Central American Refugee Caravan- How you can help

Sunday, Dec 9, 12:30pm, Central American Refugee Caravan: How do we ensure a moral and lawful response? Dr. Duane Campbell and Cori Ring-Martinez provide caravan updates and background on the root causes of the refugee crisis, followed by discussion of our individual, collective, and national responsibility to asylum seekers based on human rights and international law. Refreshments. First United Methodist Church, 2100 J St. Sacramento. FMI: 916-225-8511

Central American Refugees

Trump v Pueblos Sin Fronteras

TRUMP TAKES DACA OFF TABLE: President Donald Trump repudiated legislative deals to protect Dreamers from deportation in a tweet Sunday morning. The president urged Congress to end the legislative filibuster in order to crack down on immigration. "Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!" he wrote. In the same tweet, Trump warned of "caravans" of people headed to the border. "It was unclear whether the president's tweets represented any change in his immigration policy," wrote Katie Rogers in the New York Times, "or were just the sort of venting he is known to do after reading a newspaper article or seeing a television program." That was Rogers' polite way of saying that Trump almost certainly was just venting. 

Trump's "caravans" are actually one (fairly large) caravan of about 1000 people travelling north. "Hundreds of Central Americans - children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras - have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States," Adolfo Flores reported Friday for BuzzFeed News. "Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them. Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants."

"When they get to the U.S., they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally," Flores writes. "More likely is that it will set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration's immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds. The number of people who showed up to travel with the caravan caught organizers by surprise, and has overwhelmed the various towns they've stopped in to spend the night." More here. 

TPS; Protected Status for Some

Temporary Protected Status of some immigrants

TPS ON SHAKY GROUND: Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke must decide today whether tens of thousands of people from Honduras and thousands from Nicaragua will continue to receive temporary protected status. Here's how the program works: If a country experiences a natural disaster, armed conflict, or some other extraordinary event, the DHS secretary can extend protected status to its nationals for up to 18 months if they're in the U.S. at the time of the event. Hondurans and Nicaraguans were initially granted TPS after Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998; subsequently they received an extended series of renewals. Now protected status for the two countries is due to expire on Jan. 5. The department will also face decisions on TPS for Haiti later this month and for El Salvador in January.

The Trump administration has signaled it won't continue the virtually automatic renewals that were common in the past. Along those lines, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in a letter to Duke last week that conditions in Central America and Haiti no longer warranted a TPS designation, Nick Miroff and Karen DeYoung reported in the Washington Post Friday evening. "Tillerson's letter does not amount to a recommendation," the Post reported. "But DHS is required to seek the agency's input, and officials said the State Department's position carries significant weight." People from the aforementioned countries - Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador - make up 94 percent of the roughly 439,000 approved for the program at the end of 2016. 

US Policies Drive Migrants from Central America

http://www.dsausa.org/us_policies_drive_migration_from_central_america

By David Bacon

The mass migration of children from Central America has been at the center of a political firestorm in the United States. Both migration and deportation increased again in late 2016, causing the mainstream media to run even more stories blaming families, especially mothers, for sending or bringing their children north. Even President Barack Obama himself lectured them, as though they were simply bad parents. “Do not send your children to the borders,” he said recently.

(Post originally written in 2016.  Updated 2017)

Under the new Trump administration,  the Tea Party and conservative Republicans are using this issue to attack Obama’s executive action in 2009 deferring the deportation of young people, along with his proposal to expand it to include family members of legal residents and citizens. More broadly, the right wants to shut down any immigration reform that includes legalization and is gunning for harsher enforcement measures. Marine Corps general John Kelly, former commander of the U.S. Southern Command, calls migration a “crime-terror convergence.”

This push for greater enforcement and a conflation of migrants with terrorists ignores the real reasons families leave home. Media coverage focuses on gang violence in Central America, as though it were unrelated to a history of U.S.-promoted wars and a policy of mass deportations.

In fact, U.S. foreign and immigration policy is responsible for much of the pressure causing this flow of people from Central America.

There is no “lax enforcement” on the U.S. - Mexico border. The United States spends more on immigration enforcement than on all other enforcement activities of the federal government combined. There are more than 20,000 members of the Border Patrol, the largest number in history. We have walls and a system of detention centers that didn’t exist just 15 years ago. More than 350,000 people spend some time in an immigrant detention center every year. Yet the Tea Party and the Border Patrol demand increases in the budget for enforcement, and the Obama administration bends before this pressure.

 The migration of children and families didn’t start recently. The tide of migration from Central America goes back to wars that the United States promoted in the 1980s, in which we armed the forces most opposed to progressive social change. Two million Salvadorans alone came to the United States during the late 1970s and ‘80s, as did Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Whole families migrated, but so did parts of families, leaving loved ones behind with the hope that someday they would be reunited.

The recent increase in the numbers of migrants is not just a response to gang violence, although this seems to be the only reason given in U.S. media coverage. Growing migration is a consequence of the increasing economic crisis for rural people in Central America and Mexico. People are leaving because they can’t survive where they are.

The North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and structural adjustment policies required privatization of businesses, the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects, and cuts in social budgets. Huge U.S. corporations dumped corn and other agricultural products in Mexico and Central America at low prices, forcing rural families off their lands when they could not compete.

When governments or people have resisted NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States has threatened reprisals.

Refugee Crisis from Central America Continues

Joseph Sorrentino

The refugee crisis isn’t over. I’m not talking about the tens of thousands pouring into Europe over the last several months, but about the tens of thousands who are still trying to get to the United States from Central America.

But you’d never know it from listening to our government or our media. After the panic over the “surge” of children at the border last summer, stories about Central American refugees all but disappeared. Now, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is crowing about a nearly 50 percent drop in apprehensions of family units at the Southwest Border over the last 12 months, compared to the previous year.

Yet, according to staff in refugee shelters across Mexico, shelters are full and refugees are still streaming into that country, hoping to make it to the United States. If we’re apprehending fewer people, it is because more are being deported by Mexico or falling prey to gangs, drug cartels or dangerous terrain on a voyage that is becoming as treacherous as the Mediterranean crossing.

And like the Syrians, they meet the UN criteria for a refugee: anyone fleeing their home country because of violence and who fears persecution upon return. I spent seven weeks in Mexico between late January and March of this year, interviewing Central American refugees in shelters stretching from Oaxaca to Mexico City. Although several mentioned economic concerns, almost all said it was violence that drove them from their homes; violence mainly perpetrated by the incredibly brutal gangs Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have some of the highest murder rates in the world. People told me of having to pay la renta, extortion money, to operate a business or even to live in a particular neighborhood. If they did not pay, the gang would kill their children. Gangs also forcibly recruit young men; if they refuse, they or their families turn up dead.

US Returning Migrants to Danger

Five Blatant Lies Immigration Hawks Want You to Believe

With November's midterm elections fast approaching, the immigration issue is heating up once again. Politicians often debate immigration with little regard for the facts, and the recent child migrant crisis and the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization have provided fodder for a new series of wildly inaccurate claims that play on Americans' fears.

Here are five flat-out untrue statements that immigration hawks want you to believe.

by Roque Planas 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/immigration-lies_n_5875282.html?ir=Latino+Voices

Refugee Crisis on Our Border - What Should We Do Now ?

By Duane Campbell

Over the past several years and in particular since February of 2014, the number of children and families fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and arriving on the U.S. southwestern border has grown significantly.  More than 57,000 children have arrived already this year. The majority of unaccompanied children and families come from a region of Central America known as the “Northern Triangle.”

The rise in violence in the sending countries has been significantly increased by U.S. policy, including tacit support for the coup in Honduras in 2009, direct military support for the war in El Salvador in the 1980’s and indirect support for the genocidal war by the Guatemalan oligarchy and the military against its own people in the 1980’s and 90’s, as well as the current uncontrolled U.S. drug market and the U.S.-directed drug war.   The U.S. continues to contribute significantly to creating the crisis through our military and economic policies, creating more violence and narco-terrorism, as well as poverty and exploitation. 

Civil Rights Groups sue to stop deportations

The ACLU and other groups sue the U.S. to stop the summary deportations of Women and Children from Central America claiming refugee status.
http://alj.am/1q2VvCj

8 Reasons Why U.S. Trade and Immigration Policies are Causing the Crisis

8 REASONS U.S. TRADE AND IMMIGRATION POLICIES--NOT "LAX IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT"--HAVE CAUSED MIGRATION FROM CENTRAL AMERICA
By David Bacon
In These Times, web edition, July 8, 2014
http://inthesetimes.com/article/16919/8_reasons_u.s._trade_and_immigration_policies_have_caused_migration_from_ce



In front of Oakland's Federal Building young people from immigrant youth groups protest against the detention and deportation of young migrants and families on the U.S. border, and especially against President Obama's decision to increase border enforcement and deport them more quickly.

The mass migration of children from Central America has been at the center of a political firestorm over the past few weeks. The mainstream media has run dozens of stories blaming families, especially mothers, for sending or bringing their children north from Central America. The president himself lectured them, as though they were simply bad parents. "Do not send your children to the borders," Obama said last week. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it."

Meanwhile, the story is being manipulated by the Tea Party and conservative Republicans to attack Obama's executive action deferring the deportation of young people, along with any possibility he might expand it╤the demand of many immigrant rights advocates. More broadly, the Right wants to shut down any immigration reform that includes legalization, and instead is gunning for harsher enforcement measures. Even Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command, has sought to frame migration as a national security threat, calling it a "crime-terror convergence," and describing it as "an incredibly efficient network along which anything - hundreds of tons of drugs, people, terrorists, potentially weapons of mass destruction or children - can travel, so long as they can pay the fare."

Child refugees on our border

Dear President Obama:  July 3, 2014
We, the undersigned immigration, civil and human rights, faith, labor, anti-violence, and community organizations, urge you to reconsider the plan to expedite the deportation of Central American children to the dangers they escaped in their home countries. The administration’s recent statements have placed far greater emphasis on deterrence of migration than on the importance of protection of children seeking safety. At a time when the region is confronted with a major humanitarian crisis, our nation cannot compromise on fundamental principles of compassion, fairness, and due process, nor on our international refugee protection obligations.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has found that almost 60 percent of children fleeing to the United States from Central America are asylum seekers.i The United States is not alone in seeing higher than normal migration flows – according to UNHCR, other countries in the region have experienced a sharp increase in the number of asylum applications filed by Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans since 2008. From 2008 to 2013, the number of such applications filed in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Belize increased by 712 percent.
We are deeply concerned that the administration will circumvent the protections of the bipartisan Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2008 and remove the children apprehended at the border through a non-judicial process. Instead of affording these children proper screening for trafficking and persecution, as well as the opportunity to receive fair and full consideration of their legal claims before an immigration judge, the administration appears to propose to quickly deport them, without access to legal counsel, following cursory screenings that have already proven entirely inadequate to identify genuine refugee claims among Mexican children.ii
he proposed plan would appear to place at risk these existing legal protections, jeopardizing the lives of children seeking safety in the United States. Undermining due process and protection under the law is not the right answer, and certainly will not appease the criticisms of those who have been calling for more punitive and aggressive enforcement. The cost of pushing vulnerable children back into dangerous or deadly situations is simply too high.

Migrant children in custody

Migrants flow into South Texas

Julia Preston. NYT. June 17, 2014.

McALLEN, Tex. — Exhausted and dazed, hundreds of Central American migrants, mainly women with small children, come to the bus station of this border city every day now, spilling into a church next door that has opened its doors. Having crossed into the United States illegally, the new arrivals are often grimy and famished. In the church, they eat, bathe and sleep, changing into donated shoes and clothes.

With no immigration detention site equipped for women with children in the area — the closest one, in Pennsylvania, is overbooked — they are freed by the Border Patrol with a bus ticket to travel to where they have relatives in this country, and an order to appear in immigration court in 30 days.

They are among at least 30,000 migrants released this year, border officials and federal lawmakers said, amid a surge of illegal crossings in the Rio Grande Valley.