September, 12 2019, 12:00am EDT
Trump Administration's Asylum Ban Could be a Death Sentence for People Seeking Safety
Today, Amnesty International condemned the Supreme Court's decision allowing the Trump administration's asylum ban to temporarily proceed. Charanya Krishnaswami, the Advocacy Director for the Americas at Amnesty International USA, stated:
"The asylum ban the Supreme Court has upheld could be a death sentence for people in search of safety and protection. The asylum ban is grounded in an ideology of hatred and xenophobia, and it cannot stand.
WASHINGTON
Today, Amnesty International condemned the Supreme Court's decision allowing the Trump administration's asylum ban to temporarily proceed. Charanya Krishnaswami, the Advocacy Director for the Americas at Amnesty International USA, stated:
"The asylum ban the Supreme Court has upheld could be a death sentence for people in search of safety and protection. The asylum ban is grounded in an ideology of hatred and xenophobia, and it cannot stand.
"Every person has the right to seek safety: this is a moment that will prove itself infamous, when the country turned its back on those it used to welcome and chose to ignore people's humanity."
Next week, Amnesty International will travel to South Texas to seek access to the secretive port courts that have been built for assembly-line proceedings for asylum-seekers subject to the Trump administration's Remain in Mexico policy, under which the U.S. government forces people to stay in Mexico while they ask for asylum in the United States.
Background and context:
Amnesty International has documented the dangers that people seeking asylum face, not just in their countries of origin, but also on their journeys to safety. We have previously found that LGBTI-identifying asylum-seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras face tremendous risks of sexual assault, violence, and harm on their journey north. The ban could mean that LGBTI-identifying people would be forced to seek protection in places where they are at grave risk of harm.
Amnesty International has also found that Mexico's asylum system is ill-equipped to respond to the number of people who could be forced to seek protection there. Amnesty International's investigation found that far from providing asylum-seekers safety, the Mexican government instead routinely detains them and deports them into harm's way. Recent actions by the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, including the deployment of National Guard troops throughout the country to crack down on asylum-seekers, have made the situation even more dangerous for asylum-seekers. According to official numbers, Mexico's deportation numbers increased from from 53,747 January to June 2018 to 71,376 in the same period in 2019.
Under the "Remain in Mexico" program, Amnesty International has found that asylum-seekers who are forced to wait in Mexico are subject to grave harm, including kidnapping, assault, and extortion by the very authorities who are supposed to protect them.
This release is available online at: https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/trump-administrations-asylum-ban-could-be-a-death-sentence-for-people-seeking-safety/
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Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
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UN Chief Warns of Israel's Syria Invasion and Land Seizures
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stressed the "urgent need" for Israel to "de-escalate violence on all fronts."
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday that he is "deeply concerned" by Israel's "recent and extensive violations of Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity," including a ground invasion and airstrikes carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in the war-torn Mideastern nation.
Guterres "is particularly concerned over the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes on several locations in Syria" and has stressed the "urgent need to de-escalate violence on all fronts throughout the country," said U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.
Israel claims its invasion and bombardment of Syria—which come as the United States and Turkey have also violated Syrian sovereignty with air and ground attacks—are meant to create a security buffer along the countries' shared border in the wake of last week's fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and amid the IDF's ongoing assault on Gaza, which has killed or wounded more than 162,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
While Israel argues that its invasion of Syria does not violate a 1974 armistice agreement between the two countries because the Assad dynasty no longer rules the neighboring nation, Dujarric said Guterres maintains that Israel must uphold its obligations under the deal, "including by ending all unauthorized presence in the area of separation and refraining from any action that would undermine the cease-fire and stability in Golan."
Israel conquered the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights in 1967 and has illegally occupied it ever since, annexing the seized lands in 1981.
Other countries including France, Russia, and Saudi Arabia have criticized Israel's invasion, while the United States defended the move.
"The Syrian army abandoned its positions in the area... which potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations," U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press briefing earlier this week. "Israel has said that these actions are temporary to defend its borders. These are not permanent actions... We support all sides upholding the 1974 disengagement agreement."
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Addressing the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and conversations it has sparked about the country's for-profit system, longtime Medicare for All advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday condemned the murder and stressed that getting to universal coverage will require a movement challenging corporate money in politics.
"Look, when we talk about the healthcare crisis, in my view, and I think the view of a majority of Americans, the current system is broken, it is dysfunctional, it is cruel, and it is wildly inefficient—far too expensive," said Sanders (I-Vt.), whose position is backed up by various polls.
"The reason we have not joined virtually every other major country on Earth in guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right is the political power and financial power of the insurance industry and drug companies," he told Jacobin. "It will take a political revolution in this country to get Congress to say, 'You know what, we're here to represent ordinary people, to provide quality care to ordinary people as a human right,' and not to worry about the profits of insurance and drug companies."
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"Killing people is not the way we're going to reform our healthcare system," Sanders added. "The way we're going to reform our healthcare system is having people come together and understanding that it is the right of every American to be able to walk into a doctor's office when they need to and not have to take out their wallet."
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The 83-year-old Vermonter, who was just reelected to what he says is likely his last six-year term, is an Independent but caucuses with Democrats and sought their presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. He has urged the Democratic Party to recognize why some working-class voters have abandoned it since Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress last month. A refusal to take on insurance and drug companies and overhaul the healthcare system, he argues, is one reason.
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In addition to highlighting Sanders' interview on social media, Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed out to Business Insider on Wednesday that "you've got thousands of people that are sharing their stories of frustration" in the wake of Thompson's death.
Khanna—a co-sponsor of the Medicare for All Act, led in the House of Representatives by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—made the case that you can recognize those stories without accepting the assassination.
"You condemn the murder of an insurance executive who was a father of two kids," he said. "At the same time, you say there's obviously an outpouring behavior of people whose claims are being denied, and we need to reform the system."
Two other Medicare for All advocates, Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), also made clear to Business Insider that they oppose Thompson's murder but understand some of the responses to it.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—a co-sponsor of Sanders' Medicare for All Act—similarly toldHuffPost in a Tuesday interview, "The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system."
"Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far," she continued. "This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the healthcare to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone."
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Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) 2024 roundup, which was published Thursday, found that at least 54 journalists were killed on the job or in connection with their work this year, and 18 of them were killed by Israeli armed forces (16 in Palestine, and two in Lebanon).
The organization has also filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court "for war crimes committed by the Israeli army against journalists," according to the roundup, which includes stats from January 1 through December 1.
"In Gaza, the scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible," wrote Thibaut Bruttin, director general of RSF, in the introduction to the report. Since October 2023, 145 journalists have been killed in Gaza, "including at least 35 who were very likely targeted or killed while working."
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When counting the number of journalists killed by the Israeli army since October 2023 in both Gaza and Lebanon, the tally comes to 155—"an unprecedented massacre," according to the roundup.
Multiple journalists were also killed in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Sudan, Myanmar, Colombia, and Ukraine, according to the report, and hundreds more were detained and are now behind bars in countries including Israel, China, and Russia.
Meanwhile, in a statement released Thursday, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) announced that at least 139 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza began in 2023, and in a statement released Wednesday, IFJ announced that 104 journalists had perished worldwide this year (which includes deaths from January 1 through December 10). IFJ's number for all of 2024 appears to be higher than RSF because RSF is only counting deaths that occurred "on the job or in connection with their work."
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