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ralfmaximus:

palmtreepalmtree:

ralfmaximus:

colordogluckynumber:

shamethepainaway:

uppityfemale:

Not truthiness, just truth.

Yeah well perhaps they should have figured out what a border is first. Because their parents broke the law by Crossing ours and better than spend the time in these facilities than a prison with grown adults who made the human traffickers not even their parents

Actually, let me enlighten you.

These people in detention have not committed a crime.
- I don’t mean that in a moral or a figurative sense. I mean literally. It is NOT a crime to ask for asylum.
- These people didn’t jump a fence, they didn’t sneak into the backyard. They are knocking on the front door and saying “People are trying to kill me in my home country, will you let me in?”
- Now, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck. Some of these people are lying. That’s why you have a hearing. And because they might wander off, these people are held in detention until the hearing.
- This hearing is NOT in a criminal court. It’s in an immigration court. Because these people have not committed a crime.
- Immigration court is not like criminal court. You don’t have a right to an attorney.
- So these people are waiting around, separated from their children, with no attorney, until they get a hearing.
- In 2015, the median wait for an immigration hearing was 404 days.
- Here’s where it gets even more twisted. If people plead guilty to asylum fraud, they get their kids back and get deported.
- So these people knock on the front door, which is perfectly legal, and we take their kids, and tell them the quickest way to get the kids back is to confess to fraud.
- If someone committed a crime (ie. shoplifting, armed robbery, murder) and you took their kids away to make them confess, that confession would be thrown out.
- But these confessions are lawful, because this isn’t criminal court.
- Because these people haven’t committed a crime.
- Now some people think that if we make it so unpleasant for these people, they will stop trying to cross the border.
- But the message this sends isn’t “Go Home.” The message it sends is “Sneak in.”
- If they go home, they think they will be murdered. If they request asylum, they are separated from their children.
- If they sneak in successfully, they’re safe. If they sneak in and get caught, they are no worse off than if they sought asylum legally.
- And remember, these people haven’t committed a crime.

^^This

Now, here’s the really ugly part: a lot of Trump supporters know this. 

Not all of them, for sure, but a huge number of educated Trumpsters do.

But they don’t care, because brown people are dangerous, unamerican, and need to be locked up. They HATE it when you call them racist, so they use the “illegal alien” thing as a shield.

“I’m not racist, I just believe in law and order.”

Yeah, right.

Here is a little bit more information to help create a clear understanding of what is happening at the border:  

It is true that most asylum seekers present themselves legally at an inspected border-crossing point.  However, CBP has been throttling the number of asylum seekers it receives each day for processing.  This is creating bottlenecks at the border.  Migrants seeking protection are prevented from presenting themselves upon arrival, and are made to wait in Mexico at the border until CBP allows them to present themselves and apply. 

Many migrants are sleeping rough, often with their children, for days and even weeks, for the opportunity to legally present themselves as an asylum-seeker. As described by the New York Times:

While some of the migrants have found beds in shelters in Nogales, others said they avoid the facilities out of fear of theft or abuse. Instead, they prefer to guard their spot on the asphalt so as not to lose their place in line when American officials at the crossing allow a handful each day to submit their asylum requests. 

You can read more about the dire situation at the border here.

As @colordogluckynumber mentioned, this is driving migrants, out of desperation, to attempt a more hazardous unlawful entry, outside of an inspection point.  If they successfully enter without getting caught they can apply for asylum from within the country. 

If they do get caught, unlawful entry is a misdemeanor.  Until recently, this crime was generally not prosecuted.  Prosecuting this crime provides little legal benefit to the government.  The individuals are sentenced to a few days in prison, at the cost of the taxpayer, after which they are handed over to immigration authorities for immigration processing.  But such a conviction has no immediate negative effect to the asylum claim.  It does not stop the asylum application, it does not allow the government to do anything but then continue to process the application for asylum.

So why do it?

Here’s why: while these individuals are being criminally prosecuted and serving their sentence for the misdemeanor unlawful entry, law does not allow that their children can remain with them.  Insisting on criminally prosecuting migrants is the justification being used to take their children away.  

As has been noted time and again, it is this policy decision to prosecute migrants for misdemeanor unlawful entry that is being wielded as a cudgel in an attempt to deter migrants.  

Further, this legally enforced separation from their children is being used to pressure asylum-seekers to withdraw their applications for asylum and voluntarily depart the United States with their child.  Asylum-seekers are thus faced with an impossible and cruel decision.

I have not heard as much about asylum-seekers being separated from their families in detention as @colordogluckynumber describes (there is family detention which is a whole other post), and I have not heard that detainees are being pressured to confess to immigration fraud as also described above.  Rather, the longer an individual waits in detention to have their claim heard the more likely they are to “voluntarily” withdraw their claim and concede their removability.  Meaning, they are more likely to give up and acquiesce to deportation, to return to the circumstances they fled.  I am open to being pointed in the right direction for more reading.  

But that should not undermine the overall point.  

In the end, this is what I know to be true: In the 1930s, my grandfather and his brother were arrested for illegally crossing the border into Russia.  As a result, they were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust.  

There is nothing criminal about survival.

Reblogging again for commentary by @palmtreepalmtree because she is an immigration lawyer and has expert knowledge and is awesome besides.
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Opinion | My Viral Tweet About Muslims Wearing Kippahs

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Opinion | My Viral Tweet About Muslims Wearing Kippahs Didn’t Show The Whole Truth:

littlegoythings:

When we see an image that stirs something deep inside of us, we can’t help but share it with the world. There is just something about a man who lets another man fall asleep on him on the subway that is just so utterly sweet and beautiful. It awakens something deep inside of us, deep enough that we feel a need to share it with the world. And that’s how things go viral.

For a long time, I believed that it was part of my mission to help spread these images, to encourage the world to see the positivity around them. I still believe this, but something has changed for me.

I recently shared some utterly beautiful images which went viral: According to my Twitter statistics, over 5 million people have seen my tweet.

The tweet contained three images of Muslim women in Germany who were participating in an event called the “kippah march.” The event was organized by the Jewish community in Germany to encourage Germans to show solidarity with the Jewish community after a rash of anti-Semitic attacks in the country, partly in response to the call by a prominent rabbi for Jews to stop wearing kippahs publicly.

In these images, the Muslim women are shown wearing kippahs over their hijabs. The images are striking, an oasis of beauty in a world that feels like it’s increasingly crumbling to hate. And yet, something felt off about the response I received. People focused on the images without realizing why the demonstration to exist in the first place.

Those who reacted to the images said things like, “Love always defeats hate” and “Nice one Germany.” In other words, many people people saw the images as a sign that the fight against anti-Semitism in places like Germany was succeeding. As long as women in hijabs kept putting kippahs on their heads, everything would be okay.

But the story that inspired this act, that Jews are in such danger in Germany that they were advised not to wear kippahs, han’t been told outside of the Jewish community. There have been far fewer politicians, actors, and celebrities sharing the stories of the actual anti-Semitic acts happening to Jews in Germany recently. Often, it seems it is only Jews who seem invested in these stories.

This issue is about far more than the dynamics of internet culture. It is about a culture that sells a false narrative: that change for the less fortunate requires no real sacrifice from the fortunate. That being selfless doesn’t mean actually sacrificing the self.

*

The images I shared were powerful because they were captured during a brief respite from the constantly-increasing level of hate in Germany and Europe against Jews. In fact, according to the Berlin-based Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism, the number of individuals affected by anti-Semitism in Germany increased 55 percent in 2017.

There have also been a number of high-profile attacks, including one captured on video that helped spark the kippah march.

It was German Jews who woke me up to this reality. They commented and sent me messages, upset that my images didn’t tell the whole story.

Not only did my images give a false impression of what has been happening in Germany recently — they gave a false impression of what happened in Germany that very day. One of the smaller kippah marches was broken up within 15 minutes because people started spitting on them, tearing an Israeli flag away from one of the demonstrators, calling them terrorists and open Neo-Nazis walked through the procession threateningly.

That story didn’t go viral. It hardly got shared by anyone but other Jews.

This is the inherent problem with the way social media works: just as we can often fall for “fake news” that conforms to our beliefs, we can also fall for “limited news:” news that makes us feel good about ourselves and the world, or news that, without more context, reaffirms our already-held beliefs rather than challenging them. By sharing it, we feel that have done some measure of good. In this case, it was the myth that anti-Semitism has largely been eradicated. I fear that my tweet going viral contributed to that myth, when it should have done the exact opposite.

*

This dynamic replays itself constantly in our discourse. We are a society that is constantly looking to pat ourselves on the back for problems that we have solved.

There is perhaps no better example of this than the election of Barack Obama and the backlash against Black Lives Matter. There was a moment in America where it seemed, for a moment, as if we had solved all of our racial problems. A black man was president.

And yet it cost very little, really, to vote a black man into office. It meant going to voting booth and making a quick choice. It is almost as easy as retweeting an inspiring image on Twitter.

It was the viral story of America, the first slacktivist moment for us all to engage in. And for well-meaning Americans who did not understand that changes to pervasive racism could not be solved just by one inspiring action, no matter how consequential, the grisly details and vile racism surrounding Trayvon Martin’s murder less than a month after Obama was sworn into office came as a shocking wakeup call.

When the Black Lives Matter movement was born, white Americans faced an internal crisis: How could there be an entire movement devoted to fighting for black lives when a black man was the President of the United States?

And so, there was a backlash, no different than what Martin Luther King Jr. described in “Where Do We Go From Here?” He discussed the white reaction to the fact that blacks still insisted on reforms after desegregation was achieved: “White America would have liked to believe that in the past ten years a mechanism had somehow been created that needed only orderly and smooth tending for the painless accomplishment of change.”

But for blacks, who had to actually live with the daily pain of racism, this was not a reality: “Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.”

The same is true today. We have seen the rise of racism and the election of a president who reveled in that rise. It was the result of the backlash of white Americans saying that blacks have “come far enough.” Study after study has shown this to be the case.

The same is true for Jews in Germany. While appreciative of the solidarity shown, to them and the virality of positive images, they must still live every day in fear for their safety. No one rally will save them and no viral post that makes us feel good will help them.

And so while I am happy, and beyond grateful that the images I shared spread far enough for so many millions to see, I hope that we will one day reach an age where calls for sacrifice, for deep digging, for structural changes also go viral. Otherwise, these images lead to people to wonder how on earth Jews can dare to complain about anti-Semitism when they have it so good. That the Jews have “come far enough.” If our society is to learn anything from our civil rights history, it is this: symbolic acts matter, but only insofar as they lead to a place of actual change. If they don’t, then our sharing them is really just an act of selfishness.

Sorry for how long this post is, but I know a lot of folks run into paywall problems, and the entire piece is worth reading.
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It is so hot. It is SO HOT.

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It is so hot. It is SO HOT. 
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