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Month: September 2017

Immigrants to ICE: Show Us Your Papers – Launch of National Challenge to Raids

Posted on by Amanda Chavez

Groups across the country file FOIA requests at every single ICE field office to prevent agency from acting with impunity, investigate plans for raids

WASHINGTON — In every single field office in the country, Mijente, Detention Watch Network, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and close to fifty organizations representing immigrant communities are filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests today, demanding details regarding the planning and execution of enforcement activities, especially the rumored nationwide sweep dubbed Operation Mega, as well as the procedures for targeting and capturing individuals agents encounter.

Since the election and under the direction of Tom Homan at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice (DOJ), Trump’s deportation force has become unchained and been acting with impunity.

Under Trump, ICE has reported a 150 percent increase in the use of force. It has rescinded any guidance on prosecutorial discretion making every single undocumented person a target for removal. And even before the promised 15,000 additional agents, ICE’s arrest rate rose 40 percent in the first hundred days of Trump’s administration alone, frequently in conjunction with new prosecutions by Sessions’ DOJ.

With rumors circulating of massive raids planned by the agency, advocates plan to monitor the agency’s activity and force its corruption into public view.

“Under Trump and Homan, ICE has been acting with impunity,” said Legal and Policy Director for Mijente Tania Unzueta. “As they prepare to raid our communities, we’re preparing to force its corruption into public view and to protect and defend our loved ones.”

“ICE is an agency that regularly lies and actively hides information from public view,” said Danny Cendejas, organizing director of Detention Watch Network. “We will fight ICE’s abusive practices at every level, from preparing local immigrant communities to demanding the release of information on their enforcement activities in an effort to end the relentless attacks on our communities.”

“Our community no longer trusts ICE. That is why today we are asking them to give us in writing what they are really planning,” said Anibal Fuentes, a member of Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) as he helped deliver the FOIA to the Chicago ICE office. “We want to show them that we are going to continue organizing and fighting so that they cannot separate our families,” he concluded.

“It seems that Operation Mega was deliberately planned right before the end of the fiscal year so that ICE could manufacture higher numbers of people in immigrant detention, and then use those deliberately inflated numbers as justification for increased funding from Congress” said Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network. “We’ve seen this time and time again–the machinery of ICE trying to turn immigrants from human beings with families and communities into bureaucratic numbers with dollar signs attached.”

A list of the ICE Regional Field Offices Where FOIAs are Requested Can be Found Here:

https://www.ice.gov/contact/ero

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Prepare Against Raids: New “Defend Your Rights” Materials Available

Posted on by Amanda Chavez

Even under the Trump regime, there are things we can do to protect ourselves and our loved ones and prepare to better defend ourselves against raids. ICE may be acting with impunity, but people power will always be more powerful than the people in power.

With rumors swirling of massive raids being planned and with the daily raids continuing, we offer a new “Know Your Rights to Defend Your Rights” handbook to help inform and prepare you and those you hold dear.

Download the booklet in English | Baja la libreta en español

The “Know Your Rights to Defend Your Rights” handbook was developed with Puente Human Rights Movement in Arizona and the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and authored by our field director, Jacinta Gonzalez, who shares years of experience doing deportation defense in New Orleans. We collaborated with Touch Touch Studios for the illustration. It compiles some of our best learning from red state veterans and reminds us that – the only secure community is an organized one.

In the books, you’ll find information on what to do if ICE comes to your home, your work, or stops you on the street or while driving. There’s a checklist of helpful documents to compile and keep in a safe place ahead of time. And there’s sheets you can tear out to put on the inside and outside of your door in case an agent comes knocking.

We’re also making the graphics available for non-commercial use so that they can be a tool in your local organizing, on your fliers, and in your presentations.

In addition to the new books, you may also want to check out some more resources:

Mijente Hosting First Ever National Gathering of Members!

Posted on by Mario Gil

What is La Sazonblea de Mijente?

This October 20-22, join us in Phoenix, Arizona for our first official national gathering of Mijente’s membership. Many have joined us at Lánzate, in Chicago in 2015 and/or in San Juan in 2016 – don’t worry, Lánzate is coming in 2018! At Lánzate, we pledged to help build an ecosystem of Latinx and Chicanx change-makers who understand that it takes more from us not just more of us to make transformative change. Some of you have taken the step to formally become a part of Mijente, to build a political home and vehicle towards a pro-Latinx agenda that is pro-organizing, pro-Black, pro-indigenous, pro-queer and trans. We will be coming together to connect, strategize together and build shared vision for the work of Mijente. This is an invitation to help build the infrastructure for our casita–our political home–to grow and expand the familia.

La Sazonblea de Mijente will be our space to imagine and prototype the structures and plans we have and those we need, support and develop our constellation of leaders, and begin to season our collective sazon and our story.

Mijente was launched to build political home for Latinx and Chicanx organizing that’s URL and IRL (in real life). On a daily basis, from our barrios all the way to the White House, we see all that is needed, all that we face. This October, don’t miss this critical opportunity to re-energize our spirits, co-conspire plans of action, and create nuestra casita.

Sign up to become an official Mijente member here.

Day After DACA Repeal, Immigrants Take Down Statue of Jeff Sessions Outside the DOJ

Posted on by Cris Batista

After yesterday’s announcement that the White House is terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, groups rallied in front of the Department of Justice to condemn Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his role in ending DACA and promoting hyper discriminatory, anti-immigrant, and pro-prison practices.

Groups Mijente, Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), Juntos, United We Dream, LCLAA, and GLAHR (Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights) and others collaborated to organize the rally, with approximately 200 people in attendance.

What Happened?

Members of the immigrant community spoke out against the racist attack on undocumented DREAMers, including Genoveva Ramirez, an Illinois grandmother ordered to be deported next month. Ramirez emphasized that Sessions should have no place in the Department of Justice, white supremacists should have no place in the White House, and the urgency of rising up against attacks on our communities. The rally set a tone of fierce resolve, with high-energy chants and calls for continued resistance.

Tearing down @Jeffsessions and white supremacy – neither have any place in our government or our society @ConMijente @GoIUPAT @LCLAA #1u

IUPAT Organizing (@JoinIUPAT) September 6, 2017

The Take-Down

Following the speak outs, community members erected and pulled down a statue of Jeff Sessions, calling him a living monument of the Confederacy that needs to be taken down.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is named after Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy and P. G. T. Beauregard, the Confederate Army’s first General who started the Civil War. True to his name, Sessions was determined to be ‘too racist’ to be a federal judge in 1986 and is now pushing the Department of Justice to take a more active and heavy-handed role in driving deportations as the U.S. Attorney General under Trump. Revoking DACA is the latest of his aggressively racist and discriminatory moves as Attorney General including:

During a time when our news feeds are overwhelmed by a never-ending stream of crises, it helps to remind ourselves that there are specific individuals who are responsible for systems escalating the violence we are seeing across the U.S. and, as the old saying goes, they have names and addresses. Today’s demonstration did exactly that by naming Jeff Sessions as the racist monument that he is and insisting we take him down.

More on the Rally

Check out more highlights and the full livestream of the rally below.

https://www.facebook.com/conmijente/posts/777553572427374

As long as we are standing, as long as we are breathing, we will continue fighting.” -Olivia Vasquez @Vamos_Juntos_ #DACA rally

Elizabeth Fiedler (@Fiedler4Philly) September 5, 2017

Check out images and video from the action: Protesting Jeff Sessions, Living Monument to White Supremacy & the livestream video of our action.

Born and raised in Miami, Belinda Rodriguez is a Cuban-American organizer and activist based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Mijente Reacts to Trump’s Cancellation of DACA

Posted on by Amanda Chavez

We Will Organize Against this White Supremacist President’s Agenda

September 5, 2017

In response to the announcement that the White House is terminating the deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) program, Marisa Franco, director of Mijente, issued the following statement:

“Jeff Sessions is a living monument to the Confederacy. He and Donald Trump’s white supremacist agenda must be stopped. Today we stand together with the 800,000 young people who will lose their status as a result of DACA’s termination as well as the 11 million undocumented immigrants who have watched this president unleash his deportation force upon them with impunity. We will not accept the criminalization of our community and we will push every person in an office of power to stand against it as well.”

Tania Unzueta, Mijente’s legal and policy director and a DACA recipient herself, adds,

“We fought for and won relief then, we will fight and win again.  Undocumented youth and our broader community are stronger than the racism that currently inhabits the White House, the Department of Justice, and ICE.  In pardoning Arpaio, Trump has shown an utter disregard for law, constitutionality, and the courts and so any use of those terms to justify his latest attack on us is not just hollow, it is absurd. Today our community mourns the cruelty that has taken over government and we also rededicate ourselves to organizing to confront and overcome it.”

Mijente and others will gather at 10:45am tomorrow, Wednesday, at a park near the Department of Justice (Indiana Plaza at 7th St. & Pennsylvania Ave) to erect and tear down a statue of Jeff Sessions, who they are calling a living monument to the Confederacy.