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Add an EventFall 2019 National Immigrant Solidarity Network News Alert!
Please download our latest newsletter: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Fall2019.pdf Immigrant justice videos from ActivistVideo.org
8/8: ICE raids followed a massive sexual harassment settlement at Mississippi plants The raids could discourage future complaints of worker abuse. Zack Ford – Think Progress The raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which led to nearly 700 workers being detained, targeted seven Koch Foods Inc. poultry plants in Morton, Mississippi. As it happens, last year, Koch Foods settled a $3.75 million lawsuit for racial discrimination, national origin discrimination, and sexual harassment against its Latinx workers in that very same Morton facility. According to the suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), supervisors, “touched and/or made sexually suggestive comments to female Hispanic employees, hit Hispanic employees, and charged many of them money for normal everyday work activities.” Many workers were reportedly either discharged or subjected to other forms of retaliation when they complained. As part of the settlement, Koch Foods not only paid out a massive sum to the victims, but also agreed to implement training for employees and set up a 24-hour hotline for reporting discrimination complaints in both English and Spanish. The settlement lasted three years, which means Koch Foods is still under supervision to continue efforts to reduce discrimination in its work place. As labor reporter Mike Elk notes at Payday Report, it may not be a coincidence that the Morton plant was raided. There have been at least two other plants, one in Salem, Ohio, and another in Morristown, Tennessee, where ICE raids have followed complaints of worker conditions. Last year, for example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Fresh Mark over $200,000 for three separate incidents in which proper safety guards were not in place in its Salem meatpacking plant. A week later, it was raided by ICE. The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), which represents many of these plant workers, is concerned these ICE raids will discourage workers from reporting abuse or unsafe conditions. This means employers like Koch Foods can rely on the fear of raids to help them exploit migrant laborers already working in dangerous facilities without accountability for their other illicit labor conditions. Wednesday’s raid was one of the biggest ICE raids in over a decade. It took place on the first day of school in Morton, meaning many children whose parents were detained had no family to go home to at the end. ..... Link to the report: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=1492 8/18: How The U.S. Created The Central American Immigration Crisis What Happens in El Norte Doesn’t Stay in El Norte Rebecca Gordon - Tom Dispatch It’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been running toward them with an upraised butcher knife. For two years, members of my littleEpiscopal church joined other neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner’s office continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already reported — that he had indeed been running away from those officers when they shot him. In the end, the San Francisco district attorney declined to prosecute the police for the killing, although the city did reach a financial settlement with his family back in Guatemala. Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he — like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations — was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month — May — of this year.. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.” It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president’s wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s, dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the region) with U.S. economic and military backing. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes in genocidal wars on its indigenous Mayan majority.To top it off, climate change, which the United States has done the most of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.....Link to the report: 8/18: How The U.S. Created The Central American Immigration Crisis(1) 8/18: How The U.S. Created The Central American Immigration Crisis(2)
Projects of National Immigrant Solidarity Network (NISN) and Action LA Network, Fiscal sponsorships of Alliance for Global Justicehttp://www.ChinaDelegation.org
A 11-days US activists to China solidarity delegation, going to Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing, will witness the dynamic county and celebrate the 70th Anniversary of People’s Republic of China (October 1st), the tour starts 9/24 at Shanghai, meeting with activists and city tour, then high-speed train to Nanjing for history tour. Finally arriving Beijing at Sep 29th for official and activist meetings, joining their Oct 1st China national day celebration, and Beijing tour. All Proceeds will support NISN and Action LA Network Contact Us:
More Recent Immigrant Justice News.. 7/18: US, Mexico Deported 54,000 Guatemalans from January to June 7/24: Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy 7/25: By the numbers: Migration to the US-Mexico border
7/28: Border Patrol agents sickened by toxic raw sewage flowing in from Mexico 8/4: Hispanic Leaders Say Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Language Is Fueling Violence Like El Paso 8/4: More El Paso Victims Might Be Avoiding Hospitals Because of Their Immigration Status 8/5: El Paso Has Exposed the Ugly Reality of the “Immigration Debate” 8/8: ICE raids followed a massive sexual harassment settlement at Mississippi plants 8/12: OCA Condemns Blanket Profiling of Chinese Students and Academics 8/18: How The U.S. Created The Central American Immigration Crisis(1) 8/18: How The U.S. Created The Central American Immigration Crisis(2) 8/22: The Trump Administration’s Sustained Attack on the Rights of Immigrant Children Please download our latest newsletter: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Fall2019.pdf
Useful Immigrant Resources on Detention and Deportation Immigrants Shape California: New "Access to Justice" Laws ICE custody program and its budget Refugee Appropriations Docs & Resources Immigration Bond: How to Get Your Money Back (1) Immigration Bond: How to Get Your Money Back (2) http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=1709
Face Sheet: Immigration Detention--Questions and Answers (Dec, 2008) by: http://www.thepoliticsofimmigration.org Thanks for GREAT works from Detention Watch Network (DWN) to compiled the following information, please visit DWN website: http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org Tracking
ICE's Enforcement Agenda - From
Raids to Deportation-A Community Resource Kit
Useful Handouts and Know Your Immigrant Rights When Marches
Immigrant Marches / Marchas de los Inmigrantes
(By ACLU)
Immigrants and their supporters are participating in marches all over the country to protest proposed national legislation and to seek justice for immigrants. The materials available here provide important information about the rights and risks involved for anyone who is planning to participate in the ongoing marches. If government agents question you, it is important to understand your rights. You should be careful in the way you speak when approached by the police, FBI, or INS. If you give answers, they can be used against you in a criminal, immigration, or civil case. The ACLU's publications below provide effective and useful guidance in several languages for many situations. The brochures apprise you of your legal rights, recommend how to preserve those rights, and provide guidance on how to interact with officials. IMMIGRATION LABOR / FREE SPEECH PROTESTERS STUDENTS
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