Category Archives: Immigration

Attorney General Merrick Garland Speaks at Ellis Island (Take That, Ron)

Attorney General Merrick Garland swore in 200 new citizens at Ellis Island to celebrate the anniversary of the Constitution. Garland spoke about his immigrant grandparents, in an unusually personal and moving talk that serves as a rebuke to the neo-fascists busing and flying immigrants around the country as human pawns.

By the way, this post at Digby’s Blog has fascinating details about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s migrant-shipping flights to Martha’s Vineyard, including a copy of the (false and misleading) brochure prepared to lure asylum-seekers to the airplanes.

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Sincerely, Estella

From the DNC last night:

Posted in 2020 Election, Immigration | 1 Comment

Closing in on Next Time

I was clicking about to see if there was a Miami chapter of Never Again Action when I stumbled on this gem,

“In the winter, 10% of U.S. Jews are in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties,” said Eva Shvedova, the museum store and group tour manager at the Jewish Museum of Florida, where I took in a tour during a Miami Cultural Crawl. “There are about 600,000, mostly in Broward County,” she said, “and 124,000 Jews in Miami-Dade alone.”

Why not? Jews are many things, but they aren’t stupid. With sultry temps about 80 degrees all week, plenty of action and the ability to make foolproof plans in the winter, Florida is a guaranteed warm and pleasant destination.

10%??? That’s too good a statistic to check for veracity. Although they did get the weather wrong as it’s only February, but rather than warm and pleasant it is already more like hot and humid — one might say, almost oppressive.

Which brings me back to Never Again Action, I didn’t find a local branch, but did find their bright yellow T-shirts. On the radio this morning they were talking about California’s apology for the Japanese Internment. Given the ramped-up national campaign against immigrants, and the policies of deportation and cruel detention, a T-shirt doesn’t seem like quite enough of a response somehow.

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Useful Advice

Tips For Staying Civil While Debating Child Prisons.

A sample: “Avoid unkind generalizations like equating the jailing of ethnic minorities with some malevolent form of fascism.” And “Make sure any protests are peaceful, silent, and completely out of sight of anyone who could actually affect government policy.”

Previously: Yes, We Have Reached a New Low

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Yes, We Have Reached a New Low

…and I suspect we’ll go lower.

A lawyer from the US Department of Justice argued (with by all accounts a straight face and no embarrassment) to a federal court of appeals that the US has no obligation to give soap or toothbrushes to children being detained — in cages — in a federal facility while their asylum claims are pending.

Meanwhile the online crowds are debating what to call these places where kids sleep on concrete floors under foil blankets, and will no longer get English lessons or even playground access.

Is it wrong to call them “concentration camps”? That’s what the British authorities called the camps in which they imprisoned Afrikaners; the US called the WWII-era camps in which they put US citizens of Japanese origin “internment camps” but I’ve head people call them concentration camps. The terminology gets muddied when one brings in the Nazis. Historians distinguish between the Nazis’ “concentration camps” and the Nazis’ “death camps”, but I suspect a large part of the non-Jewish public today mostly doesn’t.

Personally, although I have no problem with the term “concentration camp” since it’s historically accurate, I think the best word is “atrocity”.

PS. Just to head off one common and inaccurate rejoinder, a recent study shows that “When families and unaccompanied children have access to legal representation, the rate ofcompliance with immigration court obligations is nearly 98 percent.”

And to anticipate a second rejoinder, Godwin’s Law does not apply here.

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ICE Routinely Seeks to Detain US Citizens in Miami-Dade County

When I can summon the energy to do so, I worry that the current unpleasantness threatens to exhaust my capacity for outrage.

However, I am now able to report that some news still shocks and surprises, such as this report from the ACLU, Citizens on Hold: A Look at ICE’s Flawed Detainer System in Miami-Dade County. It is not pretty reading.

Miami-Dade County’s records show that between February 2017 and February 2019, ICE sent the jail 420 detainer requests for people listed as U.S. citizens, only to later cancel 83 of those requests—evidently because the agency determined, after the fact, that its targets were in fact U.S. citizens. The remaining individuals’ detainers were not canceled, and so they continued to be held for ICE to deport them.

The ACLU reports that false detainer requests are fairly common across the country, but that we here in Miami are the epicenter.

Immigrant-rights groups say ICE’s databases are filled with outdated information. (And the ACLU says ICE’s data bases often fails to reflect that people become naturalized citizens.) And, ACLU notes a CNN investigation that showed ICE agents routinely forging their bosses’ signatures on critical detention warrants to skip mandatory document reviews.

Meanwhile, the State Legislature is considering a bill that would require local cops to honor ICE requests.

(Spotted via New Times, ICE Issued False Deportation Requests for 420 U.S. Citizens in Miami-Dade, ACLU Reports.)

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