U.S. deported over 13,000 unaccompanied children last year

On Tuesday, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) released a report confirming that 13,454 unaccompanied Mexican minors under the age of 18 were deported from the U.S. in 2012, according to Animal Politico.

Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 6,548 accompanied and 24,481 unaccompanied children, a total that includes Mexican minors. The rate of border-crossing minors tripled since 2008 to the point that in 2012, unaccompanied minors comprised 79 percent of all juvenile border crossers.

Once apprehended, minors are placed with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an U.S. Health and Human Services agency that takes custody of minors while their cases are being adjudicated. While the majority of minors from Mexico are returned without being detained, some children are kept in adult detention centers. In 2012, those children spent anywhere between three days to more than an year. Indeed, over 1,300 children spent a combined one hundred years in adult detention centers last year.

Whereas the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a policy of detaining children in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their age and needs, they have not always followed through on those orders. One four-year old child was subjected to freezing conditions.

Oklahoma votes on banning affirmative action

State Question 759.
Lawrence Ware on the attempt to repeal Affirmative Action in Oklahoma from Bruce Prescott on Vimeo.

AMLO con Javier Alatorre Hechos 15 junio 2012

Dolores Huerta Receives Presidential Medal of Freedom

DSA Honorary Chair Dolores Huerta Receives Presidential Medal

Watch Dolores Huerta Calls Herself 'a Born-Again Feminist' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

 President Obama presented  Dolores Huerta with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Cesar Chavez once described Dolores Huerta as “completely fearless, both mentally and physically.”

Over six decades, Dolores Huerta put the nonviolent fight for civil and labor rights ahead of her personal interests, and sometimes before her personal safety. Like all the farm worker strikers and boycotters, she accepted a life of voluntary poverty for many decades. Her dynamic and inspiring leadership through the most difficult and turbulent times in the farm worker movement’s history established her not only as a leader of farm workers but as a role model for women and men across this nation and beyond.
Dolores is an Honorary Chair of Democratic Socialists of America. 

          

World Financial Crisis

El Consejo de la Internacional Socialista celebró un encuentro en San José, Costa Rica, los días 23 y 24 de enero, contando con su partido miembro en ese país, el Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) como anfitrión, y con la presencia de líderes y delegados de partidos socialdemócratas, laboristas y socialistas de diversas regiones del mundo (lista de participantes). La reunión, que tuvo como temas principales la actual crisis financiera mundial y el cambio climático, ambas materias hoy en el centro de las preocupaciones del movimiento socialdemócrata, contó con la participación de S.E. Laura Chinchilla, Presidenta de la República de Costa Rica en la sesión inaugural. El Consejo discutió asimismo el fortalecimiento de la Internacional, con miras al XXIV Congreso de la organización que se celebrará este año. 


Apertura

Al iniciar las sesiones de esta primera reunión del Consejo en Costa Rica, el Secretario General de la IS Luis Ayala saludó los numerosos logros del PLN durante sus diferentes periodos en gobierno, que han hecho de este país, dijo, un buen ejemplo del éxito de las políticas socialdemócratas. Los socialdemócratas, enfatizó, se encontraban globalmente hoy en la vanguardia, ofreciendo un liderazgo progresista y proponiendo soluciones a las crisis financiera y climática, y esta reunión del Consejo era una muy buena oportunidad para definir juntos las actuales prioridades y los objetivos para hacerles frente desde nuestra propia visión y compromiso. Agradeció al PLN por acoger la reunión e invitó a su presidente a dirigirse al Consejo.

How Do We Respond to Obama?

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

April 21, 2011

http://www.blackcommentator.com/423/423_ml_bring_obama_home.php

Rather than dwell on the question of whether we can

bring Obama home, whether he ever was home, etc., I

want to refocus on this question of how to respond to

him, particularly as we start to think about 2012.

First, what do we now say about 2008? Contrary to those

who have thrown up their hands and feel betrayed by

what the Obama administration has not done, I start in

a different place. I continue to assert that Obama was

knowable in 2008. He was a charismatic, smart candidate

who made the right call on the Iraq War and stepped out

on the issue when it was necessary. He was also, as I

said at the time, someone who could appear to be

different things to different people. The problem was

that too many of his supporters saw what they wanted to

see rather than what existed.

What existed? Well, from the beginning he was a

corporate candidate. We knew that. The question was not

whether he was one but the extent to which his views

could be shifted in order to take progressive, non-

corporate stands. Second, he was a candidate who was

going to avoid race as you or I would avoid a plague

ship. He went out of his way to prove that he was not

an `angry black man' and that race was not going to be

an issue that he would harp on. Third, he was clear

that he wanted to change the image of the USA around

the world, but it was not clear to what extent he

wanted to change the substance of the relationship of

the USA to the rest of the world.