How high school students are organizing walkouts against ICE

Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.

This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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How high school students are organizing walkouts against ICE

The kids are definitely alright. This inspiring story covers the spreading movement of students (most in high school) who are linking up with local activist organizations to build and bolster their movements. The students interviewed in the article clearly give lie to the “kids don’t care” and “kids aren’t involved” stories pushed by conventional media.

These are people not yet old enough to vote who have a clear-eyed and comprehensive view of what the war on immigrants means to them, their families, and their communities. And they’re not gonna take it.

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CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements

According to an internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media, Customs and Border Patrol has been tracking the people’s movements through online advertising data purchased with our tax money.

Through many popular apps including game apps like Candy Crush, weather apps, fitness apps and dating apps like Tinder and Grindr, back end advertiser bids have allowed DHS to purchase the location data of millions of phones without any warrants to do so. And finally, lawmakers are attempting to hold DHS accountable for its warrantless purchasing and surveillance of location data from brokers who have no qualms handing it over to the highest bidder.
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Haitian Asylum Seeker Dies of Toothache in ICE detention

Austin Kocher writes about the tragic, preventable death of Emmanuel Damas, a Haitian asylum seeker being detained at Florence Correctional Center in Arizona. Damas had been complaining of a toothache for at least two weeks before collapsing and being transferred to a hospital too late to save his life. He died of sepsis. Horrifically, there are reports of staff laughing at Damas’ complaints and claiming he was faking his symptoms. DHS claims that detainees are often receiving the “best healthcare” of their lives. Kocher emphasizes, “There is no way to reconcile” this claim with “what Emmanuel Damas experienced in the weeks before he died.”

Kocher has chronicled the long, bipartisan history of preventable deaths in immigration detention. Basically, the concepts of “border security” and “immigration enforcement” have always been deadly--that’s a feature of the system, not a bug. One thing that makes it difficult to hold anyone accountable, Kocher says, is that the system is designed to ensure “that no single death can be easily traced back to a single decision or a single person.”

However, Kocher continues, “the inability to identify a direct perpetrator in any given case is not the same as the absence of responsibility. Behind every one of these deaths is a set of policy decisions made by people with names and titles and the power to have chosen differently. The deaths are, in that sense… the predictable outcome of predictable decisions, and the people who made those decisions bear responsibility for what has followed.” What a powerful call to action for all of us to hold our elected officials accountable.
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ICE detains reporter Estefany Rodríguez in Nashville

Without warrant or cause, ICE detained Colombian-American journalist Estefany Rodriguez last week during a routine traffic stop. Rodriguez has faced death threats for her reporting in Colombia; her asylum application is in process.

While it is increasingly common, this kind of lawless behavior by ICE and CBP violates international law as well as established standards for the treatment of journalists. Despite constant assaults by this administration on civil liberties, the 14th amendment of the US constitution still guarantees the right of due process to all.
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Political Education Corner

Have you wondered lately how immigration lawyers are fairing in court with their clients and what else they are doing to get procedural wins for undocumented folks stuck in our criminal immigration system? One of the most recent episodes of the podcast 5-4, which usually discusses supreme court cases, took a little break from their regularly scheduled programming to talk to two immigration lawyers currently fighting in the courts for undocumented people. Listen to the episode here.

Action items:

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for next week’s roundup, drop us a line at neveragainaction@gmail.com.

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