It’s Paradise

via Whenua Fenua Enua

Hip/hop confronting domestic violence

Who is more undesirable, the illegal alien or homosexual?

via

Over the weekend, I was reading some pro-migrant news at a Catholic site that I had stumbled on via Google News Alert service. And on the sidebar, the very site was spewing hatred about same-sex marriage in California. The churches and religious ‘right’ who first established ’sanctuary’ and are very pro-migrant, are also the ones who are very wrong on LGBT issues. So what happens when we have a gay undocumented migrant??

This post has been in my mind for quite some time because lets face it, those of us in the pro-migrant community know undocumented persons who are also gay, lesbian, transgender. This intersectionality is further complicated by our homophobic and heterosexist immigration laws that do not recognize ‘marriage’ or partnership between people of the same-sex, and hence we have undocumented partners who are forced to live in the shadows, break off their relationships or move to another country. MORE

Congressional Hearings on ICE raids

“ICE’s immigration raids have been so sweeping that they have ensnared U.S. citizens, including innocent children, in their dragnet,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “There are no regulations controlling ICE’s reckless raids, and ICE routinely violates due process while conducting raids.”

During a raid last year in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kebin Reyes, a then 6-year-old U.S. citizen, was detained for 10 hours in an ICE field office after his home was raided by ICE. The ACLU, with the San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, sued ICE on behalf of Reyes, arguing that his detention violated his constitutionally protected civil rights. Katherine Gibney, the principal of Reyes’s school, is scheduled to testify in today’s subcommittee hearing.

Fear and Loathing the Prime Time

Fear and Loathing in Prime Time
Immigration Myths and Cable News

A really great study of how cable news works to perpetuate hate and fear against the immigrant community.

Welcome to the Blog of the immigrant people!!

Welcome to the Blog of the immigrant people!!

This blog is inspired in resistance to the actual economic policies (NAFTA) in Mexico and Latin America that have been imposed by the North American government that cause us to be displaced to the United States. The current repressive immigration laws in this country have caused Flor to flourish in these dark times.

And this is the story of my resistance inspired by the same situation in which 12 million immigrants live on a daily basis in this country.

And this is why Flor Resists!!!
We expect you to do the same!!!

Sexual favors allegedly expected from some Postville workers

via des moines register

Reports that there was an expectation of sexual favors at Agriprocessors Inc. are beginning to emerge from workers at the Postville meat processing plant, and advocates for immigrants in Postville today are trying to collect and validate the stories.

Sister Mary McCauley, a Roman Catholic nun at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, said workers have said that “there was sexual abuse, that there’s propositioning.”

If a worker wanted, say, a promotion or a shift change, “they’d be brought into a room with three or four men and it was like, ‘Which one do you want? Which one are you going to serve?’” said McCauley in an interview today with Des Moines Register editors and reporters.

“Unfortunately, they are grateful for some of their ESL classes, and they knew what some of those words meant,” McCauley said. “If they had the courage, they could refuse it.”

Chaim Abrahams, an Agriprocessors representative, declined to address the allegation of sexual favors in exchange for job-related requests.

“As with any legal matter, Agriprocessors cannot comment about any specific allegation,” Abrahams said in a written statement. “The company is performing an independent investigation and will continue to cooperate with the government about this matter.”

Federal agents raided Agriprocessors Inc., a kosher meat-processing plant, on Monday in the largest single-site immigration bust in U.S. history. Arrest warrants were issued for 697 people who work at the plant.

Federal agents detained 389 in Waterloo, charged 306 with various fraud-related charges, and released 62. Twenty-one remain in custody pending immigration hearings.

Since the raid, stories of how employees were mistreated has emerged, including verbal abuse by supervisors.

Last November, the federal search warrant released after the raid said, Immigrant and Customs Enforcement agents interviewed a former Agriprocessors supervisor who said some employees were running a methamphetamine lab in the plant and were bringing weapons to work.

Another source alleged worker abuse, officials said in the warrant. In one case, a supervisor covered the eyes of an employee with duct tape and struck him with a meat hook.

Advocates are trying to document workers’ personal stories, McCauley said.

Women leaders from Guam say no to a massive U.S. military build-up on their island.

Women leaders from Guam say no to a massive U.S. military build-up on their island.

Standing With Those Who Fight for Themselves

via Zapagringo

Neoliberals believe that somehow they have finally discovered a socially responsible, or socially democratic, way of taking people’s land, labor, and resources by force, for profit.

It’s not possible. This is the myth of neoliberalism. This imposed political economy reduces human beings and natural resources into variables in an economic equation. Every day the human variable in this equation is considered more expendable. Indigenous people, farm workers, women, youth, and poor people everywhere are reduced to variables in this equation. When no longer considered economically viable by the powers that be, communities become economically expendable. If a group of people can be treated as disposable for “not fitting in,” imagine how that group is treated when they organize or resist this imposition. Historically they have been treated as a virus which must be eliminated. MORE

ICE raids interrupt child labor investigation

via Latina Lista

As one Lutheran minister explained, Postville is a town of less than 3,000 people — Mexicans, Anglos, Jewish, Guatemalans, etc. Unlike big cities, each ethnic group doesn’t have an area of town designated their part of town — they all live together. It’s the kind of assimilation that would make the harshest critic of Spanish-speaking immigrants proud.

But for exactly that reason, the community as a whole is reeling from the raid. As the minister said, the raid basically took one-third of the community’s population. That kind of loss is devastating for the families, the children and the local economy.

Yet, a story that is slowly surfacing, and which is on par in its appalling nature as the raid’s impact on the children, is the fact that ICE disrupted a state investigation into an important child labor violations investigation at the Agriprocessors plant.

An investigation that is now dead.

It seems that Agriprocessors is hardly the benevolent employer. Come to find out that Agriprocessors has a record of “grotesquely” abusing, exploiting and putting the health and safety of their workforce at risk.

Among those abuses was the hiring of kids to work in the plant. Earlier, Latina Lista reported that several juveniles were arrested among the workers during the worksite raid. What we didn’t know at the time was just how young some of these workers were.

It is being reported that some were as young as 13-years-old. It’s also come to light that management from the plant would routinely try and recruit kids from the town’s middle school to work in the plant.

In fact, their record for exploiting children and abusing their immigrant labor force was so widely known that state authorities were working with some of the undocumented immigrants to expose Agriprocessors’ management. MORE

Video from Postville Iowa