“Being nice to your oppressor and tending to their emotions and standards has never freed any oppressed group. Audacity and bravery are required.” –SHENITA ANN MCLEAN
(im)migration
785 of this year’s unaccompanied child migrants were under 6 years old
Little kids, including a troubling number of children age five or younger, make up the fastest-growing group of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the US border in fiscal year 2014. So far this year, nearly 7,500 kids under 13 have been caught without a legal guardian—and 785 of them were younger than six.
Source: www.motherjones.com
I’m guessing that the parents of these little kids were murdered.
How Failure to Fix Immigration Affects a Young Girl — Again
Outside the chambers and hallways of the Capitol, the immigration reform debate isn’t political. It’s personal. When Washington, D.C. resident Cindy Monge saw the images of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border it hit home. Eight years ago she was one of them.
Source: abcnews.go.com
ICE Detains Pregnant Women Against Its Own Policy
“According to its own policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, only detains pregnant women if they pose a public safety threat—but new evidence illustrates the practice is quite common.
Over at Fusion, Cristina Costantini found that at 559 pregnant women have been detained by ICE in just six facilities since 2012, and there’s no reason to believe they meet ICE’s own policy for holding expecting mothers. At least 14 women suffered miscarriages while in detention in 2012. According to Fusion’s estimate, up to 57 pregnant immigrant women are being detained per day.
Read more over at Fusion.”
Source: colorlines.com
Hillary Clinton backs refugee screening abroad for Central American kids
Hillary Clinton thinks the U.S. should create a refugee screening process for Central American children in their home countries to help prevent more young people from undertaking a dangerous trek north.
– Click through for more and VIDEO –
Source: fusion.net
Does Hillary Clinton know that Central American governments are likely to recruit to a drug gang or murder any child who asks for asylum?
Escondido Planning Commission considers migrant shelter permit
Tuesday night, there was another round of heated public comment in Escondido City Hall. The City Planning Commission was taking a second and final vote on a permit for the temporary shelter for migrant children. KUSI’s Sasha Foo is at Escondido City Hall with the details.
Source: www.kusi.com
U.S. Border official points gun at Boy Scout
VIDEO
A central Iowa Boy Scout troop just returned from a three-week trip they will likely never forget.
Source: www.kcci.com
Torn Apart: Immigration and the American Family
We are a compassionate nation. We look back with sadness and horror at parents and children separated in centuries past, and then turn our heads when it happens in our day. The separation of parents and children is not confined to history.
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American history is replete with stories of parents and children forever separated. Slaves were sold as individuals and families were wrenched apart to suit their owner’s needs. The tide of 19th century European immigration brought children to America on their own or parents without their kids hoping that family members would one day follow.
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Immigration is surely a political issue, but it is also a parenting and family issue. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, approximately 17 million people live in families with an undocumented family member. About 4.5 million children who were born in the US have at least one undocumented parent.
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Academics from Harvard and NYU wrote in the New York Times, “The extraordinary acceleration in the dismantling of these families, part of the government’s efforts to meet an annual quota of about 400,000 deportations, has had devastating results. Having a parent ripped away permanently, without warning, is one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences in human development.”
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
Powerful Cartoon Asks Americans To Consider The Potential Of The Children At The Border
Invoking well-known undocumented immigrant and Pulitzer Prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas who came to the U.S. as a child, the cartoon wonders about what could be.
Source: www.buzzfeed.com
I will start asking people, “What kind of refugee was your family?”
- War refugee
- Economic refugee
- Political refugee
The Alarming Rise of Migrant Deaths on U.S. Soil—And What to Do About It
More migrants’ lives could be saved with a few inexpensive adjustments in water availability, rescue beacons, and search-and-rescue capability. A directive by the Department of Homeland Security for the Border Patrol to establish water drums, particularly alongside rescue beacons, would be an important step to avoid preventable deaths on U.S. soil. Increasing the number of rescue beacons, as well as providing additional funds to expand Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit teams (BORSTAR), particularly in southwest border sectors with high numbers of migrant deaths, could also help to assist migrants in distress.
Many of the recovered remains of migrants, which now number in the thousands, are unidentified. Local officials in Brooks County, Texas, estimate that the costs of dealing with the unidentified dead, including mortician fees and autopsies, amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. No unified procedure exists to process remains and DNA samples of bodies found in the border region. Many remains have not had their DNA sampled, and there has been no consolidated effort to match the DNA of unidentified remains with family members searching for missing loved ones.
Measures such as the following would greatly contribute to identifying these remains and provide answers to family members of missing migrants about the whereabouts of their loved ones:
- Providing federal funding to counties and tribal governments for the handling and DNA analysis of migrant remains;
- Creating a Missing Migrants program within the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs); and
- Encouraging genetic laboratories receiving federal grant monies to process samples from unidentified remains and compare the resulting genetic profiles against samples from the relatives of missing migrants
Immigration reform legislation currently before the U.S. Senate (S. 744) includes billions of dollars in new funding for border security. It makes no mention, however, of steps to prevent needless deaths of migrants on U.S. soil, or to help cash-strapped counties identify the dead. The current bill offers an important legislative opportunity to stem the rise of this alarming human tragedy on the U.S. side of the border.
Click through to read more.
Source: www.wola.org
Texas recently sent 1000 National Guard to the border. That should prevent some deaths. But we need to prevent all the deaths.