COURAGE COMES IN MANY DIFFERENT FORMS. For Esmeralda, a transgender asylum seeker from Mexico, who faced horrific circumstances in immigration detention, it came in the form of seeking justice.
IF YOU’VE NOT SEEN IT around yet, I suggest you check out the new series by Colorlines called “Torn Apart.” Investigating the effects of deportation on families of color, their reporters travel to Jamaica and connect stories that span two countries and illustrate why keeping a national soul means swiftly enacting reform.
IT’S ALWAYS NICE, when you’ve been following an issue for a while—the twists and turns of its conception and effect leading a good portion of your news day by the nose—to sniff changes in the wind that you perceive as positive.
THERE IS AN AMBER ALERT for Yair Anthony Carillo, one sweet baby boy snatched in Nashville on Tuesday by a woman who entered the Carillo home pretending to be an Immigration authority demanding papers proving citizenship and left after stabbing the mother nine times.
EVERY DAY IT BECOMES CLEARER that the current form of “Enforcement First” immigration tactics boil down to a War on Latinos with all the measures in place lending themselves enabling, requiring, or encouraging the illegal practice of racial profiling. The data and evidence grows, and here is another addition.
IT’S A PRO-RAID, PRO-ICE, DIVIDE AND CONQUER STRATEGY (a popular genre, increasingly so lately given all the cultural shifting in the US) used in this article that attempts to slash at some of the strongest points that immigration advocates and human rights activists wield.
SENATOR TED KENNEDY’S DEATH yesterday was a blow to the immigrant community. For over 40 years, Kennedy was a fighter for immigrant rights and is remembered for many valuable contributions that moved the nation closer toward humane treatment of new Americans. His loss is made all the more stark by current White House capitulations toward enforcement and abdication of a similar fighting spirit.
TODAY WE PERUSE THE NEWS, from the War on Indians to the Games Nations Play. As usual, your host Nezua is glad to have you here and promises to dally, dither, and ruminate with great unabashed passion and hella brown pride. GO!
LIKE A FAVORITE CHESS GAME, the White House plays with its constituency, with it’s Latin@ constituency, with its pro-migrant constituency. Their actions show not a preference for humanitarian or People-centric legislation, but one for prison profits.
NOBODY SAID BECOMING A POST-RACIAL NATION WOULD BE EASY. The United States has its first black president, but as the son of a Kenyan immigrant, his citizenship and legitimacy are still being questioned. In the meantime, the White House, itself, is advancing programs which have been linked to racial profiling and civil rights violations.
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE UNDOCUMENTED…. but anyone who studies history knows what comes next. If you and I allow Them to be abused, we lose. I write of the ballooning Constitution-ignoring para-police agency named ICE.
THE WHITE HOUSE understands the value of the press conference and the press release and the public statement. Many positive things have been said about what will be done on immigration legislation. What is getting less notice are some of the actual moves being made in realtime—like the expansion of the disastrous 287(g) program.
THE INSIDIOUS AND DEPRAVED AND VAMPIRIC NATURE of the detention industry is a topic I cover here regularly. Latino convicts are now the largest ethnic population in the federal prison system, and all due to the criminalization of immigration that Bush brought upon us and that Obama, so far, has yet to dismantle or substantially reshape.
ONCE UPON A TIME, Barack Obama told the nation that we could not afford to approach immigration piecemeal and that his administration would tackle the issue in 2009. The surety of this sentiment has since trickled down into distillations fraught with equivocation. This week’s Wire looks at the growing polarization between advocates and foes of immigration reform.
A DEPARTMENT LIKE ICE has no conscience, of course. Just directives (like “make 400,000 arrests this year”) and a great concern for its public image. If that’s the case, however, I can’t imagine why they’d think chilling out on train platforms and plucking young Latinas out of the crowd would go over well.
House of Nezua
the XOLAGRAFIK theater!
