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For undocumented immigrants, the Trump admin makes fires and hurricanes even tougher to deal with

by DollyMoris Posted on April 24, 2018

Seven months after Juan and Jonathan Leija were forced to evacuate their flooded homes during Hurricane Harvey, the cousins face challenges that go beyond just recovering their lives. Building back isn’t easy for anybody, but the Leijas are doing it as looming policy decisions threaten to uproot them again.

Juan and Jonathan are Dreamers — young adults who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era policy that granted clemency to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. In September, President Donald Trump announced he was canceling the program, leaving it up to Congress to pass legislation on the issue — which it hasn’t been able to agree on.

Undocumented immigrants were hit especially hard by last year’s devastating hurricanes and wildfires. Immigrant populations were already struggling with higher rates of poverty and less access to medical care. Then storms, fires, and mudslides wiped out homes and disrupted industries like agriculture that employ a largely immigrant labor force. Despite the dire need for relief, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal disaster aid. Some were afraid to even go to emergency shelters or reach out for help out of fear of exposing their own or a relative’s immigration status. Post-disaster, many immigrants have turned to jobs in construction and face injury and exploitation rebuilding communities that were leveled.

Juan Leija.

“Yesterday was the first time since Harvey that it rained really hard,” Juan told Grist in March. “It definitely brought flashbacks and it triggered a little bit in me. And just to add onto it, tomorrow a year from now my DACA expires.”

While undocumented immigrants like Juan work to pick up the pieces after disaster, the Trump administration is placing targets on their backs. In addition to ending DACA, Trump has revoked Temporary Protected Status for countries at a faster pace than any other president and has intensified immigration raids, even in sanctuary cities, over the past year. For some immigrant Americans, it’s political insult to climate change-induced injury — and suggests that it may be a while before they find a measure of stability in the U.S. again.

When Hurricane Harvey struck the Houston area, it brought with it a year’s worth of rainfall over in less than a week. The storm affected 13 million people across Texas and Louisiana, killing 88. Causing $125 billion in damage, Harvey was the second costliest storm (behind Hurricane Katrina) to hit the U.S. since 1900.

Ten days after Harvey made landfall in Texas, President Trump announced an end date for DACA the following March.

“I was angry. I was confused. I was sad. I was anxious,” Juan Leija recalls. “I thought it was really heartless for him to do that after a national travesty.”

Harvey hit Juan’s family’s home hard. The Houston house they rent flooded up to his thighs. Juan is 6’1’’ and says the water level was probably above his mom’s waist. The family evacuated. They waded through water for two miles before reaching a friend’s home. For the next four months, Juan, his two siblings, his mother, and her boyfriend squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment.

The Leijas joined hundreds of Texas families struggling to rebuild after the storm. While Harvey swamped all of Houston, its impacts were not felt equally.

AFP Contributor / Contributor / Getty Images

“In terms of the extent of hardship or suffering, we definitely found disparities across racial, ethnic lines, and across income lines,” said Shao-Chee Sim, a researcher at the Texas-based advocacy group Episcopal Health Foundation, who helped lead a study of adults living in Harvey-damaged counties.

The survey found that, after Harvey, 64 percent of immigrants suffered unemployment and income losses compared to 39 percent of their U.S.-born neighbors. Immigrants were also more likely to have fallen behind on their rent as a result of the storm and were more than twice as likely to have had to borrow money from a family member or payday lender in order to make ends meet.

When Juan’s cousin Jonathan’s mobile home flooded, it was a huge setback. “Basically, we had to remodel everything,” he said. “That was going to cost money that we didn’t have.”

Undocumented immigrants — including Dreamers — are ineligible for aid provided in the wake of natural disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Families with mixed immigration status, however, do qualify because parents can apply for relief on behalf of their U.S. citizen children. Even so, many eligible families avoided applying due to worries over providing personal information in an aid application. FEMA is, after all, an agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“In an immigrant community there is a huge concern about asking for aid because there is a fear — and a legitimate one — about, ‘will this come back to hurt my chances of gaining status at some point in the future?’” Kate Vickery, executive director of Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, said. “The answer has always been complicated, but under the Trump administration, it is pretty grim.”

Jonathan Leija’s younger siblings are U.S. citizens, and the family decided to apply for FEMA assistance. The officer who came to inspect their home canceled four separate appointments before finally showing up.

Jonathan, who is studying construction management at Lone Star Community College, north of Houston, missed class twice in order to be home for appointments that never happened. Before Harvey hit, Jonathan had to withdraw from school for a semester to save up money for tuition. Dreamers don’t receive federal financial aid, so he took up jobs roofing and working at a tire shop so that he could get back to class. The storm posed more delays and after all the missed appointments, his family’s FEMA application was denied.

Still, Jonathan counts himself lucky. A nonprofit organization that builds affordable housing and has been working to help Houston homeowners recover, Avenue CDC*, sent contractors to repair the damage. That kind of help can be a godsend for undocumented immigrants who work in industries hit hard by flooding and fires. Immigrant-rights advocates are anticipating that those who lost employment because of last year’s disasters might seek out construction work as part of the rebuilding efforts.

Vickery, with Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, warns that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately part of what she calls the “second responder wave.” “They are the labor force doing the cleanup,” she explained.

The rebuilding booms that follow disasters come with their own threats. More than a third of day laborers informally employed in construction in the first few weeks after Harvey said they were injured on the job, according to a study conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Two-thirds of the respondents said that their workplace was unsafe. Eighty-five percent of day laborers who worked in hurricane-affected areas reported not receiving any training for the worksites they entered, and nearly two-thirds did not even have a hard hat to wear. Aside from all the safety risks, the study also found that more than a quarter of workers had experienced wage theft.

“The vulnerability of being a worker in a disaster recovery area if you don’t have status is a huge issue,” Vickery said.

Advocates in California are also concerned about the risks workers are facing after the state’s massive fires last year.

“A lot of people going into that labor might not have worked in construction. Those people need training,” said Christy Lubin with the Graton Day Labor Center.

Months after the blazes, many immigrants employed in affected industries — including agriculture, hospitality, and domestic work — have lost their homes and their jobs.

“A lot of people see wildfires in the hillsides of California or mudslides in affluent communities like Montecito as largely affecting wealthy homeowners,” said Lucas Zucker with the grassroots organization Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). “The reality is those wealthy homeowners employ domestic workers who are largely undocumented. They get no attention and really have nowhere to turn.”

The Thomas Fire.Marcus Yam / Contributor / Getty Images

In Santa Paula, an hour and a half northwest of Los Angeles, Marisol, a mother of three, and her family are still recovering from the Thomas Fire, which burned down their home in December. Marisol’s husband had worked on a horse ranch and wasn’t allowed time off to help his family after the wildfire. He lost his job as a result. Fearful of applying for aid that would require them to disclose their undocumented status, Marisol (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) and her husband are trying to get back on their feet with fewer resources available to them — and while U.S. immigration enforcement efforts intensify.

Like the Leija cousins, Marisol came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child — but she didn’t qualify for DACA because she doesn’t have a high school diploma, something she’s still working toward now. Her children, however, were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

“I don’t like to think about the consequences if me and my husband aren’t here,” Marisol told Grist through an interpreter as she fought back tears.

Undocumented folks and immigrant-rights groups have felt overwhelmed by the barrage of executive actions and policies targeting immigrants since Trump came into office. Deportations were already high under the Obama administration, but they jumped in the first year of Trump’s presidency. The number of people living in the United States who were deported rose nearly 25 percent, from roughly 65,000 in 2016 to more than 81,000 people in 2017.

For some migrants who received Temporary Protected Status because of a natural disaster that affected their home country, the experience of disaster and displacement is becoming a cycle — especially as climate change exacerbates extreme weather events. TPS is the only U.S. policy offering sanctuary to people displaced by environmental calamity, and Trump has been chipping away at the program by removing five countries designated for TPS, including Haiti and El Salvador, within the past year. More than 320,000 people could become undocumented as a result.

“We’ve kind of been in perpetual crisis mode for the last year as we’ve dealt with the disaster of the Trump administration on our communities to the literal disaster of wildfires and mudslides,” says CAUSE’s Zucker. “Immigrant families are basically caught in the middle of being under siege by the government and in desperate need of the government basically unwilling to provide that assistance.”

Marisol and her family in California got some much-needed financial help from an “UndocuFund” created by CAUSE and other groups, which provides grants to families affected by the raging wildfires and mudslides in California last year. But needs are still outpacing donations, and there are more than 800 disaster survivors awaiting assistance.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Juan and Jonathan Leija are determined to keep moving forward. If Jonathan’s DACA status expires before Congress passes measures to replace the program, he’ll likely lose his job at the tire shop where he currently works. That will mean he will have to find another way to pay his way through school.

DACA protest.Mark Wilson / Staff / Getty Images

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said. “I’m still going to find a way to go to school, to finish it.”

Without DACA, Juan may be unable to find lawful employment even after graduating — but he doesn’t hesitate to speak out. Since before DACA was implemented, one of the Dreamers’ rallying calls has been  “Undocumented and Unafraid.” He still wants to replace fear with hope.

“I don’t want Dreamers to feel like they have to get back to the shadows.”

*An earlier version of this story incorrectly named another nonprofit.

Taken from – 

For undocumented immigrants, the Trump admin makes fires and hurricanes even tougher to deal with

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

by ThorsteDailey Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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This post is longish and doesn’t really have much payoff at the end. It’s just something that turned into a bit of snark hunt, so I figured I’d document it. You have been warned.

It starts with a column by Mona Chalabi, the Guardian’s “data editor,” which claims to outline her research on the question of whether illegal immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. It’s faintly ridiculous and I’m a little annoyed by it, but then I come to this:

I find a study by Bianca E Bersani. I look her up — she’s a associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, her study finds that about 17% of all first-generation immigrants who are age 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months….But wait. Is that number high or low? I decide to find out how often native-born people in the US commit crimes. Luckily, her study has that too. It’s higher: about 25% of all native-born people in the US who are 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months.

That seems kind of high, doesn’t it? Then again, “committed a crime” could encompass things like smoking a joint or stealing a box of paper clips from school, so who knows? The data comes from a paper called “A Game of Catch-Up? The Offending Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” so I check it out. But there’s nothing there. The paper has nothing whatsoever to say about either 16-year-olds or first-generation immigrants. What’s going on? Here’s the chart Chalabi presents:

This is a little odd. It suggests that 25 percent of 16-year-olds have committed a crime in the past year, but only 20% of 17-year-olds. That doesn’t jibe with what I know about crime rates. And the source is Pew Research. So let’s go look at the Pew article. It’s a lengthy description of Bersani’s article, and it includes this chart:

This is odd again. It’s the same chart, all right, and the author spends a lot of time describing “A Game of Catch-Up?” But as I mentioned above, that article contains nothing like this at all. What’s more, it appeared in Crime and Delinquency, but the chart is sourced to Justice Quarterly.

So now it’s off to Justice Quarterly. It turns out that everyone is describing the wrong article. I wonder if any of them actually read it? The correct article is “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” also by Bianca Bersani. Fine. What does that article say? Here is Bersani’s chart, colorized for your viewing enjoyment:

It appears that everyone has been copying the chart properly. For what it’s worth, though, I’d make a few comments:

This data is for all immigrants. Donald Trump’s focus is solely on illegal immigrant crime.

Bersani’s data is from 1997-2005. That’s pretty old. Crime and arrest rates of juveniles have gone down more than 50 percent since then, and the population of illegal immigrants has gone up more than 50 percent since then. I don’t know if that changes the relative values in this chart, but it would certainly change the absolute values.

The data comes from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which uses a very large oversample of Hispanic and black youth. Bersani appears to be using the full sample, and since Hispanic and black adolescents commit crimes at higher rates than whites, it means the numbers for native-born Americans are exaggerated. At a guess, the real figures are 2-3 percentage points lower.

The NLSY97 data includes six types of crime that were included in Bersani’s study: (1) damaging property, (2 and 3) stealing less or more than $50, (4) other property crimes, (5) assault/serious fighting, and (6) selling drugs. By far the biggest contributors were property damage and petty theft, with fighting in third place and the others far behind. Auto theft and using a gun to steal (not included in Bersani’s study) were minuscule:
Since the vast majority of the crimes in this study are minor—and we can assume that serious violent crime is even less prevalent—it’s not clear how much this tells us. I don’t think anyone cares much whether immigrant teenagers steal six packs of beer at a greater rate than native-born Americans. We mainly care about more serious violent crimes: robbery, rape, murder, and aggravated assault. Those aren’t addressed at all.

I’d add that Bersani didn’t just add up all the crimes committed by various groups. Her methodology is pretty impenetrable to anyone who’s not an expert:

I use group-based trajectory modeling…identifies clusters of individuals who display similar behavioral trajectories over a period of time…Nagin and Land’s (1993) semiparametric group-based modeling approach…estimated using a zero-inflated Poisson form of a group-based trajectory model:

where ln(kjit) is the natural logarithm of the number of total crimes for persons i in group j at each age t. The equation specified above follows a quadratic function of age (age and age2)….

I have no idea what this means or whether it’s appropriate, but I’m a little skeptical about a model that suggests that 17- and 18-year-olds commit crimes at lower rates than 16-year-olds. Most crime data I’ve seen shows the opposite. Then again, most crime data doesn’t include extremely minor crimes like shoplifting and property destruction. It’s possible that adolescents age out of that stuff pretty early.

Long story short, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from this study. The data is old; it’s not limited to illegal immigrants; it looks only at adolescents; the crimes under consideration are pretty minor; and the methodology is probably OK, but who knows? Put it all together, and I’d say it doesn’t tell us too much one way or the other about the serious crime rate of illegal immigrants as a whole.

I have yet to see a study that persuasively suggests a higher crime rate for immigrants than for anyone else. Let’s face it: if there’s anything we native-born Americans excel at, it’s crime. That said, the Guardian’s data editor should have known better. There are tons of studies out there that try to estimate the relative crime rates of native-born Americans compared to undocumented immigrants, and cherry picking this particular one makes no sense. It does provide a rough data point suggesting that crime rates of immigrants aren’t any different from the rest of the population, but it’s nowhere near the best study out there. Citing this one and calling it a day is a real disservice.

Original article: 

Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

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How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Deportation Raids

by ThaddeuSparks Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s been a tough last couple of weeks for immigrant-rights advocates. In early February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a series of raids across 12 states. More than 650 allegedly undocumented immigrants were arrested that week, creating panic and anxiety among migrant communities. The Department of Homeland Security said that 75 percent of the people detained in these raids were criminal immigrants—but even if that is true, it means 25 percent of those detained had no criminal record.

Since the initial raids, ICE has arrested a domestic abuse victim seeking a protective order in Texas, a DACA recipient in Seattle who entered the country when he was 7-years-old, and a group of men outside of a church-based hypothermia prevention shelter in Virginia. A memo released Tuesday by Homeland Security provided further details on how the Trump administration will carry out immigration enforcement, with the new guidance essentially allowing the deportation of many more undocumented immigrants through expedited removal—a process in which someone person could be removed from the country on sight if they cannot provide proper documentation.

Immigrant-rights organizations are bracing themselves for the new challenges ahead under the Trump administration. “We don’t know exactly how the attacks will come or where,” says Salvador Sarmiento, national campaign coordinator at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). “If the first two weeks give us any sort of idea, they can easily ramp up deportations and they can hit record numbers. It’s a world of difference when the federal government doesn’t even pretend to have any sort of respect for basic notions of due process or rule of law.”

In the face of these threats, activists are fighting back. Here’s how Sarmiento’s organization, along with other groups such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) and Puente Human Rights Movement, are preparing immigrant communities to defend themselves under the Trump administration.

“Neighborhood defense”

There is no single way undocumented people can be safe, but Francisca Porchas, organizing director with Puente, a grassroots migrant justice organization in Phoenix, says it will be important for communities to work together to keep a look out for ICE and gather information on raids these next few years. She says her organization will be launching committees across the Maricopa County in Arizona. The committees will be set up as a “cop-watch”-type network where neighbors can alert one another if federal immigration agents are in their area.

“I think at this point, it’s really going to be all about neighborhood defense and building tight networks of people looking out for each other,” says Porchas. “Trump is not going to let us know where he is going, what areas he is hitting and so I think the tighter that we are and the closer that we’re working with each other the more we are going to be able to keep each other informed and protect each other.” Puente had previously used neighborhood defense committees to combat former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was notorious for his extensive raids and has been accused of racially profiling Latinos.

“One year ago, there were not a lot of organizations that were fighting for sanctuary cities and building neighborhood defense committees,” says Sarmiento. “Folks are kind of rediscovering: ‘Oh, we need to talk to our neighbors and form a little working group to defend ourselves and be ready for whatever comes.'” Similar models are also being used in other places around the country, such as Chicago.

Stopping the spread of false rumors

While neighborhood watches will be key for sharing information, organizers say it will be important that the information be accurate. The massive raids have led to a lot of rumors and misinformation going around social media. This is a result of high levels of anxiety among immigrant communities in the wake of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and stepped-up immigration enforcement, advocates say. The confusion is creating challenges for organizations as they try to provide accurate information to their communities. “I know organizations are like, ‘Ugh, can people please stop spreading rumors on the internet,'” Porchas says. “People are being re-traumatized.” .

Two groups—the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance (CIYJA) and ICE Out of CA—have created shareable infographics intended to help stem the misinformation and fear spreading on social media. “This is an answer to the panic and anxiety the community is feeling now,” says CIYJA’s Luis Serrano. “Right now we need to sit back, think, and really organize and create different sources and community based alternatives if things were to happen. But jumping to conclusions is not the right idea.”

ICE out of CA/CIYJA

ICE of CA/CIYJA

Informing immigrants of their rights

In order to deport people, ICE needs a probable cause, says NDLON Litigation Director Jessica Karp Bansal. “Even after the memos on Tuesday, know your rights workshops are going to be essential for immigrant communities protecting themselves,” Bansal says. The memo and the president can’t take away people’s constitutional rights, Bansal explains. With several reports that even immigrants with green cards and visas have been relinquishing their legal status, advocates believe that it is important for immigrants to know their basic legal rights. “It is very important for folks to understand that they don’t have to self-incriminate, that there is a due process here that they are afforded to,” says Joseph Villela, policy director for CHIRLA. “That is why it is important to understand that they should not sign anything that they do not understand and not say anything that might be used against them in proceedings. That’s something that most of the folks that we’ve worked with do not know.”

CHIRLA hosts a number of workshops in their offices and throughout neighborhoods in Los Angeles to help communities know the basics. For example, the group explains to immigrants that if ICE shows up at their house, they don’t have to open their door unless the officers present a warrant. On CHIRLA’s website, the organization offers a “Know Your Rights” video explaining the legal protections that immigrants have and printable cards with a message explaining those rights that they can attempt to use when confronted by ICE agents and law enforcement.

“Any administration can come and go, the civil and constitutional rights of individuals remain,” Villela says. “I think that’s what we are fighting for at the end of the day.”

Bansal says “know your rights” workshops will have a greater importance under Trump. “The memo, although it basically says Trump is going to unleash the full power of his deportation force on the country, actually makes it more important to know their rights because it means we’re going to have a lot of poorly trained immigration officers pounding on people’s doors.”

Making sure immigrants have a plan B

“Yes, we are going to fight like hell to stop a lot of deportations,” says Porchas. “But the reality is we are also not going to be able to stop a lot of them, as well.” In its three-day defense courses against deportations, Puente is not just letting people know what their rights if they encounter ICE officers. The group is also training people on how to prepare legal documentation in advance in case they do get detained.

“We have some cases—minors who are US citizens whose parents were detained or deported then transferred to foster care because their parent did not pick them up from school,” Villela says. “We want to make sure the children stay with their family unit to the extent that can be possible.” CHIRLA encourages undocumented immigrants to create a family plan—a guardianship letter that outlines who would gain custody of their children if the parents are forced to leave the country.

Puente also helps immigrants put together documents that help them figure out what do with the property they own, such as houses, in case they are placed in detention centers or deported. Porchas says it is important for undocumented immigrants to be prepared and not be in denial that the worst could happen. She points to the case of Guadalupe Rayos, who missed the cutoff mark to apply for DACA by four months. She’d had routine check-ins with ICE for years but was deported under the new administration.

Working with state and local policy

Bansal says one of the best ways organizations can help defend immigrants under Trump is through local and state policy. NDLON plans to work alongside lawmakers to make California a safe place for immigrants, supporting bills like SB 54, which would prohibit local law enforcement from helping federal immigration officials deport undocumented immigrants. The bill would also make public schools, hospitals, and courthouses safe places for undocumented immigrants. “There is very clear precedent from the Supreme Court that the federal government cannot make local police act as immigration agents,” Bansal says. “The memo basically directed ICE to basically triple in size, but even then they are really heavily relying on state and local police to help them identify people for deportation.”

Organizing Online

The internet has been a helpful tool for advocates to organize across the nation. Shortly after Trump was elected president, NDLON launched ALTOTRUMP.com (Spanish for StopTrump.com), where people and organizations can get a lesson on sanctuary policies and other resources, including sample meeting agendas aimed at helping people form community meetings to talk about how their community can get organized. Porchas thinks it is important for anti-deportation efforts to go beyond local communities. “There are a lot of people reaching out to us who are not organizations, who are just barely trying to figure out how to defend themselves,” she says. “The world has got to see how this country is treating its immigrants. That is the value of making this so visible.”

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How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Deportation Raids

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Black Immigrants Brace for Dual Hardships Under Trump

by AidenLoche Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two days before the presidential election, Donald Trump traveled to the deeply segregated city of Minneapolis to make a final pitch to voters. He didn’t spend any time discussing Minnesota’s racial wealth gap—according to one study, the state’s financial disparity between races is the highest in the country—or the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop in the state four months earlier.

Instead, he talked about Minnesota’s Somali population, larger than in any other state. “Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen first-hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval,” Trump said in the November 6 speech. “Some of them are joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world,” he added.

A thousand miles away in New York City, the speech left Amaha Kassa worried. In 2012, Kassa founded African Communities Together, an immigrant rights group that connects African immigrants to services and advocates for immigration policies beneficial to people coming from Africa. “When our community sees a group of African immigrants being targeted in that way, then that gives cause for concern about what we are going to see from the administration,” he said of Trump’s Minnesota speech. “The fear is that under President Trump it is going to get worse.”

In the weeks after Trump’s stunning electoral upset, discussions of what the incoming administration could mean for immigrants have largely focused on the concerns of undocumented Latinos—an unsurprising development given the size of that population and its vocal activism in recent years. But other immigrant communities have also begun to question exactly how the Trump administration will affect their lives. And the country’s growing black immigrant population, which advocates say has borne the brunt of some of the country’s harshest immigration policies, fears that it could suffer particularly severely under Trump.

Advocates point to Trump’s call for a restoration of “law and order,” his focus on “criminal aliens,” and his proposal to make nationwide use of “stop and frisk,” the highly controversial New York practice that targeted minorities disproportionately and was eventually found ineffective and unconstitutional. (Trump has since walked back his stop-and-frisk proposal after criticism.) Immigrant groups worry that these policies could prey on black immigrants, given widespread evidence of prejudice that causes people to equate blackness with criminality and black immigrants’ existing struggles in the immigration enforcement system. Trump has also used harsh rhetoric about refugees, causing concern among groups that have fled disaster and conflict zones in Haiti and parts of Africa.

Recent policy proposals to assist immigrants have focused largely on Latino groups, leaving some black immigrants to feel that their concerns aren’t being addressed by lawmakers. “People don’t look at particular communities and how they benefit within the overall immigration system,” says Francesca Menes, the policy and advocacy coordinator for the Florida Immigrant Coalition and a member of the Black Immigration Network. “When you’re black and you’re coming from a black country it is much harder for you to come into the US.”

The United States’ black immigrant population has grown considerably in recent decades. According to a report released earlier this year by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the New York University School of Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, black immigrants now account for nearly 10 percent of the nation’s black population, up from roughly 3 percent in 1980. The majority come from Africa and the Caribbean, with immigration from African countries seeing a particularly sharp increase in recent years in response to a number of humanitarian crises. While black immigrants are more likely to be in the country lawfully than some other immigrant groups, the undocumented black population is growing at a faster rate than the overall foreign-born black population. The roughly 600,000 undocumented black immigrants currently living in the United States may have cause to be especially concerned about Trump’s plans for deporting large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

“Being undocumented and black, we have the traditional issues that come with being undocumented,” says Jonathan Jayes-Green, a founder and coordinator of the UndocuBlack Network, a group that advocates for the black undocumented community. “But because we are also black we deal with the ways in which blackness is criminalized in this country.”

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration report found that black immigrants, like the black population overall, were more likely to have criminal convictions, and that as a result they were more likely than other immigrant groups to be detained by immigration officials and to be deported due to a criminal record. Although less than 8 percent of the noncitizen population in the United States is black, more than 20 percent of immigrants in deportation proceedings on criminal grounds are black. The report notes that in 2013, “more than three quarters of Black immigrants who were deported were removed on criminal grounds in contrast to less than half of immigrants overall.”

“The voices of black immigrants were not being heard in migrant rights, even as some of the most violent aspects of migration were impacting black immigrants the most,” says Ben Ndugga-Kabuye, a research and policy associate with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Ndugga-Kabuye attributes much of the expansion of immigration enforcement and detention to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, a bill passed as part of the Clinton administration’s tough-on-crime agenda. “The criminal justice system became the welcome mat into the immigration system, and the issues of racial profiling in the criminal justice system are replicated in the immigration system,” he says.

Many of the issues black immigrants face in the immigration enforcement system are not new. Advocates note that the focus on immigrants with criminal records intensified during the Obama administration and could become even more of an issue once Trump takes office. While the president-elect’s exact policy plans remain unclear, he has frequently discussed his desire to deport undocumented immigrants en masse and has more recently settled on the goal of deporting as many as 3 million “criminal aliens” during his first hours in office. He has also suggested that he would give more leeway to police. During the campaign, he frequently characterized black protesters reacting to instances of police violence as anti-police.

“I think our communities were already in a state of emergency under a Democratic president,” says Jayes-Green. “We are already not in the best of places, so as we think about the next administration, our community has gone into a sort of crisis control.”

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Black Immigrants Brace for Dual Hardships Under Trump

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Quote of the Day: "The Press Loves to Cover Her Hard"

by RozellaOFarrell Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dave Weigel notes that the media is still obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s comment about being “dead broke” when she and Bill left the White House:

They’ve got to be sick of this by now. Maggie Haberman had it nailed three weeks ago: Hillary Clinton was “still raw over the partisan wars that hindered her husband’s legacy and left the couple with millions of dollars in legal debt.” Her answer, as she told Ramos, was accurate, and it’s baffling to her that this became a “gaffe.” As she continued her tour, HarperCollins was printing up copies of Clinton, Inc., a tell-all by the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper. On Page 18, Halper recalls that in 2001 “the Clintons were broke, owing a fortune in legal fees from the many investigations into their personal lives,” and that they had to be loaned $1.3 by Terry McAuliffe. Until just a month ago, that was how even conservatives remembered the Clintons’ departure from the White House.

What’s the deal with this? Sure, Hillary could have responded to questions about her wealth a little better. She’s not the natural politician Bill is. But really, there’s not much else here. So why does it continue to be news a full month later? Uber-insider Mark Halperin explains:

She has a lot of positive attributes that are currently just being overwhelmed by all this negative coverage. And it’s going to keep going. The momentum—there’s, there’s— The press loves to cover her hard.

This comes courtesy of Bob Somerby, who’s been following this ever since the initial flood-the-zone coverage of Hillary’s “gaffe” in the Washington Post. Somerby tells the rest of the story:

Multimillionaire TV stars asked if voters would support a person as wealthy as Clinton. In response to Clinton’s answers, some of the nation’s most famous pundits launched their famous “gaffe culture.”

The Washington Post even launched a front-page jihad concerning the size of Clinton’s speaking fees. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd assailed Clinton for her “rapacious” behavior and her “wanton acquisitiveness,” which she was said to be passing along to her daughter.

….Halperin made a starting suggestion—he suggested the press corps’ coverage of a major candidate could determine the outcome of our next White House campaign.

Plainly, that’s what happened in Campaign 2000, when a twenty-month war against Candidate Gore let George Bush reach the White House. In the main, that war was conducted by the mainstream press corps, not by the RNC.

The press corps’ poisonous war against Gore let Bush reach the White House. But it’s a basic law of the guild: Major journalists never suggest that the behavior of their own guild could have such startling effects.

The media’s preoccupation with the Clintons’ wealth won’t last forever. Even for the Washington press corps, it’s too transparently silly to pretend that it’s somehow surprising that a presidential candidate is wealthy. But Somerby and Halperin are right: it’s a sign of things to come. The press has never liked Hillary, and she’s never liked them, and that’s that. If she decides to run for president, this is going to be one of her biggest problems—or maybe her biggest, period. She’s just never going to catch a break.

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Quote of the Day: "The Press Loves to Cover Her Hard"

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Color Me Skeptical About a Guaranteed Income for All

by HumbertKvy Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Should we have a guaranteed minimum income in the United States? Something nice and simple that would replace nearly our entire current alphabet soup of means-tested welfare programs?1 Dylan Matthews posts about this frequently, and others chime in occasionally as well. It even has some support among conservatives.

I am not so sure, myself. Keith Humphreys makes a couple of good points here, but I want to step back a bit. At a bare minimum, I need answers to four questions:

  1. How big would it be?
  2. Is it a family benefit or a personal benefit?
  3. Is it for adults only, or would children also qualify for a benefit?
  4. How would it phase out with income?

There are many more details to work out, all of them important, but I don’t think you can even begin to talk about this without answers to these four basic questions.

I’m skeptical about the whole thing because I don’t think you can make the details work out. Nor do I think that it’s politically feasible either now or in the future.2 What’s more, I’m always skeptical of ideas like this that haven’t been adopted by any other country, even the ones with far more liberal welfare states than ours. I figure there must be a reason for this.

But I’m happy to be proven wrong. Just give me a policy skeleton to work with. What exactly are we talking about here?

1Proponents usually (but not always) make exceptions for education and health care, which are too variable and too expensive to be handled by a simple minimum income.

2Perhaps it’s feasible in our far-distant robot future. Maybe even necessary. For now, though, let’s stick to the medium-term future.

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Color Me Skeptical About a Guaranteed Income for All

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A Question About Botched Executions

by CandiceKuefer Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m reluctant to ask a question that may strike some people as too cavalier for a subject that deserves only serious treatment. But after yesterday’s botched execution in Arizona—the latest of several—I continue to wonder: why is it so damn hard to execute people?

For starters, there are plenty of time-tested approaches: guillotines, firing squads, hanging, electrocution, gas chambers, etc. Did those really fall out of favor because people found them too grisly? Personally, I find the sterile, Mengele-like method of lethal injection considerably more disturbing than any of the others. And anyway, if you’re bound and determined to kill people, maybe you ought to face up to a little bit of grisly.

Beyond that, is it really so hard to find a lethal injection that works? Obviously I’m not a doctor, but I do know that there are plenty of meds that will very reliably knock you unconscious. And once you’ve done that, surely there are plenty of poisons to choose from? Or even asphyxiation: place a helium mask over the unconscious prisoner and he’ll be painlessly dead in about ten minutes or less.

Can anyone point me to a readable but fairly comprehensive history of executions over the past few decades? When and why did lethal injection become the method of choice? Why does there seem to be only one particular cocktail that works effectively? Lots of people have asked the same questions I’m asking, but nothing I’ve ever read really seems to explain it adequately.

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A Question About Botched Executions

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Quote of the Day: John Boehner Invites Obama to Ignore Congress on Immigration

by BryantLopresti Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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From House Speaker John Boehner, who is currently beavering away on a plan to sue President Obama for dealing with too many problems on his own:

We’ve got a humanitarian crisis on the border, and that has to be dealt with. But the president clearly isn’t going to deal with it on his own, even though he has the authority to deal with it on his own.

Man, this begs for a follow-up, doesn’t it? What exactly does Obama have the authority to do on his own, Mr. Speaker? What unilateral actions would you like him to take without congressional authorization? Which particular law would you like him to reinterpret? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Quote of the Day: John Boehner Invites Obama to Ignore Congress on Immigration

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Chart of the Day: Oil Is Getting Harder and Harder to Find

by JulianaWillifor Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oil expert James Hamilton has an interesting summary of the current world oil market up today, and it’s worth a read. His bottom line, however, is that $100-per-barrel oil is here to stay:

The run-up of oil prices over the last decade resulted from strong growth of demand from emerging economies confronting limited physical potential to increase production from conventional sources. Certainly a change in those fundamentals could shift the equation dramatically. If China were to face a financial crisis, or if peace and stability were suddenly to break out in the Middle East and North Africa, a sharp drop in oil prices would be expected. But even if such events were to occur, the emerging economies would surely subsequently resume their growth, in which case any gains in production from Libya or Iraq would only buy a few more years.

The chart on the right shows the situation dramatically. In just the past ten years, capital spending by major oil companies on exploration and extraction has tripled. And the result? Those same companies are producing less oil than they were in 2004. There’s still new oil out there, but it’s increasingly both expensive to get and expensive to refine.

(And all the hype to the contrary, the fracking revolution hasn’t changed that. There’s oil in those formations in Texas and North Dakota, but the wells only produce for a few years each and production costs are sky high compared to conventional oil.)

In a hypertechnical sense, the peak oil optimists were right: New technology has been able to keep global oil production growing longer than the pessimists thought. But, it turns out, not by much. Global oil production is growing very slowly; the cost of new oil is skyrocketing; the quality of new oil is mostly lousy; and we continue to bump up right against the edge of global demand, which means that even a small disruption in supply can send the world into an economic tailspin. So details aside, the pessimists continue to be right in practice even if they didn’t predict the exact date we’d hit peak oil. It’s long past time to get dead serious about finding renewable replacements on a very large scale.

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Chart of the Day: Oil Is Getting Harder and Harder to Find

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What Happens If Obama Loses the Halbig Case?

by wqds234der Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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So let’s suppose the Halbig case goes up to the Supreme Court and they rule for the plaintiffs: in a stroke, everyone enrolled in Obamacare through a federal exchange is no longer eligible for subsidies. What happens then? Is Obamacare doomed?

Not at all. What happens is that people in blue states like California and New York, which operate their own exchanges, continue getting their federal subsidies. People in red states, which punted the job to the feds, will suddenly have their subsidies yanked away. Half the country will have access to a generous entitlement and the other half won’t.

How many people will this affect? The earliest we’ll get a Supreme Court ruling on this is mid-2015, and mid-2016 is more likely. At a guess, maybe 12 million people will have exchange coverage by 2015 and about 20 million by 2016. Let’s split the difference and call it 15 million. About 80 percent of them qualify for subsidies, which brings the number to about 12 million. Roughly half of them are in states that would be affected by Halbig.

So that means about 6 million people who are currently getting subsidies would suddenly have them yanked away. It’s even possible they’d have to pay back any tax credits they’d received previously.

So what’s the political reaction? The key point here is that people respond much more strongly to losing things than they do to not getting them in the first place. For example, there are lots of poor people in red states who currently aren’t receiving Medicaid benefits thanks to their states’ refusal to participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. This hasn’t caused a revolt because nothing was taken away. They just never got Medicaid in the first place.

The subsidies would be a different story. You’d have roughly 6 million people who would suddenly lose a benefit that they’ve come to value highly. This would cause a huge backlash. It’s hard to say if this would be enough to move Congress to action, but I think this is nonetheless the basic lay of the land. Obamacare wouldn’t be destroyed, it would merely be taken away from a lot of people who are currently benefiting from it. They’d fight to get it back, and that changes the political calculus.

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What Happens If Obama Loses the Halbig Case?

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