Say No ! To Trump's Fraudulent Deal

Our immigrant communities, our allies -- all of us -- can take heart and inspiration from the words and actions of Dr. King, not just on his birthday, but in our daily struggle for justice. We are reminded of the persistence and commitment of the civil rights movement of decades past and as it continues today as we push back against the calls to racism and xenophobia by Donald Trump.

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Just Say 'No'...to the Deal 

Donald Trump's "major announcement" Saturday was another version of his Jan. 8 televised proposal, employing his now-familiar tactic of hostage-taking. There don't seem to be many takers, as Democrats quickly denounced his proposal of a trade-off for border wall funding, while hard-liners claimed that he was proposing some type of "amnesty" (he's not).

[UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is expected to introduce a bill ('End the Shutdown and Secure the Border Act') in the Senate this week, with a vote set for Thursday on this and the Democrats' short-term spending bill, that excludes wall funding and would re-open government until Feb. 8. Just over 1,300 pages, the Republican bill adds more troubling measures to Trump's "deal", including changes to asylum programs. We will share an overview and analysis separately, along with proposed actions over the next 2 days.]

The federal government has now been on shutdown for a month as Trump insists on $5.7 billion for his border wall construction -- a proposal that has been rejected by Democrats. In return for the wall funding and his other asks, Trump would "release" his hostages -- recipients under DACA, which he is trying to end -- and over 300,000 immigrants with TPS status, which he has refused to renew for several countries. $800 million would be allocated for humanitarian assistance, medical care (which should be provided anyway) and "temporary housing" -- which appears to largely be more tent cities, already underway. Other elements of Trump's proposal include: 

• $783 million for 2,750 border and enforcement agents and staff;
• $805 million for technology, canine units for drug deterrence;
• $563 million for immigration court support, including 75 more immigration judges (most likely intended to speed up deportations);
• $4.2 billion for 52,000 detention beds and other detention supports.

Trump proposes a 3-year provisional status is proposed for DACA and TPS recipients, with additional restrictions. However, DACA recipients will now continue their status for at least a year, as the Supreme Court has just decided it will not take up the Trump Administration's challenge to a lower court ruling, so the  program stays in place, for now. Similarly, there are legal challenges to ending TPS, and various legislative proposals are being considered to provide permanent solutions for both DACA and TPS recipients. 

The prolonged shutdown has put pressure on both the White House and all members of Congress, and the Trump/Republican Senate proposal is supposedly aimed at ending the shutdown with some type of compromise. However, the Republican and Democrats' bills are wide apart and neither is expected to get the 60 votes for passage. 

Moreover, Dreamers, affected communities and most advocates have consistently called for no trade off for the border wall. Trump's obsession with building the wall has been transparent: to reinforce his racist campaign promise to his supporters to keep immigrants out of the country.

Increased border enforcement and militarization, including border barriers, have forced migrants and asylum seekers to travel under more dangerous conditions, sometimes resulting in deaths; these border enforcement measures have undermined environmental protections and health; and they are extremely costly. Most illicit drugs enter the country through ports of entry, not between them, and the emphasis on drug trafficking has had little effect on the health crisis of drug addiction in the U.S. As for terrorism -- even DHS has had to admit that no terrorist has ever been arrested at the southern border. The wall and border control proposals do not constitute responsible and humane border governance, and certainly do not facilitate U.S. responsibilities and obligations towards asylum seekers. 

We do need to address the complex, short and long term issues of immigration. But these proposals undermine any informed consideration and do not move us towards more just and fair policies untainted by racism and xenophobia and the intentional criminalization of immigrants.

Join the chorus of opposition to a deal cut on the backs of asylum seekers, DACA, TPS recipients and unpaid federal workers! Send a message to your members in Congress -- they need to hear from ALL of us!

DACA Safe- For Now

The Supreme Court just announced they will NOT take up a case on DACA this summer. This means that current DACA recipients can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that our DACA protections will be safe for a few more months.  So, if you have DACA, we recommend you continue to renew, visit RenewMyDACA.com for more information.

We know that DACA’s protections have provided hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth with peace of mind and safety as well as work and educational opportunities. Shamefully, Trump has done everything he can to rip that apart and is playing a cruel game with our lives. As we wait for the Supreme Court to announce whether or not they will take up the case for their session this fall, let’s get this info out!

It is crucial to get this information out to as many DACA recipients as possible  , can you help us share these top 5 things everyone should know?

It’s super important we get this information out ASAP:

Why Are Los Angeles Teachers On Strike ?

Teachers may have a contract.  An agreement was reached. A vote will be taken today !

Stand Up Against Nativism ! Trump !

“All Right Then, We Are Two Nations.” That’s what John Dos Passos wrote in his great USA trilogy, recounting the divisions in the country at the time of the 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti—another season when nativism was running high and Italians were viewed by many “older stock” Americans as an inherently dangerous population.

Plus ca change:  In a survey released yesterday by the Pew Research Center, Americans opposed expanding what we have in the way of a border wall by a 58 percent to 40 percent margin, but that 58 and that 40 couldn’t be more entrenched. Not surprisingly, given the centrality of nativism, racism and Trumpism to the modern GOP, “Republican support for the wall,” Pew reports, “is at a record high, while Democratic support has reached a new low.” Moreover, Pew continues:

Nearly nine-in-ten (88 percent) opponents of expanding the border wall say it would not be acceptable to pass a bill that includes President Trump’s request for wall funding, if that is the only way to end the shutdown. Among the smaller group of wall supporters, 72 percent say a bill to end the shutdown would be unacceptable if it does not include Trump’s funding request.

I take these numbers to fairly represent what has become an unbridgeable divide between our two nations. I take them as an indication that those who are seeking the “center” in American politics will fail to find one. Neither side has any significant political incentive to plant a flag in midfield; neither side believes in the other side’s facts, epistemology, or sense of right and wrong. For the sentient American majority, the only long-term solution is to mobilize and enlarge our ranks to overcome the anti-majoritarianism of both the Republicans and the Constitution, and thereby win the political power that would strip from Republicans their capacity to inflict their bigotry on their fellow Americans. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Another Congressperson on Our Side

Why We Need to Listen to Rashida Tlaib


Jeffrey C. Isaac
January 10, 2019
Public Seminar

Defending liberal democracy from Trumpism is not a distraction from what is really important. It is itself really important, as an end and as a means of further advancing a progressive agenda.



Rashida Tlaib is seen at her campaign headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, Aug.7 2018, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75701495




Last week saw the swearing in of the new, Democratic-controlled Congress, the fruit of the “blue wave” that swept across the country last November. The 116th Congress has been rightly hailed as “historic” for its demographic diversity. The country’s first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was re-elected, and a record number of women joined the ranks of the Democrats in Congress, including the first Native-American and Muslim-American women ever to serve in the House.

Less remarked by the mainstream media has been the ideological diversity of the newly-elected Democrats, who bring to the forefront of national politics not simply a broader range of “faces” but a broader range of ideas about public policy and social justice.

At the same time, the media have taken notice of two of most visible “faces” (and audible voices) of ideological diversity, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. Both are young women of color, one a Latina and one an Arab-American Muslim. But more importantly, both are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who successfully ran very vigorous campaigns from the left of the party, and who have been outspoken in their support of progressive issues.

Reject the Border Wall _ The Poor People's Campaign

Our president and his enablers are pushing an agenda of fear, racism and white nationalism while millions of government workers and families suffer as a consequence.

With Martin Luther King Jr. Day a week away, it’s only fitting this movement not simply commemorate Dr. King and the original Poor People’s Campaign’s mission, we re-consecrate it by using our voices and bodies to protest and organize against the atrocities this administration continues to promote. 

Help hold our elected officials accountable: Make a call to your senator now and demand they end this shutdown, reject any compromise for this border wall and stand firm against the declaration of a state of emergency. Call now >>

Forward together, not one step back.

Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II and Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis

President of Repairers of the Breach & Director of the Kairos Center

Co-Chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

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As we speak, the Trump administration and the Senate are trying to divide us. They are using a racist border wall to immorally justify holding hundreds of thousands of federal workers hostage and millions of others are facing the loss of vital services from healthcare to food safety to affordable housing as the shutdown continues. At the same time, they are fueling contempt and cruelty towards migrants at the border and our undocumented neighbors. It is poor and working people on both sides of the border who face the consequences of these extremist policies and divisive tactics.

There can be no Congressional compromise that includes a dime of funding for a wall and we must stand against any future attempt to institute a state of emergency by the president.

We don’t have time to waste. Lives are at stake, and those who are most vulnerable are caught in the crossfire.

Demand your elected officials reject this border wall compromise, commit to end the government shutdown and stand against the invocation of a state of emergency. Click to call your senator now.

Rep. Veronica Escobar on Trump and the Wall

Donald Trump wants more than a wall.

Jorge Ramos, 

The president, once again, has created his own reality, manufactured a crisis, invented an invasion, criminalized immigrants, made up facts and, in a nationally televised speech on Tuesday, argued for a new wall at the United States-Mexico border. “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” he asked from the White House.

Mr. Trump is not the first president to ask for money for a wall. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush built fences and walls along the southern border. Barack Obama maintained the resulting system of roughly 700 miles of physical barriers. So why don’t we want Mr. Trump to build his wall? What is different?

The difference is that Mr. Trump’s wall is a symbol of hate and racism, it would be completely useless, and it does not address any national emergency.

The $5.7 billion requested by the Trump administration to build 234 more miles of walls and fences would be an enormous waste of time and money. Beginning with the first, 14-mile stretch of border fencing, built between San Diego and Tijuana in the early 1990s, undocumented immigrants have shown they can adapt very fast and move to areas with no border barriers. Deserts in Arizona and open areas along the Rio Grande in Texas are now a favorite point of entry. The same thing would happen with a new Trump wall.

Border Patrol Trained Killers in Guatemala

Washington Trained Guatemala’s Mass Murderers — and the Border Patrol Played a Role

Now two Guatemalan children have died under Border Patrol custody. The agency’s role in Latin American oppression has a long history. It has has operated with near impunity, becoming arguably the most politicized branch of federal law enforcement...

January 10, 2019 Greg Grandin and Elizabeth Oglesby  THE NATION

Teachers to hold "Teach In" at Tornillo Detention Center

In February, educators will gather outside a massive detention camp for migrant children and stage a 24-hour "teach in." 

The upcoming protest at the Tornillo, Texas detention camp is organized by Mandy Manning, the 2018 National Teacher of the Year, who teaches newly arrived refugee and immigrant students in Washington state. When she met President Donald Trump at the White House in a May ceremony, Manning gave him a stack of letters from her immigrant students. (She also wore buttons supporting women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and other political causes in a silent rebuke.) 

Several other state teachers of the year are joining her in speaking out against the separation of families and child detention, Manning said. (One of those teachers is Ivonne Orozco, the 2018 New Mexico Teacher of the Year, who immigrated from Mexico as a child and then received protection by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.) 

Paso por paso, repasamos las imprecisiones y afirmaciones dudosas del di...

A New Day for Mexican Workers

A NEW DAY FOR MEXICAN WORKERS
David Bacon
The American Prospect - 1/9/19
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-new-day-for-mexican-workers.html
https://prospect.org/article/new-day-mexican-workers

Two days before Christmas, deputies from Lopez Obrador’s Morena Party-in-formation introduced their labor reform bill into the Chamber of Deputies.  It will abolish the JCAs and substitute an independent system of labor tribunals.  Unions will be independent of the government and business, and leaders must be elected by a majority of the workers.  Union contracts will be public, and must be ratified by the majority of the workers in a free and secret vote.

Fact Checking Trump

Trump Steers Clear Of Facts On Immigration

Fact-checking Trump’s Oval Office speech. WaPo: “Trump does not accurately describe migrant children illegally brought into the United States. Trump describes the children as ‘human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs.’ But the number of suspected cases of fraudulent parentage is a fraction of the overall number of family units apprehended — in other words, in most cases tracked by CBP, the children are being brought in by their parents. The Post’s Joshua Partlow and Nick Miroff reported that, between April 19, when the trend was first suspected, and Sept. 30, the end of the 2018 fiscal year, CBP agents separated 170 families after determining that the child and adult traveling together were not related. That equals about 0.25 percent of all family units apprehended.”

Trump Misleads on National TV

WASHINGTON — President Trump doubled down on one of the biggest gambles of his presidency on Tuesday night with a televised appeal to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall even at the cost of leaving the government partially closed until lawmakers give in.

Embarking on a strategy that he himself privately disparaged as unlikely to work, Mr. Trump devoted the first prime-time Oval Office address of his presidency to his proposed barrier in hopes of enlisting public support in an ideological and political conflict that has shut the doors of many federal agencies for 18 days.

In a nine-minute speech that made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions, the president sought to recast the situation at the Mexican border as a “humanitarian crisis” and opted against declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress, which he had threatened to do, at least for now. But he excoriated Democrats for blocking the wall, accusing them of hypocrisy and exposing the country to criminal immigrants.

But his alarming description of a “crisis” at the border has raised credibility questions. While experts agree there are serious problems to address, migrant border crossings have actually been declining for nearly two decades. The majority of heroin enters the United States through legal ports of entry, not through open areas of the border. And the State Department said in a recent report that there is “no credible evidence” that terrorist groups had sent operatives to enter the United States through Mexico.

More deception.  https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173721/trump-border-facts-truth-speech-lying

Children Held in Concentration Camp in Texas

Support the Migrant Caravan

We'd also like to acknowledge and thank our DSA comrades currently in Tijuana providing direct aid support to migrants whose trip has stalled just shy of our border. They've joined up with a coalition of volunteers to provide aid work with some of the migrants. The following is a message from DSA-LA organizer Andrew Hall on why he volunteered: 

"On any given day, tens of thousands of immigrants are locked up within our borders. Many have been held against their will for years. Those in for-profit detention centers may labor for as little as $1 per day in order to access hygiene products, clean water, and food. Some haven’t breathed fresh air, or felt the warmth of sunshine on their skin in months. Nearly all are utterly cut off from someone they love.

The Problem of Border Security

On December 11, President Donald Trump hosted an Oval Office sit-down with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Charles “Chuck” Schumer (D-NY). Among the many noteworthy lines and exchanges which stick out is when Trump stated, “We need border security. And I think we all agree that we need border security.”

“Yes. We do. We do,” Schumer immediately responded.

“See? We all get along,” pronounced the president.

Democrats and Republicans agree on the fundamentals regarding the policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.While Trump’s declaration that “we all get along” might come across as just another over-the-top statement from the current occupant of the White House, it speaks to an important truth that is indispensable for understanding the current federal government shutdown: Democrats and Republicans agree on the fundamentals regarding the policing of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their disagreement over Trump’s border wall proposal is thus not first and foremost one of conflicting principles. Instead, it is one born largely of what Freud referred to as the “narcissism of small differences”—relatively minute distinctions that, due to the need to maintain group identities (in this case of the Republican and Democratic parties), lead to hostilities.

One group agitates for overt, brutal means—a “big, beautiful wall” in Trump’s words, and highly visible expressions of force along the international divide. The other side calls for “smart” border policing policies and infrastructure, contending that such policies are more effective in stymieing unwanted border crossings than Trumpian wall-building. However, despite such objections, the Democrats have supported the construction of large barriers along the international divide on many occasions.

Indeed, just as telling as Schumer’s “we do” was Pelosi’s “we agree with that” in response to Trump’s insistence that “this country needs border security.” In other words, though CNBC characterizedthe meeting as a “heated Oval Office fight,” the ultimate goal was not in question. It was a debate about means, not ends. And this has long been the case.

Yet mainstream commentators focused on the dramatic disagreement while failing to note and explore how much the two sides have in common. It is this common ground, the shared embrace of “border security,” that requires our scrutiny. For those of us concerned with human rights for all and who refuse to accept discrimination on the basis of birthplace or ancestry—the foundations for exclusionary national citizenship—it also requires our rejection.

It is border security—in the form of the high walls and fences that scar much of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands— that regularly impales, maims and injures countless individuals trying to scale the formidable barriers.

Border security was a decisive factor in the death of seven-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín.Border security was a decisive factor in the death of seven-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín. She and her father were compelled to emigrate and to undertake an arduous journey due in large part to decades of U.S. support for Guatemala’s military and the country’s ruling elite that dispossessed and impoverished her family. Just a few days before Trump’s meeting with Pelosi and Schumer, she died in an El Paso, Texas hospital, after being rushed from a Border Patrol detention facility due to seizures and severely elevated body temperature. A second Guatemalan child, an eight-year-old boy, died in CBP custody on Dec. 24.

Epicenters of Refuge: A Tale of Two Cities

Epicenters of Refuge: A Tale of Two Cities: The U.S./Mexico border has become the focal point for an international human rights crisis that only seems to be getting worse. Veteran photographer Arturo Talavera captures images from refugee camps in Mexico City and Tijuana, and the desperate lines of asylum seekers arrayed along the U.S./Mexico border.

Trump Produced Thousands of Family Separations

The Trump Administration Carried Out Thousands More Family Separations Than Previously Acknowledged

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

An Amnesty International report describes an orchestrated campaign by the Trump administration to seek “the full dismantling of the U.S. asylum system.”
By Ryan Devereaux, Alice Speri, Cora Currier

Under Trump: ICE Becomes a Deportation Force

By COLLEEN LONG
December 30, 2018 5:07 pm TPM.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The officers suit up in the pre-dawn darkness, wrapping on body armor, snapping in guns, pulling on black sweat shirts that read POLICE and ICE.
They gather around a conference table in an ordinary office in a nondescript office park in the suburbs, going over their targets for the day: two men, both with criminal histories. Top of the list is a man from El Salvador convicted of drunken driving.

U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations, like the five-person field office team outside Richmond, hunt people in the U.S. illegally, some of whom have been here for decades, working and raising families. Carrying out President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies has exposed ICE to unprecedented public scrutiny and criticism, even though officers say they’re doing largely the same job they did before the election — prioritizing criminals.


But they have also stepped up arrests of people who have no U.S. criminal records. It is those stories of ICE officers arresting dads and grandmothers that pepper local news. Officers are heckled and videotaped. Some Democratic politicians have called for ICE to be abolished.

ICE employees have been threatened at their homes, their personal data exposed online, officials said.