Community of Friends in Action
Communidad de Amigos en Acción
Starting August 15, DREAMers will be able to submit a request for consideration of deferred action, to USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services). The permit costs $465 and lasts two years. It is renewable.
It is NOT what we had hoped–a path to citizenship or regularized status–but it will make an incredible difference in the lives of these young people who have grown up in the U.S., pursued their education, and are only wanting the right to work and contribute to society.
TODAY, President Obama is finally granting DREAMers relief from deportation. DREAM Act youth ages 15-30 will be able to apply for protection from deportation and work permits, which will grant DREAMers a way to contribute to the country they call home. This is a HUGE milestone for DREAMers, who have been fighting for years for the chance to lead successful and prosperous lives here in America.
Now it’s time to take the next big step and have comprehensive immigration reform. Good for the migrants, good for the citizens, good for taxpayers, and good for the country. Let’s all let the President hear from us–we CARE and we VOTE!
According to a report released by the Applied Research Center, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 46,000 parents of U.S. citizen children in the first six months of 2011–1 in 4 of all deportation cases. Already an estimated 5,100 children who are currently living in foster care have detained or deported parents. Nearly 15,000 more children are expected in the next five years. The researchers found that programs such as Secure Communities, which allows federal authorities to screen fingerprints of those arrested by local police in order to detect undocumented immigrants, greatly contributed to this trend.
The number of cases has flooded the child welfare system, all at the expense of the U.S. tax payer. The U.S. spends an average of $40,000 per child for foster care. Child protective services claim they cannot place children of detained or deported parents with undocumented family members because they “could be deported at any time.”
Child protective services are legally required to reunify children with able parents, but immigrant children face enormous barriers. Parents who are detained have great difficulties in communicating with the services, and may actually give up their parental rights without realizing it. Sometimes the children are put up for adoption even before the parent’s rights are terminated.
The report urges federal, state and local governments to implement policies that protect children. For more information on this sad and serious issue, see Shattered Families, The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System, November 2011.
CoFiA, along with Grupo Ella Tu, sponsored a screening of Juan Pablo Morales Estrada’s moving documentary “Why I Am Here” on June 10 at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, NJ. The event was a great success and saw quite an emotional response from the audience who attended. The documentary, which focuses on the life of Elias Garcia now and during the war in Guatemala in the 1980s, was very well received and was lauded as an exemplary film presented by first-time director Morales Estrada. A bilingual Q & A session with the director and with Mr. Garcia followed. A moving performance by the Grupo Folklórico Tikál of a traditional Guatemalan folk dance, which included narration of the story of the dance in Spanish, also followed the screening. DVDs of “Why I Am Here” are on sale for $15 on the CoFiA website at the following link: Video now available for purchase.
A partial recording of the Guatemalan folk dance can be viewed on YouTube through the following link: Performance by el Grupo Folklórico Tikál
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:
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.
THE UNITED FRUIT COMPANY by Pablo Neruda. Translated by Ben Belitt
Pablo Neruda was a well-known Chilean poet and diplomat. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971. He died in 1973.
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.
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.
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.