I have been beside myself about the emergence of child concentration camps so I want to give a shout out to all the immigration attorneys doing your respective deity’s work right now
How can the rest of us best support you? I know of RAICES and KIND, and am trying to find the best local legal services groups to donate to
Update, friends–
My law school just emailed alums a bunch of information if we’re interested in helping immigrant families who have been separated at the border.
Here’s the gist.
Opportunities to assist with family separation:
Immigration Justice Campaign (**for attorneys only** powered by the American Immigration Council and American Immigration Lawyers Association)
Donate to organizations that have hosted Pro Bono Caravans and/or In-House Pro Bono Projects and are assisting immigrant families and unaccompanied minors:
KIND – Kids in Need of Defense https://supportkind.org/ They are supporting kids directly at the border and beyond through legal and social services.
RAICES is a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children, families and refugees in Texas. Donate generally or specifically to the RAICES bond fund: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund
People working for Amazon have written to the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, to protest the sale of facial recognition tools and other technology to police departments and government agencies.
The workers cite the use of Amazon technology by the US Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which have been criticised for enforcing Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which has seen parents separated from their childrenat the US border.
“As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used,” the letter states. “We learn from history, and we understand how IBM’s systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler.
“IBM did not take responsibility then, and by the time their role was understood, it was too late.
“We will not let that happen again. The time to act is now.”
Holocaust experts claim IBM’s German subsidiary directly supplied the Nazis with technology which assisted the operation of concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
In their letter to Mr Bezos, the Amazon workers said they would “refuse to build the platform” which powers ICE, or any technology used to violate human rights.
Listing three demands, the workers called on the CEO to stop selling the technology to law enforcement, stop providing infrastructure to partners which enable ICE, and implement stronger transparency measures.
“Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations,” the letter concludes.
last year when i was teaching 11th grade one of my fav students came in crying so i put the class on a filler activity and we just talked. they were doing ICE raids in the city and she was worried her parents wouldnt be there when she got home. then she was worried that ICE may come to the school and take her. we looked the laws up together and printed it out so she could carry the papers with her.
it is illegal for ICE to raid a school and take children. ILLEGAL. i told my student (and eventually the class in like a blanket statement because i had quite a few undocumented students) that if anyone did come i would put my body between ICE and my students and really struggle. honestly my heart broke so much that day – take care of undocumented people in your life because they deserve so much better than this ffs. this woman is so very evil and has a black heart and i hope she rots in prison
So idk if you guys know, but trump is coming to the UK on Friday 13 July (because of course he is).
So, a lot of us are getting ready to protest the fuck out of him when he gets here, which in great British fashion basically means we’re all taking the piss out of him.
Anyway, someone crowd funded a giant floatable trump to take on the protest and it’s magnificent.
Fuck him up for us, k?
Will do 👍 he’s going to Aberdeenshire after London, so the Scots will deffo get him. Last time he was in Scotland, someone followed him around playing a tune on a tuba.
We all know the pro life movement is full of shit. They only care abt controlling wm. They don’t care abt the children. Because if u were a real prolife advocate u would b completely disgusted
Holy fucking shit, this is actually happening.
In casey’all think America is still a sort of “we figured ourselves out” country. this is 2018. this is now. people actually voted for this son of a bitch. the next time someone tells you “everyone knows about hitler and the holocaust that’s obviously not going to happen again” fucking shove this up their asses.
This is absolutely fucking disgusting.
I remember when so many people told me “Don’t worry, he’s not going to be like Hitler. People are just exaggerating. It won’t be so bad.”
Together Rising Love Flash Mob. Organized by best-selling author and blogger Glennon Doyle through her non-profit organization, the fundraising effort will go to provide bilingual legal and advocacy assistance for 60 children, aged 12 months to 10 years, currently separated from their parents in an Arizona detention center. Their first priority will be to establish and maintain contact between children and their parents, with the ultimate goal of reunification and safety and rehabilitation for the children.
• The ACLU is litigating this policy in California.
• If you’re an immigration lawyer, the American Immigration Lawyers Association will be sending around a volunteer list for you to help represent the women and men with their asylum screening, bond hearings, ongoing asylum representation, etc. Please sign up.
• Al Otro Lado is a binational organization that works to offer legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S.
• The Florence Project is an Arizona project offering free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children in immigration custody.
• Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers too.
• Kids in Need of Defense works to ensure that kids do not appear in immigration court without representation, and to lobby for policies that advocate for children’s legal interests. Donate here.
• The Legal Aid Justice Center is a Virginia-based center providing unaccompanied minors legal services and representation.
• Pueblo Sin Fronteras is an organization that provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S.
• RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.
• The Texas Civil Rights Project is seeking “volunteers who speak Spanish, Mam, Q’eqchi’ or K’iche’ and have paralegal or legal assistant experience.”
• Together Rising is another Virginia-based organization that’s helping provide legal assistance for 60 migrant children who were separated from their parents and are currently detained in Arizona.
This list isn’t comprehensive, so let us know what else is happening. And please call your elected officials, stay tuned for demonstrations, hug your children, and be grateful if you are not currently dependent on the basic humanity of U.S. policy.
For those who don’t know, this is the coat of arms created for the new Duchess of Sussex:
All in all, these arms are very nice, and quite fitting to Meghan Markle (indeed, the Garter King of Arms – a fantastic title, indicating effectively the senior officer in charge of the royal heraldry of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland – stated that “[t]he Duchess of Sussex took a great interest in the design”). The design has quite a few nods to California, her home state: the blue field represents the Pacific Ocean, the gold bendlets on the field represent rays of sunshine, and at the bottom you can see blooms of the golden poppy, the state flower of California. The wintersweet plants next to the golden poppies are a sweet reminder of their Kensington Palace home, Nottingham Cottage, which has wintersweet growing in front of it. As an indication of her past writing, communication skills, and outreach work, the coat of arms also features three quills and a songbird as a supporter.
The one interesting aspect of her coat of arms is that it has been impaled – that is, placed side by side – with Harry’s (on the left, above – you can see the lions of England and Scotland and the harp of Ireland, as well as the seashells in honor of his mother’s Spencer family and the five points indicating that he is a grandson of the reigning sovereign). As I gather (though I’m far from an expert), this is atypical in a case like the Duchess of Sussex’s, where she holds these arms in her own right (rather than through her father), and instead an inescutcheon – that is, a shield with her arms placed within a shield of his arms – would have been more expected. I don’t know what the reasoning was here, but I suppose that if anyone knows what he’s doing when it comes to how arms should be presented, it would be the Garter King of Arms.
HEY remember in WWII when Jewish people were fleeing Germany and the USA put a quota on how many Jewish immigrants they would accept because they were worried there were too many Jewish people coming over to the USA???
Reminder that the USA has always been fucking garbage to immigrants and basic humanity
Over the weekend, 10 Afghan journalists were eating their last meals and having their final conversations with their loved ones, but they didn’t know it. On Monday, they were murdered in attacks that specifically targeted them — one was shot by assailants in Khost province, the others were killed in Kabul when a suicide bomber mixed with them as they reported on a bombing that had just happened. This hardly counts as news in America, because we have peculiar ideas on what constitutes bravery in journalism.
While these Afghan reporters were living their final hours in relative obscurity, hundreds of American journalists were celebrating themselves in a glitzy Washington, D.C. ballroom. Their good humor was thrown off kilter when a comedian, Michelle Wolf, delivered a lacerating routine that criticized the Trump administration, especially its chief spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Later, many of the journalists in the ballroom, and others who hadn’t been there, lined up to perform a peculiarly inverted version of courage — apologizing to Sanders and anyone else who might have been offended by the comedian’s short gig.
If you have the misfortune of being on Twitter and following a journalist or two, as I sadly do, you will be familiar with the tweet-by-tweet drama that has been playing out in 280 characters or less. Should journalists apologize when a little-known comedian skewers a powerful government official? Why are journalists apologizing for a comedian who did what journalists are supposed to do? And why, every damn year, do so many journalists stampede down a red carpet to join soft hands with government officials in a chummy evening of laughter over not-so-funny jokes about drone warfare and the invasion of Iraq?
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner touches on everything that is lucratively diseased in Washington journalism — but the martyrdom of 10 journalists in Afghanistan tells you everything you need to know about hardscrabble courage in the profession. I have seen this in every war zone and authoritarian nation I’ve reported from: ordinary men and women who risk and sacrifice their lives to report on powerful people and institutions whose displeasure will be expressed in far more serious ways than an unreturned phone call. Yaser Murtaja, Anna Politkovskaya, Peter Julius Moi, Almigdad Mojalli, Marie Colvin and Khalid Hassan, to name a few. It’s shocking to see how brave they are. In Afghanistan alone, 34 journalists and media workers have been killed by the Taliban and the Islamic State since the start of 2016, according to a tally by Reporters Without Borders.
If you’re reporting on an authoritarian regime (as America is becoming) or a ruthless insurgency, and you don’t fear for your livelihood or your life, you are probably doing something wrong. If you are concerned that you will not get invited to a background briefing or won’t be handed a morsel of news that is a scoop for 15 seconds, you are worrying about the wrong things. If you are defending the honor of a powerful official in a dishonest government, rather than working all-out to expose their corruption, you should hand your notebook to someone who will do the job right.
God, on the one hand I absolutely get the impulse to gesture wildly at journalists who objectively have it harder than most people with an American passport will, both at home and abroad, and make a point about it to American journos…
On the other hand, it’s frustrating that these murders just become pawns in some other western game about self righteousness, a tool to beat people on the head with. Idk. It’s just frustrating that it’s a tragedy that’s refracted through the western gaze again.
Cheloneuniverse 