Outpouring Of Grief And Rage Across A Nation Caging Children #LightsForLiberty

Waterville, Maine  July 12, 2019

My husband and I attended two events yesterday in Maine protesting the child concentration camps and family separations employed by the federal government to terrorize asylum seekers and other immigrants.

Waterville, Maine July 12, 2019

50 people turned out in Skowhegan to stand for two hours on the bridge, ending with a candlelight vigil.

Skowhegan, Maine  July 12, 2019

It was part of the nationwide Lights for Liberty campaign to bring the demand to the streets and, where possible, to the concentration camps themselves.

50 is a lot of people at a protest in central Maine, but there was no press at the well-publicized event.

Many of my own children's retired teachers were there, as well as current teachers and several children. Organizer and educator Aliza Jones was there with her daughter who was eating ice cream -- what children should be doing on a summer night, rather than crying for their parents while laying on concrete in a cage near the border.

Skowhegan, Maine July 12, 2019

Lots of signs called on the federal government to do better. Some expressed a belief that the USA is better than this.

Waterville, Maine  July 12, 2019

I wish I could agree that our country is better than this. Built on the genocide of Native people and the labor of slaves, we do not have an admirable history. My white people always seem to be forgetting that many of us could be holding Bobby Hayes' sign above: Grandchild of Immigrants. 

But many people do not know the true history of this nation: the U.S. government turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees who died in concentration camps, knew about the Holocaust but allowed it to proceed anyway, and, after tardily "liberating" the camps, ran show trials at Nuremberg while quietly bringing Nazi rocket scientists to the USA.

Skowhegan, Maine   July 12, 2019

But we, the people of the U.S., can do MUCH better than caging toddlers and torturing them by withholding food, showers, and hugs.

Bourassa family together in Skowhegan  July 12, 2019

As the Japanese-Americans interned during WWII hysteria have said, At least we were with our parents. 

Even for adults, even if they are alleged to have broken a law (note that seeking asylum is not a crime), indefinite detention goes against the rule of law the U.S. claims to have been founded on.

It could be you or a toddler you love next.

Skowhegan, Maine  July 12, 2019

Get busy now demanding that your elected officials shut down the camps and reunite the families: 202-225-3121.

U.S. Gov't Sez: Earn Your Rights By Killing People

Imagine you were a parent who couldn't feed your daughter, who crossed into the U.S. illegally to find work and put food on the table. Your daughter was a little girl then, "undocumented" as they say, but no less of a person for it. Now she's almost finished high school -- one of your dreams for her. But many doors are closed because she lacks either a green card or citizenship.

Applicants wait in Langley Park, MD to apply for the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals program. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo)  source: ABC News

You can't afford to put her through college. Maybe it's a blessing that she can't get a federal student loan -- at least she may escape the debt servitude of her generation among the working class.

Employers will be able to exploit her because of her legal status (how convenient for them). 

She can't visit her grandparents or cousins back in the place you both came from because of the risk that she might not be able to return to you.

How might you feel about the news that she can now "earn" a path to citizenship by enlisting in the military?

Pvt. Marleni Cruzcarranza of Sterling, Va., receives a hug from best friend Lauren Sanchez after receiving her U.S. citizenship during a naturalization ceremony Thursday morning at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. Pvt. Cruzcarranza, formerly a citizen of Honduras, will graduate from Marine Corps bootcamp today (01/04/2013). - Sarah Welliver /ASSOCIATED PRESS  source: TheState.Com

How would you feel knowing that signing up for the Army is your daughter's best bet as a reliable fast track option for "earning" citizenship?

Now, as an enlistee she could also be expected to actually fight in combat (Falguni Sheth's blog post examining this as "progress" for women" is not to be missed). Your daughter might be required to kill people in Afghanistan, Yemen (or wherever may be the war du jour) as part of the much vaunted "path to citizenship."

How might you feel about recruiting ads aimed at her, some designed to play on family loyalty? A marketing strategy that counts on the fact that she's probably low-income, that unemployment is high? The poverty draft is blowing like a gale wind force through families like yours, and it is now pushing the daughters even more than the sons. The daughters who earn less for the same work done by men. The daughters who have a lower net worth for a lifetime than any man of any class or race whatsoever.
The daughters of color who disproportionately enlist in these crappy economic times.


How might you feel about Democrats are bragging about what they are offering your daughter?

Nancy Pelosi tweet: "House Dems support President’s principles of comprehensive #immigrationreform, promise of earned citizenship + keeping families together."

Rights are not earned, they are claimed. No government can bestow rights upon its people. Humans are born with them, whether or not they are able to realize this in their lifetime. The history of groups who were offered the chance to "earn" their rights in the past is not a particularly good one.

Africans and African American slaves were offered the chance to support combat troops for the North in the U.S. Civil War. They came home to lynching and the rise of the KKK, Jim Crow segregation laws, and voter suppression. Thanks, vets!

Japanese Americans who had been in the military still got put into illegal internment camps during WWII.

Native American veterans do no better economically or socially for having been in the military. In fact, they are more likely to end up addicted and/or homeless than the other members of their community. 

Actually, so are vets of any ethnic group. 

Apparently a right to quality health care if injured while on active duty is not one of the rights that can be earned -- although I'll bet you anything that's what recruiters told them was part of the package. "We'll take care of you AND your family if something happens to you," is what recruiters reportedly say. Ask the 900,000+ vets whose claims are backlogged at the VA right now if that claim turned out to be true.

And if you're one of the many who succumb to suicide while waiting to be helped with your PTSD or brain injury, your family gets nada.

In recent times, the Pentagon has shown its appreciation for families by having young mothers on active duty arrested, sometimes causing their children to be taken into protective services when the moms fail to report for duty due to childcare being unavailable. (Not like anybody in the patriarchal empire of the united bloody states thought there was ever any possibility of earning the right to universal high quality child care!)

Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old Army cook, appears in fatigues in the photo held by her mother and viewed by her baby. The baby was taken from her when Alexis was arrested for not deploying.

Warm and fuzzy soft recruiting tactics aimed at high schoolers sure don't make it seem like the military would be such a mean boss. From the Jobs for Maine's Graduate program newsletter on a service learning project providing gifts to needy families over the holidays:

"We partnered with the Army National Guard in Skowhegan to facilitate wrapping the gifts and delivering them to the distribution sites."

Partnered is such a cozy verb, isn't it?

Militarization is the poison pill in every liberal offering these days.

"We will not kill innocent people in exchange for Green Cards"

Camilo Mejía is a Nicaraguan American who was the first public Iraq war resister.

I just read a bracing indictment of the DREAM act, which I didn't realize used to contain a provision for 2 years of community service, or military enlistment, or college. The community service option was stripped away before Congress stuck the act on to the great rotting corpse of the national Pentagon budget.


Don'tAsk, Don't Tell repeal was used in a similar fashion.
Rep. Chellie Pingree told a group of us back in May that she had voted ought to pass for the "defense" funding bill both on the House Armed Services Committee and in a preliminary floor vote because DADT was appended to it, and she would have plenty of time to vote "no" on it later. I pray that she does so.

This prostituting of worthy legislation to pass military funding is what we are all about these days. Among other things, it provides a pretext to mobilize supporters of equal rights for all, or supporters of immigration reform, to lobby their reps and senators to vote yes on an even bigger slice of the federal budget pie for weapons and wars.

Here's more from VAMOS Unidos Youth on the feasibility of an undocumented migrant youth being able to exercise the education option in the DREAM act:

..the cost of each year in school without the aid of PellGrants or Financial Aid for attending two years of a four years University; our calculations were the following for a university in Ohio, which does not allow in-state tuition for undocumented students: Cleveland State University: Out of State

* 12 Credit Hours – $7,884.00 X 2 = 1 Year = $15,768.00 X 2 years = $31,536.00

* Expenses for Students Living at Home with their Parents = $6,568.00 X 2 years = 13,136.00

* GRAND TOTAL = $44,672.00

Only 10 states allow for undocumented students to pay for in-state tuition...

Young people in the U.S. are struggling and will struggle under the enormous weight of unsustainable military spending, and unsustainable environmental destruction. Undocumented youth have the additional burden of being non-persons with limited rights dangled only when they sign on the recruiter's dotted line.

Shame on us for treating them with such disrespect. Shame on the richest country in the world for not providing everyone with the right to a decent, affordable education.

These are the conditions that scholars and the Army's own handbook on counter insurgency would identify as breeding violence and terrorism, by the way.

The best thing we could do on behalf of the world's children, grandchildren, and beyond would be to bring our war dollars home.

DREAM workhorse for military funding??

I see where the DREAM act has become attached to the FY11 "defense" funding bill in the senate.

Just like the congress had education funding attached to the last war supplemental funding bill a few months ago. So orgs like my union could send out bulletins pushing members to call their rep or senator urging passage of the bill. Many members click without knowing much about the piece of legislation and certainly without being told that they are urging passage of the largest "defense" funding bill in history. Deception is a complicated game.

Respecting the educational needs of young undocumented immigrants is the aim of DREAM and this is a wonderful goal, but it's a tiny part of all that doesn't work about our immigration policies.

It makes me sick when ideals -- like not interrupting the education of undocumented youth -- are twisted for the profit of death dealers. But this is what our country has become.

And under DREAM service in the military would be equivalent to education as a path to citizenship.

I remember the fact that immigrants are offered a path to citizenship by enlisting came to light during the Winter Soldier hearings. We were in a local cafe screening the hearings and the young hometown waitresses were amazed by that fact.

DREAM is already a band-aid applied to a gaping wound and doesn't need this odious association to further weaken it. Real immigration reform is one of the many things that were supposed to change. Challenging AZ over SB1070 was a good gesture, but delivery on real change would have meant fixing large portions of the dysfunction of U.S. immigration policies.

Now immigration is brought in as a workhorse as congress labors to pass two war bills each year. One bill is hardly behind us before another bills begins the dark dance of committees and cloture and arcane rules. The chief executive of the nation renews the national "emergency" caused by 9/11. A constant state of war requires a constant flow of (borrowed to be paid back later) dollars gushing forth from our taxes and other revenues.

Private corporations are mercenaries paid for by public funds. Knowing this does not make me feel safer at all.