AILA - Announcements of ICE Enforcement Actions
ICE ERO Houston announced that nine individuals were arrested between November 1, 2020, and December 31, 2020, in the greater Houston area as part of a recent enforcement action targeting individuals who had unlawfully reentered the U.S. after having previously been removed.
Convention relating to the Status of Refugees | OHCHR
Entry into force: 22 April 1954, in accordance with article 43 Preamble The High Contracting Parties, Considering that the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved on 10 December 1948 by the General Assembly have affirmed the principle that human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination,
Explainer: How the U.S. Legal Immigration System Works
Through which visa categories can immigrants move temporarily or permanently to the United States? What are the main channels by which people come, and who can sponsor them for a green card? Are there limits on visa categories? And who is waiting in the green-card backlog? This explainer answers basic questions about temporary and permanent immigration via family, employment, humanitarian, and other channels.
The Florence Project
When we work together,
freedom cannot be detained.
When we work together,
freedom cannot be detained.
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National Immigration Law Center
Established in 1979, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) is one of the leading organizations in the U.S. exclusively dedicated to defending and advancing the rights of immigrants with low income.
At NILC, we believe that all people who live in the U.S. should have the opportunity to achieve their full potential. Over the years, we’ve been at the forefront of many of the country’s greatest challenges when it comes to immigration issues, and we play a major leadership role in addressing the real-life impact of policies that affect the ability of low-income immigrants to prosper and thrive.
In April 2019, NILC finalized a new strategic framework, which will govern our work over the next five years. This framework represents a shift in our strategy orientation in recognition of the fact that legal and policy strategies alone are not enough to achieve the long-term transformational change we believe the times require. We will continue to use our litigation and policy expertise to challenge unjust laws and policies that marginalize low-income and other vulnerable immigrant communities and advance systemic policy solutions that make it possible for immigrants and their loved ones to thrive. But we are now also focusing on building a stronger, more inclusive immigrant justice movement and fostering intersectional alliances with other communities in order to amass the political power necessary to hold decisionmakers accountable for making policy changes real and lasting. And we will also engage in narrative and culture change to shift public debate toward the notion that—no matter where a person is born or how much money they have—everyone has a stake and constructive role to play in shaping the country’s future.
Refugee status of persons with disabilities - Stephanie Anna Motz
"In many countries around the world persons with disabilities still suffer torture, ill- treatment and severe discrimination. Sometimes they are persecuted directly by the state, but frequently it is their family members, society or religious institutions that expose them to serious harm, while the state turns a blind eye to it. Persons with disabilities make up approximately 15% of the world population and an estimated 20% of the population of refugees and internally displaced persons. This book examines when persons with disabilities, who are being persecuted for reasons of their disability, are refugees and thus entitled to the protection of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol"--
Great escape : a true story of forced labor and immigrant dreams in America - Saket Soni
"In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000 dollars each to apply for this "opportunity" to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, putting their families into impossible debt. Soni traces the workers' extraordinary escape; their march on foot to Washington, DC; and their 31-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause"--
Private Data Brokers Help ICE Skirt Sanctuary Policies and Target Immigrants
Documents obtained by a coalition of immigrant rights groups reveal ICE has contracted with the third-party data broker LexisNexis, allowing it to receive real-time jail booking data from sheriff’s offices in the state of Colorado. The move to track the whereabouts of immigrants curtails Colorado’s sanctuary policies, which are meant to prevent state and local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. Jacinta González of Mijente’s #NoTechForICE campaign said, ”ICE agents once relied on the police to help them track us, arrest us, and deport us. Now, tech companies, by selling our personal data, are helping them instead.”
Queer and trans migrations : dynamics of illegalization, detention, and deportation - Eithne Luibheid (Editor); Karma R. Chavez (Editor)
"More than a quarter of a million LGBTQ-identified migrants in the United States lack documentation and constantly risk detention and deportation. LGBTQ migrants around the world endure similarly precarious situations. Eithne Luibheid's and Karma R. Chavez's edited collection provides a first-of-its-kind look at LGBTQ migrants and communities. The academics, activists, and artists in the volume center illegalization, detention, and deportation in national and transnational contexts, and examine how migrants and allies negotiate, resist, refuse, and critique these processes. The works contribute to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, borders and migration studies, and decolonial studies. Bridging voices and works from inside and outside of the academy, and international in scope, Queer and Trans Migrations illuminates new perspectives in the field of queer and trans migration studies"--
Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants! | MR Online
A nation of immigrants: This is a convenient myth developed as a response to the 1960s movements against colonialism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. The ruling class and its brain trust offered multiculturalism, diversity, and affirmative action in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, an end of imperialism, and the rewriting of history -- not to be "inclusive" -- but to be accurate. What emerged to replace the liberal melting pot idea and the nationalist triumphal interpretation of the "greatest country on earth and in history," was the "nation of immigrants" story.
Opening the gates to Asia : a transpacific history of how America repealed Asian exclusion - Jane H. Hong
Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In this first comprehensive history of Asian exclusion repeal, Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration.
The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America's postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.
Not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States
Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US's history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.
She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity--founded and built by immigrants--was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good--but inaccurate--story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.
While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.