The United States’ insistence on a racial caste system is similar to Argentina’s insistence on a ethnic-racist-classist-nationalistic caste system. Both actively marginalized and abused of who they deemed the “undesirables” of society. However, there needed to be a basis on which to oppress these folks. For the United States, particularly after Bacon’s Rebellion, in which poor blacks and poor whites united against the elite, it became a matter of socially-constructed race. For Argentina, several factors were involved– your nationality, race, and class. Both countries continued their oppression through the stronghold of violence. The Ku Klux Klan incorporated all social classes in their effort to subjugate black people in America; this furthered the idea that “you may be poor, but at least you’re not black.” In Argentina, the strike was fueled based on different pay systems across the poor that took into account nationality, ethnicity, and race. Both countries were trying to whiten their respective societies through the use of disenfranchisement, and when they tried to resist (as in the workers’ strikes and eras of slavery and lynchings), their lives proved even less than objectifiable laborers for profit, and were killed.
Immigration courts, lacking judges, are sinking under a massive backlog of cases
When Miami immigration attorney Tammy Fox-Isicoff takes on new clients, the first thing she tells them — no matter how simple the case, no matter how open-and-shut — is, “This is going to take, at an absolute minimum, one year to resolve.”
And she’s probably low-balling it. The average time for a case to wend its way through South Florida’s hopelessly backlogged federal immigration courts is 551 days — closer to two years. Even if those courts stopped taking new cases tomorrow, it would take about four years to work the backlog down to zero.
“The backlog in these courts is terrible, and it’s getting worse every day,” Fox-Isicoff said. “It’s not a new problem — it’s been growing for years, and everybody in the system knows it.”
South Florida’s clogged immigration dockets are merely a reflection of a much larger national problem. A recent report by the federal Government Accounting Office (GAO) revealed that a chronic shortage of immigration judges doubled the backlog of cases across the country between 2009 and 2015.
Nearly 600,000 immigration cases are awaiting decisions, the report says, and some overwhelmed courts are so far behind that they’re already scheduling cases for the year 2020. In some of them, the average time for a single case is nearly three years.
Immigration judges and lawyers, as well as the GAO, say many different problems have contributed to the glut of cases. But the main one, they agree, is a lack of judges. “For the past 15 years, they haven’t hired enough judges to handle the backlog,” said Andrew R. Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., who served eight years as an immigration judge.
There are only about 300 judges, which means they have an average caseload of about 2,000 each, a number that practically everybody agrees is unmanageable. To make matters worse, about 40 percent of the judges are eligible for retirement and could leave at any moment.
It’s a daunting obstacle to the Trump administration’s plans for more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws, which have already run afoul of a major shortage of Border Patrol officers. Hiring another 200 to 250 judges — the consensus agreement of what the courts need to get a handle on the backlog — and the support staff to back them up, then find finding the space to accommodate them all, would require a gusher of cash that no recent president has been willing to commit.
“We’re sort of like the Cinderella of the Department of Justice,” said Denise Noonan Slavin, a judge who worked 20 years in South Florida courts before moving last year to Baltimore, where she is executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, the judges’ union. “We’re at the end of the line when it comes to money.”
And even if the cash were to materialize, it would probably be years before the new judges follow. According to the GAO, it takes more than two years, on average, to hire a new judge.
“That’s just a ridiculous amount of time,” said attorney Fox-Isicoff. “Especially since nearly all the judges they hire now are former [Immigration and Customs Service] prosecutors. It’s not like you have to start checking their backgrounds from scratch. They’ve already been extensively vetted.”
The shortage of judges amplifies other problems in the immigration system. Unlike the judges in U.S. district courts that hear criminal cases and civil lawsuits, immigration judges are not part of an independent legal system.
They work for the Justice Department, which oversees their court dockets. That means the judges and their courts have to conform to the changing winds of Washington policy, which can seriously disrupt the case flow — especially after a change of presidential administrations.
When a surge of undocumented immigrant children arrived at the U.S. border in 2013 and 2014, the Obama administration ordered the immigration courts to hear their cases first on the theory that if they were deported promptly, it would stop the flow, experts said.
But that meant a lot of cases that were ready for trial got bumped to the back of the line, while the kids’ cases went to the front, even though they were more complicated and mostly hadn’t yet met even the simplest of preliminary requirements, like getting them lawyers.
Something similar happened in February when the Trump administration ordered many immigration judges to leave their regular courtrooms and head to border towns, in hopes it would quicken the pace of deportations. Once again, cases that had been in preparation for years and were ready for trial were shuffled to the rear.
“Our criticism on this has been bipartisan,” said Dana Leigh Marks, the San Francisco judge who is president of the judges’ union. “We criticized the Obama administration for politicizing the surge — we said, you’re moving cases not ready for hearings to the front of the line, and we’re not going to get as much done. We were proven right…
“We said the same thing with the current administration’s decision to move judges around. This is not going to speed things up, it’s going to slow them down. We’re just simply short of judges, and taking docket management out of the hands of judges only makes it worse.”
The shortage of judges amplifies other problems in the immigration system. Unlike the judges in U.S. district courts that hear criminal cases and civil lawsuits, immigration judges are not part of an independent legal system.
They work for the Justice Department, which oversees their court dockets. That means the judges and their courts have to conform to the changing winds of Washington policy, which can seriously disrupt the case flow — especially after a change of presidential administrations.
When a surge of undocumented immigrant children arrived at the U.S. border in 2013 and 2014, the Obama administration ordered the immigration courts to hear their cases first on the theory that if they were deported promptly, it would stop the flow, experts said.
But that meant a lot of cases that were ready for trial got bumped to the back of the line, while the kids’ cases went to the front, even though they were more complicated and mostly hadn’t yet met even the simplest of preliminary requirements, like getting them lawyers.
Something similar happened in February when the Trump administration ordered many immigration judges to leave their regular courtrooms and head to border towns, in hopes it would quicken the pace of deportations. Once again, cases that had been in preparation for years and were ready for trial were shuffled to the rear.
“Our criticism on this has been bipartisan,” said Dana Leigh Marks, the San Francisco judge who is president of the judges’ union. “We criticized the Obama administration for politicizing the surge — we said, you’re moving cases not ready for hearings to the front of the line, and we’re not going to get as much done. We were proven right…
“We said the same thing with the current administration’s decision to move judges around. This is not going to speed things up, it’s going to slow them down. We’re just simply short of judges, and taking docket management out of the hands of judges only makes it worse.”
KKK and La Patagonia Rebelde (Rebel Patagonia)
Both KKK and La Patagonia Rebelde (Rebel Patagonia) films are in the same discriminatory spectrum.
KKK are based on racial segregation. During the reconstruction period, they patrolled against African Americans in the US south. I recommended a book called “A Fool’s Errand” by Albion W. Tourgee. It is a fiction novel, and it is about a gentleman who went to live in the US south during the reconstruction era. The daughter of the gentleman, the heroine of the novel fell in love to a Klansmen.
During the civil rights movement, the freedom riders faced groups of Klansmen who attacked them during their “march to the sea” (like Mahatma Gandhi) throughout the south. The book called “Voices of Freedom” has an oral history of all the civil rights movement, and is based on the PBS television series “Eyes on the Prize”.
On the other hand, La Patagonia Rebelde (Rebel Patagonia) shows the power vs. the powerless, the landlords vs. the servants, or the owners vs. the workers. However, the workers or unionists worked together against the work exploitation. I remembered a book called “Let It Rain Coffee” by Angie Cruz, and it is based on the work exploitation made by Victoria’s Secret in the Dominican Republic. The women’s workers joined together to founded their own business “El Secreto de la Victoria”.
Trump Rolls Back DAPA Protections for Undocumented Parents
Trump Rolls Back DAPA Protections for Undocumented Parents.
On June 16, 2017, Department of Homeland Security, Secretary John Kelly, ended an Obama-era program that sought to pave a pathway to citizenship for the parents of lawful permanent residents. The program is called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents or DAPA.
Dapa previously had come under fire from 26 Republican-governed states who claimed President Obama was overstepping his bounds by granting federal amnesty to DAPA recipients. The governors of these states filed a suit that made its way all the way to the Supreme Court which ruled with a split decision. This decision meant that no changes were made to the previous stay in the order, leaving the DAPA program powerless.
DAPA could have potentially saved 3.7 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. However, the original program did not exist without its own controversy. Certain immigrant’s rights groups argued that the program did not extend enough protections to the most disenfranchised immigrants. President Obama’s plan for DAPA had requirements that its recipients have no criminal record and a child who had since become a lawful permanent resident before November, 2014.
New ‘Hamilton Mixtape’ Music Video Takes Aim at Immigration
New ‘Hamilton Mixtape’ Music Video Takes Aim at Immigration
American flags. References to border security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents dragging away immigrants in the thick of night.
A music video released on Wednesday for “Immigrants (We Get The Job Done),” a song off “Hamilton Mixtape,” is replete with stark political imagery and not-so subtle messaging targeting President Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.
“Hamilton Mixtape” is an album of covers sung by mainstream artists including Alicia Keys and Usher, inspired by the Broadway musical-turned-cultural phenomenon “Hamilton” and released shortly after the presidential election in 2016. The song “Immigrants,” performed by K’naan, Snow Tha Product, Riz MC (known to film audiences as Riz Ahmed) and Residente, is the first from the album to spur a music video.
The video starts with a number of somber train passengers, seemingly immigrants, listening to the radio.
“It gets into this whole issue of border security,” a commentator says. “Who is going to say that the borders are secure?”
“It’s really astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word,” the commentator adds, setting the tone for the video. It was directed by Tomas Whitmore and executive produced by Robert Rodriguez and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton.”
The video, which lasts more than six minutes, morphs to immigrants stitching American flags under the main refrain of the song and Snow Tha Product rapping in front of an American flag. There are shots of workers picking fruit in fields, Riz MC rapping his verse on a barely-lit New York City subway car and, eventually, immigrants being dragged away in the dead of night by border patrol agents.
“Hamilton” is no stranger to politics. President Obama was an avowed fan of the show and invited the cast to perform at the White House after seeing the musical multiple times, one of them at a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee. After the election, “Hamilton” found itself the target of Mr. Trump’s ire. In late November, Mike Pence, then the Vice President-elect, attended a performance and found himself being directly addressed by the cast during a curtain call after drawing jeers from the crowd.
Standing on the stage, Brandon Victor Dixon, who played Aaron Burr, said to a departing Mr. Pence, “We truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us.”
Mr. Trump demanded an apology, saying the cast had been ““very rude” toward Mr. Pence and that the theater “must always be a safe and special place.”
Pope Francis Takes 12 Refugees Back to Vatican After Trip to Greece
MYTILENE, Greece — Pope Francis made an emotional visit into the heart of Europe’s migrant crisis on Saturday and took 12 Muslim refugees from Syria, including six children, with him back to Rome aboard the papal plane.
The action punctuated the pope’s pleas for sympathy to the crisis confronting the refugees just as European attitudes are hardening against them.
Those taken to Rome were three families — two from Damascus and one from Deir al-Zour — whose homes had been bombed in the Syrian war, the Vatican said in a statement as the pope departed the Greek island of Lesbos, where he had visited the Moria refugee camp. “The pope has desired to make a gesture of welcome regarding refugees,” the statement said.
by the New York Times
Documenting Outside the Classroom 