Tag: Immigration

Instead of Them, Let’s Support Us

Many are reeling from the ever-emerging news that the Trump administration has been turning away people at the border, who are seeking asylum. They force them to cross illegally, so they can detain them instead. This is egregious enough, but that’s not enough for the white supremacists in the White House. They are ripping kids away from their parents arms, and separating them. The parents get detained, and charged. The kids are being sent to detainment camps and agencies all over the country, with no paperwork, to reunite them with their parents, ever. 
 
Some people think it’s not their problem. Some people are wrong.  There are about 65 million displaced people in this world (https://news.sky.com/story/we-must-help-refugees-because-simply-it-could-be-you-11410452). Human beings. More often than not, they are taken in by developing countries, while more developed countries, like the US, shrug their shoulders and prioritize that we have to protect our borders. People need to fill out the proper paper work, is the problem. If only these people fleeing devastation, would ask nicely, get in a line and wait their turn, then we would welcome them in. I highly doubt that is true, but my priority is on all these kids, that the government has effectively kidnapped.
 
The rest of us want to help those who need help the most.  Many of us want to help these people who have had their kids ripped away from them, by our government. Many of us want our government to be held responsible for the human rights abuses they are committing in plain daylight.
 
So it’s us vs them, right? 
Who is the us, though? 
Who is the them? 
Left vs right? 
American vs immigrant? 
 
I say we chuck all the dividing lines and look at this differently. Us, are people. The human race. A global community. If we are all one people, then maybe we can support each other, without regard to whether that person lives next door to us, in the next country, or across the world. It shouldn’t matter. If your house was on fire, and you ran over to someone else’s house to ask for help, what would you hope they would do? Let you in? Or tell you to just go back to your house, fill out some paper work, and prove that I should let you come into my house? Should I take your kid and have you arrested, for trespassing on my property? I mean you did step on my property, which is trespassing. Is that what is important here, or is your house being on fire, maybe the more important issue we need to prioritize?
 
I don’t care if an immigrant comes here legally or illegally, I will not call them illegal. They are human beings. They are souls, and they are people who bleed, just like me. I will stand up for them, as soon as I will stand up for my friends and family. I don’t understand people who won’t. I admire those who do.
 
An old friend asked me some ideas for how to help, so I put this together. I thought I would share it, for anyone else looking for ways to help.  I by no means have all the best ways to help, but this is what I’ve got.
 
Donate

One way to help is donating to legal efforts to represent the parents and fight for them to be reunited with their kids

RAICES:
https://www.facebook.com/donate/490507544717085/

Act Blue has a fundraiser that is being spit across orgs including ACLU:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/families-border
I got that one from Hillary Clinton on Twitter

Michael Avenatti (Stormi Daniels attorney) has pledged (and already started) to represent 50 moms, pro bono. While he’s covering the legal cost, there are other expenses like bond for the moms and such. There is a crowd-funding effort for that:
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stop-separating-families/

 
Contact Your Reps in Congress

Contact reps and keep contacting them:
Use @resistbot – you start a message to resistbot in fab messenger. It will get your info to look up your reps, and then it’s easy to type “resist” then “Congress” then type your message. Hit enter, then “done” and then “send” and they send you message right to your reps.

@Countable is another great app for messaging your reps on any legislation being voted on.

Calling reps is really important too, especially if your rep is a Republican. We have to demand they vote with Dems on this. They should sign on to Senator Feinstein’s bill called Keep Families Together.

We should be calling for an investigation and hearings. There is no oversight, so abuses aren’t being reported at all.

Protest
 
Sign up for a protest event for June 30th. This will hopefully be a massive nation-wide protest in solidarity with our fellow global citizens, who are being horrifically mistreated by this government:
https://act.moveon.org/survey/June_30_Pledge/?source=homepage
 

I saw people have been protesting one ICE office so much they had to close:
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/21/622243400/ice-temporarily-closes-portland-office-amid-tumult-of-protests-across-u-s

Not sure that is realistic, nation-wide, but hey I’d love to see them unable to do their job.

As crappy as it is, we need to get people registered and convinced that their vote is everything. It’s crappy, because we can’t wait that long. These kids can’t wait that long. That’s not soon enough to help all those people, but there are some horrific realities:

  1. Some parents have already been deported and kids placed in private adoption agencies. It will be near impossible to get them reunited 
  2. Some kids have been “misplaced” and turned over to human traffickers. 
  3. At least one father killed himself, after his kid was take from him
  4. Congress is controlled by the GOP, who will not hold the Trump administration accountable
  5. Russia is going to attempt to hack our election. We need a blue wave so that the margins are so wide, Democrats overwhelmingly take over Congress.

Those realities are why we need an independent investigation, public hearings, and independent oversight of family reunification. We need an independent and accountable source, so that they will actively advocate for the parents and kids, not be shills for Trump’s fascist administration.  None of that is going to happen, while Republicans are in control of Congress.  They won’t stand up to Trump. They just enable him with their complicit silence.

 
This isn’t a legal issue, or a political one. It’s a moral imperative.  The crux is that we need political power, to ensure the moral imperative is achieved. We can no longer allow voter apathy to be accepted. We have no excuses. We should have near 100% registration and voter turn out. If we want our government to be a transparent and accountable body of citizens representing citizens, we must hold them accountable. We must be informed and we must vote in every election.  We must do the hard work of convincing our friends and family to do the same. 
 
We have to condemn the eye rolls at politics and campaigns. Being patriotic isn’t about waving a flag, as much as it’s about participating in the democracy that is the lifeblood of our country. Politics and campaigns are dirty and nasty, but the more citizens pay attention to the real issues, and not the character assassinations, we can push it to be cleaned up. We can reward honesty and transparency. We can expect our elected officials and candidates to answer hard questions and call them out when they duck those questions.
 
If we sit back and expect it to be done for us, it will, but it will look like the Handmaid’s Tale. If you haven’t seen it, it’s terrifying.

Should We Create A Database?

I work in database application development, which is my non-sequitur way of saying we should talk about the Trump transition team plans to create a database of immigrants from Muslim majority nations.  Honestly, I have a hard time trying to figure out where to start with this.  I thought I might as well start with NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s response to this:

He’s by far, not the first mayor to respond in this kind. It’s not a shock that mayors of large cities are standing up to say they want their cities to be a refuge and safe place for immigrants, in defiance to this announcement.  What is infuriating and terrifying, is that all of Congress isn’t rejecting this.  It’s lunacy to me that our government isn’t disqualifying him or making it known he will be impeached on day one of his trying to implement anything close to this.

I don’t wear a gold star on my clothes, and either did my grandparents.  That’s because brave soldiers from USA and around the world stood up and stopped that from happening to the millions of Jewish, Polish, Russian etc masses who were being registered into “databases”, and eventually rounded up. Yeah, I know, they didn’t have databases.  They had paper. And we see what the result was.  Families were torn apart. Communities were decimated.  Many were deported.  Many were killed.  Of course that didn’t happen over night.

It started with the idea of a “database”. Registering people from one culture, race, religion.  It started as “We need to get a handle on this.  Some of them are criminals.”  Well, there are some white American criminals too.  Some of them wear hoods.  Should we make a database of them, until we get a “handle” on it?  No, we shouldn’t.  We don’t register people according to their nationality, race or religion.  Our country is as diverse as the entire world, because we welcome people from the world to come here, from here to travel there, and for all to find opportunity TOGETHER.

We are better than this.  We have to be, or our country will not be as great as the idea we claim it to be.  I want to stop terrorism, and I have not seen any facts or reputable research ever finding that registering immigrants will help stop domestic terrorism.  In fact, while I’m not a full fledged journalist, who will find the best research, I believe the majority of our domestic “terrorist” attacks have been with guns, and done by non-Muslim American citizens. Many of them white.  We can’t make our biggest cities places of fear.  We can’t create an atmosphere where people are afraid that they, their friends or family will be rounded up and deported.  Where kids worry that they will be separated from their parents, because of what they see on the news or because they are being harassed by other kids in school.

That last part has already been happening.  So this is where we need to start.  I have a readership of like 12 people, and I think 6 of those are my parents re-clicking on the same post because they kept getting bored.  We need the media, with actual readership and viewership, to call out President-elect Trump now.  Every press conference and every question has to report on an incident of hate.  Make him respond to every damn incident.

Then make him respond to the pressure from Congress, to his appointment plans for Steve Bannon.  He is the wrong person to have anywhere near the White House, or near any strategy work for the President of the United States.  We need serious people with experience and knowledge of the jobs being filled in his Administration.  They need respect for the job, and equal respect for all Americans. Appointing someone with a record of promoting white nationalist goals, is the opposite of the resume any President of this country should be looking for in a candidate in his administration.

He may have to look outside the well of sycophants he clung to, during his disrespectful and boastful campaign of vanity and ego.  If he really wants to make good on his promises to help this country, he needs to work on making this country great, like he and his supporters say they want it to be.  If he can’t find an AG, who believes in the vital importance of the 3 branches of government, then he may just need to cross the aisle.  Real leaders can swallow their pride and do that. Can he?  The head of the EPA should believe in climate change.  Our Secretary of State shouldn’t have any conflicts of interest in their previous businesses or work, that could even potentially hurt our standing in the global community.

Good Republicans must stand up to this onslaught of unqualified candidates, who have conflicts of interest or ideology.  If their candidacy would not be in the best interest of this country, then Trump should be disqualifying them from the list.  If he is going to prop up these candidates, then the Republican led Congress and Republican party should. Everyone who voted for him, and the party he is now the head of, should care about how he staffs this Administration.  It can’t just be up to Democrats, to stand in opposition.  We need Republicans who care about not just the welfare of their party, but this country, to insist that the Trump administration be run 1) the way he promised it would be and 2) the way a good Republican administration should be run.

I mean besides, I really don’t want him impeached.  Then we would have a President Pence.  Not really wanting a database of the LGBT community, so gay conversion therapy camps can be started and HIV/AIDS can spread like wildfire across this country.

No, we’ve got to stay the course.  So does Trump.  So does the Republican party.  So does the media.  So do the citizens of this country.  It’s on all of us.