For the past year, AlterNet has reported on ICE's notable cruelty since Trump's inauguration. Now the numbers are in, and they confirm that the stories of ICE targeting non-criminal individuals aren't just one-off aberrations.
Black undocumented immigrants have been at the unfortunate intersection of the Trump Administration’s anti-black, Islamophobic and xenophobic agenda. The issues surrounding immigration do not only live within the Latinx, Muslim and Asian communities. We need to stop working in silos and change the narrative to be more inclusive, concentrating on ALL communities in need of our attention. Immigration is a black issue.
In early February, the existence of a draft Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report came to light, which calls for long-term surveillance of Sunni Muslim immigrants.
On Thursday, a federal court in California ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants on the basis of unconstitutional requests from ICE known as immigration detainers. “The court’s decision vindicates years of work by the Los Angeles immigrant community to challenge the Sheriff Department’s abuses and throws a major wrench in the Trump administration’s deportation machine,” said Jessica Bansal, litigation director of NDLON.
With narratives such as #HereToStay and #IAmAnAmerican, we erase the facts that we're living on stolen native land and that focusing on immigrants' hard work is both textbook ableism and anti-Blackness.
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It is a bone-chilling site to see the all white buses, including windows blocked out by white covers, approach the airport. The immigrants are shackled and hurried up the steps of the World Atlantic plane that will make a stop in Kansas City to pick up more immigrants. In addition to buses, ICE has added additional vehicles, that look like moving “isolation chambers.”
We affirm the rights of all working people to remain and thrive in the locations of their choosing, but also recognize that the forces of capitalism - economic policies, military intervention, and climate change - increasingly force people to leave their homes and relocate in order to survive. And we reaffirm our commitment to the struggles of undocumented immigrants in this country, demanding their labor rights as workers and human rights as people.
“While many officials champion their status as ‘sanctuary cities’ and have taken meaningful steps to protect immigrant communities, sweeping criminal laws in these places leave many immigrants trapped within an arm’s reach of deportation.”
While the executive orders, guidances, rhetoric and tweets of the past 100 days have stirred fear and anxiety in communities around the country and the world, immigrant women and women of color have continued to raise their voices, by organizing, mobilizing, engaging members of Congress and local elected leaders, in order to lead and defend our democracy.
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