This is the kind of treatment asylum seekers are currently facing in the United States; they are given the choice to either give up their asylum claim, which would keep their family together but be forced to return to a country wracked with violence, or be imprisoned for a year and have their child put up for adoption.
If the Liberal Party sees this and still concludes that the US constitutes a “Safe” country for asylum seekers then they are morally bankrupt on this issue.
Liberals? The republicans are the ones enforcing and utilizing these policies under trump. Don’t get it twisted.
Hi, the blog this post is from is called ALL THE CANADIAN POLITICS.
When Canadians refer to Liberals or ‘The Liberal Party’ we are generally not talking about ‘Liberal minded Canadians’, and we are definitely not talking about a US Political Party or its supporters.
We are talking about the Liberal Party of Canada and its supporters, who currently run the Canadian Federal Government, and guess what?
These Liberals are not taking any concrete action to deal with Trump’s outrageous immigration policies, in fact these Liberals lead by ‘WOKE BAE’ Justin Trudeau wants to make it harder for refugees to enter Canada:
And Trudeau has done nothing to make it easier for refugees in the USA in danger of deportation or family separation to apply to Canada.
In fact he wants to maintain the Safe Third Country agreement, an agreement that assumes that the USA is a safe country for immigrants, and which makes it more difficult for refugees to claim asylum in Canada.
Here’s the whole video. It’s called “Don’t Be A Sucker” and it’s 17 minutes long.
don’t just scroll past this actually watch it, it’s only 2 minutes long. If you re-recorded this today word for word with modern actors and places, it wouldn’t even look out of place as a PSA
Yeah well perhaps they should have figured out what a border is first. Because their parents broke the law by Crossing ours and better than spend the time in these facilities than a prison with grown adults who made the human traffickers not even their parents
Actually, let me enlighten you.
These people in detention have not committed a crime. – I don’t mean that in a moral or a figurative sense. I mean literally. It is NOT a crime to ask for asylum. – These people didn’t jump a fence, they didn’t sneak into the backyard. They are knocking on the front door and saying “People are trying to kill me in my home country, will you let me in?” – Now, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck. Some of these people are lying. That’s why you have a hearing. And because they might wander off, these people are held in detention until the hearing. – This hearing is NOT in a criminal court. It’s in an immigration court. Because these people have not committed a crime. – Immigration court is not like criminal court. You don’t have a right to an attorney. – So these people are waiting around, separated from their children, with no attorney, until they get a hearing. – In 2015, the median wait for an immigration hearing was 404 days. – Here’s where it gets even more twisted. If people plead guilty to asylum fraud, they get their kids back and get deported. – So these people knock on the front door, which is perfectly legal, and we take their kids, and tell them the quickest way to get the kids back is to confess to fraud. – If someone committed a crime (ie. shoplifting, armed robbery, murder) and you took their kids away to make them confess, that confession would be thrown out. – But these confessions are lawful, because this isn’t criminal court. – Because these people haven’t committed a crime. – Now some people think that if we make it so unpleasant for these people, they will stop trying to cross the border. – But the message this sends isn’t “Go Home.” The message it sends is “Sneak in.” – If they go home, they think they will be murdered. If they request asylum, they are separated from their children. – If they sneak in successfully, they’re safe. If they sneak in and get caught, they are no worse off than if they sought asylum legally. – And remember, these people haven’t committed a crime.
^^This
Now, here’s the really ugly part: a lot of Trump supporters know this.
Not all of them, for sure, but a huge number of educated Trumpsters do.
But they don’t care, because brown people are dangerous, unamerican, and need to be locked up. They HATE it when you call them racist, so they use the “illegal alien” thing as a shield.
“I’m not racist, I just believe in law and order.”
Yeah, right.
Here is a little bit more information to help create a clear understanding of what is happening at the border:
It is true that most asylum seekers present themselves legally at an inspected border-crossing point. However, CBP has been throttling the number of asylum seekers it receives each day for processing. This is creating bottlenecks at the border. Migrants seeking protection are prevented from presenting themselves upon arrival, and are made to wait in Mexico at the border until CBP allows them to present themselves and apply.
Many migrants are sleeping rough, often with their children, for days and even weeks, for the opportunity to legally present themselves as an asylum-seeker. As described by the New York Times:
While some of the migrants have found beds in shelters in Nogales, others said they avoid the facilities out of fear of theft or abuse. Instead, they prefer to guard their spot on the asphalt so as not to lose their place in line when American officials at the crossing allow a handful each day to submit their asylum requests.
You can read more about the dire situation at the border here.
As @colordogluckynumber mentioned, this is driving migrants, out of desperation, to attempt a more hazardous unlawful entry, outside of an inspection point. If they successfully enter without getting caught they can apply for asylum from within the country.
If they do get caught, unlawful entry is a misdemeanor. Until recently, this crime was generally not prosecuted. Prosecuting this crime provides little legal benefit to the government. The individuals are sentenced to a few days in prison, at the cost of the taxpayer, after which they are handed over to immigration authorities for immigration processing. But such a conviction has no immediate negative effect to the asylum claim. It does not stop the asylum application, it does not allow the government to do anything but then continue to process the application for asylum.
So why do it?
Here’s why: while these individuals are being criminally prosecuted and serving their sentence for the misdemeanor unlawful entry, law does not allow that their children can remain with them. Insisting on criminally prosecuting migrants is the justification being used to take their children away.
As has been noted time and again, it is this policy decision to prosecute migrants for misdemeanor unlawful entry that is being wielded as a cudgel in an attempt to deter migrants.
Further, this legally enforced separation from their children is being used to pressure asylum-seekers to withdraw their applications for asylum and voluntarily depart the United States with their child. Asylum-seekers are thus faced with an impossible and cruel decision.
I have not heard as much about asylum-seekers being separated from their families in detention as @colordogluckynumber describes (there is family detention which is a whole other post), and I have not heard that detainees are being pressured to confess to immigration fraud as also described above. Rather, the longer an individual waits in detention to have their claim heard the more likely they are to “voluntarily” withdraw their claim and concede their removability. Meaning, they are more likely to give up and acquiesce to deportation, to return to the circumstances they fled. I am open to being pointed in the right direction for more reading.
But that should not undermine the overall point.
In the end, this is what I know to be true: In the 1930s, my grandfather and his brother were arrested for illegally crossing the border into Russia. As a result, they were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust.
There is nothing criminal about survival.
Reblogging again for commentary by @palmtreepalmtree because she is an immigration lawyer and has expert knowledge and is awesome besides.
“If you’re a political enemy of fascism though, either they lose or you die”
Transcript of the gifs:
If you’re a fascist and anti-fascists come for you, you have a choice. You can give it up. You can renounce what you said. You could go on with the rest of your life and stop turning up to fascist rallies. Anti-fascists probably aren’t going to be your best friends, but they’ll move on.
But if you’re a person of color, if you’re trans, or a person with a disability, or gay, or Jewish and fascists come for you, there is nothing you can do to make them happy except stop existing.
That’s the key difference between the far-left and the far-right. Anti-fascists organize themselves against those that are building fascism. If you are doing that, that is something you can nonviolently stop doing. If you’re a political enemy of antifa, you can become a friend. If you’re a political enemy of fascism though, then they lose or you die.
“The Trump administration’s framing of the Central America asylum seeker crisis is that they must engage in the mass detention of children (either separated or with their parents) because that’s the only way to ensure compliance with the law. And it is true that if they subjected asylum seekers to a less intrusive monitoring regime while they await their hearings, probably some people will simply not show up for their day in court. This demand that the system be made foolproof underlies the rhetoric of “zero tolerance” as well as the demands for an impenetrable physical barrier on the border and much of the White House’s other thinking on immigration policy. Perfect enforcement is not, however, a standard that we apply to any other area of the law. Stealing bicycles is, for example, illegal. And the illegality of bicycle theft almost certainly has practical benefits in terms of increasing the security of people’s property. That said, it’s also clear that bikes are getting stolen and people are getting away with it and the government isn’t really doing much about it. The penalties for bicycle theft are not especially severe, and few police resources are dedicated to catching bicycle thieves. That doesn’t mean we have an “open bicycles” regime, that personal property in bicycles is a myth, that roving gangs of bicycle thieves are operating in the open, or that laws against stealing bikes are pointless. It simply means that in the scheme of things, bicycle theft is not that big a deal and pouring more and more resources into addressing the problem isn’t worthwhile. The White House consistently tries to raise the stakes on immigration enforcement by bringing up the fact that some small share of unauthorized immigrants murder people. They harp away at this even though immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than natives, and even though cities with more immigrants have less crime rather than more. And it’s true, obviously, that some people who break immigration laws go on to later break the law against murder. By the same token, some people who steal bicycles later go on to commit murders. But nobody thinks a “zero tolerance” regime for bicycle theft would be a good way to prevent murders.”
El vampiro torce la ley. Como arroz, es blanqueado de compasión. No llega cuando prometas, y entra sin permiso.
¿Cuál depredador se anuncia? El sanguinario caballero lanza la voz; dice que es policía, vecino, amigo. Roba tus padres y les transforma en criminales sobre el papel.
No es posible razonar con el vampiro. La única solución para él es clavar la estaca en el corazon.
The vampire loves the law. Watch him count rice on the doorstep, grain promises. He does not arrive unless invited, or at least, he does not come in.
Like a predator, the sanguine gentleman announces himself. He has no need to throw his voice. The doctrine of his castle is orderly as stone; he takes nothing he is not authorized to take.
The vampire is reasonable. If you don’t want him to steal your blood, simply don’t answer the door.
“[…] the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.
Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.”
Reblogging to read later, you had me at “they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents.”
I object to the claim that periodicals like The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and National Review mislead their readers unintentionally, and given the long connection between the right wing and conspiratorial thinking(The Paranoid Style in American Politics was written in 1964, and you can draw that line further back to the Confederacy, beyond it to Jackson) I don’t think you can really say this is entirely new, or was ever entirely aimed only at “non-elites”, and Reagan is a product of this, not previous to it. BUT, having said all that, this is mostly polemical rather than scholarly and the devs he talks about are new, even if in different ways than he identifies, so is a good piece I think.
In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful. The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an East Coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.
So what are Democrats to do? The answer is simple: This is a game they cannot win, so they have to stop playing. Know at the outset that no matter what you say or do, Republicans will cry that you’re disrespecting good heartland voters. There is no bit of PR razzle-dazzle that will stop them. Remember that white Republicans are not going to vote for you anyway, and their votes are no more valuable or virtuous than the votes of any other American. Don’t try to come up with photo ops showing you genuflecting before the totems of the white working class, because that won’t work. Advocate for what you believe in, and explain why it actually helps people.
Finally — and this is critical — never stop telling voters how Republicans are screwing them over. The two successful Democratic presidents of recent years were both called liberal elitists, and they countered by relentlessly hammering the GOP over its advocacy for the wealthy. And it worked
This should be sent to Donnelly, Heitcamp, Manchin, and McCaskil. They’re all going to vote to confirm torturer and war criminal Gina Haspel to run CIA, and when the election comes around, it won’t matter at all, as they fight to keep their seats in the Senate.
this effectively means you have to find a lawyer willing to represent you over a couple hundred or thousand in missing wages against a multi million or billion dollar company and you must go to court as an individual (read: out of pocket). casual reminder lawyers tend to set higher fees for cases they see as less winnable and that this will be out of your personal free time
so one of your rights is gone. not going, but gone!
I’m fairly certain America hinges now on propaganda that everything is okay and we’re still a first world nation when actually, our country is slipping further and further, and we’re really just. The best third world country out here. Not even comparable to most first world countries, so we fucking aren’t one anymore
Sounds like we live in a police state where the rich tax the poor not to feed or protect them but to fund programs and legislature that defunds their resources and encourages them to die. The rich get richer and the middle class shrinks and suffocates while the entire country falls apart because corporate power greed refuses to see the consequences of their actions.
I wish I had the faith to believe what goes around comes around, but I think it’s time to understand that we’re the ones that need to come around and take action. The rich aren’t going to do jack shit for us anymore. Even the rich that care about people on the bottom don’t have the courage to help people en masse
Economically speaking, one of the foundations of a 1st world country is a strong middle class (source, my BBA in Economics and International Business), and it’s been abundantly clear that America’s middle class has been shrinking. Wages have been stagnant since pretty much the 1970′s, American CEO’s wage disparity is the highest in the world when compared to the average of their workers.
Basically, the us *isn’t* a first world country anymore. Our economy may still be one of the highest (I’m not sure if China has overtaken us yet), but our infrastructure is crumbling. Roads and school and bridges are in dire need of repair, our education system is laughable when you see how much money we have available for it. Military spending is out of control, often on things the military doesn’t even need or want. All in the name of continuously soaring profits for the highest echelon of society, who never needed it to begin with.
Here’s some expresses from a recent article about a UN official investigating poverty in the US:
“A United Nations official investigating poverty in the United States was shocked at the level of environmental degradation in some areas of rural Alabama, saying he had never seen anything like it in the developed world.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.comearlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where “raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.”
“Some might ask why a U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would visit a country as rich as the United States,“ Alston said. “But despite great wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality.”
Alston also pointed out that the U.S. “has been very keen” on other countries being investigated by the U.N. for civil and human rights issues.
“Now, it’s the turn to look at what’s going on in the U.S.,” Alston said. “There are pretty extreme levels of poverty in the United States given the wealth of the country. And that does have significant human rights implications.”
“The idea of human rights is that people have basic dignity and that it’s the role of the government—yes, the government!—to ensure that no one falls below the decent level,” he said. “Civilized society doesn’t say for people to go and make it on your own and if you can’t, bad luck.””
i'll apple your turnover 