San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Activism / Immigration

ACLU Investigating Escondido’s Hasty Decision on Shelter

by

Requests records from Planning Commission

By ACLU Sandiego-Imperial Counties

SAN DIEGO – Concerned that the City of Escondido may once again be undermining the rights of immigrants in its community and possibly violating the law, the San Diego ACLU requested a number of records related to the Escondido Planning Commission’s decision Tuesday evening to reject a proposed shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children.

In an official California Public Records Act (CPRA) request, the legal director of the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, David Loy, requested copies of all reports and records submitted to the commission relating to the proposed facility, the permit for the construction and operation of the intermediate care facility, and any video, audio, or written record of the Planning Commission meeting on June 24, 2014.   [Read more…]

Battle Lines Are Drawn in Hillcrest

by

By Doug Porter

The leadership of the Hillcrest Business Improvement Association has come under fire following the dismissal of executive director Sonya Stauffer earlier this month.

At the heart of this unrest is HBIA President Jonathan Hale. Depending on who you talk to, he’s either a power-mad incompetent who’s leading the group towards disaster or the victim of a political witch-hunt based on his relationship as the significant other of ‘new Republican’ congressional candidate Carl DeMaio.

On one level the question is whether the event-centric HBIA, the driving force behind  the Hillcrest Farmers Market, Hillcrest Hoedown, CityFest, the Pride Block Party, and Mardi Gras, is really acting in the best interests of the estimated 1,300 businesses in the area. Critics of the  city-sanctioned group are calling for the resignation of Hale and asking for an audit of HBIA  finances

On a deeper level the controversy reflects divisions within the LGBTQ movement, which has historically been centered in Hillcrest.   [Read more…]

U.S. Citizen Caught in Kafkaesque Immigration Nightmare

by

San Diego ACLU Challenges Citizen’s Exile to Mexico

SAN DIEGO – Citing Supreme Court precedent and existential Czechoslovakian literature, the San Diego ACLU sued top immigration officials for unconstitutionally preventing a born-and-raised U.S. citizen from returning to the United States from Mexico.

Like Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Oscar Olivas, a 45-year-old natural-born U.S. citizen, has been detained but does not know why, is unable to access the court before which he stands accused, and has not been allowed to view any evidence used against him. Olivas was unlawfully exiled to Mexico in 2011 and has been trying for three years to convince Customs and Border Protection that if he would be allowed a hearing before a judge, he could demonstrate his citizenship and return to his home and work.   [Read more…]

Score One for the GOP- Immigration Reform is Dead

by

By Doug Porter

Yesterday Illinois Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez rose on the floor of the House waving a red card (ala futbol) to pronounce the end of immigration reform.

As Lawrence Downes, writing in the New York Times put it, “In sports terms, Mr. Gutierrez’s speech was simply marking the moment when a losing team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.”

The US Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill one year ago this week. Republicans in the House rejected that approach, preferring to introduce piecemeal legislation which even they wouldn’t and/or couldn’t pass.

It’s been a year of excuses from the GOP bench and, to carry the sports analogy further, excuses are for losers.
  [Read more…]

Escondido Bigots Unite to Keep Migrant Child Shelter Out

by

By Doug Porter

Nearly five hundred people jammed the Escondido Planning Commission meeting on Tuesday night. At issue was a request for a conditional use permit to open a 96 bed shelter in a now-shuttered nursing home for unaccompanied minors detained after crossing the border.

Escondido’s now-famous racism ran rampant in the room. Despite Escondido Commission Chairman Jeff Weber repeatedly emphasizing that, by law, the panel could only consider local land-use issues, the fear of being overrun with Brown People dominated the discussion.

Here’s an example of what was being used to whip up hatred in the community:

The people of Escondido are about to be invaded with criminals from foreign countries, sent to them by the President of the United States. A former hospital, closed due to low ObamaCare reimbursements, is being transformed into either a prison or a group home. Of course, once Barack drops them off in Northern San Diego County nothing stops them from walking away and into the shadows of our large towns nearby
  [Read more…]

The U.S.-Created Child Migrant Crisis

by

By Hector Luis Alamo, Jr. / Latino Rebels

When a coup removed the democratically-elected leftist president of Honduras in June 2009, receiving tacit support from the U.S. State Department, the American people barely took notice. Then when the United States increased military funding in its little protectorate to reinforce the new right-wing regime installed there, the American public still remained largely unaware and unconcerned.

Even after it was reported that Honduras had become “the most dangerous country in the world” a year after the coup (it still is), and that a campaign against drug cartels in Mexico had made Honduras a major distribution point for drugs making their way from South American producers to American consumers, Americans couldn’t be bothered.

  [Read more…]

Immigrant Heritage Month: Articles and Videos from Across the Nation

by

Immigration was in the news a lot this past week as elections were lost, and reporters and pundits approached the topic with everything from grave seriousness to personal insight to humor. Here is a collection of articles and videos from across the nation and Canada.   [Read more…]

I say Hispanic. You say Latino. How did the whole thing start?

by

BERKELEY – From Hollywood actor Cameron Diaz to the late labor rights leader Cesar Chavez, the labels, “Hispanic” or “Latino” cover a strikingly diverse population of more than 50 million Americans.

In her new book, UC Berkeley sociologist G. Cristina Mora traces the commercial, political and cultural interests that colluded in the 1970s to create a national Hispanic identity and, in turn, boosted the political clout of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and other Latin Americans in the United States.

A Mexican American from Los Angeles, Mora completed her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley and her graduate work at Princeton University, before returning to UC Berkeley in 2011 as an assistant professor of sociology. Her incisive investigation into pan-ethnicity in her book, “Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New America” (University of Chicago Press) – as well as her related article in this month’s edition of the American Sociological Review – is sure to position her as a player in the debate over racial, ethnic and national identity in the United States, especially as it pertains to Hispanic categories in the 2020 U.S. Census. Here’s what Mora has to say about the origins of the Hispanic category and where it’s headed.
  [Read more…]

How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions

by

Undocumented migrants have become easy cash cows for private prison companies.

By Aaron Cantú / AlterNet

As states move for the first time in decades to address swollen prisoner populations, federal immigration detention centers are the new front in private prison corporations’ business strategy, and undocumented migrants their easy cash cows.

Around the country there are 13 Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons, which are managed by private companies contracted by the federal Bureau of Prisons to house a total of 25,000 prisoners convicted of living in the United States without proper documentation. In the pursuit of profits, private prison corporations have created utterly fetid and psychologically frying conditions within these CARs, making even the most squalid prisons for citizens look better by comparison. The vulnerability of an inmate population without recognized citizenship, combined with aggressive immigration policy and legal statutes allowing for-profit detention centers to operate with lax oversight, have created conditions under which carceral corporations can operate legal gulags with an endless supply of incoming prisoners.   [Read more…]

Tea Party Primary Victory a Death Knell for Immigration Reform

by

By Doug Porter

 House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated by a little-known Tea Party backed candidate last night in a Virginia primary. While some in the news media are rushing to blame his defeat on voter hostility to immigration reform, the reality of the situation is more complex.

The lede in the UT-San Diego page one story, sourced from combined AP/Washington Post coverage, said the upset resulted from “a wave of public anger over calls for looser immigration laws.”  This analysis fits very neatly into the commonly accepted narrative saying the teahadist victory is an off-year primary in a conservative district, where the largest bloc of GOP voters are about two steps above frothing at the mouth.

That just isn’t quite true. But at the Congressional level it’s a handy excuse for doing nothing, something the current batch of House Republicans have excelled at.   [Read more…]

Get Out the Leather Jackets and the Bandanas: “El Henry” Is Coming to Town

by

El Henry will premiere Saturday June 14th…Shakespeare with a Latino twist.

By Alejandra Enciso Guzmán

The Without Walls (WoW) Festival is site specific theater held at different venues throughout San Diego. The La Jolla Playhouse showcased this program in October of last year to great critical acclaim. “While the central idea of Without Walls is about exploring new theatrical forms by moving beyond the traditional four walls of a theater, we’ve found over the past several years that WoW is just as much about collaboration,” said Playhouse Artistic Director Christopher Ashley.

The latest WoW production is El Henry, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, written by and starring Culture Clash’s Herbert Siguenza. Siguenza describes his artistic approach, saying “The original play is about the king and queen of England, my adaptation is about California in the future, the year 2045. I imagined that by that time, California will be in its majority Latino. So, all the characters in this play are Chicano and Latino.”
  [Read more…]

They Are Watching You: 
The National Security State and the U.S.-Mexican Border 


by

By Todd Miller / TomDispatch

Before 9/11, there was little federal presence on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Since then, the expansion of the Border Patrol into Native American territory has been relentless. Now, Homeland Security stations, filled with hundreds of agents (many hired in a 2007-2009 hiring binge), circle the reservation. But unlike bouncers at a club, they check people going out, not heading in. On every paved road leaving the reservation, their checkpoints form a second border. There, armed agents — ever more of whom are veterans of America’s distant wars — interrogate anyone who leaves. In addition, there are two “forward operating bases” on the reservation, which are meant to play the role — facilitating tactical operations in remote regions — that similar camps did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now, thanks to the Elbit Systems contract, a new kind of border will continue to be added to this layering. Imagine part of the futuristic Phoenix exhibition hall leaving Border Expo with the goal of incorporating itself into the lands of a people who were living here before there was a “New World,” no less a United States or a Border Patrol. Though this is increasingly the reality from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California, on Tohono O’odham land a post-9/11 war posture shades uncomfortably into the leftovers from a nineteenth century Indian war. Think of it as the place where the homeland security state meets its older compatriot, Manifest Destiny.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry