Grassroots Leadership In The News

Since June, a working group has been meeting quietly to discuss what kind of public oversight is needed for the Austin Police Department.

The group is working to rebuild from the wreckage of the Citizen Review Panel, suspended after 17 years when the City Council in December rejected the police labor agreement that has always included the terms of the panel’s authority.

Chris Harris, a member of the working group and an organizer for Grassroots Leadership, a local prison reform non-profit, told The Texas Monitor the issue is whether or not the police department will concede to citizens a voice in how they are policed.

“If you look at the history of the Citizens Review Panel, I think you’ll find that multiple chiefs over the years have been very comfortable ignoring it,” Harris said. Read more about Another citizen review board for Austin police in the works

CHAOS ON THE GROUND

The reunifications have unfolded in chaotic scenes across the country. Many have been concentrated in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where families have been funneled into federal offices that were designated as "staging facilities," overwhelming area resources to the extent that some parents have had to wait days after arriving to rejoin their children.

At one such facility in south Texas, the Port Isabel Detention Center, the government has been labeling some parents as "released" while they are still in custody, according to Bethany Carson, who works for Grassroots Leadership, a nonprofit advocacy group in Austin. Read more about Border reunions meet deadline, U.S. reports, but hundreds of parents deemed ineligible

The calls for help started coming in to immigration lawyers across the country just before Memorial Day. Immigrant detainees, many fleeing gangs and violence and seeking legal asylum in the U.S., were flooding courtrooms along the Southwest border. 

Dozens were parents reporting that Border Patrol agents had taken away their children, and many were under the impression they would see their sons and daughters again within hours.

“It’s been incredibly hard to figure out how to get this family out,” Aranda said.

Other advocates said they hadn’t been allowed on the grounds of some shelters, hurting their access to families. “Some are told to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a week but may not understand what to do to avoid being detained again,” said Bethany Carson, an organizer with Grassroots Leadership in Austin, Texas. Read more about Family separation crisis continues on border even as court-ordered deadline nears

“Es un ataque directo, manipulado, al proceso de asilo”, expresó Sofía Casini, de la agrupación sin fines de lucro Grassroots Leadership, de Austin, Texas, que trabaja con mujeres inmigrantes retenidas en el vecino centro de detención T. Don Hutto, las cuales fueron separadas de sus hijos en cumplimiento de una política que fue condenada desde casi todos los sectores antes de ser interrumpida el 20 de junio.

Casini dijo que de las aproximadamente 35 mujeres con las que trabaja su grupo, más de una tercera parte no sobrevivieron a la entrevista en la que deben demostrar temores justificados de ser blanco de violencia si regresan.

Afirma que esto representa el doble que antes de que se implementaran las nuevas pautas. A nivel nacional, más de 2.000 menores y sus padres deben reunirse tras haber sido separados, incluida Aragón y su hija, que está alojada en un refugio para menores de Nueva York y cuyo futuro es tan incierto como el de su madre. Read more about Ser víctima de violencia doméstica o de pandillas ya no justificará asilo en EUA

Lost among the wall-to-wall press coverage of allegations of Russian interference in US politics is a recent revelation that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 1,310 reports of rape and sexual assault of immigrant detainees by ICE officials between 2013 and 2017 alone.

Cristina Parker, communications director for the Texas immigrant rights nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, told the World Socialist Web Site: “It’s terrible to say, but this report doesn’t shock me. Those of us who know these facilities thought, ‘That’s about right.’ It’s a common thing we hear. It’s been a problem. It’s not just at [T. Don] Hutto [detention center], it’s endemic and pervasive in the system.”

The corporate media has largely ignored the reports of widespread rape and sexual abuse by US immigration officials. The New York Times buried Kassie’s video shortly after it was published, while the Washington Post made only a passing reference to it at the conclusion of an article summarizing the day’s news. Otherwise, the story was not covered in the bourgeois press. The fascistic abuse of immigrants has been drowned out by the hysterical anti-Russia campaign dominating the airwaves.

“It’s disturbing that this doesn’t get more coverage and isn’t met with more outrage,” Parker said. “The media is more interested in the reality television show that is our current federal administration and not the impact that it’s having on individuals and human beings on the border. Even though immigration has fallen off the national radar, only a fraction of the children separated from their parents have been reunited. The detention system is operating at a mass scale.” Read more about Media, #MeToo silent on widespread sexual assault of detained immigrants

There is an abundant opportunity in border protection, an area in which the U.S. government has been increasing spending nonstop for almost two decades.  The U.S. Government has spent $263 billion on immigration enforcement since 1986, according to a report by the American Immigration Council. That kind of spending has no precedent in the history of the country.

Detention is a big part of that, particularly since 2009 when Congress first passed a mandate to maintain funding for no less than 33,400 detention beds, known as the "detention bed quota".

That quota has since increased to 34,000 and the Trump Administration is seeking to up it yet again.

Since its implementation in 2009, the immigration bed quota have increased the private share of the immigrant detention industry, according to a report by Grassroots Leadership, an activist group critical of the industry. Read more about Immigration Detention is Profitable for Private Prisons

As part of the Trump administration's broader crackdown on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently tightened the restrictions on the types of cases that can qualify someone for asylum, making it harder for Central Americans who say they're fleeing the threat of gangs, drug smugglers or domestic violence to pass even the first hurdle for securing U.S. protection.

"This is a direct, manipulated attack on the asylum process," said Sofia Casini of the Austin non-profit Grassroots Leadership, which has been working with immigrant women held at the nearby T. Don Hutto detention center who were separated from their kids under a widely condemned policy that President Donald Trump ended on June 20.

Casini said that of the roughly 35 separated mothers her group worked with, more than a third failed their credible fear interviews, which she said is about twice the failure rate of before the new restrictions took effect. Nationally, more than 2,000 immigrant children and parents have yet to be reunited, including Aragon and her daughter, who is being held at a New York children's shelter and whose future is as unclear as her mother's. Read more about 'Credible Fear' for US Asylum Harder to Prove Under Trump

In June, once school let out in rural Dutchess County, New York, I packed up my 7-year-old son and drove 2,054 miles to the Texas-Mexico border. I needed to see with my own eyes what is happening to migrant children separated from their parents as a result of the Trump administration’s escalated “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

Last Saturday, we met a mother, Lesvia, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala with her son, Yudem, almost two months ago. She was taken into custody 56 days ago and finally released from the T. Don Hutto immigration detention center in Taylor, Texas, on Thursday. She was driven to Brownsville by representatives of the Austin-based organization Grassroots Leadership, who had advocated for her release, to have a one-hour visit with 10-year-old Yudem, who is being held at Casa El Presidente. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over a month. She sobbed as she was led away from our tent while CNN’s news cameras surrounded her. Read more about I’m Camping Out In Front Of A ‘Tender Age’ Shelter With My Son. Here’s What I’ve Seen.

Mario knows where his daughter is—they’re both in El Paso, Texas—but he’s not allowed to see her. Before they have the opportunity to permanently come back together as a family once again, the U.S. government’s got a ton of hoops that they want Mario to jump through. The common thread: he needs to prove that he’s his daughter’s father. Last month, Mario and his legal representative were working to get his passport back from the FBI, as it had been taken from him when he was taken into custody at the border. This week, he’s waiting to be fingerprinted. That each step of the process to get his daughter back is being handled by a different government organization only serves to slow things down. Similar stories are playing out with other families as well. Claudia Muñoz, is the immigration programs director for Grassroots Leadership, an Austin-based group that opposes for-profit immigrant detention centers. From what she told the Texas Tribune’s Julián Aguilar, the level of red tape that detainees are having to cut through in order to get back their kids is at a level where one has to start to wonder whether the government actually wants families to be reunited. Hmmmm… Read more about A stunning amount of red tape is keeping detainee families from reuniting