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Immigrants

Labor Fights End To ‘Temporary Protected Status’ For 59K Haitians

November 25, 2017 Max Zahn, transform-network.net , , , ,
By Max Zahn for Waging Nonviolence - Wilna Destin, a UNITE HERE organizer, fled political unrest in Haiti 17 years ago for asylum in the United States. After arriving on her own in Miami, Florida, she worked restaurant and hospitality jobs in Orlando, eventually gaining accreditation as a nursing assistant. She married and had two children. She built a life. When the Trump administration announced on Monday night that it would end temporary protected status, or TPS, for approximately 59,000 Haitians in 2019, Destin learned that she will have to leave in a matter of months. “I was shocked,” she said. “I’m not ready to go back.” Labor advocates across the country aren’t ready to see her and her fellow Hatians go either. In the latest surge of labor opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, union leaders and rank-and-file members rallied on short notice Tuesday, vowing to fight the TPS decision and seek a path to citizenship for the Haitians affected by it. TPS is an immigration status granted to foreign-born residents unable to return home due to dangerous or challenging circumstances in their native countries. In 2010, the Obama administration granted TPS to Haitian-born residents after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti that year. “This is a very, very terrible moment for us in the labor movement,” said Gerard Cadet, vice president of Service Employees International Union 1199, at a press conference in lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning. According to Cadet, who was born in Haiti, over 12 percent of SEIU 1199 members are Haitian immigrants.

America Was Never White

August 25, 2017 Joe Krulder, historynewsnetwork.org , , ,
By Joe Krulder for the History News Network. Events in Charlottesville recently cascaded into domestic terrorism. Three dead and dozens wounded as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other “alt-right” members descended upon the university that Thomas Jefferson built; their purpose, it is alleged, to defend a statue – a monument – to the Confederate Civil War soldier, General Robert E. Lee. These radical rightists arrived from all across the United States upon the college town of Charlottesville to protect, in their words, their “white” heritage. Among the many problems I have with so-called “white supremacists” is their purposeful mixing of “heritage” with “history,” rhetorically pining for a once proud “white” America. But history proves that America was never white. That I need to make this statement, and worse, that some may take offense from it, shows the blurring rhetoric between what is Heritage and what is History.

Hidden History Of Japanese American Incarceration And Defiance

August 8, 2017 Elliott Gabriel, www.telesurtv.net , ,
By Elliott Gabriel for Tele Sur - Filmmaker Konrad Aderer's grandparents were among those incarcerated in the camps. In his latest documentary, “Resistance at Tule Lake,” viewers are presented with a long-stifled aspect of the tragedy of Japanese American detention, with the organized mass resistance bravely waged by the 12,000 residents branded as “disloyal” to the U.S. government taking center stage. Detained under color of law at the Tule Lake Segregation Center along California's northern border, the protagonists of “Resistance” defy attempts to marginalize their suffering or their defiance. The documentary, which is being screened at select venues, gives audiences a rarely-heard opportunity to listen the voices of those who were unexpectedly plunged into “a hell,” as one survivor recounts, but maintained the strength not only to survive, but also to fight back. “The resistance that arose in the incarcerated Japanese American community is a story that has been largely hidden until now,” Aderer told teleSUR. “And it holds so much more much more meaning now, can be better understood in this post-post-9/11 era when, absent any new major attack in the United States, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hatred has managed to become even more vicious and influential."

Immigrants In Georgia Detention Centers Put In Solitary For Hunger Strikes

May 8, 2017 Kevin Gosztola, www.shadowproof.com , , ,
By Kevin Gosztola for Shadow Proof - Georgia immigrant detention centers frequently put asylum seekers and other migrants into solitary confinement as punishment for going on hunger strike. In a report [PDF] produced by Project South and the Penn State Law Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, human rights abuses at Stewart Detention Center and Irwin County Detention Center are examined. Twenty-four year-old Somali asylum seeker Sadam Hussein Ali describes how he was punished in 2016 at the Stewart Detention Center. “The staff put me in segregation for several days because I participated in the hunger strike that happened around Thanksgiving. They also fired me from my kitchen job for participating in the strike,” Ali said. “About twenty other Somali detainees were put in segregation. In segregation, I couldn’t see outside. I lost track of whether it was day or night. I had to request to use the bathroom every time; then I was chained; and then a guard would walk me to the bathroom in chains. I participated in the hunger strike because we have been detained for far too long. The nurses actually threatened to force-feed all of us on the hunger strike.”

50 Clergy, Students & Allies Sit-In At Detention Center

April 25, 2017 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org , , , ,
By Staff of Cosecha. The sit in a the South Bay detention center in Boston comes in response to the detention of three immigrant rights activists from Justicia Migrante in Burlington, VT: Jose Enrique “Kike” Balcazar, Zully Victoria Palacios, and Cesar Alexis Carrillo Sanchez. ICE has been specifically targeting immigrant rights activists in what appears to be blatant political retaliation for advocating publicly for the rights of immigrants and dairy workers. “While the realities of raids, repression, and deportations are nothing new for our people, they’ve reached an unbearable boiling point,” said Rodrigo Saavedra, a Cosecha organizer. “The time has come for immigrants to transform the political weather. Cosecha is planning what could be the largest immigrant strike since the 2006 megamarches on May 1. It will be a Day Without Immigrants: We won’t work; we won’t buy; we won't go to school. Instead, we will rise together, we will march together and, in the absence of our labor and consumption, we will be recognized.”
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