Category: Your Rights

JHISN Newsletter 05/23/2020

Posted on May 23, 2020 by - 2020, Coronavirus, ICE, Immigration, Jackson Heights, News, Newsletter, Politics, Your Rights, Your Voice

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you as spring returns to warm us all again. We are learning how to change seasons in a pandemic. How to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan while physically distancing. How to have birthdays while staying-at-home.

We will mark Memorial Day in the shadow of over 6000 coronavirus deaths in the borough of Queens; 1200 deaths in Jackson Heights and neighboring areas. With terrible clarity, we know that people are dying more often in immigrant communities, working class neighborhoods, and communities of color throughout New York City. How can we memorialize this almost unimaginable loss? How do we struggle together locally for immigrant rights, and economic and racial justice, so that we are all protected equally from the ravages of a global pandemic?

Newsletter highlights:

  1. Urgent Need for Deportation Moratorium
  2. NICE Fights for Recently-Arrived Immigrants and Leads in Local Food Support
  3. Food Politics are Immigration Politics

1.  End Covid Cruelty — Stop Deportations Now

Our newsletter readers are aware that immigrants have been subjected to staggering forms of discrimination and abuse during the Covid-19 epidemic. Immigrants face higher rates of infection, hell-hole conditions in detention centers, racist attacks in public, denial of unemployment benefits and urgently-needed aid for immigrant households, small businesses and undocumented people—the list goes on and on. What’s also become clear is that the Trump regime is using the coronavirus as a pretext for achieving what it always wanted: to exclude and deport as many immigrants as possible.

The Trump administration now denies entry to virtually all refugees, supposedly because of the pandemic. But this is only their latest attempt to manipulate “public health” issues to seal US borders. In 2018, the architect of Trump’s most vicious anti-immigrant policies, Stephen Miller, used an outbreak of illnesses and deaths in unhealthy detention centers to attack immigrants. In 2019, he again highlighted “health concerns” with immigrants when mumps broke out among detainees. Later that year, he politicized a flu outbreak at Border Patrol stations. In each case, Miller hoped to leverage the extraordinary powers given to the president in times of public health emergencies. With COVID-19, he and Trump have hit the jackpot:

The administration has weaponized an arcane provision of a quarantine law first enacted in 1893 and revised in 1944 to order the blanket deportation of asylum-seekers and unaccompanied minors at the Mexican border without any testing or finding of disease or contagion. Legal rights to hearings, appeals, asylum screening and the child-specific procedures are all ignored.

More than 20,000 people have been deported under the order, including at least 400 children in just the first few weeks, according to the administration and news reports. Though the order was justified as a short-term emergency measure, the indiscriminate deportations continue unchecked and the authorization has been extended and is subject to continued renewal. (NYTimes, May 11, 2020)

Meanwhile, green card applications for 358,000 people trying to join their loved ones in the US have been frozen. In a private phone call, Miller clued in his supporters that this “temporary” Covid-19 order is part of a larger strategy to reduce overall immigration.

Despite obvious health dangers, deportation from ICE detention facilities grinds on in the form of dozens of flights to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Many deported immigrants are Covid-positive, meaning that the US is effectively exporting the virus. This exposes the ultimate in hypocrisy: a regime claiming to act because of a health emergency is causing the pandemic to spread around the world. In a bitter rebuke, the Health Minister of Guatemala has labelled the US “the Wuhan of the Americas.”

The United Nations Network on Migration has called for the suspension of migrant deportations during the pandemic. Doctors Without Borders insists that the US halt deportations to Latin America and the Caribbean. And a coalition of more than 100 groups has demanded that Trump stop deportations to Haiti. JHISN has long called for a moratorium on all deportations and migrant detentions. Today this call is more critical than ever.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

 2.  NICE: Fighting for Low-Wage Immigrant Workers

Several weeks ago, the New York Times reported on Manuel Castro’s dilemma with food distribution. Castro, the executive director of NICE (New Immigrant Community Empowerment), had secured 100 boxes of food to distribute to the immigrant day laborers and domestic workers the group supports. But who should get it? His method of selection was randomly fair, and by no means preferential. Names were pulled from a hat.

One month later, the Jackson Heights-based NICE is still working on food distribution to thousands of Queens residents excluded from COVID-19 federal stimulus, unemployment, and other supports because of their immigration status. This time the NICE4workers team are working alongside local street food vendors, labor unions, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, giving out free fresh food secured from New York state farms. NICE also partners with the NGO Khalsa Aid USA–founded on the Sikh principle to “Recognise the whole human race as one”–bringing healthy grains, lentils, beans, vegetables, fruits, and rice (in a reusable canvas tote!) to undocumented families in Jackson Heights.

Somehow, NICE also finds time to actively protest wage theft and exploitation of immigrant workers with their #TakeItBack campaigns. With a membership composed largely of newly-arrived immigrants, and undocumented immigrants in the construction and landscaping industries (including a growing number of women transitioning to construction work), NICE organizes some of the most vulnerable and precarious workers in NYC.

No one was truly prepared for this pandemic. But NICE was ready to take action, with its founding purpose to “prioritize the leadership and voices of low-wage undocumented immigrant workers who are often excluded and/or marginalized from other spaces.” Low-wage undocumented workers have been multiply marginalized during the pandemic crisis, receiving no federal support (even when deemed ‘essential’ workers), and having to fight for resources from state and city agencies–all while continuing to risk hard physical labor when other New Yorkers have the luxury of working remotely and remaining physically isolated.

NICE promotes the welfare of their members with regular Occupational Safety and Health training programs, focussing attention on employees’ legal rights in the workplace. NICE also provides job training videos on subjects like plumbing, painting and English-language wording commonly used in the construction industry. They have ensured that COVID-19 information is available to workers in their own language. 

NICE recently supported the May 20 Town Hall demanding an Excluded Workers Fund in New York State. Working with a coalition including New York Communities for Change and Make the Road NY, NICE is calling for a $3.5 billion state relief program, funded by taxing billionaires and corporations, to support immigrants who have been systematically excluded from government assistance legislation. Meanwhile, one of the founding members of NICE, Jessica González-Rojas, is running for State Assembly District 34.

On May 19, NICE announced that almost $4,500 was raised from 64 donors to fund NICE’s front-line community support efforts. JHISN applauds the sustained efforts by NICE to support, train, advocate for and provide services to our immigrant workers, fighting for an economy that works for everybody.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

3.  Food, Immigrant Labor, and the Politics of Hunger

The signs are clear: lines for local food banks in Queens stretching for blocks, reports that one in four New Yorkers now lacks adequate food, higher food prices just as more people have less money to spend. Hunger and food insecurity are not new in our city, but the pandemic and its economic fallout have placed an estimated 2 million New Yorkers at risk of not having enough to eat. In Jackson Heights, mutual aid work by immigrant-led community groups is focused increasingly on food assistance.

While the city promises to increase its pre-made meal distribution program to 1.5 million meals each day, mutual aid groups in Jackson Heights note that most immigrant households need groceries and staples for cooking—not pre-made meals. Nourish New York, a $25 million state initiative drawing from public health emergency funds, allows local food banks across NY to purchase agricultural products from upstate farms that were being ‘dumped’ by desperate farmers. In central Queens, over 30,000 pounds of upstate farm food is being distributed weekly in food bank and hot meal programs organized by State Senator Jessica Ramos’s office.

While food insecurity in NYC is certainly not limited to immigrant communities, there are deep challenges immigrant households face as hunger threatens more of us, including accessing resources and provision of culturally-appropriate food. Even before the coronavirus crisis, the number of low-income immigrants nationwide signing up for food benefits was dropping, as recent changes to the ‘public charge’ rules governing legal status for immigrants threaten to disqualify those who access public benefits. Fear is spreading among immigrant communities that any kind of government assistance—even food aid during the pandemic—can block their path to legal status. The anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric of the Trump regime feed that fear, even as immigrant households grow hungrier.

At the other end of the food supply chain—food production—immigrant workers face a new set of dangers during the crisis. With immigrants supplying 30-50% of the labor in the U.S. meat processing industry, Trump’s designation of the meat industry as ‘critical infrastructure’ during the pandemic means that his violently anti-immigrant regime has just acknowledged that thousands of immigrant workers are in fact “essential” workers. Since up to 50% of immigrant laborers in the meatpacking industry are undocumented, Trump’s pronouncement also acknowledges the critical, essential nature of undocumented labor in the U.S. (Note that a mere nine months ago, ICE conducted one of the largest workplace immigration raids in U.S. history at seven poultry plants in Mississippi, arresting nearly 700 hundred immigrant workers.)

Being designated an essential worker during this pandemic is hardly a blessing, despite popular celebrations of their “heroism.” For workers in the pork, beef, and poultry processing industries, becoming ‘essential’ often simply means that corporate employers can make more demands with fewer restrictions or protections. And when an essential workforce includes many undocumented workers, we have “created a workforce largely made up of people who aren’t legally allowed to work and also, now, not permitted to stop” (“The Workers are Being Sacrificed…” Mother Jones, May 1, 2020).

As meatpacking plants across the Midwest and South become hotspots for coronavirus infections, with confirmed cases at 214 plants, thousands of workers testing positive, and at least 59 workers dead, ’essential’ workers are revealed as ‘expendable’ workers. Many plants employ a wide diversity of immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, Somalia, Sudan, and Burma. With the federal government demanding no interruption to the nation’s meat supply, and employers determined to keep their profits flowing, meatpacking plants are forcing their workforce to stay at grueling jobs, despite anxiety, shortages of PPE, illness and death. Refuse, and face losing both your job and unemployment benefits. 

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Gratitude for your collective care in this ongoing moment of crisis and radical uncertainty. Together we will continue to build forms of solidarity and community action, as we fight for a future that embraces us all. 

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network

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JHISN Newsletter 05/16/2020

Posted on May 16, 2020 by - 2020, citizenship, Coronavirus, Immigration, Jackson Heights, News, Newsletter, Politics, Your Rights, Your Voice

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you, as we enter the third month of stay-at-home restrictions in New York City. We continue to use our e-newsletter as a collective ‘public space’ during the pandemic, sharing news with a local focus on immigrant politics and solidarity. We are grateful for your encouraging responses! Please continue to send us ideas for future newsletter items, and feedback on how to make the newsletter most useful to you at info@jhimmigrantsolidarity.org

We are also now sharing the newsletter on social media. We invite you to follow @JHSolidarity on twitter and facebook, and to circulate newsletter items to folks who might be interested.  

Newsletter highlights: 

  1. Immigrants Excluded from Rent Relief — update on #CancelRent and Legislative Proposals
  2. Activist Art Traditions Continue during a Pandemic 
  3. Immigrant Students Struggle for Educational Access 

1) Still No Rent Relief for Immigrants

Widespread inability to pay rent during the Covid-19 catastrophe continues to threaten the housing security of millions of immigrants left out of federal and state assistance programs. About 20% of tenants in the US failed to pay any part of their rent on May 1. This figure actually represents a drop from April 1. Analysts believe that increased rent payments were made possible by stimulus or unemployment money. Neither of these is available to roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants, as well as many others in their households.

#CancelRent says that there were 190,000 rent and mortgage strikes nationally. In New York, there were about 14,000 strikers, mostly in 57 large buildings. Many immigrants participated. This is probably not the massive response that organizers had hoped for, but it’s a solid beginning for a movement that seems likely to grow as the rent crisis deepens. As activists say, “We can’t pay, so we won’t pay…together.”

Proposals in the US Congress for emergency rent suspension or rental assistance, including initiatives by Ilhan Omar, Sherrod Brown, and a group of Queens Congress members, seem unlikely to go anywhere right now because of Republican opposition. At the state level, Governor Cuomo has made it clear that he does not support aid of any sort for undocumented immigrants. The current legislative effort with the best prospects may be the bill proposed by Michael Gianaris in the State Senate, calling for a 90-day suspension of rent and mortgages for anyone economically impacted by Covid-19. Notably, it has attracted support from some commercial tenants, individual homeowners, and even landlords, because it would provide for broad mortgage forgiveness as well as rent relief.

Currently, there is a NY State freeze on evictions, which has been extended through August 20. Tenant advocates expect a wave of eviction proceedings once the freeze ends, since all back rent will be due at that time. Also, a new provision added to the freeze puts the burden on tenants to prove that they can’t pay their rent specifically as a result of Covid-19. This raises the prospect of grueling eviction hearings, initiated by landlords challenging the rent freeze for individual tenants. “Landlords will bring tenants to court, who will then have to demonstrate to landlords…that they were impacted, and the court will either find [tenants] credible or not,” said Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Society. “In a city where landlords have called ICE on their tenants, people will have to choose whether or not to tell their landlords about their immigration status.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

2) Making Art and Public Memory in Pandemic Times

In times of uncertainty, art is more than beauty or decoration — it’s a tool. Art can heal, art can save lives, art can bring us together — even when we’re apart. Aaron Huey, “Artists Paint a Portrait of a Pandemic”  

She has purple and white wings, pink-red boxing gloves, a blue cap, a white mask. Painted on the side of an abandoned building in Denver by mural artist Austin Zucchini-Fowler, Healthcare Hero is one of countless works of public art blooming across cities and towns in response to the pandemic. In New York City, she is four stories tall, a nurse in white and blue, palms pressed together like buddha, and E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L spelled out in bright red letters above her head—a poster designed by the Hawaiian artist Marvin Madariaga and projected on the side of an NYC hospital.  

Public art has a long, activist history of escaping the museum and the gallery to directly engage people in our everyday lives. In the current crisis, institutions ranging from the United Nations to the social change organization Amplifier are holding international contests for artists to contribute their work in the service of popular education and collective well-being during the pandemic.  

Here in Queens, a call for “Art from the Epicenter” is circulating right now for artists in Jackson Heights and neighboring areas to donate their artwork to support local organizations, including Covid Care Neighbor Network, Make the Road NY, and Meals for Elmhurst Hospital. Artists’ donated work will be sold in an online exhibition/auction, with all monies going to local groups providing mutual aid to immigrant communities and those hit hardest by the crisis.

The Queens Public Library and Queens College have also launched the Queens Memory COVID-19 Project, a public art initiative gathering stories of how we are struggling, surviving, and coming together during the crisis. Part of the larger Queens Memory Project–a community archive narrating everyday life in “The World’s Borough”–The COVID-19 Project belongs to us. As an intimate collection of oral histories, images, and experiences, the project will become a form of public memory for a moment which, for many of us right now, is filled with silence and loss.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

3) Immigrant Students Can’t Count on Billionaires for Equal Access to Education

Before the pandemic, the Education Justice Project of Make The Road New York, an immigrant-led justice organization, worked with public school parent committees and youth leaders to end ineffective punitive policies, and challenge the management of overcrowded and underfunded neighborhood schools. With a stunning 85% of youth participating in their Student Success Centers accepted to college, MTRNY’s model was replicated across all five NYC boroughs, serving over 17,000 students in 34 schools.

After the pandemic hit and the schools closed, education for the children of immigrants has been disproportionately disrupted. The Mayor’s office gave lip service to supporting immigrant families left out of federal funding and lacking access to educational technology. It was unclear how the city’s approach would be funded, until the announcement that the Open Society Foundations, run by liberal philanthropist George Soros, earmarked $15 million to fund the Department of Education’s remote learning program. 

Educational technology is often a problem area, especially for immigrant and low-income families. 15% of US households with children lack high-speed internet at home. One in three households that make below $30,000 a year lacks any internet. When parents live apart, or are in quarantine, internet learning can easily be disrupted. In New York, the Department of Education is supplying large numbers of internet-connected tablets, but some students still fall through the gaps. In one family we know, the children are doing their homework on their parent’s mobile phone.

A JHISN newsletter reader, embracing Mutual Aid, asked us if there were organizations that were funding immigrant children who lack the devices and other technology necessary to participate in the remote learning program. They were looking to make a contribution to a local organization that specifically supports children’s edtech needs. Please let us know if you are aware of any in our neighborhood?

Governor Cuomo took the idea of billionaires funding education even further by recently inviting Bill Gates to advise a council to ‘Reimagine Education’. The council met without the input of any educators from New York City, or any grassroots experts like the New York Immigration Coalition’s Education Collaborative. As Forbes magazine reports, The Gates Foundation has been involved in several education projects that have ended badly. This includes the 2011 InBloom initiative, which Gates simply walked away from after $100 million had been wasted.

Over 150 years ago an immigrant industrialist, Peter Cooper, founded Cooper Union on the Lower East Side to provide free education to the working class, women, and people of color. He aimed to promote civic virtue and harmony. Today we have racist millionaires in the White House who are “prompting immigrant families to forgo services that they fear could land them on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s radar or jeopardize their path to citizenship.” Although right now we find ourselves a long way from civic harmony, perhaps we can at least provide all students access to the necessary resources they need to pursue the education they deserve. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

With gratitude for collective care and mutual aid in these staggering times, 

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network

Follow @JHSolidarity on facebook and twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 05/09/2020

Posted on May 9, 2020 by - 2020, Coronavirus, History, ICE, Immigration, Jackson Heights, News, Newsletter, Politics, Your Rights, Your Voice

Dear friends,

Warm greetings to each of you, as Spring arrives in full force during the ongoing pandemic. In this strange mix of blooming flowers, economic anxiety, lush green trees, and local grief, we hope you are finding ways to be safe and to feel connected. 

To celebrate the return of light and warmth, we want to share with you a public art project that one of our newsletter readers just shared with us. ‘Queensbound’ is “poetry for the people online,” a collaborative digital project that brings together recordings of poetry by Queens writers, many of them first or second-generation immigrants. One poem is selected for each subway stop in Queens–click on the green dot for ‘Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave’ stop and you will hear Meera Nair, local writer and community activist, reading her wonderful poem “In These Streets”. 

Newsletter highlights:

  1. How to practice Mutual Aid 
  2. New York Taxi Workers Alliance: Essential Workers
  3. Local small businesses in danger as federal programs offer little relief

1. ‘Solidarity not Charity’ — Practicing Mutual Aid

Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions … by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. There is nothing new about mutual aid—people have worked together to survive for all of human history. “Solidarity Not Charity…” March 2020  

Many of us first heard the phrase ‘mutual aid’ in the early weeks of the pandemic, as neighbors in Jackson Heights quickly mobilized in the face of a frightening threat. Working at the local level, often through all-volunteer actions, mutual aid starts by respecting and nourishing our basic interdependence—the deeply ‘mutual’ ways in which we rely on, care for, and shape each others’ everyday lives. 

The origins of mutual aid are many. Some would remind us that thousands of years of communal ownership and collective action among indigenous communities embody the core values of mutual aid. Some would point to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program for children, free health clinics, free ambulance services, and transportation programs for elderly folks in the community. Some of us remember how here in NYC, after the devastating hurricane of 2012,  Occupy Sandy organized emergency relief, food and essential supplies delivery, clean-up crews, and house rebuilding that exceeded what Bloomberg’s municipal government was willing or able to provide. 

Mutual aid steps in to say that we can’t wait for government or philanthropy or power elites to meet our needs—especially in disaster or crisis situations. Mutual aid says that we will cooperate and work together for the sake of our common good, our shared and very ‘public’ health, our interdependent economic lives, our cultural survival. Mutual aid knows that the new social relations that we create through intimate material support for each other can be a building block for sustained social movements and political change. 

Locally and globally right now, there are countless mutual aid projects taking place, sharing resources and power, redistributing money and the tools for protection in a pandemic. Many of them don’t call themselves ‘mutual aid’; nor do they need to. Here in Jackson Heights, immigrant-led and frontline community groups are organizing essential workers, delivering food and needed supplies, mobilizing rent strikes, strategizing small business survival, sharing public health information, providing burial assistance, and collectively mourning community members lost to COVID-19. All of this and more is mutual aid.

We invite you to explore some of the mutual aid projects taking place in our neighborhoods (see below), and consider how you might participate. Mutual aid requires us to move beyond the language of gifting or donating or helping those in need, by recognizing that the people you are ‘aiding’ have already aided you, and will aid you again. It is, profoundly, mutual. As those of us with food security think about how to participate in food assistance for community members threatened with hunger and food insecurity, we can remember how important immigrant, and often undocumented, labor is at supplying us with access to food. Those of us who can redirect some or all of a stimulus check to local immigrant-led groups can reflect on how the money can be more ‘mutually’ distributed in the face of a federal government that systematically excludes many immigrants, and all undocumented households, from emergency federal relief. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO

2. NYC Taxi Drivers — Essential Workers Fighting for Essential Rights

The Queens-based New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) was featured in 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting detailing the predatory loans that have crushed the NYC taxi industry. In August 2019 the NYTWA successfully lobbied to ensure that a cap was extended on the number of for-hire vehicles in NYC, and was taking the next steps to demand guarantees for a living wage, job security for app drivers, and a raise for all drivers. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

The NYTWA was forced to shift priorities. They are now focused on advising their nearly 20,000 members–almost all immigrants, from over 100 countries–on ways to deal with the ongoing health and economic crisis. The NYTWA’s comprehensive guide to help drivers and their families get through the pandemic covers the full range of needs: from unemployment advice to burial assistance, stimulus checks and medallion loans, business loans, and food access. 

The group’s activist work also continues. NYTWA is gathering signatures for a petition against Uber’s employment practices, including the company’s misinformation about drivers’ eligibility for unemployment benefits. They are using Twitter to report on the large number of food deliveries by NYTWA members, and to share the announcement that TLC drivers will now be paid $53 per route by the city, rather than an hourly fee for these food runs.

NYTWA also announced recently the good news that the MTA will pay for taxis for essential workers during subway shutdowns. Between 1 am and 5 am, trips will be dispatched via Curb, Arro, and other apps that are now contracted for Access A Ride taxi trips. The Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network values the services that taxi drivers provide throughout our city and applauds the work that NYTWA is doing to ensure they are recognized and rewarded for their essential work.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

  • Add your support to the petition calling on Uber to stop misleading drivers about their employment rights
  • Listen in to the special community radio program held every Sunday night at 9 pm by dialing in to Radio Samatiguila at 712-770-5345; Code 123843#

3. How the PPP has Failed Small Businesses

The vibrant street-level commerce of our local neighborhoods has been transformed into stretches of urban desert, as small business after small business stands empty, indefinitely closed during the pandemic. The Queens Chamber of Commerce recently warned that up to 50% of Queens restaurants and bars may not reopen. The emergency federal Payroll Protection Program (PPP), hailed as offering stimulus money to aid small businesses,  ”has been a disaster” for Queens businesses, according to CoC President Tom Grech. Many immigrant-run small businesses, the cultural and commercial backbone of Jackson Heights, face a precarious future as federal relief remains out of reach.

The PPP was initially funded by Congress with $349 billion. The idea was to generate forgivable loans to small businesses so they could pay current employee wages, plus rent, utilities, and mortgage interest. However, the way the program was structured and implemented turned it into a bitter farce. 

The PPP plan had two critical problems. First of all, the definition of “small” business, as crafted by lobbyists, was ridiculously broad. Loans of up to $10 million were available, offered to businesses with up to 500 employees. PPP eligibility regulations were riddled with giant loopholes. For instance, wealthy owners of large hotel or restaurant chains were allowed to qualify for PPP loans if each of their franchises or outlets had fewer than 500 employees. One absurd example was Ashford, Inc. Made up of several subsidiaries owning or operating 130 hotels, it received $126 million. Shake Shack, a parent company with many different stores, also received a multi-million dollar loan.

The second major problem was that PPP loans had to go through a complicated application process at private banks before being forwarded to the Small Business Administration (SBA) for approval. Banks favored their long-time customers–usually what we would consider mid-sized businesses with access to accountants and lawyers. This favoritism effectively put true small businesses at the end of the line. Many ended up on long waiting lists, and couldn’t even get their loan applications reviewed by the banks.

With funding quickly running out, and millions of small businesses facing disaster, there was a huge outcry about the unfairness of the PPP. As a result of public pressure, the regulations were tightened; many big companies “voluntarily” returned their loans. On April 29, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said that large public companies would have to prove they met the revised criteria or face criminal liability. He promised to audit any company that received more than $2 million. More than 100 companies have disclosed loans of $2 million or more; as of April 30, about 20 will return the money.

All $359 billion of the original PPP funding is gone. It wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t distributed fairly. Look around your neighborhood. Don’t you think the shuttered small businesses you see are the ones Congress should be helping? The SBA says it approved 2 million loans. They say that the loans they did make averaged around $206,000 each–far more than most local mom and pop businesses were asking for. One-quarter of all the PPP money went for loans of more than $2 million. If the PPP money was spread around, almost 7 million small businesses could have gotten a $50,000 loan. Instead, small local businesses in our neighborhoods–many of them immigrant-owned–are struggling to survive, their viability undermined by favoritism, bureaucracy and corporate greed.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Thank you for supporting the many forms of collective care and political power that our communities so deeply need right now. We wish you well-being and spring breezes.  

In solidarity,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network

Please share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.

Public Charge: Latest Update

Posted on February 3, 2020 by - Immigration, News, Public Charge, Your Rights, Your Voice

A letter from Nick Gulotta, Director of Outreach and Organizing, Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs:

Dear Community Leader,

I am writing to share an important update on the Trump administration’s public charge rule. As you may have heard, yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted the public charge rule to go into effect, while litigation over the rule continues. This means the public charge rule is in effect, for now, in New York and most places nationwide.

It is important to know:

·         The “public charge” test does not apply to everyone.

·         There is no “public charge” test for green card holders who apply for citizenship.

·         Free legal help is available. Call ActionNYC at 1-800-354-0365 and say “public charge.”

·         The public charge rule does not change eligibility requirements for public benefits.

·         The City's litigation against the "public charge" rule is not over.

What you can do: Attached is an updated flyer in English and Spanish to share with anyone who can use it. You can also post PSAs on social media and in newsletters from MOIA’s social media tool kit, and visit nyc.gov/publiccharge for updates. Translations will be posted on our website as soon as they become available.

Statement from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affair’s Commissioner Bitta Mostofi:
“I am deeply troubled that the court has allowed this dangerous Public Charge Rule to go into effect, for now, placing the well-being of millions of families, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities at risk.  The City will do everything in its power to connect people to the resources they need and to help dispel the confusion the Rule has created.  It’s important to know that eligibility for public benefits has not changed and many immigrants are not affected by public charge. It is also important to know that the case is still being fought in court.  Don’t stop using public benefits unnecessarily.  If you are worried or have questions about immigration and public benefits for you or your loved ones, you can call the free, confidential ActionNYC hotline at 1-800-354-0365, or call 311 and say ‘Public Charge’ to access timely and trusted information and connections to legal help. The City is here to help you make a decision that is best for you and your family.”

Statement from Mayor Bill de Blasio:
“Immigrant New Yorkers are our neighbors, our friends, and our fellow parents. We cannot stand by while they are treated as less than human – expected to weigh putting food on the table against the need for a Green Card. The Trump Administration wants to scare us into silence, but this is New York City. We are still in court and we will not stop fighting for the rights of immigrants to feed their families.”

In community and solidarity,

Nick

More information can be found in this PDF, in ENGLISH and SPANISH.

 

 

 

Five Facts About Next Year’s Census

Posted on November 12, 2019 by - Census, News, Your Rights

Trump and his allies are hellbent on reducing our participation in the Census next year. And if they succeed, they’ll have an easier time passing laws that promote white nationalism and violence against immigrants and communities of color.

Their goal is to scare us. But we are unafraid, and ready to fight back for our communities. So we want to make sure you have the facts.

Here are five important things you need to know about next year’s Census.

  1. It WILL NOT include a citizenship question: It’s as simple as that. There will be no citizenship question on the Census, and everyone (citizens and undocumented folks) can fill out the Census.
  2. Participation is convenient: The Census forms will be sent right to your home (and you’ll receive reminders to fill it out). The forms can be mailed back to the Census Bureau free of charge.
  3. Your information is safe: The data is protected by the strictest confidentiality protections in federal law. This means that no one will be able to share the information you provide.
  4. It impacts how billions of dollars are spent. Do you want better schools, roads, hospitals, parks and public facilities in your neighborhood? The Census helps determine where $800 BILLION in federal funding will be spent.
  5. It impacts your political representation: We can gain a Member to represent us in Congress by filling out the forms. But we can also lose a seat at the table if we skip out.

Make sure everyone knows the real facts about the Census. Share on Facebook today.

Thanks to United We Dream for the information.

 

 

How To Not Be Brave

Posted on September 5, 2019 by - CBP, Immigration, Your Rights

By Jackie Orr, Activist and Member of the Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network

 

"I am not there to ‘aid.’ I stand in solidarity. We do not need medals. We do not need authorities deciding about who is a ‘hero’ and who is ‘illegal’ …. What we need are freedom and rights."
—Pia Klemp, captain of migrant rescue ship, arrested by Italian authorities in August 2017

The man, hands cuffed behind his back, was taken off the train platform by three uniformed border patrol agents wearing guns and bulletproof vests, and accompanied by a German Shepherd straining at the leash. The man’s encounter with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was just beginning. I stood watching in the doorway of the Amtrak train car where the man had been a passenger; my own encounter with US Border Patrol was ending. The man is now being pressed through the US deportation machine. I am now sitting safely in my home writing you a story about what it might mean today to be a US citizen, watching non-citizens being detained, incarcerated, and cued up for deportation. What will we do besides watch?

My encounter with CBP began on the sidewalk outside the Amtrak station. A uniformed man approached me as I stood next to my luggage. With a friendly smile, he asked, “Are you a citizen of this country?” The sun was shining, and I was a white, middle class , fiftysomething, US citizen who had never before been asked this question by an official bulked out in militarized gear, smiling. For a moment I was speechless. Then a mental rerun began of several videos I had watched this summer, posted by people driving through border patrol checkpoints in the Southwest and exercising their rights. I said, “By what legal authority are you asking me that question?” The agent looked bemused and said he wasn’t in the mood to have that conversation. I said, “I refuse to answer your question.” He smirked and said, “You already did.” And walked away.

I followed him. Because I had watched those videos. Because the ghosts started dancing, ghosts of fascism and trains and uniformed men demanding identity papers. Because the smirk made me angry. Because he looked like a cold threat on a warm, sunny day. The agent entered the train station, and I kept following—and now saw two more uniformed CBP agents awkwardly standing around. I approached all three of them, again asking by what legal authority they posed their ‘citizenship’ question. In the 10-minute conversation that ensued, I learned some useful things. That US immigration agents since 1952 are allowed to  “search for aliens” on railway cars, ships, and other transport vehicles within a “reasonable distance” from the US border. That questions about citizenship status are a ‘consensual interaction,’ and the immigration agent is not permitted to in any way coerce a response. That three men with guns enjoy mocking a white woman citizen (no weapon) who asks questions.

My train was pulling into the station, and I went up to the platform. I was surprised to see one of the CBP agents boarding a train car ahead of me. I followed him. He was asking some people, not others, the question: ‘Are you a citizen of this country?’ When he entered the next train car, I followed him and said in a loud voice (I hoped no one could hear my voice shaking), “You are not required to answer the questions you are about to be asked. And if you are a US citizen, it may be useful to non-US citizens around you to refuse to answer this question.” The CBP agent then said, equally loudly, “If you are an alien and you do not answer my questions, you can be arrested.” My head spun with the illogic of what he was saying—how would anyone know you were undocumented if you remained silent and didn’t answer the question, which is the right of citizens and non-citizens alike? I stopped following him when I saw him exit the train car. And I thought everything was over.

It wasn’t over. A few minutes later, as the train was still held in the station, I entered another train car looking for a seat and saw a man, hands behind his back, being led down the aisle by a border patrol agent. My heart died. He was being taken off the train. “Is there a phone number you want me to call, to tell someone what has happened?” I cried out. Dying again inside because I could only speak English, not Spanish. The man looked at me with an extraordinary calmness, and shook his head. He was taken off the train and the two other CBP agents quickly appeared, one with a German Shepherd, and walked the detained man down the platform ramp, disappearing.

What happened in the next hours on that train? Two passengers passed me small folded written notes, thanking me for my “courage.” One of them, a Canadian citizen, wrote that she was shocked by what she had just witnessed, and that the man detained had two children, both of them still on the train and sitting a few seats back. Conversations with the two teenage children, shocked and red-eyed, now returning home on a train without their father. Google searches for more information on the legality of border patrol operations and stories of citizens’ resistance. Wait in line for the bathroom where a young woman, a recently naturalized citizen, tells me that when the border agents asked her if she was a citizen, it was the first time that her heart didn’t race, and she told them ‘Yes.’ But then she saw how they moved through the train car and arrested the man. And so she had spent the last 4 hours posting to friends, and searching Google about Amtrak trains and border patrol searches, and preparing herself to say something different next time. She says, “You were badass.” I say, “I was scared, I didn’t feel badass at all … I was angry and scared but I’d watched these videos that gave me ideas about what else to do.” Phone call to my partner, weeping, to say that nothing that I did made any difference; this man’s life was changed by being detained, while his children watched. Learning that a local immigration and refugee defense network had immediately sent volunteers to that train station—where five people had been detained before 12 noon. Weeping again, with an intimate gratitude, for all the people trying to resist.

“I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency,” writes Audre Lorde in 1988. Thirty years later, her words reverberate across this landscape of deportation terrors and immigration raids. How to create, individually and together, a ‘rough place on the chin of complacency’?  How to use fear’s lessons to mobilize the security and privilege of US citizenship in the name of immigrant freedom and rights? I write you this story from the safety of my home, in the shadow of a stranger’s detention and the haunting memory of his calm demeanor, performed in part for his children seeing him being handcuffed and taken away. I write you with the honest question, what can you do besides watch? Bravery is not required. You don’t need to be a hero. Find what you need to act. You can cry or tremble inside later … many of us do. But don’t think you are not needed. You are. We are. The time is here. To do everything that we can.