Dear Friends,

We hope this finds you safe and well, surrounded by things that can offer solace and a sense of community. 

As the health emergency continues in Jackson Heights and far beyond, JHISN wants to recognize the incredible emergency work being done by community-based immigrant rights and advocacy groups. In Queens, immigrant-led groups are right now organizing virtual unemployment clinics; home food delivery; quarantine facilities for people with COVID-19; support to renters, small homeowners, and small businesses who need rent and mortgage relief; burial assistance and bereavement support; digital literacy classes; census work via phone banks and texting; and political pressure on electeds for adequate relief aid, including to undocumented and mixed-status immigrant households.   

With media focused on the ravages and vulnerabilities in low-income and immigrant communities, this less visible labor of community care and material support by immigrant-led groups is life-nourishing. We honor their work.

Newsletter highlights:

1. Supporting immigrants excluded from federal stimulus relief under the CARES Act 
2. The COVID-19 crisis in US detention centers
3. Delivering food justice and food solidarity during the pandemic

1. “Stimulus” Discrimination: Another Blow to Immigrants

Excluding undocumented workers in this relief package is a grave mistake, one that will lead to great suffering in our communities, and likely the loss of life. — Manuel Castro, New Immigrant Community Empowerment

Some Jackson Heights residents are already starting to receive thousands of dollars in “stimulus” checks (or electronic deposits) mandated by Congress. But millions of immigrants who desperately need financial help during the pandemic won’t get a penny. 

The government’s action to exclude many of our neighbors from receiving needed stimulus relief money reveals an inhumane commitment to anti-immigrant policies, even during a deadly pandemic. 

• City Limits reports that many mixed-status households are excluded.
• Just The News clearly outlines the narrowly defined group of immigrants who are eligible.
• The New York Immigration Coalition denounces the exclusion of immigrants. 

On April 16 the Mayor of New York City announced a $20 million relief program, developed with the Open Society Foundations, specifically to provide emergency monetary relief to immigrant workers, including undocumented workers and their families. While this philanthropy will provide much-needed relief for up to 20,000 undocumented workers facing financial distress because of  COVID-19, it is important to note that there are 360,000 undocumented workers and 48,000 undocumented business owners in this city, none of whom will be receiving federal government support.

Responding to the discriminatory federal aid program, teachers in Oakland, CA have pledged to give their own stimulus money to undocumented families of the children they teach, adding momentum to a growing effort to re-distribute the stimulus money through voluntary actions. Nationally, the prominent immigrant justice group Cosecha is mobilizing a #ShareMyCheck campaign. JHISN is exploring local ways that those of us who are able can share some or all of our stimulus money with immigrants excluded from the stimulus program. Stay tuned for details next week. Together we can make a difference.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

• Discuss the inequities in the stimulus package with neighbors and friends.  
• If you are getting the stimulus payment, and don’t need some or any of it right now, consider gifting it to aid immigrant communities in our neighborhoods. Our next newsletter will offer suggestions for making your donation count locally.

2. #FreeThemAll: Release Detainees and Prisoners At Risk

In New York State, infection rates on Rikers Island have reportedly soared to seven times the rates in New York City as a whole. As of April 16, coronavirus infections in NYC jails have already reached a catastrophic 8.5%. The Legal Aid Society warns:

COVID-19 is spreading rapidly at Rikers Island and other local jails, endangering our clients, correction staff and all of New York City …. New York City jails have become the epicenter of COVID-19. It is imperative that Albany, City Hall, our local District Attorneys and the NYPD take swift and bold action. Source: Legal Aid Society, April 16, 2020

Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo has largely ignored calls for clemency for elderly inmates and others at high risk of infection among the 42,000 inmates at NY state prisons–even though at least 700 staff and inmates have tested positive. 

The Thirteenth Amendment kept slavery alive by constitutionalizing involuntary servitude as a punishment for those convicted of a crime. This is what allows inmates to be paid $0.62 per hour to make hand sanitizer while being charged $5.30 to buy toilet paper. Now we have Rikers inmates ‘volunteering’ to don personal protective equipment to dig mass graves for those who died from COVID-19–for $6.00 an hour. The pandemic has exacerbated the human rights issues in the USA’s incarceration industry since physical distancing is not an option for either the jailed or their jailers. 

When it comes to immigrants detained by ICE and CBP–two rogue agencies ignoring Congressional oversight and enforcement–the demand to “Free Them All” makes urgent sense. “ICE has sweeping discretion to release the people in its custody for civil immigration violations at any time.” As we write, over 4,000 doctors have signed an open letter to ICE calling on the agency to release individuals in immigrant detention in order to save lives. Responding to widespread outrage, ICE has recently released several hundred detainees, fitting many with tracking ankle bracelets. But tens of thousands remain locked up in ICE detention, facing imminent threat of infection by COVID-19.

At a privately-owned detention center near San Diego, at least 17 immigrant detainees have tested positive for COVID-19. In Tacoma, Washington, immigrants at the Northwest Detention Center held a protest on April 15 by forming the letters SOS with their bodies in the center’s yard, and launching their third hunger strike in three weeks, as they continue to demand release. At a Chicago shelter for immigrant youth,19 children and two staff members have been diagnosed this past week with COVID-19. 

The brutal consequences of unjust incarceration combined with the deadly pandemic extend beyond the United States. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers across the globe confront national lock-downs and border closures, trapping them in crowded encampments or carceral detention facilities. The Global Detention Project gathers updated information about what different countries are doing to protect–or not–vulnerable migrant populations: “Growing numbers of medical practitioners, NGOs, and international organisations have urged governments to release detainees and provide them with support as they navigate complex and perilous public spaces. While authorities in some countries have released detainees, many others have refused to do so.” 

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

• Volunteer to assist New Sanctuary Coalition with their Free Them All campaign
• Push Governor Cuomo to use his clemency powers to Free Them All.
• Be one of the 30,000 signatures needed for the moveon.org petition to Free Them All
• Distribute this comic-book style explanation about the importance of decarceration, by Free Them All Connecticut
• Advocate for bail reform, support @covidbailoutnyc on twitter and use their links to Venmo, PayPal, or ActBlue

3. Food Justice during a Pandemic

Food radically connects humans to each other. The spread of coronavirus vividly exposes the global and local realities of interdependent food supply chains, as well as the power hierarchies that determine who farms and delivers food, who enjoys ‘food security’ and who does not. Today we should all take notice that many food supply chains in the US begin with farmworkers and people who labor in food processing plants. These workers are disproportionately immigrants of color, often undocumented. We are learning, too, that the lack of workplace protections, access to health care, adequate housing and hygiene have made these workforces dramatically vulnerable to the threat of COVID-19 outbreaks.

In southwest Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is calling for immediate protections for farmworker communities—over 2 million workers nationwide—living in dense housing conditions and traveling to work in crowded buses. Farmworkers are laboring without protective gear, hand sanitizer, or access to COVID-19 testing. Farmworkers are clearly “essential workers” although often they have not been recognized as such: without their work, many grocery store shelves would be empty of familiar goods and produce.  

This week, the biggest coronavirus hot spot in the United States emerged in a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where a staggering 598 employees are now infected with COVID-19, among a largely immigrant workforce of 4,000 people. Meat processing plants across the country are starting to close due to the existence or the imminent threat of COVID-19 outbreaks. 

Here in central Queens, food insecurity is causing anxiety for more and more households. Local immigration groups reported last week that some of us are starting to worry about basic needs like food. Hunger, and fear of hunger, is stalking our community.  

On April 15, Mayor de Blasio announced a $170 million emergency food program to address hunger. A select number of NYC public schools are operating as Meal Hubs, offering three free meals daily, Mon-Friday, in one ‘grab ‘n go’ food package. Food is available not only for students but for any New Yorker who shows up.  Below is a list of reliable resources for COVID-19 food assistance for folks in our neighborhoods and the NYC area:

1. Meal Hub lookup to find a location nearest you.
2. COVID-19 Food Assistance Resources.
3. FoodHelp NYC
4. ACCESS HRA 
5. HelpNowNYC 
6. NYC Food Delivery Assistance 

WHAT CAN YOU DO? 

• Sign and circulate this petition calling on Florida Governor DeSantis to protect Immokalee farmworkers.
• Share the food assistance information here with neighbors, friends, folks in your synagogue, mosque, church or temple. Post in your coop building or share on a listserv or social media!
• If you are able, consider donating or volunteering with Hungry Monk Rescue Truck, serving Queens and Brooklyn. 

In solidarity, with gratitude for the collective care that we share.

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network

Dear friends,

We reach out to you, again, in hopes that we might find new ways to connect even as our daily lives remain physically distanced from each other. Collective care feels urgent and particularly difficult now. Some of us woke up to the latest news about the unfolding tragedy in central Queens–Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona. Our home.

The coronavirus, here as elsewhere, both reflects and deepens long-standing economic and racial inequalities. And the vibrant immigrant communities that are the life-blood of Jackson Heights are being decimated. We must join forces any way we can, collectively, with love and creativity.

Newsletter highlights:

1. A look at the central role of immigrant labor in our healthcare infrastructure and in the battle to save lives during the COVID-19 crisis.
2. The grassroots work of Queens Neighborhood United (QNU) during the pandemic, making visible the most vulnerable among us.
3. An invitation to invent ways to sustain public memory and honor the neighborhood people being lost to the pandemic.

1. Healthcare workers and essential workers are immigrant workers

As we search for practices of solidarity in a global pandemic, our support for healthcare workers becomes especially important. Solidarity with healthcare workers is solidarity with immigrants. While the US healthcare system teeters on the edge of an almost unimaginable disaster, immigrant healthcare workers are doing their best to keep it from collapsing completely. As COVID-19 spreads through the US and the government closes its borders to non-US citizens, nearly 1.7 million foreign-born medical and healthcare workers are on the frontlines of the national crisis, according to the Census Bureau.

Source: Axios Health Apr 3, 2020

All told, about 25% of all US healthcare workers, and almost one-third of US doctors, are immigrants. Twenty-nine percent of nurses in the New York/New Jersey area are immigrants. Even the Trump administration has realized that the US needs this workforce right now:

Since it came to power, the Trump administration has waged a relentless, multi-layered war on immigration. But it only took a few days of panic over the spread of the novel coronavirus for the government to start seeing the value of at least some immigrant workers. In an announcement published on March 26, and promoted on its social media channels, the State Department called on foreign medical professionals who already have US visas to either move forward with their plans to come work in the country or, if they are already in the country, to extend their stay. Source: Quartz March 30, 2020

Nevertheless, incredibly, some 29,000 frontline medical workers who live under the tenuous protection of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), are facing the possibility of immediate deportation. The Trump regime has gone to the Supreme Court for final authorization to destroy this Obama-era program. Analysts say that the Court will probably side with the regime. Not much has changed since last November when Ian Millhiser wrote, “The fate of DACA and the approximately 670,000 immigrants who depend on DACA…appears grim.” The blow could come literally any day now.

Will we see ICE agents dragging health care workers out of Elmhurst Hospital in the middle of the pandemic? Or, as an op-ed in the New York Times speculates, will immigrant workers “be asked to serve in this crisis for now, only to be deported later”?

Meanwhile, Dr. Chen Hu, an Asian-American physician at NYU Langone Medical Center, describes what it feels like to be both “celebrated and villainized” during the pandemic: celebrated for his life-saving work for COVID-19 patients; villainized as a second-generation immigrant of Asian descent who is harassed on the subway as he heads to work in his blue medical scrubs.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

• At 7 pm each night, join your Jackson Heights neighbors by coming to your window to celebrate our amazing healthcare workers with cheers, applause, and pots ‘n pans!
• Check out the work of Queens Feeds Hospitals. Local restaurants like The Queensboro and Senso Unico are closed, but they are taking donations and providing good meals to Elmhurst hospital workers.
• Support the multi-pronged efforts to get personal protective equipment (PPE) to health workers
• Join the #GetThemPPE hashtag campaign on Twitter
• Sign and circulate the petition by the NY State Nurses Association demanding the Defense Production Act be put to full use for the mass production of PPE, COVID-19 tests, and other much-needed medical equipment.
• Sign and circulate frontlineppenow’s change.org petition to urge our government, industry, media and the general population, to assist HCWs in obtaining immediate access to critical PPE
• If you are a health care worker, please consider sharing your story about the lack of PPE with Frontline PPE Now.

2. Fighting Criminalization and Displacement with Queens Neighborhood United

Queens Neighborhood United (QNU) is a diverse, community-based organization founded in 2014 to address local issues including policing, immigration, community control of public land, and the growing economic displacement of small local stores by large chains (like Target).

Last weekend, QNU shared news with their 3,500 Facebook followers of police arresting three homeless people in Corona Plaza with no explanation. This action flies in the face of the CDC guidance, as reported by The Intercept: “Unless individual housing units are available, do not clear encampments during community spread of COVID-19.” Putting homeless people in jail, where physical distancing cannot be practiced, directly exposes them to the threat of contracting COVID-19. QNU reminds us that the CDC and WHO repeatedly state that “jails and prisons are extremely dangerous during a pandemic.”

QNU exemplifies another important aspect of true community support in a pandemic: Mutual Aid, a concept many people are becoming familiar with and mistakenly think of as some form of charity. The truth is that the best people to trust to organize Mutual Aid are the already existing grassroots groups, like QNU, who have been doing this work for many years. They have proven their leadership, advocating for the people in their neighborhoods with actions such as Rent Strikes. And they make community services available to the people who actually need them. These are the organizations that can best guide us in how and where to give our financial support during the crisis, because they are already trusted by and embedded within our communities.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

These are the groups that QNU has identified as great to directly support. You don’t need to donate to every group (unless of course, you can), but pick at the one that resonates with you personally…and then ask your friends to do the same! Your network will help their network.

• If you hear about an organized rent strike, support it in every way you can.
• Contribute to New York State Youth Leadership Council emergency fund for undocumented youth and their families.
• Do these 5 things to support food workers.
• Support the Street Vendor Project.
• In Memory of activist Lorena Borjas, Donate to the Transgender Emergency Fund.
• Help reach the $25,000 goal to provide food and medicine to the Laundry Workers Center.
• Help Vinylbomb make personal protective equipment for our medical personnel.

3. In Memoriam

Make the Road’s Trans Immigrant Project has been posting “Rest In Power” memorials for the trans activists in our neighborhood lost to COVID-19. The names of Jamilet Valente, Lorena Borjas, Liz Fontanez, and Yimel Alvarado may not be known to us in the same way as rich personalities who post on social media about their fun ways of dealing with social distancing at home, but they have had significant influence in our neighborhood. These activist women helped combat the ostracism and exclusions that transpeople suffered long before the current health crisis and the government is not to be relied upon to help replace these leaders and their programs with the emergency funding they will need to continue their work.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

• JHISN is looking for a creative way for everyone in our community to share the loss of friends, neighbors, and family in the pandemic and to do it in a way that is not as fleeting as social media. After 9/11 the posters of loved ones were seen throughout the city. But with shelter-at-home requirements, we cannot go out and pay homage the same way. Help us build an online solution that allows us to share our grief and memorialize those we mourn. Contact aniotus@outlook.com if you have ideas or want to help.

We wish everyone protection, safety, and well-being. Thank you for continuing to protect our wider and deeper home, in communities of care and solidarity.

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network