May, 15 2020, 12:00am EDT
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Immigrant Rights Groups Call on Governors, Health Officials to Release People in Immigration Detention
WASHINGTON
Nearly two dozen human rights, immigrant rights, and civil rights advocates and service providers are coming together to seek the release of immigrants and asylum-seekers in detention.
In the face of continued refusal by federal authorities to use discretion to release people from immigration detention, the groups will leverage the influence of their grassroots supporters to petition the governors of California, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington to take action to urge Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release immigrants and asylum-seekers in detention. Releasing people in immigration detention will not only protect them but also facility staff and the communities where detention centers are located in their states, the groups said.
"As the government official responsible for the health and safety of your state's residents, I urge you to take all possible actions to press ICE to release immigrants and asylum-seekers detained in your state without delay and that all appropriate steps are taken to protect them, facility staff, and the broader public from the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in ICE detention facilities," read the petition sent to Governors Gavin Newsom, Phil Murphy, Tom Wolf, John Bel Edwards, Greg Abbott and Jay Inslee.
Today's action represents stepped-up pressure from human rights, immigrant rights, and civil rights advocates and service providers to urge governors and state-level health officials to act. In early March, some of these same groups urged state and local governments to release those held in ICE custody. But ICE continues to detain vulnerable individuals in conditions ripe for the spread of disease, even in detention centers where staff and/or other detainees have already tested positive for COVID-19.
The groups are:
- ALDEA - The People's Justice Center (PA)
- Amnesty International USA (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) (CA)
- Centro Legal de la Raza (CA)
- Families Belong Together (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- Human Rights First (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- Human Rights Watch (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- Immigrant Defense Advocates (CA)
- Immigration Justice Campaign, an initiative of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council (NJ)
- Innovation Law Lab (CA LA TX)
- ISLA Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (LA)
- The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (CA)
- National Immigrant Justice Center (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- Never Again Action (CA, WA, NJ, PA)
- Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (WA)
- OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- Oxfam America (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX)
- Physicians for Human Rights (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
- RAICES (TX)
- SPLC Action Fund (LA)
- Women's Refugee Commission (CA, WA, NJ, PA, TX, LA)
Public health experts predict that - unless ICE drastically reduces the numbers of detained immigrants in its care - once there are five or more cases in a facility between 72 percent and 100 percent of detainees in that facility could contract COVID-19 within a 90-day period. Continued detention endangers detainees and could overwhelm hospital capacity, impacting the health of the local communities where detention centers are located. Already one immigrant in detention has died of COVID-19 at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in California.
In a joint statement, the groups are asking these governors to take action and stand up to ICE in a collective action:
"ICE has a well-documented history of medical abuse and neglect. Since the onset of the pandemic, ICE facilities have failed to provide detainees with sufficient soap and sanitizer, neglected to facilitate physical distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within crowded facilities, and continued to transfer detainees between facilities at grave risk to their health. Even before COVID-19, the needless, arbitrary detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers in inadequate conditions with negligent medical care violated human rights and caused untold human suffering.
"We are coming together to amplify pressure on ICE to act. As states address the public health and humanitarian challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are urging governors to use their public health authority to press ICE and federal immigration detention facilities and county and local jails and prisons to immediately and substantially reduce occupancy in facilities detaining immigrants and asylum-seekers. We hope that they will hear us and act swiftly to save lives."
To learn more about this effort visit: https://rightsnow.amnestyusa.org/free-people-from-ice-detention/
This release is available at: https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/governors-release-people-in-immigration-detention/
People can donate to Amnesty International USA's COVID-19 advocacy work at: https://donate.amnestyusa.org/page/57034/donate
Media Contacts:
Amnesty International USA: Mariya Parodi, media@aiusa.org; (212) 633-4211
HRF: Meredith MacKenzie, hrf@westendstrategy.com, (202) 412 -4270
HRW: Grace Sung Ehn Meng, mengg@hrw.org, (646) 363-6495
Oxfam America: Alyssa Eisenstein, alyssa.eisenstein@oxfam.org, (202) 560-2652
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: Rafael Medina, medina@civilrights.org (202) 869-0390
Centro Legal de la Raza: Lisa Knox, lknox@centrolegal.org, (415) 684-4783
Women's Refugee Commission: Joanna Kuebler, joannak@wrcommission.org, (646) 255-5586
Never Again Action: neveragainactionpress@gmail.com
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project: Raul Alvarez, raul@nwirp.org
RAICES: Lucia Allain, lucia.allain@raicestexas.org, (646) 488-5919
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.
(212) 807-8400LATEST NEWS
Critics Warn Manchin-Barrasso Permitting Bill 'Is Taken Straight From Project 2025'
"You thought Project 2025 was just a threat after the election? It's actually happening *right now,*" said one climate campaigner.
Jul 26, 2024
Climate and environmental defenders on this week implored U.S. senators to block a permitting reform bill introduced this week by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that one campaigner linked to Project 2025, a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
Common Dreamsreported Monday that Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Barrasso (R-Wyo.)—respectively the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that although the proposal "includes several positive reforms for the accelerated development of transmission projects," it also advocates "limiting opportunities for communities to challenge projects, loosening oversight for drilling and mining projects, extending drilling permits and fast-tracking [liquified natural gas] permits, and several other provisions friendly to fossil fuel giants."
"This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
These are nearly identical policies to what's proposed in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. The plan, which was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, calls for "unleashing all of America's energy resources," including by ending federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands; limiting investments in renewable energy; and rolling back environmental permitting restrictions for new oil, gas, and coal projects, including power plants.
While Manchin has been trying—and failing—to pass fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform legislation for years, Brett Hartl, director of public affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that his "Frankenstein legislation is taken straight from Project 2025, and it's the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry."
Hartl said the bill "deprives communities of the power to defend themselves and gives that power to Big Oil by making it harder for communities to challenge polluting projects in court," and "prioritizes the profits of coal barons over public health."
"And it mandates oil and gas extraction in our oceans," he continued. "The insignificant crumbs thrown at renewable energy do nothing to address the climate emergency."
"Monday was the hottest day in recorded history," Hartl noted. "It's shocking that as the climate emergency continues to break records around us, the Senate continues to fast-track the fossil fuel expansion that is killing us. This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
Hartl added that "to preserve a livable planet," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "must squash this legislation now."
Manchin—who has said this will be his last term in office—has been a steadfast supporter of the fossil fuel industry, partly because his family owns a coal company. The senator says his permitting reform bill "will advance American energy once again to bring down prices, create domestic jobs, and allow us to continue in our role as a global energy leader."
However, Allie Rosenbluth, Oil Change International's U.S. manager, warned Thursday that "this bill is yet another dangerous attempt by Sen. Manchin to line the pockets of his fossil fuel donors, sacrificing communities and our climate along the way."
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else," she continued. "It would unleash more drilling on federal lands and waters, unnecessarily rush the review of proposed oil and gas export projects, and lift the Biden administration's pause on new LNG exports."
"We urge Congress to reject this proposal and commit to action that protects frontline communities from the impacts of fossil fuel development and the climate crisis," Rosenbluth added.
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else."
NRDC managing director of government affairs Alexandra Adams said Wednesday that "this bill is a giveaway for the oil and gas industry that will ramp up drilling and environmental destruction at a time when we need to be putting a hard stop to fossil fuels."
"We cannot afford to roll back so many of our bedrock environmental and community legal protections and offer a blank check to the oil and gas industry," she stressed. "We need new solutions for permitting if we are going to meet our clean energy potential and address the climate challenge. But this is not it."
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Both parties in Sudan's civil war are to blame for a looming mass famine, experts say, and the military's blocking of U.N. aid at a border crossing with Chad exacerbates the problem.
Jul 26, 2024
Sudan's military is blocking United Nations aid trucks from entering at a key border crossing, causing severe disruptions in aid in a country that experts fear may be on the brink of one of the worst famines the world has seen in decades, The New York Timesreported Friday.
The border city of Adré in eastern Chad is the main international crossing into the Darfur region of Sudan, but the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the state's official military, which is engaged in a civil war with a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has refused to issue permits for U.N. trucks to enter there, as it's an RSF-controlled area.
U.S. and international officials have issued increasingly alarmed calls for steady aid access to help feed the millions of severely malnourished people in Darfur and other areas of Sudan.
Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., said that the SAF's obstruction of the border was "completely unacceptable."
Both warring parties in Sudan continue to perpetrate brazen atrocities, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. This piece focuses on the SAF's ongoing obstruction of essential aid. The situation is catastrophic. The policy is criminal. https://t.co/FKhqQh3EI9.
— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum) July 26, 2024
The Sudanese who've made it out of the country and into Adré reported dire and unsafe conditions in their home country.
"We had nothing to eat," Bahja Muhakar, a Sudenese mother of three, told the Times after she crossed into Chad, following a harrowing six-day journey from Al-Fashir, a major city in Darfur. She said the family often had to live off of one shared pancake per day.
Another mother, Dahabaya Ibet, said that her 20-month-old boy had to bear witness to his grandfather being shot and killed in front of his eyes when the family home in Darfur was attacked by gunmen late last year.
Now the mothers and their families are refugees in Adré, where 200,000 Sudanese are living in an overcrowded, under-resourced transit camp.
In addition to those that have made it out of the country, there are 11 million people internally displaced within Sudan, most of whom have become displaced since the civil war began in April 2023.
An unnamed senior American official told the Times that the looming famine in Sudan could be as bad as the 2011 famine in Somalia or even the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
In April, Reutersreported that people in Sudan were eating soil and leaves to survive, and The Washington Postcalled it a nation in "chaos," reporting that World Food Program trucks had been "blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted, and detained."
In late June, a coalition of U.N. agencies, aid groups, and governments warned that 755,000 people in Sudan faced famine in the coming months.
The U.S. last week announced $203 million in additional aid to Sudan—part of a $2.1 billion pledge that world leaders made in April, which some countries have not yet delivered on.
Some officials including Thomas-Greenfield, who has dubbed the situation in Sudan "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," have called for the U.N. Security Council to allow aid delivery into the country even in the absence of SAF approval; it's believed that Russia would veto such a measure.
Sudan's civil war has seen a great deal of international interference. Amnesty International on Thursday published an investigatory briefing showing that weapons from Russia, China, Serbia, Turkey, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been identified in the country. And The Guardian on Friday reported that the passports of Emirati citizens had been found among wreckage in Sudan, indicating the UAE may have troops or intelligence officers on the ground, though the UAE denied the accusation.
The International Service for Human Rights on Friday warned that both the SAF and RSF were engaged in wrongful killings and arrests, especially targeted at lawyers, doctors, and activists. The group called for an immediate cease-fire.
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Vance "meant no disrespect to cats, but he did mean to demean women and still holds the view in 2024 that they should be punished for not having children."
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After days of condemnation from critics including actress Jennifer Aniston and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Sen. JD Vance was given the opportunity on Thursday to clarify his remarks from 2021 in which he said the Democratic Party was run by "childless cat ladies."
Instead, the Ohio Republican and running mate of former President Donald Trump assured SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly on "The Megyn Kelly Show" that while he has "nothing against cats," he meant what he said in terms of "the substance" of his argument.
Vance made it clear, said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), "that he meant no disrespect to cats, but he did mean to demean women and still holds the view in 2024 that they should be punished for not having children."
The comments in question were made by Vance to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was running for the Senate.
Calling out Buttigieg—who, the secretary disclosed this week, was struggling at the time to adopt a child with his husband—and Vice President Kamala Harris, a stepmother of two and the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee, Vance said people without biological children "don't really have a direct stake in" the future of the country and therefore shouldn't hold higher office.
In separate remarks that same year, Vance said parents should "have more power" at the voting booth and that "if you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice."
He also specifically categorized people who don't have children as "bad" in an interview in 2021, saying the government should "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad," with people taxed at a lower rate if they have children.
While a spokesperson for Vance told ABC News that the senator's taxation proposal was "basically no different" than the child tax credit supported by the Democratic Party, Democrats who have pushed for the credit have heralded its proven ability to slash child poverty rates and help families afford groceries, childcare, and other essentials, rather than viewing the tax savings as a way to reward people for procreating.
In his interview with Kelly on Thursday, Vance attempted to pivot away from his own comments, saying his point was to criticize "the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child" and claiming without evidence that the Harris campaign had "come out against the child tax credit"—a signature policy of the Biden-Harris administration.
"I'm proud to stand for parents and I hope that parents out there recognize that I'm a guy who wants to fight for you," said Vance. "The Democrats, in the past five, 10 years, Megyn, they have become anti-family. It's built into their policy, it's built into the way they talk about parents and children. I don't think we should back down from it, I think we should be honest about the problem."
Vance and Kelly went on to lament the anxiety "hardcore environmentalists" and progressive lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have expressed about the damage fossil fuel extraction is doing the planet, accusing them of pushing people to forgo having families—but said nothing about Republican policies that have made child-rearing less accessible.
In recent years, the entire Republican caucus in Congress was joined by conservative then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia in blocking the extension of the enhanced child tax credit, which had been credited with cutting the national child poverty rate in half. Republicans also allowed a pandemic-era universal school meal program to expire, while several Democratic-led states have passed state-level programs to ensure all children can have meals at school, regardless of their family's income.
Under Republican abortion bans, numerous stories have cropped up of pregnant people who have been forced to carry pregnancies to term despite finding out that their fetuses had fatal abnormalities and would die soon after birth—as have stories of children who were forced to give birth or had to cross state lines in order to get abortion care.
As with his position that nonparents should be "punished" for not having children, "who else does 'pro-child/family' Vance think should 'face consequences and reality' by way of curtailing choices, rights, and freedoms?" asked writer Alheli Picazo. "Women and girls who become pregnant through rape/incest."
University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick said that one could test "empirically" Vance's claim that Democratic policies are anti-family.
"But I haven't heard the GOP talk much about things that would help my family and my kids," she said, "like reducing childcare and tuition costs."
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