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Balboa Park Conservancy Avoids Confrontation Over Transparency

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By Doug Porter

Activist David Lundin and others were in attendance last night at the Balboa Park Committee Board meeting ready to ask serious questions about the Balboa Park Conservancy, the group now charged by the City of San Diego with trying to salvage the 2015 Centennial Celebration.

Responding to charges made earlier that the Conservancy was violating its own charter by failing to have two annual public meetings, the group claimed their reports made in meetings of the Balboa Park Committee fulfilled the requirement.

Alas, hopes for a window into the Conservancy’s inner working were dashed last night as, for the first time in more than seven years, the meeting was cancelled in its entirety because quorum of the Balboa Park Committee Board failed to appear.

After a 30 minute wait the Board chair announced the cancellation, saying it was “illegal to open the meeting, even for informational or no-action items.”     [Read more…]

Lies and Deceit: One Neighbor’s Deportation Sheds Light on the Inhumanity of US Immigration Enforcement

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By Daniela Maria Ugaz / Upside Down World

I remember jolting awake at 6 AM. Still dark. Someone was banging on my neighbors’ door. I could hear whispering, then screaming. When I opened my eyes, just like that, I made out two, three, four distinct voices.

Months later, my neighbor, who I’ll call Beto, told me there must have been 10 to 12 police officers at his door that morning. They were definitely police and not Immigration. The squad car parked in front was stamped with the LAPD logo and the officers’ uniforms were neatly labeled POLICE. And yet this was an immigration raid. It had all the trappings of an immigration raid, from the hour it was conducted, to the defining fact that Beto, along with many other migrants in our LA neighborhood, were targeted that day for being in the country illegally. But we didn’t realize this until much later.   [Read more…]

The Drug War Fuels Mass Deportation of Nonviolent Migrants

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250,000 people have been deported for drug offenses in the last 6 years.

By Daniel Robelo / AlterNet

The drug war has increasingly become a war against migrant communities. It fuels racial profiling, border militarization, violence against immigrants, intrusive government surveillance and, especially, widespread detentions and deportations. 

Media and politicians have tried to convince us that everyone who gets deported is a violent criminal, a terrorist or a drug kingpin. But a newly released, first-of-its-kind report shatters that notion, showing instead that the majority (some two-thirds) of those deported last year were guilty of minor, nonviolent offenses – including thousands deported for nothing more than possessing small quantities of drugs, typically marijuana.   [Read more…]

Legalization is a Human Rights Issue: Latin America Steps Up Resolve to End the Drug Wars

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By Wendy Call/ Yes!
Seattle’s South Park neighborhood has seen its share of drug-related crime and violence. Many of its residents are recent immigrants from Mexico; some came north fleeing the drug cartel violence that has ravaged their home communities. So the South Park Community Center was a poignant venue for Mexican poet, writer, and activist Javier Sicilia to speak about his campaign to end the drug war in his home country. He began the evening with a moment of silence for all the lives lost – somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 – since the Mexican government stepped up the war against drug cartels in 2006. Then, his commanding voice heavy with grief, Sicilia read a poem:

All absence is cruel
and nonetheless, remains like a space that comes from the dead,
from the bleached roots of the past.
Where might we turn?

Sicilia wrote this poem, “The Survivor,” in 2009. Two years later, he became a survivor of heartbreaking absence himself, when his 24-year-old son was murdered, with six of his friends, by drug traffickers in Cuernavaca, Mexico. With the cruel loss of his son, Sicilia did not know where to turn. He wrote a final poem dedicated to his son, Juan Francisco, and then renounced writing poetry.   [Read more…]

The Night I Decided to Stop Going to Sea World

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By Lori Saldaña

I was born in San Diego, and my family began attending Sea World back in the 60s when it had a Japanese Garden and pearl divers (I still have a pearl ring, a birthday gift one year).

Then, it was a very different place than it is today: quieter, smaller scale, and more about Pacific Rim culture than theme park shows. We went often, and not just as casual visitors. Since my father was a journalist, and Sea World knew the value of cultivating relationships with the media, we would often attend special events throughout the year, including a lavish annual kick-off party that marked the start of their summer season, complete with a preview of the newest Shamu show.

I enjoyed going early, before the dinners and presentations, and wandering around the park after the daytime visitors departed. I especially enjoyed being able to enter the exhibits and watch the animals without the usual crowds around.   [Read more…]

Love Transcends Borders and Legal Status

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Shameful immigration policies separate loved ones

By Brent E. Beltrán

Love doesn’t recognize borders. It doesn’t know if the person you love has papers or if they have done time for youthful indiscretions. None of that matters to love because love transcends all. My cousin Alma, who grew up on 29th St. near K St. in Grant Hill, knows about this kind of love. She and her children live it every day.

My cousin fell in love with, and eventually married, her husband Juan. Him not having legal status to live in the US didn’t bother her whatsoever. She was in love and her heart didn’t care if the man she wanted to be with was allowed to be in this country legally or not.

Alma met Juan in Tijuana in 1997. They must’ve hit it off pretty good because within a few months she was pregnant with their first child. At the time Juan used a temporary crossing card that he had had since he was eleven years old to cross the border. But when he used it he was breaking the law because he had been previously deported after being convicted of burglary.

Juan used to be in a gang. He lived the typical, poor, working class barrio lifestyle and all of the negatives that comes with that. Joining a gang helped him cope. Readers can judge all they want but if you don’t live this reality you will never understand the pressures of joining a gang and the hardships of living in the barrio.

After being convicted he served about two years between 1995-1997. Upon release he was deported. The same year he was released he met my cousin and his life changed. Love has a way of changing people. And for Juan it was for the better. When he found out they were pregnant he knew he could never be the person that he was.   [Read more…]

SDPD Strip Club Raid Raises More Integrity Questions

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By Doug Porter

It was another bad day for the San Diego Police Department. A group calling itself FED UP-San Diegans Against Police Sexual Misconduct held a morning press conference in front of the Hall of Justice demanding accountability for the repeated sexual assaults by SDPD officers.

Holding up signs that said “I am Jane Doe,” referring to the a victim currently battling the city in court demanding an outside monitor for the SDPD, the group demanded sweeping changes within the department.

And then the Washington Post posted a story –originally reported on Saturday by ABC 10News— about a police department raid on a local strip club. Ten armed officers wearing bulletproof vests closed down the Cheetah Club, located in Kearny Mesa on Thursday night. In addition to checking for permits, the officers lined up the women working at the club and photographed them in their semi-nude attire.   [Read more…]

Israeli Company Contracted to Build U.S.-Mexico Border Fence

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By Aaron Cantú / Alternet

This week, the Israeli company Elbit Systems Ltd. announced that its subsidiary won a contract from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection to produce and install surveillance systems along the U.S.-Mexico border. The company is famous for providing “intrusion detection systems” and other infastructure support for the Israeli West Bank barrier.

The subsidiary was awarded a $145 million contract for a project called the Integrated Fixed Tower (IFT), which is to be built on the Mexico-Arizona border over the next year. The contract also guarantees eight years of infrastructure support from Elbit Systems.

The project outlines the construction of an undisclosed number of observation towers at the border by Nogales, Arizona, a town about an hour south of Tuscon. Additional towers could be built at five other areas along the state’s border.   [Read more…]

Family, Friends and Activists Continue to Seek Justice for Those Killed by the Border Patrol

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“Four years and we haven’t seen a single result.”

By D. Gutiérrez

Despite the rain, dozens of protestors assembled outside the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Saturday afternoon, March 1st. Representatives from multiple grassroots organizations, as well as professors, students, and concerned citizens gathered to voice their anger at the growing amount of deaths that have occurred at the hand of the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Family members of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas were also present to denounce the four years they have endured without any justice.

Anastasio Hernández Rojas was killed in 2010 while detained by Border Patrol and CBP agents. Videos surfaced some time later documenting the brutal death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas. Multiple government agents crowded around the handcuffed Hernan-dez to inflict bodily harm as another agent electrocuted him with a taser gun.

Despite compelling video, four years have passed and still no one was been punished for the crime.   [Read more…]

A Trail for Humanity’s Final Walk Begins in Chicano Park

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Video by Horacio Jones

On the morning of Saturday, August 16, more than 100 people gathered by the temescal (sweat lodge) in Chicano Park for a ceremony to honor the walkers of A Trail for Humanity. On July 22, a group of women and children left Merced, California on a journey south to the US-Mexico border in San Ysidro to pressure the Obama administration to put a halt to its deportation enforcement only policies; call for an end to the use of police as immigration enforcement agents; demand an end to family separations; and stem the tide of racial profiling that has incarcerated so many migrants and African Americans.   [Read more…]

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