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Text of Senator Kamala Harris’ Speech Outside Core Civic Otay Mesa Detention Center

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Following is a speech given by U.S. Senator Kamala Harris on Friday.

So let’s shout for the children and families. Let’s shout for them. So, first of all, I want to thank everyone for coming out and for all the work that everyone has been doing to give voice to these families, to these children, and to this issue.

I was just in there, I got a tour of that detention facility and then I sat down and spoke for some time and visited with the mothers who are there. And my heart is broken. These mothers, these mothers have given testimony, if you will, have given the stories, have shared their stories, their personal stories that are a story of a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government.

And we are so much better than this and what we have got to do is fight against this. This is contrary to all of the principles that we hold dear and that give us a sense of who we are when we are proud to be Americans, but we have no reason to be proud of this. We have no reason to be proud of this.

This is a situation where the United States government and this administration brought upon itself and the reputation of the American public, brought upon us, without a request, shame. Shame.

  [Read more…]

Otay Mesa Detention Center – Chant and Response: “We are with you. We hear you. We will not forget you.”

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“Estamos contigos. Les oyemos. No les olvidamos.”

By Kathy Stadler

With so many events taking place around the immigration travesty, it seems one may have gone under-noticed. During the PICO California statewide day of action today, it was clear that the people being detained at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, could hear the protesters outside and tried to make contact – shouting and drumming.

PICO California, “the largest multi-racial faith-based community-organizing network in the state” organized a statewide weekend of action that began on Friday evening at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church. Faith leaders, PICO volunteers, and others came from across the state (including but not limited to Redondo Beach, Santa Ana, San Francisco, Bakersfield, and Fresno) for the Let Our Children Go action.

Friday evening included a vigil, interfaith service, and a training in non-violent civil disobedience. Many folks spent the night at the church and started organizing early Saturday for the action at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. Posters and noisemakers were made, blessings were written to send to people inside the Center, peacekeeping was organized, more tactics of non-violent civil disobedience were taught. Just after noon, hundreds headed to the Detention Center.   [Read more…]

Photo Galleries: A Weekend of #KeepFamiliesTogether Demonstrations Throughout San Diego County

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Eds Note: This story will be updated as more information becomes available.

In San Ysidro, Otay Mesa, Chula Vista, downtown San Diego, and Escondido, people throughout the region this weekend raised their voices in opposition to the zero tolerance and family separation policies of the Trump administration.

At 9 am on Saturday, people began gathering in San Diego’s Community Concourse. By 10am, the place was jammed, and police blocked off Third Street to handle the overflow crowds. After a couple of hours of speaks and music, the crowd marched down Broadway to Front Street and rallied in front of the Federal Building housing the ICE offices for San Diego. Local media estimates of the crowd size put it north of 5000 people.

I’ve been going to demonstrations for five decades, and this was one of the best organized I’ve ever seen. It started on time, the public address system was actually good enough to cover the whole area, and the security people were friendly, well organized and helpful.    [Read more…]

Muro (The Wall) | Video Worth Watching

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The bilingual band from L.A., The Mexican Standoff, performs Muro (The Wall). From their YouTube site:

“Muro” is the narrative of one of eight hundred thousand stories. Today´s president is making a lot of noise about building a border wall when there are around 344 miles of wall built already. Politics are out of control, and as musicians and story tellers we want to bring some humor and music to today’s issues. We hope to bring people together in these days where America is divided. We support dreamers. We support immigration. We support equality.

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Navy Proposes to Build Trump Internment Camp at Camp Pendleton

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In response to the President’s call for the military to assist in holding ICE detainees, the Department of the Navy has drawn up plans to build “temporary and austere” tent cities for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in California, Alabama, and Arizona.

A facility at Camp Pendleton, according to an internal planning memo obtained by Time Magazine, will be built to house 47,000 people; another at a former Naval Weapons Station in Concord, near San Francisco, will hold a similar number.

Abandoned airfields near Mobile, Alabama, at Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach, Alabama, and nearby Navy Outlying Field Silverhill will have facilities for an additional 25,000 people. The document suggests a further study to consider housing an undetermined number of detainees at the Marine Corps Air Station near Yuma, Arizona.

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Immigration Protests: The Whole World is Watching | Progressive Activist Calendar June 22-July 2, 2018

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Protests Set for Three Cities in San Diego County As Trump’s Psychosis Continues

The Trump administration’s policies on immigration have fired up local activists, with protests set for Escondido, San Ysidro, and downtown San Diego this weekend.

Another round of demonstrations is in the works for next weekend, coinciding with actions in over 400 cities being organized by Move-On. See calendar further down in the story for details.

And while a substantial part of the U.S. looks on in horror at the cruelty and chaos within the administration, the rest of the world is taking notice.   [Read more…]

Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy

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The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history.

By Ian MacDougall / ProPublica

Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.–Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.

The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)

On Monday, ProPublica published audio recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the   [Read more…]

Migrant Kids Update: Trump Fixed It! (Snark Alert) | Video Worth Watching

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Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee regrettably notes that Trump’s Executive Order attempting to “fix” the problem of baby jails that his policy of “zero tolerance” has created, essentially just replaces the baby jails with Mommy & Me jails. In passing she also reveals that Border Patrol is uncomfortable about the use of the “c” word in reporting on its facilities.   [Read more…]

Immigrants as Hostages: The GOP’s Midterm Election Strategy

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Plus: Listings of ways you can help in San Diego

I laughed when late-night host Steven Colbert said the President folded like an origami Trump Casino on the child separation issue. The joke, however, is on us. The immigration policies of the administration remain fundamentally unchanged. And it has nothing to do with comprehensive reforms or building the great wall of Donald.

The motivation for those policies, exploiting a fear of the “other” manifested as racism remains. Donald Trump has overruled GOP strategists who thought campaigning on the strength of the economy and tax cuts was the ticket to victory (defined as not losing too many seats) in November 2018.

The specter of immigrant “gangsters, drug deals, rapists and welfare cheats” ‘infecting’ America will be the core GOP strategy this fall, whether the (few) remaining rational people in the party like it or not.   [Read more…]

‘Immigrant Orphans’? No Plan to Return over 2,300 Children to their Parents

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State Sponsored Terrorism In Our Name

There are 11,000 children currently in detention in 100 shelters in 17 states. This figure includes unaccompanied minors. Over 2,300 children, including babies and toddlers have been separated from their parents seeking asylum at the border between May 5 and June 9 alone. These children who arrived at the border with their family are being sent all across the country, ending up in places as diverse as Grand Rapids, Michigan and New York City. We know that some of these children are in El Cajon and Lemon Grove.

These children have been snatched from their family, sent to undisclosed locations and there is no plan to reunite them with their parents.   [Read more…]

Dazed and Confused in Ocean Beach | 1968

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1968 wasn’t a good year to be a transfer student at Point Loma High School.

A San Diego Police Department bust in early December 1967 (where a tiny amount of marijuana was seized with a street value of two million dollars) prompted lots of paranoia throughout the student body.

The Christian Science Church across from the school provided a great vantage point for the Evening Tribune photographer to document the dopers, and select students made the paper’s front page with black tape covering their eyes.

I wasn’t one of those students, but it didn’t matter. Depending on the point of view of the long-time students, outsiders were either narcs or dangerous drug dealers.   [Read more…]

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