Category: Racial Equality

Kirstjen Nielsen Says Family Separation Policy Doesn’t Exist

~ mcequality

And even before Sessions announced that the new policy was official, parents were allegedly being separated from their kids at the border, a practice that a federal judge called “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency”:

Ms. L explained that she wanted to apply for asylum and passed a crucial interview with an asylum officer. She was then taken and held in a detention center in the San Diego area.

Less than a week after arriving at the border, her daughter, called S.S. in court documents, was forcibly taken from her and brought to a detention facility in Chicago for minors who are unaccompanied, the lawsuit states.

“When S.S. was taken away from her mother, she was screaming and crying, pleading with guards not to take her away from her mother. That was the last time Ms. L saw her daughter,” the lawsuit reads.

via Kirstjen Nielsen Says Family Separation Policy Doesn’t Exist

US child migrants: 2,000 separated from families in six weeks – BBC News

~ mcequality

Almost 2,000 migrant children were separated from their families at the US border over six weeks, officials say.
Following a Trump administration crackdown on illegal border crossings from Mexico, adults are being detained, meaning the children with them are removed from their care.
The issue is causing a growing political storm in the US.

via US child migrants: 2,000 separated from families in six weeks – BBC News

Woman Faces Jail Time for Writing ‘Stop Putting Kids in Cages’ Outside GOP Congressman Ken Buck’s Office

~ mcequality

On Monday, local news channel Denver7 reported that a woman in Castle Rock, Colorado was charged with a misdemeanor after protesting outside Republican Congressman Ken Buck’s office, an act of dissent which included writing on the sidewalk in chalk.

The woman in question, Shauna Johnson, was there to speak out against the Trump administration’s monstrous policy of separating children and parents seeking asylum at the United States border. On the sidewalk in front of the congressman’s office, Johnson wrote, “Stop putting kids in cages Ken Buck, love Jesus and a cross.”

Denver 7 reported that it was the building’s management, and not Buck’s office, that called the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department following the incident, resulting in the misdemeanor charge related to scribbling in chalk on private property.

via Woman Faces Jail Time for Writing ‘Stop Putting Kids in Cages’ Outside GOP Congressman Ken Buck’s Office

APNewsBreak: US launches bid to find citizenship cheaters

~ mcequality

The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.

Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.

via APNewsBreak: US launches bid to find citizenship cheaters

Trump looking to erect tent cities to house unaccompanied children | McClatchy Washington Bureau

~ mcequality

The Department of Health and Human Services will visit Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army base near El Paso in the coming weeks to look at a parcel of land where the administration is considering building a tent city to hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the plans.

HHS officials confirmed that they’re looking at the Fort Bliss site along with Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene and Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo for potential use as temporary shelters.

“HHS will make the determination if any of the three sites assessed are suitable,” said an HHS official.

via Trump looking to erect tent cities to house unaccompanied children | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Jeff Sessions Gives Speech in PA Defending “Zero-Tolerance”

~ mcequality

During his speech, Sessions recited from a well-rehearsed script, repeating talking points central to the administration’s worldview and subsequent policies. Sessions warned of the “tens of thousands” of undocumented workers crossing American borders, conflating immigrants with criminals. He spoke of the “shootings, stabbings, and beatings,” as well as the rapes and murders committed by MS-13, the Trump administration’s preferred monster. Sessions warned in his speech that the gang was “recruiting illegal aliens as young as 15.” Danger, it seems, lurked in every corner. He warned, too, that the “porous” Southwest border was impacting the rest of the United States, telling law enforcement in the audience that the lack of security at the border “makes your job that much harder.”

via Jeff Sessions Gives Speech in PA Defending “Zero-Tolerance”

Jeff Sessions’s Racist Whims and the Danger Ahead for Victims of Domestic Violence 

~ mcequality

After arriving in the U.S., A.B. was permitted to seek asylum, but her case has been tied up in the courts for more than four years. In 2016, the Immigration Board of Appeals ruled in her favor, allowing A.B. the right to asylum in the United States as a victim of domestic violence. On Monday, Sessions overturned the decision, writing that most claims “pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.”

“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence—or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” he wrote.

via Jeff Sessions’s Racist Whims and the Danger Ahead for Victims of Domestic Violence 

Jeff Sessions: Bible Supports Separating Children From Parents

~ mcequality

Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues to be pleased with the outcome of his “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in the forcible separation of children—some only a few months old—from their parents, who often do not know where they’ve been taken. The psychological repercussions of these forced separations, particularly for extremely young children, are massive. One Honduran woman told CNN that her infant daughter was taken from her in a detention center while she was breastfeeding; a father from Honduras died by suicide in his cell after being separated from his wife and 3-year-old. Due to overcrowding, some minors will evidently be detained in “tent cities,” forced to sleep outdoors, somehow, in a 100-degree desert.

via Jeff Sessions: Bible Supports Separating Children From Parents

To Be an Immigrant in Trump’s America: A Theory of Animals

~ mcequality

Immediately, both conservatives and liberals jumped to his defense on the basis of context, because he had previously been talking about the MS-13 gang. These justifications are hollow. Criminals are human; I grew up Catholic, then evangelical, so I can tell you I learned that one from Jesus. It’s also fruitless to analyze the words of a man who speaks in non-sequiturs, whose brain apparently functions at the level of images that remind him of other images. Coming from the person who has said repeatedly that immigrants are rapists and criminals, the “people coming into the country” are the same person. They deserve the same treatment. Animals, all.

I’ve spent the past couple of years writing a book about undocumented immigrants around the United States. I tell the stories of undocumented second-responders after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, day laborers on street corners and worker centers, South American housekeepers who came to feminism in middle age. I write about immigration because I think almost everyone who writes about immigrants gets it wrong. I’d know. My family is undocumented. I came to the United States when I was five years old and was undocumented until recently, when I became a permanent resident.

via To Be an Immigrant in Trump’s America: A Theory of Animals

Einstein’s travel diaries reveal racist stereotypes – BBC News

~ mcequality

Newly published private travel diaries have revealed Albert Einstein’s racist and xenophobic views.
Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries track his experiences in Asia and the Middle East.
In them, he makes sweeping and negative generalisations, for example calling the Chinese “industrious, filthy, obtuse people”.
Einstein would later in life advocate for civil rights in the US, calling racism “a disease of white people”.

via Einstein’s travel diaries reveal racist stereotypes – BBC News