January 27, 2018

Juan Orlando Hernandez inauguration in Honduras. Photo: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

wave of domestic and international condemnation. Despite reports by eyewitnesses including Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican, Trump denied insulting Haitians, Central Americans, and Africans. He also repeatedly denies that he is a racist. Representative Mia Love, a Republican and the only Haitian American in Congress, accepted the truth of the reports, called Trump’s behavior unacceptable, and demanded an apology.[…]

Laura S. Photo: Carolyn Drake / Magnum/New Yorker

Miami commemoration of the 2010 earthquake. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Haitian workers rally, Port-au-Prince, 2012. Photo: Marty Goodman/Socialist Action

Duane Street: protesters surround vehicle carrying Ravi Ragbir

The New Sanctuary Coalition is asking for phone calls to legislators and government officials demanding Ragbir’s release.—TPOI editor

Ragbir displays his handcuffs

https://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/stories/2018/1/2018-01-12-tm-jean-montrevil-detained-cl.html

Trump rants about Salvadoran gangs. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Witness for Peace

By Tom K. Wong, Center for American Progress
January 26, 2017
As the Trump administration begins to implement its immigration policy agenda, the issue of local assistance with federal immigration enforcement officials is back in the spotlight. So-called sanctuary jurisdictions are one focus of that debate. Sanctuary counties—as defined by this report—are counties that do not assist federal immigration enforcement officials by holding people in custody beyond their release date.1 Using an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, dataset obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center,2 the analyses in this report provide new insights about how sanctuary counties perform across a range of social and economic indicators when compared to nonsanctuary counties.

Assassinated Honduran activist Berta Cáceres

February 28, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/opinion/an-idealists-martyrdom-fails-to-move-honduras.html

Horrific conditions in the Northern Triangle led to a major policy crisis for the Obama administration. A new wave of refugees could do the same for Trump.

By Emily Gogolak, The Nation
December 26, 2016

Time passed slowly inside the detention center. It was the after noon of June 3, 2015, and the oppressive heat of South Texas reminded Lilian Oliva Bardales, a 19-year-old mother from Honduras, of home. For 239 days, she and her 4-year-old son, Cristhian, had been held inside the Karnes County Residential Center, a family immigration detention facility an hour southeast of San Antonio. Inside that day were 604 women, some of them pregnant, and their children, some of them still nursing, virtually all of whom were asylum seekers from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the violence-plagued region of Central America known as the Northern Triangle. Two hours west, a detention center in the small oil town of Dilley held another 1,459 mothers and children. Lilian had been informed the previous day that she and her son would soon be deported.

“I write you this card so you know how it feels to be in this damned place for eight months,” Lilian wrote in a small notebook, dotting her “i”s with open circles. She had been deported once before, in May 2014, when she came north without her son. “You humiliate all of us who have come to this country for the second time. If I do this it is because only God knows what I have suffered in my country. I come here so this country can help me, but here you’ve been killing me little by little with punishment and lies in prison when I haven’t committed any crime… I do this because I don’t feel any life going back to my country.” She signed her name and identification number, and left the notebook on her bunk bed.[...]

Read the full article:
https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-the-central-american-women-the-united-states-is-detaining-and-deporting/

By Yennifer Mateo and Joshua LeClair, People's World
April 25, 2016

LUMPKIN, GA - From April 5-9, People's World accompanied a local faith based advocacy group to visit immigrants being held at Corrections Corporation of America's (CCA) Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA. What we witnessed is criminal.

U.S. actions drive immigration

Before I delve into details of the trip, let's review a few things about the realities of immigrants in the U.S.

We cannot even begin a conversation about immigration without first addressing why people leave their home countries and begin a dangerous and often deadly journey to the U.S. We must first start with understanding how U.S. foreign policy and imperialism have been the root of many of the conflicts, economic insecurity, forced relocations and even genocides in much of the developing world. Let's start with what I know about my home country, the Dominican Republic.

On April 28th, 1965, 405 U.S. Marines landed in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, to support the U.S. backed military dictatorship in their fight against the Constitutionalists and revolutionary forces; a dictatorship responsible for over 50,000 murders including the Parsley Massacre and the disappearing of numerous political and union activists. To this day, U.S. and Canadian businesses through economic and political means, continue to make it nearly impossible for the Dominican people to make a life for themselves and determine their own political destiny. Please go here for a more detailed history of U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic.[...]

Read the full article:
http://peoplesworld.org/hope-vs-horror-realities-of-u-s-immigration-and-foreign-policy/

Undocumented Mexican migration essentially ended in 2008

By Douglas S. Massey, MarketWatch
April 21, 2016

Throughout the Republican primary debates, all candidates have vociferously called for more border enforcement. Donald Trump famously proposes the construction of a 2,000-mile border wall and to make Mexicans pay for it.

This inflamed rhetoric is odd given the fact that undocumented Mexican migration, on a net basis, ended in 2008 and has been zero or negative for the past eight years. Although other Latin Americans continued to arrive at the border in small numbers, the volume isn't enough to yield a positive inflow of people.

Undocumented migration from Mexico actually began to decline in 1999, not because of border enforcement, but because of that country’s demographic transition. From a fertility rate of around seven children per woman in the 1960s, Mexican fertility fell rapidly in subsequent years and today stands at 2.25 children per woman.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/donald-trump-will-build-a-mexican-wall-to-solve-a-problem-that-doesnt-actually-exist-2016-04-20

By David L. Wilson, MRzine
April 13, 2016

On April 24, 2013, some 1,134 people died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The building housed factories where low-wage workers, largely women, stitched garments for the U.S. and European markets.

For several years before the disaster a number of U.S. opinion makers -- notably New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof -- had been arguing that assembly plants like those at Rana Plaza were crucial to the development of economies in the Global South and therefore a boon to the world's most impoverished. The media's efforts to promote sweatshops suddenly slowed down after the collapse in Bangladesh, but they seem to be reviving now, just as we approach the third anniversary of the disaster.

The occasion for the new pro-sweatshop campaign is Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' opposition to trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).[...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/wilson130416.html

By David L. Wilson, Truthout
March 15, 2016

There are two surprising facts that most mainstream US media outlets have studiously ignored in their coverage of immigration and the 2016 presidential campaign:

First, the Republican candidates are promising to end a wave of unauthorized immigration that actually ended eight years ago.

And second, the same working-class white people who cheer billionaire candidate Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rants would themselves benefit from legalizing the immigration status of the approximately 11 million people who currently lack legal papers.

We'd be well on our way to ending the current anti-immigrant frenzy if only we could get these two facts across to a majority of the US population - and this might be the year to do it.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35220-from-scapegoating-to-solidarity-2016-is-the-year-to-turn-the-immigration-debate-around

As investigative journalist Allan Nairn said on Democracy Now! in January: "Well, you know, if you go and burn down your neighbor's house, don't complain when, as they run from the flames, they come onto your lawn."

By David L. Wilson and Jane Guskin, MRZine
March 13, 2016

The March 9 debate in Miami between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was the first chance the two candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination had to discuss immigration and its connections to trade and U.S. policy in Latin America. Unfortunately, neither candidate took advantage of the opportunity.

The mainstream "immigration debate" generally avoids mentioning the forces that have driven millions of Latin Americans to move here without legal authorization over the past forty years. The media and the politicians treat the migration either as a natural disaster ("flooding over the border") or as a second-rate science fiction movie ("the aliens are invading") -- with either scenario seen as deserving an aggressive response.[...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/wg130316.html

By Meleiza Figueroa, Truthdig
February 19, 2016

At first glance, Thursday seemed like a banner day for Hillary Clinton’s “minority firewall.” Several respected leaders of Latinx organizations offered their enthusiastic support for the Democratic presidential candidate, while at the same time—Beyoncé-style—her campaign dropped a new, emotionally charged ad into the Nevada market two days before the state’s crucial caucus event. In the ad, a 10-year-old Latina girl expresses fear for her parents, who have just received a letter of deportation. Clinton urges her to be “brave” and let Clinton do “all the worrying”; the candidate chokes up as she tells the child, “I’m going to do everything I can so you won’t be scared.”

Though the ad was obviously meant to be warm and inspiring, it chilled me to the bone. I grew up in Los Angeles—the great Latinx-majority metropolis I once heard described as “the northernmost city in Latin America”—as the child of immigrants, and I have been a witness to the great transformations wrought by the dynamics of immigration over the last few decades. And I cannot reconcile Clinton’s newfound role as “worrier-in-chief” for immigrants in the U.S. with what I know about the policies she has supported for that vast region south of our border where many immigrants to the United States (especially those lacking legal permission) come from.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hillary_clinton_cries_crocodile_tears_for_latin_american_immigrants_2016021

By Jeff Abbott, Truthout
February 13, 2016

This year Guatemala inaugurated a new president: Jimmy Morales, a former comedian known for a racist television show in which he regularly performed in blackface and mocked Guatemala's indigenous populations. Morales, who took office on January 14, had positioned himself as a political outsider who was able to ride the wave of popular discontent to the office. But before his inauguration, Morales was paid a special visit by US Vice President Joseph Biden, whose late arrival disrupted the events planned for the day. Biden privately met with the new president in an upscale hotel in Guatemala's wealthy Zone 10. Guatemala's daily newspaper reports that the two discussed the importance of Washington's latest plan to curb northern migration, the Alliance for Prosperity.

A month prior, the US Senate passed the controversial Alliance for Prosperity Plan as part of the 2016 budget on December 18, 2015, in a vote of 66 to 33. The plan includes $750 million to improve governance, strengthen security and promote the economic integration of the northern triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In late 2015, Mexico and Nicaragua were both added to the plan, with each country receiving nearly $120 million of the funds made available to secure their borders.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34776-the-alliance-for-prosperity-solution-to-the-central-american-migrant-crisis-or-deja-vu