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My friend Keinst who studied in Beijing has created a video project called “Ethnicity and Identity” which you can find in four parts on his youtube channel.
He writes:
I interviewed seven ethnically Chinese people who were born and raised in different countries and I asked them how they identified themselves.
As the world becomes smaller and more interconnected, old ways of thinking become less and less suitable. New ways of understanding things must be introduced to adapt to new phenomenons; this documentary attempts to do just that. For most people, ethnicity and identity are seen as one thing. However, I theorize that in the future these two concepts will grow further apart and at the same time become vague. This piece serves as a window into the future as well as into my own personal thoughts.
Check out the first video in the series below, and find the rest here.
Thank Jesus that the Obama Administration has taken away Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s authorization to enforce federal immigration laws. This means he will be curtailed in his ability to terrorize Latino communities. Naturally, he is enraged.
Here are some interesting tidbits from Alexander Provan’s recent piece on America’s Toughest Sheriff, Joe Arpaio. I recommend reading the whole thing.
Since 2007, Arpaio’s deputies have arrested 33,000 illegal aliens (only 300 of whom were picked up on “crime suppression sweeps”), but they’ve failed to catch any drug kingpins, break up any smuggling rings, or stanch the Mexican drug gang violence spilling over the border. (In fact, the sheriff’s immigration crackdown has coincided with a surge in violent crime and the accumulation of over 40,000 outstanding felony warrants.)
…I ask him why he’s arrested so many immigrants who’ve come to the country to take on menial jobs, but hasn’t caught any major smugglers…[T]hese are not drug dealers; they’re gardeners and dishwashers and men paid six dollars an hour to stand in the sun wearing sandwich boards.
“We’re going after those that have violated laws—they are illegal,” he insists.
…“All these people that come over, they could come with disease. There’s no control, no health checks or anything. They check fruits and vegetables, how come they don’t check people? No one talks about that! They’re all dirty. I sent out 200 inmates into the desert, they picked up 18 tons of garbage that they bring in—the baby diapers and all that. Where’s everybody who wants to preserve the desert?”
With all of this, you would think he was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-immigrant vigilante who burst out of the womb ready to profile some brown people. The thing about Alexander’s article that surprised me the most is that he has only been this rabid about “illegals” for the last four years. Arpaio is 77 years old. What changed after over seven decades of not hating immigrants?
[In 2005} a 24-year-old Army reservist named Patrick Haab pulled a gun on seven suspected illegal immigrants at a rest stop in the desert, forcing them to lie face-down on the ground until the sheriff’s men arrived. “You don’t go around pulling guns on people,” Arpaio said after arresting him. “Being illegal is not a serious crime. You can’t go to jail for being an illegal alien.”
Nativists did not take kindly to this position, and in a matter of days they had thrust Haab into the national spotlight. He played the hero on conservative talk shows, where he denounced Arpaio for letting the country turn into “Americo.” All charges against him were soon dropped, and a chastened Arpaio embarked on a campaign to remake his image. Within the year, he emerged as an anti-immigration crusader.
h/t cp
A couple days ago, I mentioned a story about a mother whose newborn baby was snatched from her by a knife-wielding woman claiming to be an immigration agent. The Tennessee mother, Maria Gurrolla, is an immigrant, you see.
Good news: The perp, Tammy Renee Silas, is in custody and baby Yair was recovered unharmed.
Bad news: Not only does Maria still not have custody of Yair, but he, along with her three other children, has been kidnapped by the state of Tennessee. Maria was allowed to see Yair briefly before the authorities took him and his siblings away from her again. Authorities will not explain why, but claim it is for the children’s safety.
From the AP article: “State officials say the children were taken into custody Saturday for safety reasons but have not offered details.”
Yet… “Siskovic, an FBI special agent in the Memphis division, said there was no indication of an ongoing threat to Gurrolla’s family. He could not say why the children were put into state custody.”
Huh. Unless there is something completely startling that we don’t know about Gurrolla that makes her an unfit parent, we are looking at an egregious human rights abuse as well as unnecessary revictimization at the hands of the state.
Let us hope that justice prevails.
UPDATE 10/6/09
Yair is back! All siblings have been returned to Maria, after police realized she hadn’t been trying to sell Yair to the woman who followed her home and stabbed her before running off with Yair. That was the totes probable scenario, I presume, when the news sez the police took Maria’s children because “someone claimed a family member had tried to sell him.”
“It’s a bad horror movie,” she said. “Gurrola said she had wanted to return to Mexico after the attack and never return to the home where the kidnapping and stabbing happened.”
I’ve divided today’s issue into sections. Oh boy!
Overseas
The Czech people are celebrating the collapse of American plans to put (more) American military equipment in their country! Go Czechs!
Idiot far-right German political party NPD sent offensive letters to “parliamentary candidates of immigrant heritage, telling them to go home.” It’s part of their cynical plan to stir up the not-properly-riled dormant xenophobic neo-nazi element in German society to vote for NPD in future elections.
Good news for the gheyz!
Not only does Nevada’s same-sex Domestic Partnership Registry Act take effect today, but the ban on same-sex marriage in Texas was declared unconstitutional!
So Topical!
Ed Kilgore wrote about David Brooks and anti-anti-racism. Did you read what he calls Brooks’ “unintentionally hilarious column”?
American Girl debuts “Gwen”, their new homeless doll! How topical! Here’s a snippet of her story:
Gwen and her mother Janine fell on hard times when her father lost his job; they later lost the house as they were unable to keep up payments. Soon after, Gwen’s father left them and they became homeless the fall before the start of the book’s events.
LOL your post-racial America!
(got that title from Shakesville btw)
US attorney Jim Greenlee in Mississipi targeted convenience store owners based only on the evidence that their names sound Muslim. Not like kinda on the DL, but as a stated initiative. The Convenience Store Initiative, to be precise.
Of the more than 100 people listed as being investigated by federal authorities, nearly every name appears to be Islamic. FBI officials would not comment.
FAIL. Good thing my pals at Mississippi Immigrants Rights Association are ON IT.
ANNnnnd to cap it all off with the worst thing ever: a white woman claiming to be an immigration officer stabbed an immigrant woman and stole her 4-day-old baby. This 
happened yesterday in Tennessee to mother Maria Gurrolla. Her missing baby’s name is Yair Anthony Carrillo. Investigators said:
“The child was taken by a white female who was posing as an immigration worker. She had come to the residence and demanded the mother give her the baby. When the mother refused to comply she stabbed the mother approximately 8 times.”
Welcome to The Exciting Times, a collection of news items that caught my interest!
*There has been another anti-Latino hate crime in Patchogue, New York, a small town with a history of anti-Latino violence, including the murder of Marcelo Lucero. This time a Latino mad was beaten and robbed by a gang of white men. White dudes: get your shit together over there!
*One of the first things I ever blogged about was that Oklahoma had passed a law mandating ultrasounds for women seeking abortion. Ultrasounds are commonly given before abortions, but it is unusual for the government to mandate normally elective medical procedures. My problem with this that it is almost assuredly just another ploy to make abortion less accessible, and it amounts to mandating medical rape.
Well, HUZZAH, because the law has been repealed! Though kind of on a technicality, and might be back again next year. Apparently the law also included a set of rules mandating that doctors go over the ultrasound with the patient and describe to her how much like a baby it looks. Can’t wait to see this one come back next year.
*Canadian citizen disowned and left in jail in Kenya. The woman, Suaad Hagi Mohamud, had immigrated from Somalia to Canada and is a naturalized citizen. For some reason her passport was “challenged” when she was trying to travel from Kenya to Canada this May. She was detained in Kenya, and when she appealed for help from the Canadian consulate, diplomat Liliane Khadour denied Mohamud was Canadian, claiming falsely that she had “carried out conclusive investigations” and determined that “the person brought to the Canadian High Commission on suspicion of being an imposter is not the rightful holder of the aforementioned passport.”
All’s well that ends well, right? Am I right? Well, Khadour has been “recalled” and Mohamud, after three months, the help of friends, and DNA testing, proved her identity and returned to her country.
*Don’t miss The Women’s Crusade in the NYT Magazine this week. Though I don’t agree with every statement in the article, there are plenty of intriguing points made. For example:
It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
and
[I]t is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor [for turbulence and violence]; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp… Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force.
ANNNNnnnd finally:
*Need some fuel to win health care arguments with your backwards-thinking relatives and coworkers? Here are some numbers for you to take a gander at, comparing health data collected from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. One of these countries doesn’t have nationalized health care. One of these countries also shows significantly worse health and health care than the others. CAN YOU GUESS WHICH??
Here’s some reading for ya!
BBC: Saddam’s rule ‘better’ for gay Iraqis
All the LGBT Iraqis interviewed for Gay Life After Saddam maintained that life was easier for them when Saddam Hussein was in power, from 1979 to 2003.
Some spoke fondly of an underground gay culture that flourished before the war in Baghdad.
Seattle Times: Israel deports activists detained going to Gaza
Israel on Monday deported a former U.S. congresswoman, a Nobel peace prize laureate and other activists who were arrested and jailed after trying to break the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli navy commandeered their boat last week as it tried to sail from Cyprus to Gaza.
…There were 21 passengers and three tons of medical aid on board, and most of the activists were quickly expelled. But Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and former U.S. congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, along with six other activists, remained in Israeli custody while the government arranged flights for them…
BBC: Egypt mourns ‘headscarf martyr’
Marwa Sherbini, 31, was stabbed 18 times by Axel W, who is now under arrest in Dresden for suspected murder.
…Ms Sherbini had sued her killer after he called her a “terrorist” because of her headscarf.
…Medics were unable to save Ms Sherbini who was three months pregnant with her second child.
More on death in US immigration detention. New York Times: Piecing Together an Immigrant’s Life the U.S. Refused to See
Tanveer Ahmad, it turns out, was a longtime New York City cabdriver who had paid thousands of dollars in taxes and immigration application fees… His only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: While working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery.
It would come back to haunt him.
And now, a Day Brightener after all this shitty news:
Nine people died in Monday’s Metro crash in DC. One of them had the poor taste to be a Latina immigrant. Her name was Ana Fernandez and she was commuting to her house cleaning job.
WUSA9 news report:
The family of Metro train crash victim Ana Fernandez says they have been targeted by anti-immigrant telephone messages in the wake of her death.
Callers accuse the family of trying to financially capitalize on Fernandez’s death and have called her an illegal immigrant.
“None of this is true,” said Jose Hernandez, a cousin.
Fernandez was 40-years old and the mother of six children aged 2 to 21.
…Family members say the calls were left at a phone number announced by the Spanish language television outlet Univision, to leave messages of support for the family.
In fact, Ana was a legal immigrant from El Salvador.
The Indigenous Xicano says:
Most people would mourn at the sadness of this story of a hard-working mother going to work and dying in an accident on the way to work.
Many times there will be a call to establish a fund to help defray the costs for the funeral and to establish a fund for the surviving children.
But Ana’s last name is Fernandez. The reality in America today is that there are many abnormal people who quickly demonize people with names that sound Spanish. Deceased mothers are no exception.
…If her name was Ann Smith these monsters would not make a sound.
That seems to be unclear to certain assholes running around.
Because if everyone could agree that immigrants are people, things like this wouldn’t happen:
Immigration advocates are incensed over a Mexican woman’s fight to keep custody of her child after she was reported as an unfit mother two days after giving birth in a Pascagoula hospital.
…According to documents obtained by The Clarion-Ledger, staff at the hospital filed a report two days later listing Ruby as a neglected child.
…Court records obtained by The Clarion-Ledger indicate [Cirila Baltazar] Cruz is charged with neglecting her child, in part, because “she has failed to learn the English language” and “was unable to call for assistance for transportation to the hospital” to give birth. Her inability to speak English “placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future,” according to the document.
Uh, since when was speaking English a requirement of motherhood? Whoever stole that woman’s baby, and anyone who colluded, should end up in jail. At least there is an apparently awesome organization involved to advocate for Cruz: Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. Their Request for Action is down below the fold. If this incident shocks and enrages you, please check out their action items and get involved!
H/t Alas.
Interestingly, in the light of this sickening language-bigotry-based violation of human rights, just this past weekend Pat Buchanan and his white “nationalist” friends were having a conference where they “suggested supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting “working class white Democrats.””
Buchanan went on to mock Sotomayor for coming from a Spanish-speaking background, and conference participant Peter Brimelow, editor of white “nationalist” website VDARE.com, “urged the attendees of the Buchanan conference to attack affirmative action in an effort to attract the votes of “young whites” and “yellow people.”"
After claiming it would be “suicidal” for any “white man” to vote for Obama, Brimelow contended that immigrants should not be eligible for affirmative action because “they weren’t slaves to this country, they’ve never been discriminated against”.
Those white “nationalists” sure are eloquent. To hear these actual words come out of their mouths, pop over to ThinkProgress, where you can also view their misspelled conference banner.
Request for action below. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s the difference between these murder headlines:
Transgender Woman Murders Husband
And these ones:
Woman Arrested in Murder of Area Woman
All of these murders took place in the UK or the US. In the second group of headlines, all of the perps or accused perps are white, cisgendered US/UK citizens.
So why do editors decide not to mention the race, religion or trans status of white murders in headlines? Why do they deliberately include that information only for people with some sort of minority status (immigrant, black or brown, trans, Muslim, etc.)? Does it make the story more “sensational”? If so, why? If not, than for what other possible reason would they include that information?
The effect of emphasizing what makes minority murderers different, not like us, while declining to emphasize the identities of white, Christian, straight, non-immigrant murderers, (who are more like “us” i.e. the majority), is to make it appear to the general media-consuming public that these minorities are more likely to commit crime, and/or that their minority status has something to do with the murder.
What would happen if every time a white person murdered, their race, religion, citizenship status, and trans-status were included in the headlines? Let’s try it out.
Straight White Man Murders Wife
Christian Citizen Murders Woman
Cisgendered White Woman Murders Husband
White Christian Man Murdered Wife
Straight Citizen Murdered Young Actor
Cisgendered Christian Woman Arrested in Murder of Area Woman
Interesting effect, isn’t it?
Founded in September 2002, FAMILIES FOR FREEDOM is a New York-based multi-ethnic defense network by and for immigrants facing and fighting deportation. We are immigrant prisoners (detainees), former immigrant prisoners, their loved ones, or individuals at risk of deportation. We come from dozens of countries, across continents. FFF seeks to repeal the laws that are tearing apart our homes and neighborhoods; and to build the power of immigrant communities as communities of color, to provide a guiding voice in the growing movement for immigrant rights as human rights.
Families for Freedom has a petition going around to support the Child Citizen Protection Act.
The Child Citizen Protection Act is an opportunity for our leaders to show that they truly value families and that the health, safety and well being of our nation’s children are among their top priority. Introduced by Representative Jose Serrano (D-NY), this bill represents a grassroots effort by families to create a safety valve for our children affected by deportations and raids. The Child Citizen Protection Act preserves the basic notion of fairness that should define the U.S. justice system—providing immigration judges with the discretion to consider the best interests of US Citizen children before ordering his or her parent deported. This bill would address some of the harshest provisions of the 1996 immigration laws that made deportation a mandatory punishment for many non-citizens.
Arrest made in anti-Latino and homophobic murder! Jose Sucuzhañay was murdered in Brooklyn by men shouting racist and homophobic slurs.
From VivirLatino:
Hakim Scott, 25, was arrested yesterday in connection with the beating death. Police are looking for another suspect, identified as Keith Phoenix, 28, of the Bronx.
Let us hope that justice is served.
My friend Ally writes:
“Just a moment of your time could save my friend JoJo Tran’s life.
JoJo’s attempts at gaining asylum after being in the US for over 13 years have been denied. At this point, his only hope of staying here and safe from prosecution in Vietnam is if ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) reopens his case. A team of volunteers in Seattle is trying to collect as many signatures as possible to convince them and our local politicians to lean on ICE to do this.”
JoJo’s story:
We are calling for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to reopen Dung Anh “JoJo” Tran’s asylum case.
JoJo Tran fled Vietnam in 1996 fearing politically motivated persecution after helping American military veterans as a guide to view sites that the Vietnamese authorities claimed were not authorized, and being called in, questioned and threatened by the Vietnamese intelligence agency.
Since moving to Seatle shortly after his arrival in America in 1996, JoJo has been busy working and volunteering for numerous organizations in the Puget Sound area.
Our updated information from JoJo’s attorney is that March 28 is the last day of his voluntary departure period unless ICE consents to grant him some sort of stay while his petition is being considered.
Help us help this amazing man who has turned adversity and a fourteen year effort to become an American into thousands of hours of volunteering in the community he wants to call home.
Dorothy Loader and Rosabelle Glasby are identical twins. But not if you ask the Australian Department of Immigration. You see, different families adopted them, and it took 50 years for them to find each other again. And in fifty years, they had different nationalities: Rosabelle was in Australia, and Dorothy was in Malaysia. Dorothy wants to move to Australia to be with her sister, but the authorities claim they are “not related for the purposes of immigration” and denied her request.
I wrote about their story before.
Well, Rosabelle’s husband Marc has asked that I share a website they have created to try and reunite these sisters. On the site there are suggestions for how you can help. Check it out. Their story is crazy and Orwellian to the max.
For Immediate Release
February 13, 2009
Contact: Jonathan Godfrey (Conyers)
Pedro Riberio (Lofgren)
Ilan Kayatsky (Nadler)
Larry Dillard (Scott)
WASHINGTON – House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), and Immigration Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) called on Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate allegations of misconduct by Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Sheriff Arpaio has repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the rights of Hispanics in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Under the guise of immigration enforcement, his staff has conducted raids in residential neighborhoods in a manner condemned by the community as racial profiling. On February 4, 2009, Arpaio invited the media to view the transfer of immigrant detainees to a segregated area of his “tent city” jail, subjecting the detainees to public display and “ritual humiliation.” Persistent actions such as these have resulted in numerous lawsuits; while Arpaio spends time and energy on publicity and his reality television show, “Smile… You’re Under Arrest!”, Maricopa County has paid millions of dollars in settlements involving dead or injured inmates.
“Racial profiling and segregation are simply not acceptable.” said Conyers. “Media stunts and braggadocio are no substitute for fair and effective law enforcement.” Read the rest of this entry »
I’m really glad the New York Times published this story.
ALAMO, Texas – The citizenship of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who insist they are Americans is being called into question because they were delivered by midwives near the U.S.-Mexico border.
…The people delivered by midwives have documents such as birth certificates and medical records. But the agency that grants passports is challenging the credibility of those papers, citing a history of some midwives fraudulently registering Mexican-born babies as American.
…The government has “effectively reduced to second-class citizenship status an entire swath of passport applicants based solely on their being of Mexican or Latino descent and having been delivered by midwives in nonhospital settings in Southwestern border states,” according to a federal lawsuit against the State Department filed last year…
Read the story for yourself. Once again, looking Latin@ is unamerican and will put you at risk of your own government disowning you.
h/t Wellsmus
From the New York Times:
Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.
Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.
Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.
In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.
Bush’s attempts to appear “tough” on immigration where just that, appearance. But his cosmetic needs created two sets of victims.
The first is immigrants and those suspected of being immigrants.
[R]andom arrests of low-level violators in residential raids not only raised a new set of legal and humanitarian issues, including allegations of entering private homes without warrants or consent and separating children from their caretakers, but was “dramatically different from how ICE has sold this program to Congress.”
The second is taxpayers.
“If we just want to arrest undocumented people,” [Michael Wishnie] said, “we can do it much more cheaply.”
Congressional financing for the fugitive operations program rose to $218 million in the 2008 fiscal year, from $9 million in 2003, as the number of seven-member teams multiplied to 104 from 8.
It’s so obvious that harassing immigrants and racially profiling brown people is totally making America safer!
We’ve all heard the story of the Suleman family by this time: Nadya Suleman, a single unemployed woman who lives with her parents Angela and Edward in California, gave birth to octuplets on January 26. She already has six children.
Before details of Nadya’s life came out, the MSM was all gaga over the octuplets. It was a heart-warming international news sensation. But once the world learned more details of her life, we decided Nadya wasn’t a fit recipient of octuplets, the love affair ended, and the judgments started to rain down relentlessly.
Nadya should be sterilized, she should have the children taken away, she is an immigrant and bleeding the country dry, she is doing this for the welfare money, she’s only doing it to become famous and rich, she should be arrested, she is mentally ill, she is pathologically obsessed with children, she should not be single, her docs should lose their licenses, there should be a limit on how many kids you have, it is immoral to have 14 kids, only married couples experiencing infertility should have access to IVF, this is child abuse, 14 children is sickening, if the family isn’t rich, then shame on them.
I find all this judgment incredibly disturbing, let alone annoying. The public has judged her Not Good Enough for the adoration usually allotted to multiple births. Even though we usually spend our time judging women for selfishly deciding to have one or no kids (below replacement fertility!), or for aborting pregnancies, or for using contraceptives, suddenly our outraged senses of decency are causing us to do a moral 180. We don’t even need the facts to do it!
Well, I’d rather have the facts, personally, and hold the judgment than vice versa. So below I respond to some of the common criticism’s of Nadya Suleman’s massive birth using Facts and References. Holy cow!
Guido Newbrough died of an untreated staph infection in his heart. He was being held at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, VA.
[G]uards should have noticed that Mr. Newbrough was in critical condition as the bacteria colonizing his heart broke loose, creating abscesses in his brain, liver and kidneys.
…Several detainees interviewed by telephone last week said that in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, Mr. Newbrough’s back pain grew so bad that he began sobbing through the night, and some in the 90-man unit took turns making him hot compresses. By the Sunday before Thanksgiving, he was desperate, two detainees said, and banged at the door of the unit’s lunchroom, yelling for help. They said by the time guards responded, he was seated at a table.
“They told him to get up, and he said he couldn’t get up because he was in a lot of pain,” said Salvador Alberto Rivas, who identified himself as Mr. Newbrough’s bunk mate, awaiting deportation to El Salvador. “Because of the pain, he started crying, and he was trying to tell them he had put in requests for medical and didn’t get any. And then one of the guards threw him to the floor.”
“They drag him by his leg, in front of about 30 people,” said another detainee, who gave his name only as Jose for fear of retaliation, adding that many witnesses had since been transferred to other jails or deported.
“We didn’t know that he was dying,” added Jose, who wrote about the case in a letter published online by a Spanish weekly. “They took him to the hole. He was yelling for help in the hole, too.”
The New York Times has reported on other deaths in immigration detention due to medical neglect, including the Piedmont facility:
Hiu Lui Ng, died 8/08
Francisco Castaneda, died 2/26/08
Boubacar Bah, died 6/07
Abdoulai Sall, died 12/06
Young Sook Kim, died 9/11/06
Sandra M. Kenley, died 2005
There are many others. The Washington Post wrote recently that “Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years…Actions taken — or not taken — by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths…”
People United, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch have been active in calling for accountability and change.
These are human lives we’re talking about. But somehow, when a person ends up in immigration detention, the value of their life declines. Jailers and immigration officials have been consistently cavalier about the deaths. From the NYT article: “Ernest L. Toney, the jail superintendent, denied accounts that Mr. Newbrough had been mistreated…” From CBS: Gary Mead, a senior immigration official, told the Congress that ICE provides “state-of-the-art medical care,” and “the best possible healthcare.”
I think my definition of “best possible healthcare” and Gary’s diverge.
Identical twins not related for purposes of Australian immigration
Australia’s Department of Immigration is really taking a page right out of USCIS’s book. One of the women pictured above is a citizen of Australia. The other, allegedly her “twin sister”, is a threat to the security of every good Australian.
From Perth Now:
A WA woman has been told by Australian authorities that she’s not related to her identical twin sister.
…Adopted by different families shortly after their birth in Malaysia, Mrs Glasby and Dorothy Loader were separated for almost 50 years before finally meeting last September.
…In a letter to Mrs Glasby last month, DIAC state director Paul Farrell explained that despite the circumstances, the present laws meant Ms Loader would not be eligible for family migration.
Clearly, Paul Farrell can see right through these women’s nefarious plot. As my roommate pointed out, and as the above photo makes clear, the Malaysian “sister” is none other than Osama bin Laden with radical facial reconstruction and fake papers!
Heckuva job, Farrell. You have masterfully detected a fake “family” that shouldn’t, no- mustn’t, be reunited. Australians can take a deep sigh of relief that their way of life has been successfully protected from terrorist, Australia-hating immigrants.
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