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Recent attempts by the Department of Homeland Security to change their policies about deporting people who have no criminal records and close family ties in the U.S. are not working. The backlog of cases to be reviewed has caused the whole process to slow down.  The requirement that each case undergo a background check means the “new” procedure is as bad as or worse than the current one, which requires people to return to their home country and wait SEVEN TO TEN YEARS for a change in status. Many of our friends in the immigrant community prefer to just take their case to court where at least, if they win, they may have the opportunity to become legal residents.  The idea of the Family Unity Waiver sounds good, but the process is unworkable.  It must be completely redesigned if it is going to have any chance of success.

 

Click here to read more about the policies:

Deportations Continue Despite U.S. Review of Backlog

CoFiA welcomes Annie Kennelly as our Summer Intern.  Annie worked with us last summer before she went to Georgetown University for her freshman year.  She is back home this summer and has graciously agreed to lend a hand again.  She is helping with our Facebook page, and is getting started on a project to write up our experiences in trying to collect unpaid wages for workers.  Our determined Wage Theft committee has had some surprising victories, and has learned a lot.  We need to share these things with the general public and with other groups!

Everyone is invited to join us for a festive dinner on Thursday, June 7, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. at the Leonia United Methodist Church, Broad Avenue at Woodridge Place, in Leonia. We will have a private screening of a revised version of “Why I Am Here,” plus special music by our own Juan Pablo Morales Estrada. Please let us know what you want to bring for the dinner!

From January to June 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed 46,486 undocumented parents with at least one child who is an American citizen.  This extraordinary acceleration is part of the U.S. government’s effort to meet an annual quota of about 400,000 deportations.

At least 5100 children currently live in foster care and are prevented from uniting with detained or deported parents.  If nothing changes, 15,000 more children may face a similar fate in the next 5 years. (See “Shattered FAmilies: The Periolous Instersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System.”  Applied Research Center. http://arc.org/shatteredfamilies.)

 

In Middlesex County there is a large group of Indonesian Christians who fled extremely violent religious persecution in the demise of the Suharto regime in the 1990s.  They came with tourist visas but were not alerted that they needed to apply for asylum.  Over the years, they established households, worked hard, and established churches.  After 9/11, John Ashcroft enacted a registration program, NSEERS, designed to identify terrorists from mostly Muslim nations. In 2003 and 2009, many Indonesian Christians voluntarily came forward and identified themselves to ICE, as part of an agreement between a local Reformed Church and ICE that they would not suffer ill consequences.  In 2011, ICE ordered them to leave. Eight have already been deported. The church now provides physical sanctuary to 5 Indonesians who have orders of deportation.  This summer, 12 U.S. citizen children are scheduled to lose one or both parents to deportation.

A bill (HR-3590) has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to help this community.  Assemblyman Peter Barnes of Middlesex County introduced a state resolution urgin the federal government to pass HR-3590, the Indonesian Refugee Family Protection Act.

People who want to help may contact their own state and federal legislators to urge them to also take action.

For more information go to www.keepfamliestogether.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the trumpets had sounded and all

Was in readiness on the face of the earth,

Jehovah divided his universe:

Anaconda, Ford Motors,

Coca-Cola Inc., and similar entities:

The most succulent item of all,

The United Fruit Company Incorporated

reserved for itself: the heartland

and coasts of my country,

the delectable waist of America.

They rechristened their properties:

the “Banana Republics”—

And over the languishing dead,

The uneasy repose of the heroes

Who harried that greatness,

Their flags and their freedoms,

They established an opera bouffe:

they ravished all enterprise,

awarded the laurels like Caesars,

unleashed all the covetous, and contrived

the tyrannical Reign of the Flies—

Trujillo the fly, and Tacho the fly,

 

The flies called Carias, Martinez,

Ubico—all of them flies, flies

dank with the blood of their marmalade

vassalage, flies buzzing drunkenly

on the populous middens:

the fly-circus fly and the scholarly

 kind, case-hardened in tyranny.

 

Then in the bloody domain of the flies

The United Fruit Company Incoporated

unloaded with a booty of coffee and fruits

brimming its cargo boats, gliding

like trays with the spoils

of our drowning dominions.

 

And all the while, somewhere, in the sugary

hells of our seaports,

smothered by gases, an Indian

fell in the morning:

a body spun off, an anonymous

chattel, some numeral tumbling,

a branch with its death running out of it

in the vat of the carrion, fruit laden and foul.

 

The video “Why I Am Here,” produced by the Community of Friends in Action, Inc., and Grupo Ella Tu, is now available for purchase.

Orders may be made by:

email: info@communityoffriendsinaction.org
telephone: 201-833-1737
or mail:
Community of Friends in Action, Inc.
50 Golf Court, Teaneck, NJ 07666.
Please enclose a check for $15 for each video ordered.

» Order form

Special screenings featuring the videographer, Juan Pablo Morales Estrada, and the subject, “Mr. Garcia,” may also be arranged by calling 201-833-1737.  Several weeks notice is usually required.  To screen the video, the organization needs to have a digital projector with audio, and a good screen; or a good-sized television with a dvd player.

“Why I Am Here” tells the story of “Mr. Garcia,” a Guatemalan immigrant.  It combines interviews with Mr. Garcia with scenes of his home and family in Guatemala, describing why circumstances including the Guatemalan civil war and the economic devastation caused by the Central American Free Trade Agreement forced him to come to the U.S. to try to find work to help support his family.  Information on the involvement of the United States and U.S. business, especially the United Fruit Company, is juxtaposed with archival and live footage of life in Guatemala over the past several decades.

Audiences are encouraged to consider current U.S. immigration policy and ways in which it needs to be reformed to benefit all of us.

The video “Why I Am Here,” produced by CoFiA and Grupo Ellatu, will be screened at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck on Sunday, June 10, 2012, at 4 p.m.  Both the videographer, Juan Pablo Morales Estrada, and the subject of the video, “Mr. Garcia,” will be present to discuss the film with the audience.

The presentation of the video will be followed by a performance by Grupo Folklórico Tikál, a local troupe performing traditional Guatemalan dances.  They will present “The History of Tecún Umán,” the last King of the Quiche Mayan people who is honored as a hero because he defied the Spanish conquistadors, and gave his life for his people.

For more information on

the event, go to www.puffinculturalforum.org

Beginning on Monday, April 9, 2012, CofiA will sponsor “Casa Latina,” a drop-in program to be held at Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Palisades Park on Monday evenings from 7 – 9 p.m.  The program will offer “café, formación, e información” (coffee, education/training, and information). It will be open to the public and is free.  Volunteers are welcome to assist with refreshment and programs.  Call 201-833-1737 (English) or 201-362-3928 for more information.

We have just learned that one of our worker friends received a payment from an employer who had failed to pay him.  The worker is a very young man–just 16 years of age–who came to this country to try to support his mother.  He was working in a restaurant.  When he came to the CoFiA wage theft committee he said he was owed a fairly substantial amount of money.  When our committee confronted the employer, a restaurant owner, she not only admitted she owed him that amount–she said she owed more!  And promptly went on to pay him.  A true cause for celebration.

Other people have not been so lucky.  Four workers are owed large amounts of money.  The employer had first paid them with bad checks, which he refused to make good on.  They and the committee met with the employer several times, and he agreed to pay them on an agreed schedule.  He did not pay them, but another person in the same business made the first payment.  When no other payment was forthcoming, members of the committee tracked the second person down and advised him that additional money was still owed.  Although he denied it was his responsibility, he did promptly make the second payment.  The third payment is still outstanding.  Committee members have made many calls to the original owner, have sent him certified letters, and have even gone to his house attempting to collect this money. As of now the issue is unresolved.

Several other cases are pending.

On Thursday, April 26, 2012, at 7:00 p.m., the Community of Friends in Action, Inc., and Grupo Ellatu, present a new video, “Why I Am Here.”  A documentary created by Juan Pablo Morales Estrada, the video features Mr. Garcia, a Guatemalan who lives in Bergen County.  Interviews with Mr. Garcia, interwoven with scenes of his home and family in Guatemala and archival footage of the Guatemalan civil war, document why he had to leave his beloved homeland to try to survive and make a living in the U.S.

The video was funded in part by grants from the Puffin Foundation Ltd., and CoFiA.  It is free and open to the public.  Donations to support the work of the filmmaker will be welcome.

For more information call 201-598-2253.