Mexican AG's office apologizes to parents for 12-year-old migrant's death

EFE: The Mexican Attorney General’s Office publicly apologized to an Ecuadorian couple for the March 2014 death of their 12-year-old daughter at a children’s shelter in the northern state of Chihuahua.

The deputy attorney general for human rights, crime prevention and community services, Eber Omar Betanzos Torres, “addressed some words to the parents,” who live in the United States, at the Consulate General of Ecuador in New York, the AG’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

Undocumented Cannot Count on Obama's Migration Initiative (La Jornada, Mexico)

WorldMeetsUS: President of the United States Barack Obama yesterday announced the adoption of a regularization plan to grant five to eleven million undocumented migrants living in the country legal status for the next two years. To take advantage of the change in requirements one must demonstrate having been in the United States for five years, the existence of children or dependent permanent residents in the U.S., with potential beneficiaries subject to a criminal background check. In the short term, the measure could halt the deportations of about 4 million people. Read more.

Housing migrant kids splits small Michigan town

Detroit News: When people opposed to housing young Central American immigrants here claimed the youths worked for drug cartels, Adam Barden was frustrated.

When the opponents attended demonstrations armed with semi-automatic rifles, he was perplexed.

And when they threatened to boycott his hardware store for not agreeing with them, he got angry.

“They’re doing damage to our community,” said Barden, 38, owner of True Value. “It really ticks you off.” Read More. 

Will Syria Crisis Stifle Immigration Reform?

Frontera NorteSur
Immigration News
September 7, 2013

As the political crisis and debate intensify over Syria, immigrant advocates fear the issue of possible U.S. military action will delay comprehensive immigration reform in Washington.

At a Labor Day march this past week, Eric Garcetti, the new mayor of Los Angeles, said Syria could become a “distraction” for immigration reform. The leader of the nation’s second largest city contended that action on immigration legislation should be the top national priority at the moment.

On Capitol Hill, the looming vote on President Obama’s push for U.S. military action could make Republicans in particular even more skittish about tackling the controversial issue of immigration reform, according to a Republican political consultant.

“(Syria) is going to be a difficult vote, and I really doubt that they would want to take two difficult votes, especially if the second one is about immigration,” said consultant David Johnson. Although a comprehensive immigration reform bill passed the Senate earlier this year, corresponding action failed to gain traction in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

If a legislative delay on immigration reform emerges as one effect of the Syria crisis, it will be the third time in a dozen years that pending action was put on the political back-burner. In 2001, a movement in such a direction by U.S. President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox was derailed by the 9-11 attacks. Eight years later, as the Great Recession deepened, campaign promises of immigration reform by newly-elected President Barack Obama  took a back seat to health insurance reform and other issues.

Besides Syria, the politically thorny matter of the debt ceiling could complicate prospects for an immigration overhaul in the weeks and months ahead. Beltway talk is growing of a postponement of immigration reform until 2015 or even 2017, well after the next congressional and presidential elections.

Despite the sudden appearance of a new round of adverse political circumstances, immigrant rights activists in California, New Mexico and elsewhere are stepping up their mobilizations for a national legislative reform.

Building on an intense summer of activities at both the national and grassroots levels, immigrant advocacy and labor organizations have announced plans for demonstrationsOctober 5 in at least 60 U.S. cities.
Dubbed the “National Day of Dignity and Respect,” the protests are being organized to demand the passage of comprehensive immigration reform,  a halt to deportations, and an end to the militarization of the border with Mexico. Activists then plan to congregate for a mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. on October 8.

“We are not going to do this like in other years, and say, well, other things take priority,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera,  spokesman for the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights Coalition. “No, this time a lot has been given to bleeding, marching and voting, to not allow (immigration reform) happen.”

Sources: Noticiero Latino, September 6, 2013. Story  by Jose Lopez Zambrano. Nortedigital.com/El Universal, September 6, 2013. La Opinion, September 5, 2013. Article by Pilar Marrero.  Univision, September 2, 2013.


Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Near the Border, a Few Deputies Are Outnumbered by Drugs and Bodies

“It’s hard,” he said. “I stop these guys and they pull out their wallets. I see the pictures of their kids and I think about my own kids. I realize I’d probably do the exact same thing if the situation was reversed.” Deputy Brad Gill, Ajo, AZ

I find that consistently local law enforcement officers, forced by recent laws to treat immigrants as criminals, are far less convinced of their task and far more compassionate than lawmakers in Washington or the state capital. As the "border security" hype heats up in the context of immigration reform, legislators should pay more attention to our own "boots on the ground" and less to the defense lobbies that roam the halls with stuffed pockets, selling the tragically false equation of immigration=national security threat. 

We'll be putting out a series on recent reports on immigration in Arizona and Texas on www.cipamericas.org this week. They document the high death rate and massive human rights violations that should shame a nation committed to justice. They also reinforce the deputy's view here that the multibillion-dollar plan of building a total wall is useless and a gigantic waste of tax dollars.

NYT. June 11, 2013 AJO, Ariz. — On a recent morning, Lt. Bill Clements, commander of a remote sheriff’s department substation here, sent his deputies into the sun-blasted Sonoran Desert to recover a body — the fifth in five days. Hours later, back at the station, a deputy unzipped a white body bag, revealing the corpse of a man who had died making the brutal crossing from Mexico, his lips shrunken, either with dehydration or from being partly eaten by wild animals, the deputies said.

Pima County sheriffs moved the body of a person who had apparently died crossing the border.

Out here, life expires suddenly and without dignity. The Ajo district station recovered 18 bodies last year. As of late May, the station had recovered eight, and the summer sun was still a few weeks away.

Read More...

Illegal Immigration: Cruelty, Xenophobia and U.S. Business (La Jornada, Mexico)

"The criminalization of undocumented migration in the United States and the violations of human rights that accompany it, is a strategy that results in enormous political, economic and corporate profit, the very existence of which contradicts the founding principles of that country."

Editorial
La Jornada 
Translated By Halszka Czarnocka
WorldsMeet.us

April 4, 2013

According to official reports divulged by The New York Times, some 300 undocumented migrants a day are subject to solitary confinement in U.S. prisons on orders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE for short). This happens in spite of the fact that such people have not been jailed for criminal offences, but for civil ones, which under the laws of our neighboring country, don't even merit punishment. Their detentions are a means of ensuring that they appear at administrative hearings. Out of this figure, half, or some 150, are kept in solitary confinement for 75 days or more, which according to psychiatric experts cited by the newspaper, multiplies the risk of severe mental damage for the detainees.

Beyond the intrinsic cruelty of laws currently in force in our neighboring country under which migrants are persecuted - laws that criminalize foreigners for coming to the U.S. in search of work or a better life than what their countries of origin offer - inhumane practices like this one have various contextual elements that must be examined. Read more.

Mesoamerican Migrant Movement Press Release

Mesoamerican Migrant Movement
Original Americas Program Translation 

Mexico City, January 21, 2013. – Forty-four years since his assassination, we remember Martin Luther King’s dream of a day when his four children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Today more than 11 million undocumented migrants will have to wait for a tortuously slow legislative process to recognize their contributions, from political to fiscal, in the United States.

Barak Obama, thanks to the Latino vote, will be sworn in for the second time as President. The Latino vote was the pointer on the scale that weighed in Obama’s favor and granted him victory after a dead heat election. During his inauguration, thousands of voters will be protesting in Chicago, demanding an immediate moratorium on deportations and separation of families: While Obama orates promises of immigration reform, undocumented migrants in the United States are being harassed by a new wave of attacks, raids on workplaces, arrests and deportations carried out in the days and weeks subsequent to his reelection.

During Obama’s first administration, the numbers of deportations add up to more than 1.5 million in four years. From now until the long awaited immigration reform materializes, an estimated half a million more people will be deported unless Obama changes the current policy. It is therefore urgent to establish the moratorium on deportations and separation of families meanwhile the immigration reform law is approved and regulated for its implementation.   It is difficult to understand why the President is deporting the hundreds of thousands of people he wants to legalize.  The unconstitutional mass deportations have caused the painful separation of hundreds of thousands of families whose children are citizens and have lived in the United States for years.

Latin America looks for more action from Barack Obama

By Will Grant
BBC News, Mexico City

No sooner had losing US candidate Mitt Romney uttered the words "I have just called President Obama" than Mexico's president-elect Enrique Pena Nieto took to Twitter congratulate his soon-to-be counterpart.

He was looking forward to working together, he wrote, on common issues for their two nations.

But beyond the obvious diplomatic platitudes, some might question how much the continuation of an Obama administration will really benefit Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

Certainly President Obama's victory was met with relief in the Americas.

Merely on a practical level, four more years of an incumbent president is far more attractive to most governments in the region than having to get to know a new leader who would need time to learn the ropes of international diplomacy.

Deportation
However, the satisfaction, if not actual celebration, felt in Latin America over President Obama's victory is based much more on his political and ideological position rather than mere practicalities.

Immigration reform is a key issue
It is clear that the immigration debate was crucial in returning President Obama to the White House.

Yet ironically, as has been pointed out by English- and Spanish-speaking commentators alike, more undocumented immigrants were deported in President Obama's first term than under any other president since the 1950s. Read more. 

Sifting for answers in a mass grave in Tapachula, Mexico

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

September 12, 2012

TAPACHULA, Mexico — With the first light of day, a team of investigators using shovels and brushes begins picking through the red dirt of the Garden Pantheon cemetery, a ramshackle resting place where a mass grave sits cordoned off by yellow police tape.

Black and blue tarps (and one advertising Coca-Cola) shield the work from the intense sun and prying eyes. Slowly, over the next weeks, the team will exhume dozens of bodies that have been dumped, nameless, in the mass pauper's grave toward the back of the cemetery, in this city near Mexico's border with Guatemala.

Some of the bodies are skeletons; others, more complete. Some died violent deaths at the hands of very bad guys; others succumbed in more mundane ways: disease, car wrecks, exposure.

Standing at the center of the operation is Mercedes "Mimi" Doretti, a forensic specialist who has pretty much seen it all. Tall with long, dark hair, the 53-year-old Argentina-born single mom has dug up bodies for two decades, from Latin America to the killing fields of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

She is fiercely protective of her charges, taciturn with outsiders, sympathetic but reserved with survivors. More than 400 people with missing relatives have given DNA samples, mostly from strands of hair, which will eventually be used in the hope of identifying the bodies. Read more.