Tag Archives: immigration

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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How One Plan to Bring Undocumented Immigrants out of the Shadows Could Get Them Deported

by FrancisZxm Posted on December 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Since 2015, California has issued about 800,000 licenses to drivers who lack proof of legal residence. In Illinois, more than 212,000 people have received what are known as temporary visitor driver’s licenses. Connecticut has approved around 26,000 drive-only licenses for undocumented immigrants, and nine more states plus the District of Columbia have similar programs.

To date, these initiatives have been widely hailed as a reasonable way to try to improve public safety, by helping make sure that everyone behind the wheel was a competent driver. But now, with the incoming Trump administration seemingly committed to deporting undocumented individuals, there is worry among immigration advocates that the identifying data collected as part of these programs—names, addresses, copies of foreign passports—could be used by federal authorities looking to send people back to their home countries.

Last month, Trump said he would deport or incarcerate as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants who have criminal records. A 10-point immigration plan on Trump’s transition website lists “zero tolerance for criminal aliens,” along with a promise to “ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported.” The plan also calls for blocking funding for so-called “sanctuary cities” that historically have limited their cooperation with federal immigration agents.

“The discussion up to this point has been hypothetical or theoretical, and now it’s feeling very real,” said Jonathan Blazer, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU. “People start to think, ‘Are things going to look completely different than they’ve ever looked before, in terms of what the federal government might try to do?'”

Nothing in federal law specifically entitles immigration agents access to state data on drivers who may be in the country illegally, according to Blazer. To get states to produce a list of these drivers, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which includes the federal government’s deportation arm—might have to rely on its administrative subpoena power. Even then, states could refuse to provide the information, thereby forcing the federal government to sue for the driver data or narrow its request, Blazer and other legal experts said.

“If ICE just came and said, ‘Hey, give me all your driving privilege card holders, ‘I would say, ‘No,’ and they would have to take some sort of different legal action that is beyond my control,” said Scott Vien, the director of Delaware’s Division of Motor Vehicles, which has so far issued about 3,500 driving credentials to undocumented immigrants. Some of the records they maintain include copies of birth certificates, foreign passports and consular identification cards.

Uncertainty already surrounds the fate of more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants who first arrived in the United States as children, and who obtained temporary reprieves from deportation through a 2012 executive action of President Barack Obama. In applying to the program, these individuals submitted all sorts of personal information to the federal government, including home addresses and the names of family members. Immigrants and their advocates now fear that this information could be turned over to federal immigration officials after Obama leaves office, for use in tracking down undocumented individuals.

Driving records, it is now clear, constitute another vast store of data on US residents who may not be residing in the country legally. In all, more than 1 million licenses meant for people without proof of legal immigration status have been issued across the country.

There have already been some instances of ICE seeking to get and use driver’s license information in bulk from states that do not have the special programs for the undocumented—New Jersey among them. In 2012, ICE’s Newark field office obtained from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission a list of people who had applied for restricted licenses using valid but temporary immigration documents. An initial review “resulted in the identification of numerous foreign-born individuals who fall under ICE priorities,” according to an April 2012 letter from the field office director, who also requested that New Jersey continue to supply updated lists.

That same year, the Atlanta field office proposed gaining access to the names of foreign-born residents with temporary driver’s licenses, as well as lists of rejected license applications, as part of its efforts to achieve that year’s “criminal-alien removal target.” That DMV project was not implemented, according to an ICE official’s email from 2014, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Immigration Law Center.

The Illinois secretary of state’s office has said it cannot guarantee the safety of temporary license applicants’ information from federal immigration authorities. If the office receives a “legally valid request” for information on license applicants who lack proof of legal residence, it will comply, according to an FAQ published by the state earlier this year.

“If ICE did come to us with a subpoena, we’d probably have to go and get a legal opinion, from the attorney general,” said Dave Druker, a spokesman for the Illinois secretary of state’s office. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

The state has had a problem with protecting applicant information before. About three years ago, an employee of the secretary of state’s office alerted ICE about an undocumented immigrant who had applied for a temporary license. The applicant was then apprehended upon showing up at a state office for an appointment in February 2014. Due in part to outcry from immigrant rights advocates following the incident, the state has said it will no longer proactively volunteer information to ICE about temporary license seekers, as long as they do not have any records of felony criminal activity or appear on any terrorism watch list.

“In order to find out the legality, someone needs to be willing to sue, and because of data sharing and how it operates, a lot of times it’s going to require a political actor to do that—a state, a locality,” said Mark Fleming, the national litigation coordinator for the National Immigrant Justice Center. “That’s often a political decision for a lot of elected officials.”

ICE already enjoys limited access to basic state driver’s license information through a law enforcement data exchange network called Nlets. However, the information ICE can see wouldn’t necessarily give away someone’s immigration status.

In California, any driver’s license information that the state makes available to law enforcement agencies through data-sharing systems does not indicate whether the driver provided evidence of legal immigration status, according to Artemio Armenta, a spokesman for the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the Illinois system, however, there’s a potential giveaway: Driver data for a regular license includes a Social Security number, whereas temporary license records will list a consular card or foreign passport number instead.

Other states that offer driving privileges to undocumented individuals include Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Vermont. In Washington state, no resident has to provide evidence of legal presence or citizenship to obtain a standard license. Even so, many immigrants who lack proof of legal residence face a dilemma in deciding whether or not to take advantage of these programs and apply for driving credentials.

“People can’t be afraid to get the license that would enable them to learn the rules of the road and hold them accountable for driving,” said Tanya Broder, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. At the same time, “we’ve told people that if they’re at high risk, if they don’t want to be seen or found, that the DMV database makes them easier to find.”

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How One Plan to Bring Undocumented Immigrants out of the Shadows Could Get Them Deported

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Don’t Underestimate “Jane the Virgin,” the Soap Spinoff With a Social Conscience

by AlfredoCollocot Posted on October 16, 2016

Mother Jones

Jennie Synder Urman Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Perhaps because Jane the Virgin has such a silly premise—a 23-year-old virgin is accidentally inseminated at a routine gynecological appointment—and perhaps because it’s aired on CW, a network best known for its searing teen dramas, the show tends to get lost in the assumption that it should be judged by the company it keeps. But Jane the Virgin accomplishes quite a lot in each 43-minute episode. Inspired by a Venezuelan telenovela, the show balances a slightly satirical soap-opera style with heartfelt storylines and the comedy that stems inevitably from Jane’s predicament.

Jane the Virgin makes some unusual calls for a mainstream TV show: Its heroine is a virgin by choice, her abuela is undocumented and speaks only Spanish, and the writers give us an unvarnished look at the travails of new motherhood—some are mothers themselves—as well as issues such as postpartum depression and the difficulties faced by immigrants in America. With the season three premiere due for delivery on October 17, I caught up with Jennie Synder Urman, Jane‘s creator and showrunner, for a little chat.

Mother Jones: Tell us more about the show’s origins.

JSU: Ben Silverman brought me the original Venezuelan telenovela. He told me the log line—a virgin gets accidentally artificially inseminated. From there, I came up with the show. The original is very different, and I didn’t want to just remake what they made successfully. I started to think about an older character whose virginity was more of a choice, less than circumstance—when you’re younger, half the people are virgins, half aren’t. And I wanted it to be a multigenerational story between a daughter, her mother, and her grandmother, because those are the relationships that I love: strong women and matriarchies. We have a character who loves telenovelas and the characters, and how her life starts to become like one of the telenovelas she loves to watch. That’s what I ultimately pitched to the studio.

MJ: You and head writers Jessica O’Toole and Amy Rardin are white. How do you keep things real when it comes to Latina culture?

JSU: Well, we also have nonwhite women in our writing room, and I have a cast of Latina women. We’re all very close, and we talk and they tell me what feels real. But I’m trying to create characters, not represent an entire culture. If you try to do that, you fall into a trap of stereotypes and clichés. I’m writing Jane, the daughter of Xo, who’s the daughter of Alba. I’ve created those characters, so I’m loading them up with specific things. They’re a Catholic family and I’m not Catholic, but I also have Catholic writers. I feel like race and ethnicity is really important, but also socioeconomic class and religion, and I’m baking it all into these characters. We’re all humans, we all want the same thing: love and respect and success and family and happiness.

MJ: Your writers and directors are mostly women. Was that a conscious choice?

JSU: Yeah, I think so. Conscious in that I don’t have the unconscious bias that women are not able to do all of these jobs and do them well. To me, the heart of the show is the Villanueva women. So it was very important to get female views early on, because without women, maybe those little moments that you don’t think about would be defaulted to men. We want you to think about everything, so you’re not just assuming this person is a man because you have a “contractor.” Why can’t the contractor be a woman? Being surrounded by women helps to further that particular agenda. We have wonderful male writers and directors, too, but predominantly the people who have stuck and lasted on Jane have been women. They’ve done a great job. I brought ’em back.

MJ: It seems pretty special to have a mostly female space in television.

JSU: Most of my actors have told me they worked with more female directors on one season of Jane than they have in their whole career! I like that we have a space where a female director can succeed. She can take 10 minutes if she needs to pump because she has a new baby. Last year, I think 15 of 22 writers and directors were women. This year, I don’t know what our makeup is, but it’s gotta be that or more. I’ve got a son and a daughter and I want them to see women leading things in general.

MJ: In one interview, Jessica O’Toole said the writer’s room has “one token straight white male.”

JSU: We do! We’ll turn to him and be like, “Well, what do you think about this?” Laughs.

MJ: I’ve been impressed by your attention to the flaws in America’s immigration policies. Were you worried about blowback?

JSU: I was really moved and inspired early on when I met Diane Guerrero, who is Lina on our show and who is in Orange Is the New Black. She told me this story about when she was 14 and her parents were deported. Just stunning how no one checked up on her afterward! Her parents weren’t criminals; they just were undocumented. They tried to get their papers and because of circumstance, because of people who misled them, they didn’t, and they sent these parents of this 14-year-old girl away.

I remember feeling like we have to use this platform to dramatize that in some way. I cast the three women—Jane, Xo and Alba—as Venezuelan, partly as an homage to the telenovela and partly because I wanted to have Alba be undocumented, so we could play that fear and victory when she gets her green card. The cast would be so excited when we put a hashtag “immigration reform.” Our feeling was like, we’re gonna make everybody fall in love with Alba, because she’s this great grandmother. Then suddenly you’re like, “Wait, why are we trying to get her to leave the country?” It would affect people by personalizing the political.

MJ: The show’s realistic, unglamorous look at new motherhood isn’t something we typically see on TV. The scene where Jane’s milk comes in while she’s out on her front lawn comes to mind—or when she forgets her breast pump on a writer’s retreat.

JSU: I was very committed to that. I’ve got two very young kids and I was stunned at how hard it was. I had a lot of people at the beginning who were saying, “Well, what happens once she has the baby? Where does the story go from there?” The implication is that her life stops because she has a baby. How can a mother be interesting? Who cares about that love life or that career agenda? As a writer, you spend your whole life sort of thinking about yourself and forming your identity and where you want to be in the world and then you have a baby and you’re like, “Oh my god, I work for you now?” It’s a real earthquake.

I was writing at the same time I was having my kids, who now are five and six, but when I was doing Jane at the beginning they were probably three and four. The balance was hard. Nursing was really hard—I was shocked! I felt like someone had taken over my body for the first six months. I remember after the first day we had our son, my husband and I looked at each other in the morning and we were like, “That was one day? What the fuck? How are we going to do 18 years?” I hadn’t seen that on TV. We knew Jane had this baby, and I didn’t want the baby to just disappear. You’re always looking for drama and conflict and difficulties for your character, and having a new baby is a really difficult thing, especially for a character like Jane who plans everything.

MJ: So, what can we look forward to in season three?

JSU: We’re going to try to continue to balance our comedy and drama and social responsibility. Our family is Venezuelan, and Venezuela is in a really difficult situation right now. I want the show to at least be aware of that reality. Food shortages and no medicine—I think the more we pull from specifics, the more texture it gets, and the more real it becomes. We want to always balance the fantastical telenovela twists and turns with the more grounded, emotional, dramatic and comedic moments.

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Don’t Underestimate “Jane the Virgin,” the Soap Spinoff With a Social Conscience

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

by LorenD35vd Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Roughly 30 Central American women and their children who are applying for asylum in the United States are being held outside Philadelphia in a federal immigration detention center called the Berks County Residential Center. Many have been there for more than a year, and in August, 22 mothers went on hunger strike to protest their prolonged detention. Now, a group of 17 Democratic senators, including former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and current vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, have called on Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to release the families and end the practice of family detention.

“Many of these mothers have asylum claims based on rape, severe domestic violence, and murder threats,” the senators wrote in a letter released on Tuesday. “It is unconscionable to keep these children locked up and goes against our most fundamental values.” The children at Berks, who make up about half the population of detainees, range in age from 2 to 16 years old. Many have been held for months and, in some cases, more than a year. The senators said family detention is “wrong” and “should be ended immediately,” pointing to research showing that prolonged confinement is harmful to children’s physical and mental health.

The Berks Center is one of three family detention centers in the country. The other two, located in Texas, were opened by the Obama administration in 2014 in response to the surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Around that time, the centers came under scrutiny for poor medical care, lack of access to legal council, and alleged sexual abuse. (Earlier this year, one former guard at Berks was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a teenage detainee.)

Last summer, the administration announced a series of reforms to reduce the length of confinement. Shortly afterward, a district court in California ordered the government to release migrant children within three to five days of their initial confinement, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. The administration says it has taken steps to come into compliance with that court decision. Secretary Johnson has said his agency is detaining families for an average of 20 days or less, but advocates say the experience of the Berks mothers tells another story.

The 17 senators urged Johnson to review their cases and release them unless they are a serious flight risk or threat to public safety. Hillary Clinton has taken a similar position as her running mate and called for an end to family detention.

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

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Donald Trump Just Gave His Most Extreme Immigration Speech Yet

by MoraRidgley Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a provocative 75-minute speech Wednesday evening in Phoenix, Arizona—one that quickly drew praise from David Duke and other prominent white nationalists—Donald Trump put to rest any notion that he is “softening” his stance on immigration. The GOP nominee reiterated many of his most extreme proposals, outlining a 10-step policy that included building his much-discussed wall (which Mexico will pay for, he still insists), immediately deporting “criminal aliens,” and adding an “ideological certification” to ensure that US visa applicants—at least from certain countries—share American values.

Per his usual, Trump painted America as a country under siege by criminal aliens and pledged (implausibly) that from his very first hours in the Oval Office, he would commence with the promised deportations. “Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone!” he said, virtually roaring into the microphone. “You can call it deported if you want, you can call it whatever you want, they’re gone.”

Reactions were swift, with Jared Tayor, a prominent white nationalist, calling the speech “almost perfect” on Twitter and Duke, a former “imperial wizard” of the KKK (and candidate for Senate in Louisiana) live-tweeting the speech and offering praise. Hillary Clinton and her supporters took to Twitter to slam Trump’s proposals.

In his address, Trump portrayed American citizens as under attack by illegal immigrants who have sexually assaulted, beaten, and/or murdered innocent citizens. He cited a list of specific examples, in one case describing an Air Force veteran Trump said was “beaten to death by a hammer.” Speaking more generally about “criminal illegal immigrants,” Trump said: “Their days have run out in this country. The crime will stop. They’re going to be gone. It will be over. They’re going out. They’re going out fast.”

The Republican nominee repeated his call for an “extreme vetting” of legal immigrants, and a suspension of new visas for citizens from countries where “adequate screening of visas cannot occur.” He promised he would “cancel” President Obama’s 2014 executive action that offered temporary protection from deportation for at least five million people, including undocumented parents of children who are American citizens—an order that is currently tied up in court.

Trump also detailed for the first time that his proposed ideological test would include questions about honor killings and attitudes toward women, LGBT rights, and radical Islam. Deportations would be swift. The tone of the speech was classic Trump: “Number three. Number three, this is the one, I think it’s so great. It’s hard to believe, people don’t even talk about it. Zero tolerance for criminal aliens. Zero. Zero. Zero. They don’t come in here. They don’t come in here.”

While Trump—on the heels of a controversial visit with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto—touched briefly on his infamous border wall (including sensors above and below the soil), he focused more on the need to “take back” America from the “crisis” of illegal immigration: “This is our last chance to secure the border, stop illegal immigration and reform our laws to make your life better.”

Trump’s immigration language has been picked apart in recent weeks, following talk that he was perhaps softening his positions. He launched his campaign, of course by calling for a “great” border wall, and promised to create a deportation force for the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. His hard-line stances and peddling of scary scenarios—both criminal and economic—fueled his rise in the polls. Earlier this month, however, Trump reportedly told Hispanic leaders he was interested in courting a “humane and efficient” way to deal with undocumented immigrants. Since then, he and his campaign have been sending mixed signals on Trump’s immigration plans.

In tonight’s speech, Trump took his most controversial stances and, if anything, pushed them further. While acknowledging that there are “some good illegal immigrants” living in America, he also claimed the Obama administration has implemented policies that prioritize the interests of undocumented immigrants over those of Americans. The former, he claimed, are treated “even better than our vets.” President Obama and Hillary Clinton, he added, “support catch and release on the border. They support visa overstays. They support the release of dangerous, dangerous, dangerous, criminals from detention.”

“Hillary Clinton, for instance, talks constantly about her fears that families will be separated, but she’s not talking about the American families who have been permanently separated from their loved ones because of a preventable homicide, because of a preventable death, because of murder.”

“For those who are here illegally today waiting for legal status, they will have one route and one route only: to return home and apply for reentry like everybody else under the new system,” Trump continued. “We will break the cycle of amnesty and illegal immigration.”

The nominee’s rhetoric may contradict some of his own business practices. In a Mother Jones investigation of Trump’s modeling agency, Trump Model Management, several former models told reporter James West that they had worked illegally in the United States on the company’s watch. (Mike Pence, Trump’s vice presidential pick, dismissed the women’s allegations as a “sidebar issue.”)

Near the end of the speech, Trump briefly brought on stage 10 “angel mothers” who spoke of their children allegedly killed by undocumented immigrants. The women expressed their support for Trump. “This is a movement,” he proclaimed solemnly. “We’re going to take our country back.”

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Donald Trump Just Gave His Most Extreme Immigration Speech Yet

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The Feds Could Stop Hiring Private Prison Companies to Detain Immigrants

by StaceyDowling61 Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will reexamine its use of private prison companies to hold immigration detainees, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced today. The decision comes less than two weeks after the Justice Department announced that it would close out its contracts with private prison companies, a decision that affects approximately 22,600 prisoners in 13 federal prisons.

Last Friday, Johnson directed an advisory council to evaluate whether DHS should “move in the same direction” as the Justice Department. The council is expected to report back by November 30.

If Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS division that controls migrant detention, were to end its contracts with for-profit prison companies, the decision could be more significant than the Justice Department’s announcement. While private prisons oversee about 12 percent of federal inmates, for-profit companies operate 46 ICE facilities and oversee a daily average of 24,567 people, or 73 percent of immigration detainees.

The Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, the country’s two largest for-profit prison companies, together control 8 of the country’s 10 biggest immigration detention centers. Both corporations’ stock prices took a severe hit after the Justice Department’s decision on August 18, and both are now facing class-action lawsuits from investors. Johnson’s announcement sent their stocks falling once again, with CCA slipping 9.4 percent and GEO falling 6 percent after the announcement.

ICE’s immigration detention capacity has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Private prisons have played a key role in expanding ICE’s capacity to hold migrants. For-profit prison operators controlled 62 percent of immigration detention beds in 2014, up from 25 percent in 2005. The rewards for private operators of immigration detention centers can be huge: Last year, CCA made 14 percent of its total revenue from one 2,400-bed facility, the South Texas Family Residential Center, after it obtained a four-year, $1 billion contract from ICE.

Today, ICE is required by law to fill an average of 34,000 beds daily, a requirement instituted in 2010, when former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) added the private detention quota to the DHS budget. As of December 2015, around 400,000 migrants were detained by ICE annually.

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The Feds Could Stop Hiring Private Prison Companies to Detain Immigrants

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These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

by NedHMTKiuufr Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Nearly two dozen migrant women at a family detention center outside Philadelphia have been on hunger strike for more than a week to protest their extended confinement—and, more broadly, what they claim is the Obama administration’s mischaracterization of the detention of Central American families.

Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that DHS has been detaining families for an average of no more than 20 days. This directly contradicted the experience of the hunger strikers, who say they have been held with their children in the Berks County Residential Center between six months and a year while awaiting their asylum claims to be appealed. So on August 8, 22 women began refusing all food and drinking only water, and two days later they sent a letter to Johnson asking to be released while they wait for their claims to be heard.

“All of us left our countries of origin fleeing violence, threats and corruption,” they wrote. “We are desperate and we have decided that we will get out alive or dead.”

Bridget Cambria, one of the attorneys representing the women, says most of them have lost between 6 and 10 pounds over the last 11 days. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said the agency fully respects the hunger strikers’ right to express their opinions and said that health personnel are actively monitoring their well-being. The spokesman also said that ICE only recognizes 18 hunger strikers; previously, it acknowledged just four. (Last year, a wave of similar hunger strikes took hold at immigration detention centers across the country—including at one family detention center in Karnes City, Texas.)

The Berks County Residential Center is the smallest of three family detention centers in the United States. It currently houses 75 detainees, 34 of whom are adult women. The country’s other two (much larger) family detention centers are located in Texas. In 2014, when increasing volatility in Central America led to a surge in women and children fleeing for the US border, the Obama administration responded by increasing the federal government’s capacity to detain families.

However, those detention centers soon came under scrutiny for poor medical care, allegations of sexual abuse, lack of access to counsel, and unaffordable bonds that make it difficult, if not impossible, for families to obtain their release. Last summer, Johnson announced a series of family detention reforms meant to reduce the length of confinement, including setting bonds at a more realistic level. The following month, a district court in California ruled that the government must release migrant children within three to five days, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. Otherwise, the court said, the administration would be in violation of an 18-year-old court settlement dictating the proper treatment of migrant children in detention.

Earlier this month, Johnson told reporters that the government is in compliance with those standards, having limited the average length of stay at family detention centers to 20 days or less. But advocates point to the prolonged detention of children in Berks as a clear violation. “It’s 100 percent violating the settlement,” Cambria said. “There is a right for the children to be released. I don’t even get it. I don’t…We should be caring for the best interests of the child.”

In their letter to Johnson, the hunger strikers stressed their concern for their children’s mental health. They said their sons and daughters have even expressed suicidal thoughts. Human Rights First, which has been making periodic visits to the Berks facility, issued a new report Friday documenting the poor state of mental health at the facility. For example, the report claims that one preteen girl wet the bed so frequently that she had to wear diapers at night. An independent psychological evaluation determined that she had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and that her bed-wetting, though it started well before her incarceration, was “exacerbated by her continued experience of heightened stress and hypervigilance while being detained.” The girl told her therapist that the thought of leaving her mother even briefly in the middle of the night filled her with so much fear that she often wouldn’t make the trip to the bathroom.

Numerous studies have shown that even short periods of detention can affect children’s mental and physical health. In a letter to Johnson in July 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that incarcerating Central American families could lead to “poorer health outcomes, higher rates of psychological distress, and suicidality.”

The ICE spokesman said he is prohibited from commenting on specific cases for privacy reasons but noted that the agency takes these allegations seriously and will review them. He also emphasized that comprehensive medical care, including from licensed mental-health providers, is available throughout a migrant’s detention, along with 24-hour emergency care.

Cambria and other immigrants’ rights advocates say that families seeking asylum shouldn’t be detained at all, let alone for months at a time. They would rather see women transferred out of detention into the care of their relatives in the United States or community-based programs while their asylum cases are processed.

“We’re not dealing with people who are violent. We’re not dealing with people who are a danger,” Cambria said. “They’re children and vulnerable women.”

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These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

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The Real Story of the Syrian Family Who Donald Trump Said Might Be Terrorists

by GeorginaTindal Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Matt Chase

The couple who had panicked the nation’s right-wing politicians and pundits sits on a couch in a spartan ground-level apartment on the outskirts of San Bernardino, California. Thirty-two-year-old Samer is in a blue sweatshirt and jeans, lounging next to his wife, Sara. He has a round face and relaxed eyes; she is more angular, her eyes more direct. They’re both wearing ankle monitors. Ever since they were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention two months earlier, they’ve kept a low profile. It took me weeks to contact them, and now they’ve agreed to tell their story. But they have some caveats: no real names, not too many details. They don’t want to stir up any more trouble than they’ve already been through.

Eight months before I met them, they were in Syria, on the phone with a smuggler. ISIS fighters were on the fringes of their small Christian village, firing mortars into it. Samer and Sara knew if the village fell there was a good chance they’d be abused or executed. There was no power, no work, and the price of food was punishing. Part of their home was blown up. Their little boys, two and five years old, were “afraid all the time,” Sara recalls. They almost never ventured outdoors. Of Syria, Samer says, “It is not a life.” So they decided to seek a new one—in America, where they hoped to join Samer’s parents and sister, who live in California.

The smuggler told them he could help, in exchange for everything they had—a valuable tract of land, the remains of their home, and all its contents. The smuggler’s network stretched across the globe, and he arranged to get them to Lebanon, then Turkey, where they waited three months before being supplied with expertly forged European passports—they won’t say which nationality—and plane tickets to Brazil. From there, they traveled north. The smuggler told them where to go, whom to meet, when to take a car, and when to fly. The passports worked at every checkpoint, border, and airport.

On November 17, Samer, Sara, and their two little boys walked across the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, and turned themselves in to American immigration officials. Samer remembers, “I was so happy. I finally arrived here to have a safe life, a good life for my children.”

They didn’t realize they were stepping into a firestorm of anti-refugee hysteria. Four days before their arrival, ISIS-backed terrorists had attacked in Paris. After Samer and Sara entered the United States, the conservative website Breitbart proclaimed—falsely—that they and another Syrian family who had crossed with them were “illegal aliens” who had been “caught” sneaking into the country. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted a link to the story. Ben Carson said their arrival could be a sign that “our worst nightmare may be unfolding before our eyes.” Trump tweeted that they might be terrorists: “ISIS maybe? I told you so. we need a big & beautiful wall!” In the days that followed, more than 30 governors said they did not want Syrian refugees settling in their states.

Almost immediately after requesting asylum, Sara and the boys were put in one ICE detention center, Samer in another. They went through the extensive asylum interview process and were determined to have “credible fears of persecution or torture” in Syria. Within two weeks they were approved for release. ICE officials told Samer’s family in California to buy airline tickets for them. But the day before they were set to depart, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook slaughtered 14 people in San Bernardino. ICE told Samer’s family to cancel the flights to California, and Samer and Sara were denied parole. The only explanation was a vague declaration of “law enforcement interests.”

During their weeks of detention, Samer was allowed to speak to Sara only once on the phone. The boys cried every night, asking Sara where their father was. As Christmas approached, the children had been held for nearly 40 days, despite a mandate that most migrant kids should be released after three to five days. “The look on their face is a look of terror,” their lawyer, Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, told me after visiting Sara at the time. “The look and the panic of a person pinned down on a hospital gurney.”

“I definitely thought America would accept me,” Samer told the Guardian. “If I had known that it was so terrible here I wouldn’t have brought my family.” On Christmas Eve, the family was finally released, reunited, and put on a flight to California.

That’s where I meet them two months later, in the warm and tidy apartment where Samer’s parents live. A cross hangs above the kitchen doorway. We drink tea in the living room as Samer and Sara lay out the terms for sharing their story. They’re wary: They don’t want to be back in the headlines, and they worry more press could endanger Sara’s mother and sister, still trapped in Syria. “They didn’t have a chance to leave,” she says. ISIS is still on the outskirts of their village.

They talk about life before the war, of their town—a small community speckled with trees and fields of crops. Sara doesn’t want to dwell on how the war has changed it. “The way the village looks is not important,” she says. “It is like all of Syria,” a landscape of broken concrete and twisted rebar.

Their troubles aren’t over. The asylum process, as Ryan puts it, is “designed so that people fall into the cracks, lose their cases on a technicality that would drive any sports fan nuts.”

But for now, Samer and Sara are piecing together a normal life. “My son started school,” she says, beaming. “Preschool. Just five years old, but he is a big boy. He is starting to learn English.” The boys, who have been playing in the living room, disappear into the kitchen and return proudly carrying potted flowers. “They bought this flower for their grandma,” Sara explains. Next they walk out holding a bag of peanut M&Ms with pleading eyes, grinning and squirming. They can play outside now. But not today. “It’s too windy!” Sara says with a laugh.

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The Real Story of the Syrian Family Who Donald Trump Said Might Be Terrorists

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Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

by Matthia76J Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting look today at the costs and benefits of immigration across the Southern border. After Arizona cracked down on illegal immigration in 2007, their population of undocumented workers dropped by a whopping 40 percent—and it’s stayed down since then:

Arizona is a test case of what happens to an economy when such migrants leave, and it illustrates the economic tensions fueling the immigration debate.

Economists of opposing political views agree the state’s economy took a hit when large numbers of illegal immigrants left for Mexico and other border states, following a broad crackdown. But they also say the reduced competition for low-skilled jobs was a boon for some native-born construction and agricultural workers who got jobs or raises, and that the departures also saved the state money on education and health care. Whether those gains are worth the economic pain is the crux of the debate.

You should read the whole thing if you want all the details, including the fact that wages increased about 15 percent for a small number of construction workers and farmworkers—though Arizona’s unemployment rate more generally has been no better than its neighbors’. Beyond that, though, the Journal provides only a graphic summary that doesn’t really summarize much. So I’ve helpfully annotated it for you. It sure looks to me like Arizona has a very long way to go before the benefits of reducing illegal immigration will come anywhere close to the costs.

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Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

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Republicans Are Trying to Block Syrian Refugees Yet Again

by SGGGordon421 Posted on January 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republican politicians have restarted their push to stop Syrian refugees from entering the United States after the FBI announced on Thursday that it had arrested two Iraqi refugees on charges of providing material support to ISIS.

“The arrests of these men present a stark warning about the deficiencies of our programs for accepting refugees from Iraq and Syria,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “Continuing these programs in their current form poses unacceptable risks to our national security that are growing more acute by the day.”

The House passed a bill called the American SAFE Act in November after the terrorist attacks in Paris stoked fears that terrorists were trying to infiltrate the United States by posing as refugees. The legislation would temporarily halt all Syrian refugee resettlement, and within the current refugee vetting process it would require the FBI director, the Homeland Security secretary, and the director of national intelligence to all personally sign off that each admitted Syrian posed no security risk.

The SAFE Act passed the House with a veto-proof majority but stood little chance of making it through the Senate. Now House Republicans are using Thursday’s announcement of terrorism arrests to pressure the Senate to take it up. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the House Homeland Security Committee chairman and a co-sponsor of the SAFE Act, demanded on Friday that the Senate pass the bill as well. “We cannot delay while more potential jihadists slip through the cracks,” he said in a statement. “Terrorist groups like ISIS have vowed to use these programs to infiltrate the West, and now it is clearer than ever that we should take them at their word.”

Critics of the legislation, including President Barack Obama, the Democratic congressional leadership, and refugee resettlement groups, have called the SAFE Act an unnecessary addition to an already lengthy and secure vetting process—and one that would make refugee admissions all but impossible. The White House and refugee groups argued in November that Syrians undergo the most thorough screening of anyone who enters the United States. “These are not just random people showing up who we don’t know who they are,” said Matthew Soerens, who works on refugee resettlement for World Relief, one of the nine groups that helps place refugees in the United States. “These are people we know all sorts of details about, who’ve been individually interviewed, vetted, before they come to the United States.”

The two terrorism suspects whose arrests were announced by the FBI are both from Iraq; one entered the United States in 2009 and the other in 2012. More than 130,000 Iraqis refugees have resettled in the United States since 2007, and administration officials have acknowledged that the vetting of Iraqi refugees was not as strong as the current system. FBI director James Comey told the House Judiciary Committee in October that Iraqis had undergone “less-then-excellent vetting,” but said that the government has “improved dramatically our ability as an interagency—all parts of the US government—to query and check people.” Senior administration officials who work on refugee resettlement echoed that statement during a conference call with reporters in November. “I would say that with the Syrian program, we’ve benefited from our years of experience in vetting Iraqi refugee applicants,” said one official. “The partnerships we have today and the security checks we have today really are more robust.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, McCaul said the administration must put in place a “proper vetting system” before more Syrians are admitted to the United States, but he did not provide details on what steps would be required to fix the current system. McCaul’s office could not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones about what a sufficient vetting process would entail.

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Republicans Are Trying to Block Syrian Refugees Yet Again

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