Tag Archives: immigration

New White House Program Will Provide Legal Aid to Unaccompanied Migrant Kids

by JosefWOOZigzhlu Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Last Friday, the Obama administration announced the launch of “justice AmeriCorps,” a new program that will provide legal support to unaccompanied migrant children facing deportation. As Mother Jones has reported extensively, the number of undocumented children caught illegally entering the US without a parent or guardian has more than doubled in recent years, to nearly 39,000 in 2013.

The new initiative is sponsored by the the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review and the Corporation for National & Community Service (CNCS), which runs AmeriCorps. According to a CNCS statement, around 100 lawyers and paralegals will be recruited to provide legal services and representation for unaccompanied kids under 16 facing removal hearings. Nonprofits in 29 cities with high immigrant populations will enlist and supervise the legal volunteers, who will commit to one year of service as AmeriCorps members. Attorney General Eric Holder called the program “a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society.”

This marked the administration’s second major recent announcement regarding the influx of unaccompanied children. Last Monday, the White House announced the creation of a task force to ensure that federal agencies are “unified in providing relief to affected children,” as well as plans to relocate 600 kids from border holding cells to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

In his statement, Holder noted that many of the children and teens who will be assisted by the new AmeriCorps program “are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse, or trafficking.” This description of the circumstances under which children migrate alone matches the findings of a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Of 400 unaccompanied migrant children interviewed, 58 percent “had suffered, been threatened, or feared serious harm” that might merit international protection.

As Wendy Young, executive director of KIND, a nonprofit that helps unaccompanied immigrant kids find pro bono legal support, told Mother Jones’ Ian Gordon, “This is becoming less like an immigration issue and much more like a refugee issue. Because this really is a forced migration. This is not kids choosing voluntarily to leave.” Deported children often return to the same dangerous or desperate situations they attempted to escape, further burdened with smuggling debt. The new initiative will attempt to curb this problem by training its members to identify signs of human trafficking and abuse in the children they serve.

Kimi Jackson, director of ProBAR, which provides legal services to detained children in South Texas, said in an email that “this initiative is a good step. Currently, the majority of kids appear in court and represent themselves without a lawyer. Attorneys for released kids are urgently needed.”

Although the program aims to serve the “most vulnerable” unaccompanied children, the 100 funded lawyers and paralegals will only be capable of providing assistance to a fraction of the 74,000 children anticipated to be apprehended by Border Patrol this year. CNCS estimates that 10,000 unaccompanied kids will appear in immigration court in the 29 participating cities in the 2015 fiscal year.

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New White House Program Will Provide Legal Aid to Unaccompanied Migrant Kids

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

by FletcheDriscoll Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the Obama administration announced that it was creating a multiagency taskforce to oversee the recent surge of unaccompanied child migrants coming primarily from Central America and Mexico. The announcement included plans to move some 600 kids from holding cells at the border to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

As the number of unaccompanied children entering the United States has more than doubled since 2011, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—the part of the Department of Health and Human Services charged with caring for unaccompanied minors in US custody—has brought more and more shelters online to accommodate the influx. (Kids are typically housed in these shelters until ORR can reunify kids with US-based family, with whom they stay pending their immigration hearings.) Here’s what the increase has looked like:

So where, exactly, are these shelters? Fifty of the 80 shelters in 2013 were in states along the Southwest border; Texas alone had 33 shelters. The rest, however, are spread out throughout the country. As Maria Woltjen, director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told me in an interview: “Nobody in Chicago knows there are 400 kids detained in our midst. You walk by, and you think it’s just an old nursing home, and it’s actually all these immigrant kids who are detained inside.”

Check out our map of ORR’s 2013 shelters, data I obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request:

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

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Wait, So the New "Transformers" Movie Is a Pro-Immigration Allegory?

by MiraHarricks Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Michael Bay‘s big, loud action movies sometimes have plot elements resembling political messages. The Rock (1996) depicts the blowback from illegal American covert operations overseas. In Armageddon (1998), the NASA-recruited team of deep-core drillers agree to embark on a dangerous mission to save the planet from an asteroid—on the condition that they never have to pay taxes again. In Bad Boys II (2003), the film’s heroes illegally invade (and destroy large chunks of) Cuba, all in the name of fighting the drug war.

But could the 49-year-old director’s latest film, Transformers: Age of Extinction (in theaters June 27), actually be an allegory for the plight of undocumented immigrants in modern-day USA? Well, the film is currently being marketed that way. As flagged by Entertainment Weekly earlier this week, the Paramount Pictures-associated website TransformersAreDangerous.com documents the (obviously purely fictional) rise of anti-Transformer sentiment in America. In the previous Transformers film, some of these alien robots killed a bunch of people and blew up a lot of stuff in Chicago, so the advent of a “KEEP EARTH HUMAN” movement isn’t exactly stunning.

Much of the anti-Transformer/pro-human propaganda certainly resembles what you might expect from anti-immigration hardliners. Here are a couple posters from the website:

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

And here’s a fake PSA on the “fall of Chicago”:

So will this dose of mindless, robots-battling-robots summer fun also double as Michael Bay’s impassioned cry for immigration reform? Dunno. We’ll have to wait until the end of June to find out. In the meantime, here’s a trailer for the upcoming Transformers flick:

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Wait, So the New "Transformers" Movie Is a Pro-Immigration Allegory?

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John Boehner Speaks Up For Main Street Republicanism

by Sybil0169hkc Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve always felt a little sorry for John Boehner. In another era—a non-tea party era—he would have been your basic Main Street Republican, willing to cut compromises to keep the country moving along in a tolerably orderly way. The kind of guy who would have taken his cues from the Middletown Rotary Club.

Speaking of which, Boehner spoke to the Middletown Rotary Club yesterday and let his hair down. For most Republicans, this would have meant getting caught making some kind of incendiary remarks about Obama thuggery and class warfare against job creators. In Boehner’s case, it meant some incendiary remarks about the, um, unrealistic attitudes of the more excitable members of his caucus:

On immigration: “Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,” Boehner whined before a luncheon crowd at Brown’s Run County Club in Madison Township. “We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”

On Obamacare: “(To) repeal Obamacare … isn’t the answer. The answer is repeal and replace. The challenge is that Obamacare is the law of the land. It is there and it has driven all types of changes in our health care delivery system. You can’t recreate an insurance market over night.”

On the tea party: “I don’t have any issue with the tea party. I have issues with organizations in Washington who raise money purporting to represent the tea party, those organizations who are against a budget deal the president and I cut that will save $2.4 trillion over 10 years….I made it pretty clear I’ll stand with the tea party but I’m not standing with these three or four groups in Washington who are using the tea party for their own personal benefit.”

This is all about pragmatism, a cri de coeur against the Foxification of the Republican Party. And I guess it means one of two things. Either Boehner doesn’t really care much about holding onto his leadership position anymore, or else he’s sensed that there’s a burgeoning Main Street backlash against the radicalism of the tea party wing of the modern GOP.

Boehner has always wanted to govern, and he’s never believed that compromise was surrender. That’s not the kind of pol he is. But he’s been hemmed in by the demands of the tea party, and now maybe he’s starting to think it’s time to bust out. The Middletown Rotary Club is probably more interested in keeping things on an even keel than in endless confrontation and hostage taking that does nothing except hurt the economy. They think immigration reform is good for business, and even if they don’t like Obamacare, they probably understand by now that it’s not a catastrophe and it’s time to make the best of it. Maybe they’re finally starting to find their voice.

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John Boehner Speaks Up For Main Street Republicanism

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For Republicans, Immigration Reform Is Unavoidable

by KaraRaineiguo Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Should Republicans support immigration reform this year? From a purely political perspective, there are good reasons not to:

It would anger the conservative base, which is dead set against any kind of comprehensive immigration reform that allows undocumented workers to stay in the country legally (i.e., a “path to citizenship” or a path to legal residence of some kind).
Even outside the tea party base, most Republicans oppose immigration reform.
It almost certainly wouldn’t help Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. It might even hurt them.

What about the other side? In my view, there’s really only one good reason for the Republican leadership to forge ahead despite all this:

In the long term, it would be good for the party. Opposition to immigration reform is a festering sore that prevents the GOP from appealing to the fast-growing Hispanic population, something that they’ll have to address eventually.

In the simplest sense, then, this is an issue of timing. At some point, Republicans will have to bite the bullet and do this. They just can’t keep losing the Hispanic vote 70-30 and expect to ever win the presidency again. It’s a simple question of brute numbers. The question is how long they can hold out.

My own guess is that now is just about as good as it’s going to get for Republicans. With a House majority, they have a fair amount of leverage to get the kind of bill they can live with. In fact, if they play their cards right, they might end up with a bill that fractures Democrats even more than Republicans. But what if they wait? Passing a bill is hopeless in 2015, with primary season for the presidential election so close. It’s possible that Republicans will be better off in 2017, but that’s a long shot. Democrats are certain to do well in that year’s Senate races, and are probably modest favorites to win the presidency again. Republicans would have less leverage than ever if that happens.

And even if the long shot pays off, what good would it do them? Immigration reform of the kind that would pass muster with the tea party base wouldn’t do the GOP any good. In fact, it would probably give Democrats an opening to get Hispanic voters even more riled up. What Republicans desperately need is a bill that (a) is liberal enough to satisfy the Hispanic community, but (b) can be blamed on Democrats and a few turncoat moderate Republicans in November.

I’m not optimistic about getting a decent bill passed this year, but what optimism I do have is based on this simple-minded analysis. If Republicans are smart, they’ll get this monkey off their backs now, when it won’t do them too much harm in the midterms but will give them time to start mending fences with Hispanics in time for 2016. Unfortunately, smart is in short supply these days.

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For Republicans, Immigration Reform Is Unavoidable

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

by al36olu Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the US-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of US Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore. There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the US southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States.

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How the US Militarized the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

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How Immigration Reform Could End the Budget Wars

by SherlynHa Posted on November 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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The conversation in Congress’ latest budget meeting Wednesday revolved around the standard issues you’d expect from DC politicians raising a fuss about the deficit: the Democrats argued that raising taxes should be the priority and Republicans pushed cuts in entitlement programs. But a few outliers from both parties offered an alternative route for fixing the fiscal impasse. “I would like to mention one other national priority,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said, speaking directly to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), “that could both help get the economy moving, help reduce the deficit, and strengthen Social Security. And that would be to pass the comprehensive immigration bill within the House of Representatives. That would accomplish a lot of the goals of this committee, and we simply need a vote to make it happen.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) chimed in with a similar argument later in the meeting. “As you look down the road,” he said, “what drives the debt? Eighty million Baby Boomers…are going to retire in the next 30 or 40 years. Who replaces them in the workforce? That’s why I think we need rational immigration reform, because our population growth is pretty much stagnant.”

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How Immigration Reform Could End the Budget Wars

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Immigration Reform is Probably Dead

by LouisaFurpnvefn Posted on October 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Dave Weigel reads the tea leaves from Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue this morning, and concludes that the business community isn’t going to press for comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon:

Donohue’s sounding more amenable to the House conservatives’ approach to immigration reform, splitting up enforcement provisions (easily passed in the House) from legalization provisions (not as easily), not allowing a conference committee to merge the proposals. Josten is talking up the conference committee without making demands. The Chamber isn’t nudging the GOP to do anything more than conservatives are asking. So much (again!) for a Tea Party-business split.

I agree about the much-ballyhooed business/tea party split. It could still happen, but the truth is that the business wing and the tea party wing of the Republican Party aren’t really that far apart. In the budget showdown, for example, the preferred course of most of the business community was for Republicans to push as hard as they possibly could but to back down at the last second if they had to. And guess what? That’s exactly what they did. What’s not to like?

As for immigration reform, would the business community like to see a comprehensive bill pass? Sure, probably. Is it a huge priority? No, not really. Are they willing to go along with the obvious reality that it can’t pass the House? It sure sounds like it.

Nor is the piecemeal approach going to go anywhere. The whole point of comprehensive reform, roughly speaking, is that conservatives get something they want (tougher enforcement) in return for giving liberals something they want (broader legalization). Will Democrats vote for individual enforcement provisions without the legalization provisions? Never say never, but they’d be idiots to do it unless the House agrees to a conference committee that stitches everything together into one big bill. Democrats know pefectly well that once you give away all the enforcement stuff, Republicans no longer have any incentive to ever address legalization. It’s the only stick they have.

So as long as House Republicans stick to their guns and refuse to go to conference, immigration reform is dead. It’s possible that some kind of very minor bargain can be forged. Maybe stiffer E-Verify requirements in return for more H1-B visas, for example. But it’s hard to see how you get much more than that, and it sure doesn’t sound like the business community is going to push for more.

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Immigration Reform is Probably Dead

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Immigration Reform: Dead or Alive?

by rakill23 Posted on August 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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When Congress reconvenes in September, the immigration debate will pick up where it left off—that is, at a complete impasse. There is still broad, bipartisan support for comprehensive reform, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has refused to allow the bill passed by the Senate earlier this summer to come up for debate; instead, members of his caucus are pursuing piecemeal legislation that focuses primarily on border security. Meanwhile, the clock is running out. With a debt ceiling showdown looming this fall and the midterm elections fast approaching after that, it’s unclear whether the congressional calendar will allow enough time for any immigration legislation to advance before the current session of Congress expires.

Immigration reform advocates are publicly optimistic, but there’s plenty of cynicism among political observers. Last week, Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall declared reform dead and its proponents in denial that House Republicans will change their tune. Reformers should “forget the heroic measures to revive it,” he argued, and “get about telling the public who killed it and holding them accountable for their actions” in the midterm elections.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), has repeatedly said nothing will happen unless Boehner allows a vote on a broad path to citizenship for most of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Reform advocates are looking to October, when the bipartisan Gang of Seven plans to unveil its long-delayed comprehensive reform bill in House. The introduction of the bill will force House members to go on the record supporting or opposing the comprehensive, Senate-style reform bill and may eventually lead Boehner to bow to pressure on a path to citizenship.

“There’s this sort of beltway conventional wisdom that we’re dead, but we’re optimistic,” says Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, who responded to Marshall’s cynical take with an open letter touting the resolve of the immigration reform movement. “The Republicans have to do something or risk going out of business as a viable national party.”

Daniel Garza, a former Bush White House official who heads the Libre Initiative, an immigration reform group that approaches the topic from free-market perspective, doesn’t see a path to citizenship as an all-or-nothing proposition. “At minimum, what we want is legality,” he says. As a possible compromise with Democrats, some House Republicans have suggested a path to legalization that would allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, but would not lead to citizenship. “We feel that at minimum, that provides certainty to the folks who are coming here unauthorized that they won’t be deported tomorrow, and we think that is significant enough to get behind what they’re going to be proposing in the House.”

“Republicans are for immigration reform, they’re just not for what the Democrats are proposing,” says Garza, who believes a path to citizenship will be limited to the something like the KIDS Act, which would only affect individuals brought to the country illegally when they were children. “Democrats have defined immigration reform as a path to citizenship,” he adds, but while “publicly they won’t tell you they would settle for legalization, I think secretly they would.”

Sharry dismisses that as “wishful thinking,” arguing that giving undocumented immigrants the ability to become permanent residents but not citizens would relegate them to a “permanent underclass.” This is a proposition, he says, Democrats will reject out of hand.

Angela Kelley, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, is more cautious. “I think it’s a big assumption on both sides to say that under no circumstances would Democrats support, in the 11th hour, a program that didn’t include a direct path to citizenship,” she says. “But it’s also hard to imagine there would be much of a political win for Republicans if they’re supporting a second-class citizenship.”

For now, it’s a waiting game. “Republicans are going to have to make some really tough decisions, but ultimately they realize the demographic cliff they’re falling off of is only getting higher and their fall is only getter harder,” Kelley says.

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Immigration Reform: Dead or Alive?

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If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

by wojciechrak75 Posted on August 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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A previously unknown Bush administration program continued under President Barack Obama grants the FBI and other national security agencies broad authority to delay or squash the immigration applications of people from Muslim countries, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Under the program, immigrants can be designated “national security concerns” based on the flimsiest of rationales, such as coming from a “suspicious” country. Other criteria that can earn an immigrant this label include wiring money to relatives abroad, attending mosques the FBI has previously surveilled, or simply appearing in FBI case files.


Our Yearlong Investigation Into the Program to Spy on America’s Muslim Communities


How the Bureau Enlists Foreign Regimes to Detain and Interrogate US Citizens


When Did Lefty Darling Brandon Darby Turn Government Informant?


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Watch an FBI Surveillance Video


Documents: FBI Spies and Suspects, in Their Own Words

“This policy is creating a secret exclusion to bar many people who are eligible for citizenship because…of their national origin or religion or associations,” says Jennie Pasquarella, the ACLU lawyer who authored a new report on the program, which is called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP). “It’s doing this without the knowledge of the public, without the knowledge of applicants, and without, we believe, the knowledge of Congress.”

The criteria laid out under CARRP, which took effect in April 2008, are used to process nearly every immigration application. But once the FBI or another government agency flags an immigrant as a potential national security threat, that person’s application for citizenship or permanent residency is shunted off into a separate system, where it lingers and is almost invariably rejected. The immigrants who have been labeled “national security concerns” have no way to know about or contest the decision.

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If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

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