SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
April, 28 2014, 03:58pm EDT
Monday April, 28 2014, 03:58pm EDT
Contact:
Rachel Tardiff, 202.746.1507, Rachel@FitzGibbonMedia.com
Protesters Arrested at White House Over Deportations
Groups Double Down on President Obama to End Immigrant Suffering; 1,100 People Protesting Outside White House Today
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON - Pressure on President Obama over deportations is increasing as 12 people were arrested outside the White House today in an act of civil disobedience for family unity -- broad administrative relief for all 11 million undocumented immigrants, and an end to the record deportations occurring under President Obama's Administration. More than 1,100 people from the racial and economic justice group National People's Action (NPA) and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) came together for the event alongside White House Hunger Strikers from Georgia with one clear message: #not1more.
Speakers at the event the event included people whose families had been torn apart by deportations, as well as those currently facing deportation proceedings.
"I am the mother of six children, two of whom are U.S. citizens. My four older children and I have a deportation order and have been told we need to leave the country on June 25th. If that happens, I'll be separated from my two younger children. We have already suffered through family separation when I had to leave my country for economic reasons," said Ana Canenguez, an NDWA member from Tremonton, Utah. "I am here to fight for my own family and for millions of others. I ask President Obama to do everything in his power to prevent this tragedy and millions more."
Participants at the event struck 1,100 drumbeats to signify the 1,100 people who are deported every day. With so many families at risk, they underlined the urgent need for President Obama to take immediate action.
Rally goers held signs reading "Keep Families Together," and chanted passionately as the others risked arrest in an act of civil disobedience.
Carolina Hernandez, an 18 year old NPA member with Sunflower Community Action in Kansas, testified to the culture of fear that is created by our broken immigration system. When she was only 12 years old, she witnessed the deportation of 11 family friends, which resulted in the separation of four families.
"From that day on," Hernandez testified, "I knew that at any moment my family could be separated. I am risking arrest for my parents, for my family, for my neighbors and for my community because enough is enough!"
"There are 11 million families suffering, our nation is suffering," said Andrea Christina Mercado, Campaign Director at National People's Action. "The time for President Obama to stop tearing families apart is now."
** Photos Available by 1 pm here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalpeoplesaction/**
People's Action builds the power of poor and working people, in rural, suburban, and urban areas to win change through issue campaigns and elections.
LATEST NEWS
Israeli Troops Blow Whistle on War Crimes in Gaza 'Kill Zone'
One IDF officer said that not only are Israeli troops killing military-age males, "we're killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We're destroying their houses and pissing on their graves."
Apr 07, 2025
An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza's border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a "kill zone."
The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel—which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls—decided on a policy of "widespread, deliberate destruction" in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.
"To create this area, Israel launched a major miltary engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip... an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza's agricultural land," the report states. "The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel's internationally recognized borders."
"The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence," the publication continues. "This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished."
"Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions," the report adds. "Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety."
"The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions," the paper says. "Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting."
"Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland."
Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone's limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that "enough people died or got injured" crossing the unmarked boundary.
Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel's blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the "kill zone" to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area's farmland was razed.
"The IDF really is fulfilling the public's wishes, which state: 'There are no innocents in Gaza. We'll show them,'" one reserve warrant officer explained. "People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but... boom," tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.
In a separate interview with The Guardian, that same officer said that at first, his attitude toward invading Gaza was, "I went there because they killed us and now we're going to kill them."
"And I found out that we're not only killing them—we're killing them, we're killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs," they added. "We're destroying their houses and pissing on their graves."
Another IDF reservist officer told BTS that he was briefed that "there is no civilian population" in the area, where Palestinians are "terrorists, all of them." Asked what the area looked like after the IDF clearing operation, the officer replied: "Hiroshima."
A captain in an armored division of the IDF reserves said "the borderline is a kill zone" where "there are no clear rules of engagement" or "proper combat procedure."
"Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death," the captain added.
The BTS report follows an investigation published last December by Haaretz, Israel's oldest newspaper, in which IDF soldiers and veterans described a "kill zone" in the Netzarim corridor in the heart of Gaza, where troops were ordered to shoot "anyone who enters."
"The forces in the field call it 'the line of dead bodies,'" one commander said. "After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that's where you must not go."
The new report comes as Israeli forces are carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being forcibly expelled from areas of Gaza including the south and an expanded border perimeter. The Associated Pressreported Monday that Israel "now controls more than 50% of the territory and is squeezing Palestinians into shrinking wedges of land."
Israeli troops are moving to seize large tracts of the Gaza Strip for a so-called "security zone" and Jewish recolonization. Members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government have said the campaign is being coordinated with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who in February said that the United States would "take over" Gaza, remove all of its Palestinians, and transform the Mediterranean enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East."
On Monday, Netanyahu arrived in Washington, D.C. from Hungary for talks with Trump and other U.S. officials regarding topics including a Gaza cease-fire, release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas, Iran policy, and tariffs. Netanyahu is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for him and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including extermination and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its conduct in a war that has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in Gaza and almost all of the strip's more than 2 million people forcibly displaced—often multiple times.
Israel's bombing and invasion of Gaza continued on Monday. An early morning IDF strike on a tent where numerous journalists were sleeping outside Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis killed Palestine Today reporter Hilmi al-Faqaawi and another man, who were burned alive as helpless witnesses were unable to douse the flames or rescue victims.
Nine others were reportedly wounded in the attack, which the IDF said targeted a Hamas member posing as a journalist. More than 230 journalists have been
killed by Israeli bombs and bullets since October 2023.
Chief Justice Blocks Court Order Requiring Return of Man Sent to El Salvador Prison
"Justices regularly issue administrative stays so the full court can mull a request," one legal expert noted. "It is surely upsetting for Abrego Garcia, though."
Apr 07, 2025
Just hours before a midnight deadline, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday blocked District Judge Paula Xinis' order directing the Trump administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador, to the United States.
Roberts—who is part of the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority but has publicly criticized President Donald Trump's attacks on the federal judiciary and sometimes sided with the liberal justices against the administration—did not explain his decision to grant an administrative stay, which temporarily pauses Xinis' order until the high court makes another decision.
"I would not reach too much into Roberts' action," saidSlate's Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the court. "Justices regularly issue administrative stays so the full court can mull a request. Remember that Roberts also stayed Judge [Amir Ali's] order on foreign aid before the full court ultimately denied a stay. It is surely upsetting for Abrego Garcia, though."
Roberts ordered Abrego Garcia's attorneys to respond by 5:00 pm ET Tuesday. "BUT: Abrego Garcia's lawyers have—at roughly the same time, although Roberts' order appears first on the docket—already filed their response," notedLaw Dork's Chris Geidner.
"In short, the question is now back to the court," Geidner explained. "No reply is required in shadow docket requests, although it is often submitted. The court does not need to wait for a reply, so any reply should be submitted as quickly as a party thinks the court would need it/might act."
As Abrego Garcia's lawyers wrote to the high court:
The government knew about the court order prohibiting Abrego Garcia's removal to El Salvador, and admits that removing him in violation of that order was an "administrative error"... Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime, in any country. He is not wanted by the government of El Salvador. He sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.
The government "can—and does—return wrongfully removed migrants as a matter of course"... The district court's order instructing the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return is routine... It does not implicate foreign policy or even domestic immigration policy in any case. The United States has never claimed that it is powerless to correct its error and before today, it did not contend that doing so would cause it any harm. That is because the only one harmed by the current state of affairs is Abrego Garcia.
The Trump administration had asked the Supreme Court to intervene earlier Monday, after Maryland-based Xinis doubled down on an order issued Friday and a panel from the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit declined to grant a stay.
One of the appellate judges wrote: "The United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The government's contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable."
Before the Trump administration sent Abrego Garcia to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in his native El Salvador, he lived in Maryland with his wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen; their autistic, nonverbal 5-year-old child; and two children from Vasquez Sura's previous relationship.
As CNNreported Monday, before Roberts' decision, Vasquez Sura had welcomed the appeals decision and renewed her call for Trump and Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, to bring her husband home.
“This decision gives me hope, and even more encouragement to keep fighting. My children, family, and I will continue praying and seeking justice. Now that the court has spoken, I ask again that both President Trump and President Bukele stop attempting any further delays," she said. "They need to follow the court's order NOW. My children are waiting to be reunited with their father tonight."
Congressional Democrats—including Reps. Joaquin Castro (Texas) and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) on Monday—have also pressured the administration to return Abrego Garcia to his family. Castro also shared a warning from Joyce White Vance, a University of Alabama law professor and legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, that "if it can happen to Abrego Garcia, it can happen to any of us."
As Common Dreamsreported, Trump on Sunday expressed a desire to accept Bukele's offer to take prisoners who are U.S. citizens. "I love that," he said. "If we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I would be honored to give them."
Citing 'Considerable Red Flags,' Oversight Dems Probe White House Use of Musk's Starlink
Elon Musk's "dual position as the recipient of federal contracts and a White House adviser creates a troubling and obvious conflict of interest," wrote two Democratic members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee.
Apr 07, 2025
Two Democrats on the U.S. House Oversight Committee are seeking more information about the federal government's use of billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by his company SpaceX, specifically at the White House complex and at the U.S. General Services Administration.
Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the committee, and Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) are looking for proof that new usage of Starlink technologies is "secure and will not enrich Mr. Musk in violation of federal ethics rules," according to a letter they sent Monday to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Director of Office Administration Joshua Fisher, and Acting Administrator at GSA Stephen Ehikian.
The letter references March reporting from The New York Times, which stated that Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, after Starlink "donated" the service. NBC News reported last month that GSA had adopted Starlink for its internet access at the request of Musk's staff, citing an unnamed source. Musk is also an adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.
"Donations such as this raise considerable red flags as to whether Mr. Musk is using his position in the federal government to benefit his companies," wrote the two Democrats.
A journalist at ProPublica observed this reported donation of Starlink resembles a tactic used by another company, Microsoft, during the Biden administration: offering free trials to get government locked in to using their technology.
"It doesn't matter if it was Microsoft last year or Starlink today or another company tomorrow," Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School, toldProPublica. "Anytime you're doing this, it's a back door around the competition processes that ensure we have the best goods and services from the best vendors."
In their letter, the two Democrats also highlighted that Musk's dual role as head of Starlink and "apparent leader" of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency—which reporting indicates could soon come to a close—"raises significant ethical, security, and regulatory implications that warrant immediate attention."
What's more, his "dual position as the recipient of federal contracts and a White House adviser creates a troubling and obvious conflict of interest, raising the risk of undue influence and potential misuse of federal contracts for personal or corporate gain."
This is far from the first time that concerns around potential conflicts of interests regarding Musk's businesses and his role in the federal government have been raised.
Last month, a group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and acting Inspector General at the Transportation Department Mitch Behm demanding an investigation into whether Musk's activities at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have violated the criminal conflict of interest statute, citing reporting that Musk's Starlink is involved in upgrading a crucial communication system at the FAA.
In their letter, Connolly and Brown said they are also concerned that the recent installation of Starlink at the White House raises potential cybersecurity and national security concerns.
The pair requested a list of information and documents from the White House and GSA, including all documents and communications relating to the legal or ethical implications of the White House and GSA using Starlink given Musk's role in the federal government, as well as documents and communications regarding any security assessments related to the use of Starlink.
Most Popular
We cover the issues the corporate media never will.
Please support our journalism.