Tag: Gaza

JHISN Newsletter 04/06/2024

Posted on April 6, 2024 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

We bring you news this week from the community frontlines of immigrant justice, highlighting the recent work of DRUM—a local group building power among low-wage South Asian and Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers. We then offer a frightening look at the publicized plans to dismantle and re-assemble the Department of Homeland Security into a militarized, anti-immigrant agency operating with impunity. The plans are part of the notorious Project 2025, a right-wing fever dream should the Republican party control the White House after the next election. 

 In these final days of Ramadan, as neighborhood communities look toward the crescent moon marking the end of this holy month of fasting, reflection, and prayer, we remember the Palestinians facing hunger and starvation in Gaza long after the Shawwal moon grows full.     

Newsletter highlights:
  1. DRUM initiates community meetings with electeds
  2. Project 2025’s plans for immigrant injustice

1. DRUM Challenges Lawmakers

DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) is known for its promotion of grassroots democracy. In February, instead of waiting for elected representatives to hold town meetings about legislation that DRUM supports, they arranged for multiple local community gatherings and invited the electeds to attend.

“For our community meetings, we wanted to invert the dynamic of us going to our representatives. We called on them to come and sit with the people of the districts they represent and hear directly from us about the issues we are organizing around.”—DRUM Facebook (March 15, 2024)

Four open meetings were held: two in Queens and one each in Brooklyn and the Bronx. These “were opportunities for [elected officials] to practice accountability and report on their actions that affect our lives,” DRUM says. 

Top issues of concern included the housing crisis, workers’ rights, education, and the genocide in Gaza. The corresponding legislation currently in the State Senate are the Good Cause, the Unemployment Bridge Program, and the Not on Our Dime bills.

The Good Cause law would protect tenants from arbitrary eviction and hold rent increases to 3%, or 150% of the Consumer Price Index, whichever is higher, as long as tenants continue to pay rent. Landlords could still evict tenants for non-payment of rent or lease violations.

The Unemployment Bridge Program would establish a fund for replacing lost wages for workers not eligible for unemployment insurance because of immigration status or the type of work they do. This proposed law is based on the principles of the historic Excluded Workers Fund. 

The Not on Our Dime! bill would end New York state support for Israeli settler activity by banning not-for-profit companies from supporting Israeli settlement activity that violates international law and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

 DRUM’s reportback states:

“For all electeds, we call on you to take the time to be in the communities that you were elected to serve, and to show up in meaningful ways.”

WHAT CAN WE DO?

2. The Intimidating Mandate of Project 2025

“Project 2025 elucidates how the administration would halt legal immigration, centralize power in the federal government, decimate privacy protections, and risk American security and prosperity, all in pursuit of a political obsession with immigration.” —Cecilia Esterline, “Unveiling the far right’s plan to demolish immigration in a second Trump term” (Niskanen Center, Feb. 2024)

Project 2025’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership is a self-described conservative playbook to “guarantee implementation of the Day One agenda,” which Trump has, without regret, stated will be his day of dictatorship. As a guidebook to “deconstruct the Administrative State,” 35 pages of Project 2025’s Mandate focus on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its immigration procedures. If implemented, these initiatives would effectively give more militarized Enforcement and Removal Operations agents the authority to conduct warrantless searches anywhere in the country, and, when directed by the Secretary, enforce regulations internationally. Project 2025 creates a blueprint for the vast expansion of unaccountable executive power. DHS would be run by the executive office and its political appointees who will take novel approaches to circumvent the Congressional confirmation process. They will create data analysis and communication channels to control the flow of all information to justify and promulgate their anti-immigration stance without any checks and balances. 

A sample of Project 2025’s recommendations to dismantle DHS and its existing immigration system includes stopping funds for all NGOs that support immigration; budgeting more government money for the border wall and to increase security at Ports of Entry; prioritizing the immediate deportation of immigrants over citations to appear in immigration court; ending legal prohibitions on family separation and allowing the expanded use of tents for temporary ‘housing’ of migrants; repealing the unaccompanied minor rule and permitting children to be housed by DHS instead of Health and Human Services; raising the standard for credible fear claims and removing domestic violence or gang violence as grounds for asylum; expanding the use of Blackies warrants, which notoriously rely on profiling appearance and ethnicity, and allowing, with limited oversight, workplace raids and the arrest of immigrant workers; and reinstating the Denaturalization Department to remove US citizenship and deport people.

The reason given for these recommendations is that DHS has “suffered from the Left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the Left perceives as political opponents” (p. 135). The Mandate itself directly weaponizes all departments against immigrants, even the one agency people recognize as supporting people in dire need, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (p. 138). After first asserting that the disaster response agency is not lawful, the Mandate then demands that any organization receiving FEMA funds should prove it is a lawful actor by: 

  • Forcing them to detain immigrants. 
  • Granting DHS full access to DMV and voting records of any state receiving FEMA support. 
  • Requiring them to register with E-verify. 

E-verify has been described by critics as an intrusive and expensive government surveillance of daily life that would create enormous privacy and security risks. The ACLU writes that “a mandatory E-Verify system—which forces everyone in the country to ask the government for permission to work—simply does not belong in fair immigration reform.” 

Project 2025 is not looking to create a fair or better immigration system; that is a legislative role. The Mandate’s primary goal is to reorganize DHS so that Congress has little power over the way the Department runs, or who runs it. A second goal is to further militarize the department and to convert administrative positions into enforcement roles. It will transform what is the third-largest federal department into a 100,000-person armed force that the president can wield, globally, without Congressional oversight. Another priority is to remove the options for asylum claims, including eliminating claims based on credible fear. The only time the Mandate adds an option for immigration is when recommending that people with wealth be allowed to pay for expedited immigration procedures (p. 146). 

Even if the recommendation is not adopted to deliver that department of 100,000 enforcers, the 2025 Mandate offers another option: combine Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a single department, the Border Security and Immigration Agency, (BSIA) (p. 138).  Given “the persistent need for and utilization of U.S. military personnel and resources to assist BSIA with increasing whole-of-government efforts” (p. 139), they go even further: the Office of Air and Marine (OAM) will share with BSIA its aviation assets across the globe, and in every state in the US. DHS would then have the option of using military/aviation equipment anywhere in the US or globally wherever it sees a threat. This militarized overreach was already tested in 2020 when CBP flew a drone outside of the 100-mile border enforcement zone to monitor a George Floyd protest in Minneapolis.

The 2025 Mandate also expands the role of the Secret Service Uniform Division which protects the physical White House grounds. Its jurisdiction would be expanded to cover all of Washington, DC, to counteract what is stated to be a “trend of progressive pro-crime policies” (p. 158). The ICE memoranda identifying sensitive zones where agents cannot go would be rescinded. By removing “self-imposed limitations on its nationwide jurisdiction,” ICE agents can pursue “the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the USA without warrant” (p. 142). This means any institution of learning, hospitals, places of religious worship, funerals, weddings, and public demonstrations, marches, or parades would become locations where federal agents can act unimpeded. 

The majority of people whose lives are vulnerable to the dehumanizing escalation and expansion of immigration enforcement practices, militarized throughout the nation, cannot vote in the elections which can stop its implementation. If US voters are fine with electing politicians who will enact these changes, that could be used to limit their own freedoms, it is because they don’t expect these tactics will ever be used against them. They could be wrong.

WHAT CAN WE DO? 

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

 

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 03/23/2024

Posted on March 23, 2024 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

Spring is official, and we welcome our readers to the early bloom of change in the neighborhood. And in this sacred month of Ramadan celebrated by so many here in Jackson Heights, we wish you extra time for reflection, community, and connection.

Our first story also brings news of change: the shifting landscape of global migration behind an increasing number of West African immigrants arriving in New York City. We then turn to report on the largely invisible stories of Palestinian Americans in Gaza and the West Bank during a relentless war, and the obstacles to immigration even for close family members of Palestinian US citizens.

Newsletter highlights:
  1. Troubled routes for West African migrants
  2. Stranded and besieged: Palestinian Americans in the Occupied Territories

 

 

1. West Africa to NYC

“We always heard when you come here, you’re going to find two jobs, you’re going to work, you’re going to survive. But when you come here, it’s hard to even find one job. It’s a fiction, what we heard.” —Ibrahim Mbengue, recent Senegalese immigrant

Embodying the shifting currents of global migration, hundreds of thousands of West Africans, mostly young men, have been arriving at the US-Mexico border over the last few years, with tens of thousands ultimately making their way to New York City. In fiscal year 2023 alone, 58,000 Africans crossed into the US from Mexico, three times as many as the year before. At the end of 2023, about 14% of the people in New York’s migrant shelters came from Senegal, Guinea, and Mauritania, countries on the Atlantic coast embroiled in social conflict and economic crisis. Like other migrants, West Africans leave home for a range of reasons, fleeing organized violence, repression, discrimination, domestic abuse, climate change, and lack of economic opportunity. But their pathways of migration, and their experiences in New York, are unique.

West Africa is much closer to Europe than to the US. But EU nations, with the cooperation of the Moroccan navy, have progressively hardened their borders, effectively discouraging West Africans from crossing the Mediterranean. At the same time, a new, circuitous route from Africa to North America has opened up. In what some commentators call a “weaponization of migration” intended to respond to US sanctions, the government of Nicaragua is providing unrestricted low-cost visas to African migrants. Flying into Nicaragua with legal status can be used as a stepping stone towards the US. In West African countries, ads for “travel packages” to Nicaragua are prominently featured on TikTok and other social media. Brokers buy up large numbers of airline tickets and resell them to migrants at a profit.

A series of flights from West Africa to Nicaragua is expensive, often costing $10,000 or more. Migrants often rely on loans from family members. The trip is also arduous. It typically begins by flying to international airline hubs like Istanbul, where migrants board the sold-out daily flight to Bogotá, Colombia. From there, they struggle to catch a connecting flight to San Salvador, and then another to Managua. Travelers often get stuck in the crowded Bogotá airport for days as they attempt to arrange the next leg of their journey. 

In Managua, migrant travelers meet up with guides and make their way north by foot, bus, and train through Central America and Mexico to the US border. By starting out in Nicaragua, African migrants have a head start: they avoid the dangers of the infamous Darien Gap, which lies further south between Colombia and Panama. Yet the trek north is still extremely perilous. Like other migrants, Africans may be preyed on by dishonest smugglers, officials, police, and gangs; they are sometimes subjected to violence or robbed of their possessions. After reaching the US border and requesting asylum, migrants undergo Border Patrol and ICE processing. The US government has found it difficult to deport Africans because of distance, and lack of bilateral agreements with the countries of origin. Most West African migrants are allowed to travel to a US city of their choice while their asylum court dates are pending.

Although a few African immigrants have come to New York on Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s infamous buses, most arrange their own transportation from the border. On arrival, they face daunting challenges. Mayor Adams has imposed a thirty-day limit on shelter stays for single migrants, including young people. Within the shelters, lack of translation resources has prevented some West African migrants—who may speak French, Arabic, Pulaar, or Portuguese—from accessing basic services or assistance with their asylum cases.

Once pushed out of the shelter system, New York’s African immigrants often struggle to find housing, food, and other necessities. Many are living in makeshift circumstances—in basements, crowded informal shelters, on the sidewalk, in the subway, or in ad hoc spaces provided by non-profits and religious groups. Usually, the community groups willing to provide emergency shelter are ineligible for government aid, since they don’t meet the required fire and building regulations.

A network of some 20 small mosques distributed around the five boroughs has found its open-hearted generosity overwhelmed by the needs of newly arrived West African Muslims. Community organizations like Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), African Communities Together (ACT), and the mutual aid group Black and Arab Migrant Solidarity Alliance (BAMSA), are also swamped by the sudden demand for food and health care, ESL classes, housing and legal assistance. The Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) is currently spending $22,000 to cater halal meals for 100 people at the neediest mosques across the city during the days of Ramadan.

Like other new arrivals, African migrants want above all to work. Lacking official permits, many have turned to day labor, street vending, and food delivery—including work for the major delivery app companies, using “shared” ID documents. These labor pools are already crowded and competitive. Nevertheless, many Africans go to great lengths to not just survive but send a few dollars back home.

A wide spectrum of community organizations and liberal politicians has called on the Biden administration to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to African and Caribbean migrants who face unsafe conditions in their countries of origin. This would reduce fear of deportation and provide access to legal employment. So far, the administration has not agreed.

“By not taking action to address the specific barriers that Black immigrants face when seeking immigration relief, the administration is not only upholding the inequities that exist throughout many of the programs, but championing the continued silence around the experiences of the country’s fastest-growing immigrant population.” —Diana Konaté, Policy Director, African Communities Together

WHAT CAN WE DO?
  • If you can, donate to the groups linked to above that support West African migrants.
  • Urge Chuck Schumer to get the Biden administration to authorize TPS for West Africans.

2. Abandoning Palestinian Americans in Gaza

“And so … you see the same pattern over and over and over again. The State Department says something very basic and generic, and then they don’t do anything about it, and they wait for the story to fade away. And that sends the message to Israel: You can do whatever you want, even to American citizens, and no one will hold you accountable.” – Edward Ahmed Mitchell, civil rights attorney and national deputy director of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), 2/14/24

The recent killing, arrests, and attacks on US citizens in Gaza and the West Bank are stories barely told in mainstream US media, or told only to soon “fade away.” Here are just a few. Samahar Esmail, from Louisiana, forcibly taken from her West Bank home in early February and detained without charges. Palestinian American teenager Mohammad Ahmed Mohammad Khdour, 17, shot in the head by Israeli forces on February 10 while sitting in a parked car with his relative near the West Bank town of Biddu. Borak Alagha, 18, and his brother Hashem, 20, both born in Chicago where they spent their early childhood, arrested on February 8 and now held in an Israeli prison.

Around 350 US citizens remained trapped in Gaza as of December 2023, with another 600 legal permanent residents or immediate family members of US citizens—eligible to come to the US—also unable to depart. That same month, two Palestinian American families sued the Biden Administration for failing to protect US citizens in a war zone, and denying their constitutional right to equal protection. (In early October as the war began, the US government chartered flights and a cruise ship to Europe for US nationals in Israel.)

Project Immigration Justice for Palestinians (Project IJP) was launched as an emergency response to the crisis in Gaza. The coalition of US immigration lawyers and justice organizations advocates for humanitarian immigration options for Palestinians, and offers legal services to US families with relatives in Gaza. The lack of accessible pathways to immigration for Palestinians is mobilizing an urgent fight for expanded eligibility criteria for who can get State Department assistance in leaving Gaza. Currently, even green card holders cannot bring their parents to the US. Aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, and siblings who are married or over the age of 21 are also excluded. In other words, most family members of US Palestinians are not eligible for immigration even if they are facing starvation and a genocidal war. The one available immigration portal created for situations of humanitarian crisis, called humanitarian parole, usually takes years to process. It also requires paperwork—birth certificates, passports, identity documents—that for most Gazans have been destroyed in the bombing of their homes, buried under rubble, or left behind as they flee their homes.  

A lawyer with Project IJP explains: “Without the government coming out and saying that [they] are going to prioritize processing applications from Palestinians in Gaza, there’s no guarantee that any of our efforts will come to anything.”

We shine this brief spotlight on Palestinian Americans not because their stories are more important than others in Palestine, but because their situation reveals the brazen complicity of the US with Israel in devaluing Palestinian life and freedom—even for American citizens.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

 

In solidarity and with collective care,
Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

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 12/09/2023

Posted on December 9, 2023 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

 As we write, it is day 62 of Israel’s ferocious bombardment of Gaza, following Hamas’ shocking attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers on October 7. Almost 70% of Gazans are UN-recognized refugees, including survivors and their descendants of Israel’s mass expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their lands and homes in 1948, the founding year of the state of Israel. This historic mass displacement of Palestinians is known as the Nakba in Arabic—meaning “the Catastrophe.” At the time of the Nakba, the vast majority of Jewish citizens in the new Israeli state had lived in Palestine for three years or less; many of these new arrivals were themselves Jewish refugees from the horrors of World War II. What has come to be called the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is profoundly about migration, dispossession, state terrorism, and violence against refugees in the past century.

We devote this newsletter to the committed actions of one local immigrant justice group that has taken up the call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. We support DRUM’s urgent demand.

1. DRUM calls for Ceasefire Now

“As peoples with histories of colonization, genocide and displacement, our hearts are heavy. We grieve for our siblings in Palestine …. As we marched, we carried a sheet with a fraction of the names of children killed due to the occupation. Members carrying the sheet shared that they felt like they were carrying the weight of the children with them.” –DRUM Facebook post (Nov. 4, 2023)

“The pulverizing of Gaza now ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age. Each day we see more dead children and new depths of suffering for the innocent people enduring this hell.” —Jan Egeland, Secretary General, Norwegian Refugee Council (Dec. 6, 2023)

DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) activated its membership almost immediately after Israel’s most recent military assault began—the sixth war on Gaza conducted by Israel since its blockade of the occupied territory in 2007. As a Queens-based group fighting for economic justice and political power in working-class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities, DRUM sees deep ties between the histories of colonialism among its members, and the colonial violence experienced by Palestinians for more than 70 years.

DRUM’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation are thus a form of global solidarity work, carried out through local action. In support of the October 18 National Day of Action, DRUM appealed to NYC leaders to “protect Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and all students against racist attacks,” as progressive Jews occupied the US capitol and high school students across the country walked out of classes demanding an immediate ceasefire. The same day, DRUM members and allies rallied with the Pakistani American Political Committee, urging local Congresswoman Grace Meng to join calls for a ceasefire, and warning that “Pakistani Americans will not support you if you continue to support Israel’s genocide.”

On November 2, DRUM and dozens of other constituents delivered petitions to Meng’s office in Queens signed by more than 800 people demanding that she support a full ceasefire, and vote against additional military financing of Israel. Activists recited names of murdered Gazans, and constituents—including children and elders—put names on sticky notes and left them on Meng’s office window.

Two weeks later, DRUM co-organized a major event at Congresswoman Meng’s Flushing office. Around two hundred constituents gathered and made Salaat al Gha’ib (Muslim funeral prayer in-absentia) for the thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli carpet bombings and assassinations. This public mourning of dead children, elders, teachers, parents, journalists, health workers, and aid workers was followed by dua (supplication) seeking peace, justice, and liberation for the people of Palestine. A program of invited speakers reminded Meng that Israel is funded and armed by our US tax dollars, and the additional billions in US aid to Israel that she supports make her complicit in the genocide being carried out with those weapons and monies.

After the program, constituents representing Latin, Korean, Jewish, Muslim, Afghan, and Arab communities made an altar in memory of those killed by Israel.

As of this writing, Congresswoman Meng has still refused to publicly support a ceasefire. On Friday, December 8, DRUM members joined other Queens residents for a mourners vigil and #CeaseFireNow rally outside her Flushing office.

Knowing that “the US support of genocide and war in Palestine make our communities more vulnerable to violence,” DRUM also organized a recent training in Richmond Hill for members to talk about their experiences of feeling threatened or being attacked. In collaboration with @nonviolentpeaceforce and @soaroverhate, DRUM shared skills to effectively intervene when seeing someone in trouble. And participants actively practiced these non-violent tactics to strengthen community safety for South Asian and Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers. 

 WHAT CAN WE DO?

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

 

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.