Number of undocumented children reaching Southwestern border surging

Baltimore Sun: Organizations that help undocumented children find homes in Maryland say there has been a spike in the number of unaccompanied minors from Central America reaching the U.S. border — to the highest levels since the surge of 2014.

Advocates expect the influx to have a disproportionate impact in Maryland, home to a large population of Central American families, with whom these minors are likely to be placed. During the last wave of unaccompanied Central American children, federal officials reported that Maryland took in more of them on a per capita basis than any other state. Read more.

America's poorest border town: no immigration papers, no American Dream

The Guardian: Seven miles east of McAllen’s palm-studded city streets, the interstate off ramp slides past the sprawling branch of a popular Texas supermarket – HEB (Here Everything’s Better) – and a drive-in bank. Swinging under the highway and heading north on Alamo Road, the shopping malls and car showrooms recede at the first traces of the colonias – the ramshackle but largely unseen towns that are home to hundreds of thousands of Latinos across the Rio Grande valley of southern Texas.

A mechanic’s sign declares “credit no problem”. Vibrant green fields of coriander or cilantro, a staple of Mexican cooking, accentuate the dilapidation of the road. A small square building with a corrugated iron awning marks the corner with East Trenton Street. A wooden, hand-painted sign is nailed to one of its walls: “Trenton’s Second Hand Store”. Doors, sinks, windows and mosquito screens are propped in a jumble on the grass in front. Buyers stop by to pick up the parts for colonia houses, constructed piecemeal as their owners find the money. Read more.

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.

The process Congress wants to use for child migrants is a disaster

Vox: Congress and the Obama administration are scrambling to respond to the humanitarian crisis of 57,000 unaccompanied Central American children who've crossed the border into the US this year.

One policy change that Republicans are expected to demand (in order to give the Obama administration the $3.7 billion in emergency funding it's asked for) has actually gotten the support of members of Congress from both parties, and encouraging hints from the White House. That change: updating a 2008 law so that Central American children could be returned to their home countries as quickly as Mexican children are today. Read more. 

'Not Since Slavery' Has U.S. Treated People Worse than Undocumented (La Jornada, Mexico)

La Jornada – Original Article (Spanish)
Translated By Florizul Acosta Perez
WorldMeets.US
June 9, 2014

According to Princeton University Professor Douglas Massey, the millions of undocumented migrants living in the United States with no respect for their civil, social or political liberties, constitute the largest population living under such conditions since the formal end of slavery in the neighboring country, in 1863.

The comparison is a painful one, but an accurate one to characterize the abuse and mistreatment our brothers and sisters are subjected to every day in the neighboring country, and in general, foreign nationals who reside there without the corresponding immigration documents.

Indeed, migration is a phenomenon as old as our species and inherent to human societies, but in the 21st century, the phenomenon is driven by poverty, lack of employment, and an absence of social mobility or positive horizons in countries like ours, where one can throw in police brutality, which is not at all ameliorated by guarantees of individual or human rights, and is dedicated to criminalizing and persecuting people who are overwhelmingly innocents.

U.S. and Mexico: The Indecisive Empire and its Stuttering Colony

Proceso
By Sabina Berman
Translated by Stuart Taylor
Mexico Voices 

For Fey Berman, my Mexican-American sister

According to conventional measurements of power, the United States is an empire. Actually, it is the most powerful empire that has ever existed. Its ideology conquered the entire world in the 20th century. Even once reluctant China is now part of the great Free Market that the U.S. spread throughout the planet and, at times, forced upon unwilling nations.

Today, its armies and security agencies patrol the streets and sidewalks of around twenty countries in crisis, such as Mexico, where, hidden behind national security forces and later independently, they fight and capture drug lords.

Its culture dominates other cultures; its movie stars are the celebrities of the globe; its academics dictate universal discourse and American English is the lingua franca of today, just as Latin was during the Roman Empire.

Above all, and at the base of its power, the giants of U.S. capital govern the transnational economy, businesses that acquire surpluses from the four corners of the planet on a daily basis to deposit them on Wall Street, the street filled with skyscrapers in whose windows the sun turns gold. Read more. 

NYC implements program that teaches how to avoid deportation

HuffPost Voces
By Claudia Torrens
Original Americas Program Translation

New York (AP) - New York will spend municipal funds to enable young immigrants without permission to live in the U.S. to petition the government for suspension of deportation orders and obtain a work permit.

New York officials announced on Wednesday that it would spend $ 18 million in adult education programs and legal assistance to help "dreamers" secure local entitlement to deferred action that President Barack Obama signed last year. The "dreamers" are young people who were brought illegally to the United States, usually by their parents as children.

New York is the first city in the country implementing the initiative, officials said.

An estimated 79,000 undocumented youth in New York City can still qualify for the Obama plan but 16,000 of them must register in a school or adult education program, as stipulated in the federal requirements. Because adult education programs in the city are full and private education is expensive, the city will use the money announced Wednesday to create 10,370 new opportunities for students in adult education programs.

The U.S. immigration reform is a setback, say migrant families

La Jornada 

By Ciro Pérez Silva 

June 27, 2013

Americas Program Original Translation 

It lacks a focus on regional integration and freedom of transit, while exploiting undocumented migrants hope.

Mexico, DF. Immigration reform without a regional integration approach and freedom of movement is a setback for citizens throughout Central America and the Caribbean, warned   a diverse group of migrant family members from Oaxaca, Guerrero and New York, among others.

"While the rest of the world is finding mechanisms to ensure human mobility in a framework of rights, the governments of Mexico and the United States are engaged in agreements that criminalize and only promote discrimination and fear of the other, represented in the migrant ".

In a statement, the families of migrants in Mexico expressed support for legalization and for the rights of more than 6 million undocumented Mexicans living in the United States.

Immigration Reform at a Dangerous Juncture

 NALACC (National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communites):

By Oscar Chacón, Executive Director, NALACC

Since late last year, immigrant communities in the US have watched carefully, as first the Senate and now the House of Representatives takes up the issue of immigration reform. As anyone familiar with the system can attest, the country is in urgent need of public policies that can start to repair the many years of neglect that have pushed our immigration laws far out of sync with the realities of modern global migration.

As immigrant communities from Mexico, Central America and the rest of Latin America, we have listened to elected officials tout the growing importance of Latino voters.  In this context, we had high hopes that the US Congress would put an end once and for all to the toxic rhetoric about immigration, and recognize the multiple ways in which immigrant communities, particularly those who reside in the US without authorization, have generously contributed to economic growth and fiscal revenues at all levels of government. Read More...

Millions of immigrants waiting for green cards

USA Today
Daniel González, The Arizona Republic
June 23, 2013

The long wait is at the center of the debate over whether to give the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally a pathway to citizenship.

Phoenix - Alejandro Bojorquez wants to play by the rules.

The Mexican citizen has patiently waited for years for a green card to allow him to come to the United States legally, even as millions of compatriots crossed the border illegally.

But his wait has been long. Very, very long.

Bojorquez was 14 when his father, Jesus Bojorquez, then a legal permanent resident, filed a green-card petition on his behalf. Alejandro is now 29.  Read more. 

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...

Over 100 Groups Call on Obama & Mesoamerican Leaders to Tackle Root Causes of Violence at SICA

By CIP Americas with several others and signed by more than 145 organizations

Dear Honorable:

President Barack Obama

President Enrique Peña Nieto

President Laura Chinchilla

President Otto Pérez Molina

President Porfirio Lobo

President Mauricio Funes

President Daniel Ortega

President Ricardo Martinelli

Attorney General & Minister of Foreign Affairs Wilfred Elrington

April 30, 2013

We, the undersigned civil society organizations from throughout the region, are writing to you on the eve of your meetings in Mexico and at the Summit of the Central American Integration System (SICA) in Costa Rica.We welcome the opportunity for our nations to discuss cooperation on critical cross-border issues and urge our States to address our concerns about the dire human rights crisis in Mesoamerica.

Our organizations have documented an alarming increase in violence and human rights violations. While we recognize that transnational crime and drug trafficking play a role in this violence, we call on our governments to acknowledge that failed security policies that have militarized citizen security have only exacerbated the problem, and are directly contributing to increased human suffering in the region.

It is time to refocus regional dialogue and resource investment to address the root causes of violence,

understanding that for many citizens and communities, drug trafficking is not the principal cause of insecurity. Harmful “development” policies have similarly caused increased conflict and abuses, while forced migration and criminalization of migrants and human rights activists continues to divide families. Most importantly, the region’s challenges must be addressed without violating fundamental rights and human dignity.