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11/30: Terror at the Border: Experts Condemn the Tear-Gassing of Children Paul Gottinger - CounterPunch On Sunday, US border officers fired tear gas at groups of asylum seekers attempting to reach the US border. Images of mothers and small children fleeing the gas drew widespread outrage from politicians and human rights groups. Wind carried the gas a kilometer away, impacting many individuals not attempting to reach the US border. As a result of the tear gas, one woman collapsed unconscious, a baby fainted, with many others were screaming and coughing, and a child with Down syndrome was among those affected by the gas. “I felt that my face was burning,” said Cindy Milla, a Honduran woman. “I ran for my life and that of my children.” But on Tuesday, President Trump defended the use of tear gas, claiming the tear gas used was “very safe”. Experts contacted by the author strongly disputed Trump’s assurances and called the tear-gassing of children illegal and potentially deadly. “Tear gas should never, in my opinion, be used on children,” said Dr. Alastair Hay, Professor of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Leeds. “The stinging of the eyes and coughing fits that the tear gases cause will terrify any child.” If a child with asthma comes into contact with tear gas, it could provoke a dangerous asthma attack in a vulnerable population that may not have access to medicine. Dr. Rohini Haar, Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, agreed that exposing children to tear gas was dangerous. “Children are particularly vulnerable to weapons like these—they have more naive respiratory systems, more fragile skin, perhaps don’t know to close their eyes and mouths so they get more in, and they don’t know quite how to get the stuff off as well as adults.” Dr. Anna Feigenbaum, who has written a book on the history of tear gas, said, “The safety of tear gas was determined by its exposure to fit, male bodies. Tear gas can be far more dangerous for children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing conditions.” Tear gas is a toxin, which is lethal if an individual receives a high enough dose, and the lethal dose for children is much lower, according to Dr. Feigenbaum. “It’s a chemical weapon, not a condiment,” Dr. Feigenbaum said. “Poisoning the air that children breath puts their lives at risk.” Tear gases work by compelling people to flee in a panic, which can cause children to be separated from parents, trampled, or trigger an asthma attack. A percentage of people exposed to tear gas will have long-term impacts, according to Dr. Wright, a professor at Leeds Beckett University. Studies have even linked tear gas to miscarriages. Both Dr. Feigenbaum and Dr. Haar questioned the legality of using tear gas on children, and Mexico is calling for an investigation into the incident. “This is a violation of UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force,” said Dr. Feigenbaum. Dr. Haar said, “Both the US military and police all use standards of conduct that require the use of proportionate force. I can’t imagine how tear-gassing unarmed civilians is proportionate.” There is also concern that officers using tear gas do so improperly. “A major hazard for civilians targeted with these weapons is direct injuries to the skull when the projectiles are fired at heads at close range – in contravention of company technical guidance,” said Dr. Wright. Tear gas is banned for use in war by chemical weapons conventions, but is regularly used against civilians, with especially brutal results by authoritarian regimes. In 2013, thirty-nine prisoners in Egypt suffocated to death when tear gas was fired into a prison van. In 2011, Saudi Arabia helped the small country of Bahrain crush its Arab Spring uprising, and the security forces extreme use of tear gas killed at least thirty people. Dr. Feigenbaum criticized the idea that tear gas is truly non-lethal weapon. “Why do we have so many deaths, if these are non-lethal weapons?” Dr. Wright said the goal of tear gas use is to appear to be less dangerous, but not necessarily be less dangerous. “In terms of alleged safety, it should be recalled that some of the first WWI agents were so called tear gases,” Dr. Wright said. In the US alone, there have been over 100 people killed by tear gas, with most of these deaths occurring in prisons or in SWAT raids, according to Dr. Feigenbaum. Now tear gas has been turned on vulnerable families living in desperate conditions near the US border. At least some of the tear gas used on Sunday appeared to be Triple Chaser and Saf-Smoke Grenade, based on canisters found near the border. Triple Chaser and Saf-Smoke Grenade are both manufactured by Defense Technology, a subsidiary of The Safariland Group. Defense Technology’s website includes a warning to potential purchasers of both Triple Chaser and Saf-Smoke Grenade: “This product can expose you to chemicals including Lead Salts and Hexavalent Chromium, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer, and Lead Salts, which are known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Dr. Feigenbaum said Triple Chaser is a particularly dangerous form of tear gas because the canister splits into 3 parts, making it hard to control where it will land. Recently the Trump administration gave US troops at the border have permission to use force to protect border officers, and attempted to take away the right to claim asylum by those who entered the US without authorization. “In the longer term, we are likely to see much greater use of such weapons at borders as conflict and climate induced migration increase,” said Dr. Wright. Dr. Anna Feigenbaum summed up one reason she thinks we may be seeing border officers using tear gas at the border. “Tear gas is cost effective if you don’t have the resources to built permanent infrastructure. You can use tear gas to create a temporary border wall as a solution to the border crisis.”Link the article: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=1670 11/10: US Must Take Responsibility for Asylum Seekers and Their History David L. Wilson – TruthOut Most people are capable of holding two or more conflicting ideas on any given issue. Immigration is no exception. A large segment of the US public was horrified in May and June when they saw the Trump administration snatching toddlers away from Central American mothers who arrived at the US border seeking asylum. Many would still be appalled if they knew that the White House is seeking to continue the practice in a different form. Most undoubtedly feel genuine sympathy for young people trying to escape violent gangs or abusive partners. Still, a lot of these same sympathetic Americans don’t actually want the asylum seekers to come here. Some may be influenced by administration efforts to induce panic about immigrants “invading” the US — for instance, President Trump’s decision to send troops to counter the latest migrant caravan, even though US Army planners have concluded that “only a small percentage of the migrants will likely reach the border.” But others look around at failing schools, collapsing infrastructure, neighbors dying of drug overdoses or going without affordable medical care, and they ask themselves whether the United States can really spare any of its limited resources to help people from somewhere south of the border. When they hear Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham saying, “It’s not our problem,” and President Trump at the United Nations telling migrants to stay home and “[m]ake their countries great again,” they tend to nod in agreement. These are real concerns. One of the most important questions before immigrant rights activists today is whether we’re going to take these concerns seriously and make a sincere effort to address them. Burning Your Neighbor’s House Anyone who has followed the history of US involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean knows that the current crises in the region are absolutely “our problem.” The US government and US companies have dominated much of this hemisphere politically, economically and militarily for more than a century. There’s no shortage of studies and articles describing how US-backed policies and regimes have driven migration here over the decades, especially from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn summed the case up forcefully on Democracy Now! in 2016. Many of the undocumented Guatemalans now living in the United States fled a genocidal campaign that a US-backed military regime carried out against their country’s Indigenous population in the 1980s, explained Nairn, who reported from the country at the time. “And then Americans complain,” he continued. “Well, you know, if you go and burn down your neighbor’s house, don’t complain when, as they run from the flames, they come on to your lawn.” But a decently large segment of the US population knows nothing about their government’s role in spurring immigration. On the contrary, people misguidedly think of US foreign policy as humanitarian, characterized by much too generous giveaways to ungrateful foreigners. After all, they rarely hear anything to the contrary, since US foreign policy is basically bipartisan. Establishment Republicans and Democrats hold the same views on most of the issues, and the corporate media follow their lead. The US relationship with Honduras provides a textbook example. In June 2009, the Honduran military overthrew the country’s relatively progressive president, Manuel Zelaya Rosales. President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave de facto support to the coup’s organizers, who solidified their position five months later with a highly suspect presidential election. In 2017, another questionable election further consolidated the coup regime by handing right-wing President Juan Orlando Hernández a second term. Trump endorsed the election results. Crime increased significantly after the coup, with the homicide rate jumping from an already high 60.8 per 100,000 in 2008, to 81.8 in 2010 and 91.4 in 2011. But most US political and media actors ignored the correlation between the right-wing takeover in Honduras and the rising violence that sent asylum seekers fleeing to the United States. The Responsibility to Engage So what can immigrant rights activists do to break through the silence about the link between immigration and US policies? We could encourage the corporate media to provide more nuanced coverage. Many reporters on the immigration beat understand migration’s root causes, but in the absence of pressure from the other side, they end up giving into more conservative editors, or else just reflecting the environment in which they work. Still, it’s unrealistic to expect the media to do all our work for us. Fortunately, many groups are already working to provide context for migration to the US. For instance, Witness for Peace, founded in 1983 by faith-based peace activists in response to US funding of the right-wing contra rebels in Nicaragua, recently concluded a Northwestern speaking tour with journalist Jennifer Ávila addressing threats to the free press in Honduras. When reporters are kept from investigating, Ávila noted, the government is free to continue the corruption and repression that drives people in her country to undertake dangerous journeys to the US border. Meanwhile, María Luisa Rosal, an organizer for School of the Americas (SOA) Watch, was touring campuses in the Midwest and California to promote her organization’s upcoming annual November gathering at the US-Mexico border, which will bring US and Latin American activists together for rallies, panels and workshops on such topics as organizing for “the right to stay.” This is a term Mexican activists coined for people’s right not to have policies imposed on them that force them to leave their homes. SOA Watch was started in 1990 to draw attention to the role of the US Army School of the Americas military training program (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) in producing Latin American human rights abusers. SOA Watch activists say their focus is currently on raising public awareness of “militarized US foreign policy as a principal root cause of migration.” Efforts like these need broader support. Grassroots education is hard work, but it pays off. Right now, we have an important opportunity to end, once and for all, the delusion that the US government is acting as the world’s benevolent big brother. We don’t lack examples of US-supported regimes giving people reasons to flee; each week seems to bring new ones. On October 21, the Guardian reported that the trial for the March 2016 murder of Honduran environmental and Indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres was now “in chaos.” Cáceres — one of the best known and most popular grassroots leaders in Honduras, and a 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize recipient — was killed while leading a struggle by the Indigenous Lenca against an internationally financed hydroelectric project. The accusedinclude a manager from the Honduran company owning the dam and three active or former military officers; two of the officers received training from US military programs. Irregularities in the trial suggest that the defendants may get off with acquittal or a light prison sentence. The US political class isn’t paying much attention to these developments; it’s too busy obsessing over the migrant caravan, which in fact, originated in Honduras. But the Cáceres case points to the sort of treatment Hondurans and other Central Americans can expect when they try to “make their countries great again.”Link the article: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=1647
Also Read.. 9/10: Trump ratchets up attack on immigrant children 9/24: ICE Separates Dozens of Families Across Wisconsin 10/1: Her husband went to an immigration interview about their marriage He was detained by ICE 10/2: Child Concentration Camps in USA 10/10: Abolish ICE: Beyond a Slogan(1) 10/10: Abolish ICE: Beyond a Slogan(2) 10/10: Abolish ICE: Beyond a Slogan(3) “Migration Is a Form of Fighting Back”(1) “Migration Is a Form of Fighting Back”(2) “Migration Is a Form of Fighting Back”(3) 10/23: Crackdown on Honduran migrant caravan 'against international law' 10/23: Internationalist solidarity with Central American migrant caravan 10/23: Why are thousands of Hondurans walking towards the US border? 10/25: Undocumented Immigrants Pay Billions of Dollars in Federal Taxes Each Year 11/2: The caravan “invasion” and America’s epistemic crisis (1) 11/2: The caravan “invasion” and America’s epistemic crisis (2) 11/2: The caravan “invasion” and America’s epistemic crisis (3) 11/4: US militia groups head to border, stirred by Trump’s call to arms 11/5: A New York Times Blindspot:The Police Links to White Supremacists 11/10: US Must Take Responsibility for Asylum Seekers and Their History 11/12: Migrant Caravans Challenge the Continent’s Governments (1) 11/12: Migrant Caravans Challenge the Continent’s Governments (2) 11/15: Local Police Can't Detain Immigrants For ICE, NY Court Finds 11/18: No one is illegal - Solidarity with the Migrant Caravans 11/26: How a march at the US-Mexico border descended into tear gas and chaos 11/30: Terror at the Border: Experts Condemn the Tear-Gassing of Children Please download our latest newsletter: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Winter18.pdf
Useful Immigrant Resources on Detention and Deportation Immigrants Shape California: New "Access to Justice" Laws ICE custody program and its budget Refugee Appropriations Docs & Resources Immigration Bond: How to Get Your Money Back (1) Immigration Bond: How to Get Your Money Back (2) http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Issues&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=1709
Face Sheet: Immigration Detention--Questions and Answers (Dec, 2008) by: http://www.thepoliticsofimmigration.org Thanks for GREAT works from Detention Watch Network (DWN) to compiled the following information, please visit DWN website: http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org Tracking
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Raids to Deportation-A Community Resource Kit
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Immigrants and their supporters are participating in marches all over the country to protest proposed national legislation and to seek justice for immigrants. The materials available here provide important information about the rights and risks involved for anyone who is planning to participate in the ongoing marches. If government agents question you, it is important to understand your rights. You should be careful in the way you speak when approached by the police, FBI, or INS. If you give answers, they can be used against you in a criminal, immigration, or civil case. The ACLU's publications below provide effective and useful guidance in several languages for many situations. The brochures apprise you of your legal rights, recommend how to preserve those rights, and provide guidance on how to interact with officials. IMMIGRATION LABOR / FREE SPEECH PROTESTERS STUDENTS
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