of those barriers and access that.

- Do we have any understanding of what the demographics of people who are landing in Detroit are?

Are we talking mostly families, individuals, children?

- I asked several organizations that are gonna be providing resources at the event about this and I got some conflicting answers.

So I heard a lot of people say that as immigrants are coming here, they're not always coming with their entire families all at once.

So it'll be one or two people from the family who get here and kind of set up their home here before the rest of their family has an opportunity to come.

So I also was hearing that a lot of the people coming here are younger and don't have families of their own yet.

So we're kind of hearing conflicting things.

But as far as numbers of people, I did see that according to the American Immigration Council, the metro Detroit area has anywhere between 397,000 and about 401,000 immigrants just in this area, which is about two thirds of the state's overall immigrant population.

- Oh wow.

That's a lot.

- Yeah, exactly.

So we're talking about nearly half a million people just, you know, immigrants in the metro Detroit area, not even including the entire rest of the state.

- How can someone get involved?

Where do they need to go?

What do they need to do?

- The event will be at the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation, right on Trumble on October 16th.

It starts at 6:00 PM so you can just show up to the event right then and there and get all the resources you need.

But also you could register ahead of the event on our Eventbrite Bridge Detroit.

Just Search BridgeDetroit one word.

It'll come up right there and that way you can get signed up, get all the information you need about the event ahead of time there, and bring anything you might need to get your Detroit ID card if that's something that you're interested in getting.