Customs and Border Protection’s acting Internal Affairs chief said Friday that he is unaware of any Border Patrol agent or CBP officer being formally disciplined for killing someone through the use of force since at least 2004.
Source: www.azcentral.com
Insisting that factors beyond his control had created an untenable political situation, President Obama said Saturday that he would postpone his promised executive action to make drastic changes to the immigration system — a delay that leaves tens of thousands of immigrants open to deportation and millions more in limbo.
Source: www.latimes.com
By Matt Hanson
Introduction
In North America, and elsewhere around the world, for example in Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy, there is a growing antipathy for migrants. The United States and Canada are not alone in the increasing volume of political distaste for migrants. In the United States in particular, there is an inherent contradiction within this debate, and this crisis of asylum, as concerns the identification of migrants as invaders.
With unabated trends favoring economic globalization, such as the overshadowing precedence of international free trade agreements, wealthy nations have a greater responsibility to receive economic migrants, and equally, forced migrants fleeing life-threatening persecution. To deny this responsibility is to reject the foundations of humanity, and to delegitimize the standard of national boundaries as security zones. Instead, national boundaries fulfill their original purpose, militarized demarcations, where the history of an invasion has simply taken another form.
In other words, the misperception of migrants as invaders exposes the fundamental myth of the modern nation state as a cultural, social, political, or economic distinction. As is most apparent outside of North America and Europe, however within as well, cultural, social, political and economic phenomena observably transcend state boundaries, merging in varying forms transnationally. Similarly, all people, as such, are a part of the transnational social capital that exists in every nation individually, and collectively throughout the globe. The inequalities of the global marketplace are manifest in the story of the modern immigrant.
Immigrant is a very different term than migrant. With its special legal, political, social and cultural ramifications, immigration is a process whereby a foreigner resides permanently in a country other than that of their origin. Immigration also connotes official identification, as recognized by the country wherein one is immigrating. Whereas migration is a primordial concept, immigration entails the officialdoms of international law, and domestic policy.
Anti-immigration is the result of geopolitical insecurity, while deeply rooted in forms of racism steeped in multigenerational, and colonialist inequality.
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Source: unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com
The Second Cooler is a documentary about illegal migration shot primarily in Alabama, Arizona, and northern Mexico. The premise is that Arizona is the new Alabama—the epicenter of an intense struggle for migrant justice. The documentary’s purpose is to bring basic migration issues into focus. Those issues include the impact of free trade agreements on migration, the lack of a legal way for poor Latin Americans to come to the United States, the inherent abuses of the guest worker program, the fact that many migrants are indigenous people, anti-immigrant politics in Alabama, the thousands of migrant deaths at the border, and an escalating ideology of the border.
Source: thesecondcooler.com
Guillermo Arevalo Pedraza (2nd L) poses with his wife and daughters in an undated photo released by his family in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. REUTERS/Family of Guillermo Arevalo Pedraza/Handout via Reuters
The family of a Mexican man who was shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents two years ago has filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that the agency sanctioned an unbridled use of deadly force in response to rock throwing.
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Source: soboco.org
January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City’s Lower East Side.
Some of America’s first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.
A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.
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Source: www.history.com
This article mentions the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 but fails to mention the Asian Exclusion act of 1924.
It also fails to mention that non-Europeans were not allowed to become citizens at many points in U.S. history.
People born in India were not allowed to become US citizens till 1946.
All Asians were allowed to become citizens in 1952 with the Walter–McCarran Act.
If we do not talk about citizenship rights when we talk about immigration, we are missing half of the discussion about dignity, respect and humanity.
Today’s social injustice issue is still about who is allowed to immigrate and become a citizen.
History shows that humans were allowed to (im)migrate to the U.S. for both religious and economic reasons.
Today’s (im)migrants move for reasons of survival (like the Irish did).
And they also move as war refugees, climate refugees, economic refugees and political refugees.
No human is illegal.
“It’s funny how much people hate
to see me standing at the Gates,
presuming I can give expression
to real, system-wide oppression.
To them I say,” Well you tell me
why nothing here applies to me.
Why every fundamental right
applies to everyone in sight
except for those you single out
as people who just do not count.”
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Source: electricinthedesert.wordpress.com
Check the whole post to get the full impact.
It’s haunting and powerful.
By BRIAN MELLEY, Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mexico’s president spoke of the need for U.S. immigration reform on a two-day visit to immigrant-friendly California, saying those who reject diversity and inclusion will ultimately be proven wrong.
“We want to be a factor of cohesion, not division, with full respect for the sovereignty of the United States,” President Enrique Pena Nieto said Monday. “This, at the end, is about — and only about — a matter of justice for those who contribute so much to the development of the American society.”
Pena Nieto was welcomed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who played up his immigration credentials in a speech that highlighted the close cultural and historical ties they share across borders.
“It wasn’t very long ago that the governor of California was outlawing driver’s licenses for people who were undocumented from Mexico,” Brown said. “That’s not the law anymore.”
Brown signed a bill into law last year that will enable immigrants to get driver’s licenses next year. He said he got the message after a visit to a Monterey artichoke field where the workers yelled “licencia, licencia.”
During an upbeat speech embracing the ties between Mexico and California, Brown didn’t entirely gloss over a relationship that has, at times, been fraught with tension and he referred to past ethnic problems.
California voters in 1994 passed Proposition 187 that sought to ban immigrants who are in the country illegally from access to social services including health care and education, though it was reversed by the courts.
Hispanics have now become a force to be reckoned with in California. They now make up the largest of any racial or ethnic group in the state, though their voter registration numbers still lag behind whites.
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Source: www.usnews.com
“A man brutally beaten by police in June after he surrendered and lay down on the ground is now at risk of being deported.
Police officers in Santa Ana, California, beat Edgar Vargas Arzate on June 20, according to surveillance video of the incident and interviews with Arzate’s attorney. Arzate, who has struggled with addiction and mental health issues, went to visit the house of a friend, apparently not realizing that the friend no longer lived there, according to his attorney, public defender Frank Bittar. The new residents saw Arzate mumbling incoherently outside their house and called police.
Arzate ran when he saw the officers, leading them on a roughly four-block chase before he surrendered in the front yard of a neighbor’s home, Bittar said. In the video, Arzate can be seen lying facedown on the ground. The officers then begin to savagely beat Arzate, punching, kicking and swinging a flashlight at him.
“He’s lucky he wasn’t put in a wheelchair,” Bittar told HuffPost.
Once he was taken into custody, Arzate was charged with assaulting a police officer. The charge was then enhanced to a higher-level felony when police accused him of having “personally inflicted great bodily injury” on one particular officer who claimed to have broken his hand, according to the charging document.
On Monday, Arzate, 27, who came to the U.S. without documentation as a teenager, was riding with family members to a preliminary hearing to face the charges. Suddenly, three unmarked cars pulled the family over and Arzate was quickly taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“They stopped them and made everyone get out of the car and then arrested my brother,” said Araceli Vargas, Arzate’s younger sister. “Right now he’s under immigration hold and we’re just waiting on a bail so we can get him out of jail again. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, honestly.”
“My mom told me that the ICE agents made her feel less than human,” Vargas continued. “My dad was so disappointed in the system. My grandpa was so scared, he’s been in bed since. My aunt started crying. Nothing had happened since June, he was just living his normal life, but we have cameras here and we saw the cars that stopped my brother yesterday morning — it was a gray Chevy Impala — they didn’t have markings, but they had been spying on us. They passed by the house at least four times that morning, so they knew what they were doing. Why did they wait until we were leaving the house and going to court?””
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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
James F. Tomsheck, seen in 2009, was chief of internal affairs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection for eight years. He was removed in June.
Credit: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
More than two dozen people have died in violent clashes with U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2010. Despite public outrage over some of the killings, no agent or officer has faced criminal charges – or public reprimand – to date.
Yet at least a quarter of the 28 deaths were “highly suspect,” said James F. Tomsheck, the agency’s recently removed head of internal affairs. In a sweeping and unauthorized interview with The Center for Investigative Reporting, he said the deaths raised serious questions about whether the use of lethal force was appropriate.
Instead, Tomsheck said, Border Patrol officials have consistently tried to change or distort facts to make fatal shootings by agents appear to be “a good shoot” and cover up any wrongdoing.
“In nearly every instance, there was an effort by Border Patrol leadership to make a case to justify the shooting versus doing a genuine, appropriate review of the information and the facts at hand,” he said.
Those comments and others represent the most scathing public criticism ever lodged against Customs and Border Protection from a high-ranking official at the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. Although Tomsheck was removed from the internal affairs office, he is assigned to the Border Patrol as its executive director for national programs.
Source: beta.cironline.org