Cutting Off Your Nose

The Trump administration decreed on July 6 that international students have to leave the country if their universities opt for online-only classes because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The anti-immigrant cruelty of this order is surpassed only by its utter stupidity.

Slamming the Door on Refugees—Again

On June 6, 1939, the United States refused to allow entrance to 937 refugees from Nazi Germany who arrived on the M.S. St. Louis. Today, the Trump administration refuses to allow entrance to any refugees. Its latest: a regulation denying asylum to almost everyone. The regulation would:

• restrict protection for people who have been or fear that they will be tortured;
• eliminate all protection for people fleeing violence from non-government actors (such as paramilitaries, gangs, or even rogue police or military officers acting without legal orders);
• deny asylum to anyone who travels through a third country on their way to the United States—thus putting into a regulation the very provision that U.S. courts have said violates U.S. law;
• strip away due process rights for asylum seekers;
• deny asylum to anyone whose claim is based on gender, which would include all victims of domestic violence, even when that violence is endorsed by their country’s law enforcement apparatus, and all LGBTQ people whose lives are endangered by persecution in their home countries.

What You Can Do About Immigration and Refugees

Photo by Joe Frazier, used under Creative Commons license https://www.flickr.com/photos/146781514@N05/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I recently got an email from someone who had heard me give a presentation on immigration myths and realities. They wanted to know what they could do. Maybe someone reading this also wants to know what they can do about the relentlessly anti-immigrant actions of this administration. Here’s what I wrote in response:

CELEBRATE! Supreme Court Says Yes to DACA

ln a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today dealt a major blow to the Trump administration, reversing the administration’s attempt to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which leads off the complex 74-page array of concurrences and dissents. Click here to read the pdf of the opinion, if you are so inclined.

After years of organizing by and for Dreamers, DACA was created on June 15, 2012, by President Barack Obama. “Dreamers” are undocumented immigrants who entered the United States at a young age and have grown up here. In every sense that counts—except for visas—this is their home.

Suspending the Law to Build a Wall

Saguaro cacti at Organ Pipe National Monument. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Drax Delton at the Q52 project.

The Trump administration has unilaterally suspended more than two dozen laws in border areas in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California to allow border wall construction to proceed without any legal limitation. These laws  include:

• The National Environmental Policy Act
• the Endangered Species Act
• the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly referred to as the Clean Water Act
• the National Historic Preservation Act
• the Migratory Bird Treaty Act
• the Migratory Bird Conservation Act
• the Clean Air Act
• the Archeological Resources Protection Act
• the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act
• the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act of 1988
• the Safe Drinking Water Act
• the Noise Control Act
• the Solid Waste Disposal Act
• the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
• the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act
• the Antiquities Act
• the Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act
• the Farmland Protection Policy Act
• National Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956
• the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
• the National Trails System Act
• the Administrative Procedure Act
• the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899
• the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act
• the Eagle Protection Act

The Trump administration also suspended the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

Immigration Policy as Child Abuse

From photo by Fibonacci Blue, published under Creative Commons license.

The stories break your heart. Two Honduran sisters, eight and eleven years old, were scheduled for deportation back to Honduras, where they have no family to care for them. Eight years old and eleven years old. Think about that.

People Helping People: Relief for Immigrants

Solidarity efforts across the country help immigrants barred from official government relief programs. Federal programs bar undocumented immigrants (and their U.S. citizen spouses and children) from COVID-19 relief benefits, even though these immigrants pay taxes. Some have lived, worked, and paid taxes in the United States for decades.

In Minnesota, the MN Immigrant Families COVID-19 Fund has raised nearly a quarter of a million dollars to support “immigrant families who don’t qualify for local, state or federal support,  and for those who, because of COVID-19, may be pushed even deeper into the shadows with little or few resources available to meet their immediate needs.” The fundraising is a collaborative effort with Asamblea de Derechos Civiles- St Cloud Chapter, Asian American Organizing Project (AAOP), Awood Center, Black Immigrant Collective (BIC), Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL), ISAIAH, Navigate MN and National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) St. Cloud chapter and Release MN8. Yes, you can still donate, and donations are tax-deductible.

ICE Detention Death Sentences

Federal courts have ordered ICE to provide minimal safety precautions to immigrants in detention. Soap. Water. Toilet paper. Reducing overcrowding to allow minimal social distancing. Detained immigrants still report lack of soap and sanitation supplies and dangerous overcrowding.

Now two immigrants have died of COVID-19 in detention. The first, 57-year-old Carlos Escobar Mejia, had lived in the United States for 40 years, died at Otay Mesa Detention Center:

Meatpacking and Moral Responsibility

*UPDATED 5/13/2020 with more MN data—More than a century ago, Upton Sinclair’s described dangerous and dirty meatpacking plants in The Jungle. Congress responded to public outrage by enacting the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Neither law protected workers. Public outrage focused not on brutal working conditions but on food safety.  “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair later said. Today, as thousands of meatpacking workers are infected with COVID-19 and dozens have already died, public policy still prioritizes our stomachs (and profits) over protection of workers.

The Thanks Essential Workers Need: Paychecks and Protection

Picking lettuce in California. Photo by yaxchibonam, published under Creative Commons license.

Nancy Silva, a 43-year-old woman who picks clementines in California, carries a letter from her employer saying that the Department of Homeland Security considers her “critical to the food supply chain.” A 25-year-old father of two young daughters in Mankato carries the same kind of letter. His work: cleaning food manufacturing plants. Like many other essential workers, they are immigrants.