Posts
3/2/21
The following is a response to a question I am repeatedly asked: on the issue of how to handle migrant children at our borders, what would I do instead? Here are some thoughts.
The claim is that the current flow and expected increase in the flow of unaccompanied minors into the country will exceed hard-walled shelter capacity, necessitating the extensive use of temporary influx shelters which are determined to be comparatively detrimental to child welfare. This discussion accepts the premise.
3/1/21
ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 22 Feb 2021.
Photo: A young girl learns she will be freed from the trap of MPP in Matamoros and will join her family in the US to seek asylum. Joy.
Far fewer removal flights than most weeks at 15. Driven by 6 fewer flights per week to Mexico.
There were a large number of domestic flights shuffling people around the US, but some may have been make-up flights from those weather impacted the prior week.
3/1/21
You want to move your family to North Carolina. Some of your family already lives there. They went a few years ago when they heard there was work there, building furniture. Some farm work. Rents are not high, especially if you are willing to tolerate the smell of pig farms when the wind shifts in the spring.
2/26/21
When the US government was sued by attorneys representing a little girl named Jenny Lisette Flores, a few principles were established that were intended to improve the experience of migrant children who were going through traumatic transition as a result of their migration to this country, often involving separation from their families.
It was determined that the most damaging thing you could do to children was to restrict them, in other words, to lock them up.
2/24/21
What’s Next? Postcard Campaign
Urgent Postcard - Mailing February 24-28
Imprisoning Children is STILL Wrong
Recently the Biden administration has announced that it is opening/reopening several “Influx” Child Detention Centers. We oppose these moves and need to make sure that the Biden administration hears our opposition.
2/23/21
So we wake up this morning to what feels like floodwaters rising.
The way we address the migration of people from other places, places we have sunk into poverty and criminality with our greed and indifference, falls into old familiar patterns, across administrations. So, once again, we turn a humanitarian question into one of security, this time pretending that disease is preventing us from exercising our humanity.
2/22/21
Many in this group would like to believe that, now that Trump is out of power, the struggle for migrant rights is over. The thing that got me involved, grabbed my attention, was family separation. I rushed down to the border, thinking i would add a voice to the cries for the policy to end.
But what I found was something different. The longer I have spent looking at the plight of people who migrate, the more I see that the issue is not one that restricts itself to one political party or leader.
2/21/21
Since Title 42 has been in place, the # of pedestrians and passengers crossing the border from Mexico approaches 100,000,000. No health checks. During that time, 440,000 migrants were expelled with no chance to assert their legal right to asylum because of health concerns. Logic?
Map: Decolonial Atlas
2/21/21
ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 15 Feb 2021.
Week severely impacted by weather. Average daily flights are around 18 and this week the daily flights were M-F, 6, 7, 3, 3. This week there and 18, respectively. In a typical week there are 21 removal flights. This week there were only 12. In a typical week there are 89 total ICE Air legs. This week there were only 37.
2/19/21
We don’t have to reach very deep into our xenophobic souls to find an assumption that is resilient and persistent: the belief that the threat of contagious disease comes from foreigners, a greater threat, for instance, than the risk you might run at a basketball game at an American high school gym. This unfounded belief is based on no evidence at all that disease, like Covid, is any more prevalent in the migrant population than it is at an an all-American Thanksgiving dinner. It is simply not so.
