Author Archives: BenitoStingley

Here Are the Churches Fighting Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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For the past eight years, Jeanette Vizguerra had shown up for every one of her required check-ins with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Though Vizguerra, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, had been issued a deportation order for two misdemeanors in 2011, ICE officials had previously granted her requests for a stay of removal and allowed her to remain in the country with her four children.

But last week, Vizguerra took a different route. Fearing deportation, she took refuge in the First Unitarian Society in Denver and declared sanctuary. The decision proved prescient: The day of Vizguerra’s scheduled check-in, ICE officials told her attorney that Vizguerra’s request to remain in the country had been denied.

Because ICE has a longstanding policy to not enter churches and schools, Vizguerra will be shielded from deportation. But that means that she’ll have to stay in the church indefinitely. “I did not make this decision lightly,” Vizguerra said through an interpreter, according to NPR. “I was thinking about it for weeks. But I think that I made the right decision in coming here.”

Vizguerra may be one of the first undocumented immigrants to seek this kind of refuge since Donald Trump’s election but, for months, churches have been preparing for exactly this possibility. Since the election, faith-based organizers and leaders have ramped up their work as part of the sanctuary church movement, a campaign among organizers and clergy to help undocumented immigrants facing deportation. More than 700 congregations have signed on to a sanctuary pledge, with the number of participating congregations doubling since the election, says Noel Andersen, a national grassroots coordinator at Church World Service, an international faith-based organization. New sanctuary coalitions have popped up in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

In many ways, this has all happened before. Churches played a huge role in sheltering Central American migrants in the 1980s, when civil wars brought an influx of border crossings. They reached out to immigrants again in 2007, when workplace raids were a common tactic among ICE officers. During the Central American child migrant surge in 2014, congregations revived the movement, opening up their doors to children and families fleeing violence. Churches were able to offer a safe haven to immigrants facing deportation and, in some cases, help individuals win temporary relief from removal.

Now, organizers say, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies have spurred leaders to continue that movement and expand it to other communities targeted by the administration, such as Muslim and LGBQT communities. They’re also looking toward other types of community organizing, such as rapid-response and know-your-rights trainings.

Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, has focused his efforts on a “sanctuary in the streets” campaign, a rapid-response network of volunteers who are trained to peacefully disrupt ICE raids. In a raid in Philadelphia last week, Pedemonti says 70 people showed up outside an ICE office within 20 minutes of being notified. “The broader strategy is to shine a light on what ICE is doing,” he says. “We want ICE to know that if they come into our neighborhoods and try to drag away our friends and neighbors, we are going to be there to slow it down and disrupt it.”

In Los Angeles, Guillermo Torres, an organizer with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, says that the group’s congregations have been working with the National Immigration Law Center to develop rapid-response trainings. They want to train people to film encounters, interview witnesses, and build prayer walls around ICE officers. CLUE is also trying to enlist faith leaders who would be willing to go to detention centers after raids to talk to ICE officers or to serve as a source of spiritual support to detainees.

Torres says he’s seen a “surge” in clergy leaders expressing interest in the movement, many of whom he’d never met before. “The darkness that’s coming out of the president and his administration has created a lot of pain and sadness in in the faith community,” says Torres, “and that pain is compelling leaders to move to a level they’ve not moved before.”

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Here Are the Churches Fighting Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

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How Do San Franciscans Really Feel About Google Buses?

by BenitoStingley Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, the Bay Area Council, a coalition of Bay Area businesses, commissioned EMC Research to ask 500 likely voters in San Francisco how they felt about the much discussed commuter shuttles that take people from The City, Oakland, and Berkeley to tech-company campuses in Silicon Valley. The EMC researchers wrote in the ensuing report (PDF), released this week, “Despite what it might look like from recent media coverage, a majority of voters have a positive opinion of the shuttle buses and support allowing buses to use MUNI stops.” (MUNI is San Francisco’s municipal transportation agency.)

But I’m not so sure that rosy conclusion is warranted. For starters, Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, which contracts with several tech companies to provide bus service, is a member of the Bay Area Council. So are Google, Facebook, and Apple. There’s also the fact that the survey found an awful lot of shuttle riders to poll. Six percent of respondents said that they rode one of the shuttle buses. Now, estimates of shuttle bus ridership vary wildly, but San Francisco’s total population is only about 836,000—six percent of which is about 50,000. A spokeswoman from the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency recently told me that an estimated 4,125 San Franciscans ride the tech buses. That’s closer to 0.5 percent of city residents. The San Francisco Examiner points out that the survey excluded Spanish speakers.

And then there’s the delicate phrasing of the survey questions. Last week, Pacific Standard had a great little post explaining why surveys are not always accurate measures of public opinion. The post looks at a recent survey conducted about the movie Noah. The group Faith Driven Consumer asked respondents: “As a Faith Driven Consumer, are you satisfied with a Biblically themed movie—designed to appeal to you—which replaces the Bible’s core message with one created by Hollywood?” Unsurprisingly, 98 percent said they were not satisfied. Variety reported the survey’s findings in a story titled “Faith-Driven Consumers Dissatisfied With Noah, Hollywood Religious Pics.”

I thought of the Noah survey as I read the the tech-shuttle survey’s script. Here are two examples of the questions, plus the percentage of respondents who strongly agreed with the given statements.

Please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statements:

Image courtesy of Bay Area Council

Now, thinking specifically about employee shuttle buses in San Francisco, please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with each of the following statements:

To be fair, the survey did include a few questions that allowed respondents to express negative opinions about the buses. But those questions tended to include loaded language. For example:

Now, thinking specifically about shuttle buses in San Francisco, please tell me if you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statements:

I’m guessing that if the word “causing” had been replaced with “contributing to,” more people would have agreed with the statement. Same if the word “ruining” had been replaced with “changing.”

Rufus Jeffris, the vice president for communications and major events at the Bay Area Council, wrote to me in an email that the Council stands by the survey. “The poll was intended to provide some broader context and perspective on some of the wrenching and painful issues we’re dealing with,” he wrote. “We feel strongly that scapegoating a single type of worker and single industry is not productive and does not move us forward to solutions.”

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How Do San Franciscans Really Feel About Google Buses?

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Openly Gay NBA Player Jason Collins Signed by Brooklyn Nets

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The NBA will have its first openly gay active player. Jason Collins, who came out in Sports Illustrated last April, signed a 10-day contract Sunday with the Brooklyn Nets. When Collins steps on to the court, it will be the first time an athlete who is widely known to be gay will have played in an NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB game.

Collins announced he was gay when, after a slew of injuries, he wasn’t on any team’s roster and he remained unsigned until the Nets recently reached out to him. Collins will likely make his first appearance in the Nets’ Sunday night game against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Collins’ NBA return comes as former University of Missouri football player Michael Sam is working out at the NFL Combine and preparing for the league’s May draft. Sam, who came out in February, is looking to be the first openly gay player in the NFL. John Amaechi became the first former NBA player to come out in 2007, though he did so after his five-season career was over. Glenn Burke, who played baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland Athletics from 1976 to 1979, may have been the first openly gay player in any major American professional sport—though reporters at the time kept Burke’s sexuality under wraps and the Dodgers even tried paying him to take part in a sham marriage. (Burke refused.)

Collins received the public backing of many NBA stars when he came out last year. That support continued during the signing process, with new teammate Kevin Garnett telling reporters, “I think it’s important that anybody who has the capabilities and skill level gets a chance to do something he’s great at. I think it would be bias, and in a sense, racist, if you were to keep that opportunity from a person.” Collins will wear jersey number 98 with the Nets in honor of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student whose brutal 1998 beating and death made him a gay rights martyr.

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Openly Gay NBA Player Jason Collins Signed by Brooklyn Nets

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Federal coffers are missing out on what could be billions of dollars in lost revenue due to shoddy accounting work by the office that handles leases for coal mines on public land, according to a report made public today by the investigative arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office was asked by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a stalwart climate hawk, to look into whether the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management routinely sells leases to coal mining companies for far less than their market value. Investigators found that BLM agents in Wyoming (by far the country’s largest coal producer) set prices based on coal’s historic value, but, in contradiction of the department’s own rules, fail to take into account how much it will likely be worth in the future. Similar problems were found in other coal-producing states. As a result, the GAO report claims, many leases were sold far beneath their true market value, depriving taxpayers of additional royalties (which, as it stands, come to about $1 billion per year) that are normally skimmed from the mines’ profits.

“As a net result, the public is getting screwed,” said Tom Kenworthy, an energy analyst at the Center for American Progress who has kept tabs on Interior’s longstanding problems with coal lease valuation.

That the leases are selling for less than they’re worth seems clear; what’s less obvious is exactly how much money is at stake, since the values were never properly set in the first place (the GAO report doesn’t specify a number). A 2012 analysis of federal lease records by former New York State Deputy Comptroller Tom Sanzillo for the independent Institute for Energy Economics found that undervalued coal leases cost the Treasury $28.9 billion in lost revenue since 1983, or almost $1 billion every year. Meanwhile, analysis by Senator Markey’s office put the figure at $200 million, although a spokesperson would not specify the time period to which that applied, as the underlying data are considered proprietary to the Interior Department, he said.

Since 1990, the federal government has leased 107 parcels of public land for coal mining; these parcels typically account for 25-40 percent of the roughly one billion tons of coal produced annually nationwide. That adds up to a massive carbon footprint: Fossil fuels produced on public land create roughly a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every year, about as much as 285 coal plants.

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

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