Posts
3/17/21
YOU THOUGHT MPP WAS BAD? WELCOME TO TITLE 42.
Under the banner of an arcane heath code, families with small children fleeing the deadly violence of Central America are being kidnapped, raped, extorted, assaulted, murdered in some of the most dangerous cities in Mexico. Cities designated by the United States State Department as “Category 4” - places to which Americans should never ever travel due to risk of kidnapping and violence.
Drawing by Marc Nelson for Every.Last.One.
3/15/21
The wall can be a stupid ugly fence.
It can be towering bollards, a word no one ever used until we started erecting them out of steel on the southern border.
It can be guards in green uniforms driving vans up and down dirt paths along a river.
It can be boats with mounted automatic weapons and itchy triggers.
It can be planes with chains that rattle as men and women, heads down, watch their feet take short steps up a gangway.
And it can be a law that calls people on the other side diseased, and removes them, even though nobody thinks it’s true.
3/15/21
Day 15 of Witnessing at Homestead, Part 2
If you'd like to join us to witness at Homestead, we are usually here from 9:00 to 4:00 every day. Just put 920 Bougainville Blvd in your GPS. If we don't know you're coming, maybe wait until 10:00 just to be sure someone is here. It would be great if you can sign up to let us know when to expect you. There are 4 links below, covering several 2 week periods. Just put your name in as many or as few hours as you'd like. We are here to see what we can see relating to preparations to open. And to be seen, so it is known there is opposition to this re-opening. Our goal is to #KeepHomesteadClosed
3/15/21
ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 8 March 2021.
Monday started the 2 per day flights from Brownsville to El Paso, and several originated in San Antonio accounting for 13 of the 66 shuffle flights.
Although initially the implication seemed to be to shelters in El Paso that the 270 people a day on the 2 flights were going to be released to them, we were always suspicious of that conclusion. It appears that some of the people on those planes are being expelled into MX from El Paso. Especially worrisome is if families are flown there for expulsion because MX won’t receive them in Tamaulipas, but will in Chihuahua.
3/14/21
There has been a lot of debate and discussion within this group over the last few days about influx shelter and their place in the current situation at the border. Many of us argue that there are 2 key ways to reduce the need to increase shelter space, and thus reduce the need for large influx shelters like Homestead and Carrizo Springs.
3/14/21
When a judge told Biden that he could not suspend deportations for 100 days, as the administration had announced, he did not tell Biden he could not immediately cut down on deportations. He didn’t say, for instance, that this would be a great time to load up planes with Haitians, and fly them back to a land in political and economic chaos. Or to continue his policy of immediate expulsions of hundreds of thousands of people, by land and by plane.
3/13/21
How are we to understand the reluctance of the current administration to take decisive action to end the anti-immigrant hysteria of the last decades? Why does policy continue to rely on the mythology of invasion when a simpler, pacific view of the movements of rational people is plainly within our intellectual reach?
3/12/21
From Witness at Homestead: Stop the Re-Opening Campaign in Florida
We have seen this truck or one like it every day. Today is Day 12. We've also seen other pest control trucks. I wonder what kind of infestation they're dealing with. Do you think this is a good place for kids? And it's a superfund site, with dangerous pollution. And it's next to an Air Base, with frightening, noisy jets coming and going every day. Why would anyone want to imprison traumatized teens here?
3/12/21
How to make an unaccompanied minor:
1. Use a policy that relies on people’s fear of disease to pretend that migrants are a contagion threat to prevent families with children from seeking asylum. This forces families to send children across the border by themselves.
And more….
Photo: Allan Mestel, Homestead FL
3/10/21
Root Causes and the Right to Migrate
One of the key ways in which the Biden-Harris administration could take innovative, decisive steps to dismantle Trump’s devastating legacy as to immigration and border policy is through its reiterated commitments to address the “root causes” of continuing mass migration from the Mesoamerican region (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico) and beyond (Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, among other possible examples). (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
3/8/21
It began as families huddling together at the foot of the bridge across the border river in Matamoros, Mexico. Told at first that they must wait their turn for a chance to plead for asylum, for mercy, they stayed on the plaza, in a pocket of concrete in sight of the uniformed troops that stood guarding the arched path to the other side, a walkway daily slowly traversed by those clutching the documents that allowed their passage.
