so anyway I met a guy when I was walking out of the metro today
“I’m Polish, I just haven’t been here for thirty years,” he said, and even under the stubble and the fucking haggard look that had me make eye contact before he walked up to me because damn bitch, you okay bro? and I know what kind of desperation puts that kind of look on your face, I pegged him at some mid-thirties, so he’d be like, what, four fucking years old when he left the country, “I’ve just been deported from Chicago, I have no family here, I have no home, I have nowhere to go. So I’m trying to get on a train to Berlin, but all I have,” and he shows me a handful of silver and yellow pennies and a crumpled banknote that is very distinctly not Polish currency, “is these and one dollar, I haven’t slept in two days, I haven’t showered in a week, I haven’t had water,” and he really fucking looks the part too and his voice breaks when he says the train from Warsaw to Berlin is so-and-so fucking expensive, BUT it’s cheaper from Poznan even counting the Warsaw-Poznan course and I’m just glad this man had the sense to beg near an ATM and to ask if I speak English before he said all that
and he was dead certain I’m not serious when I handed him enough for that train ticket and as much over as I could spare so he can remind himself he’s a human being
and I guess why I’m making this post is
@America, kindly get your SHIT TOGETHER
STAT.
Please reblog this. Please keep reblogging this. Please make Americans see this and see it again and over again. Their government is doing this to their own people, and it doesn’t result in anything being made great.
Can we start calling the random deportation of longtime US residents “flying TrumpAir”?
Last month U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released previously unreported statistics on the numbers of active duty and veteran service members who were seeking deportation protections for a spouse or a dependent.
The data shows that rejections of veteran requests have increased under President Donald Trump, from about a 10 percent rejection rate in fiscal 2016, the last year President Barack Obama was in office, to an almost 20 percent rejection rate through the first nine months of fiscal 2018…
The protections, known as Parole in Place, allow members of the military to petition the government to drop any removal proceedings against a spouse or dependent who entered the U.S. illegally…
Parole in Place requests from both active duty and veteran service members spiked 31 percent from the last year of the Obama administration to the first year of Trump’s presidency, to 6,586 applications in 2017, as the new president directed the Department of Homeland Security to increase the number of deportations it processed.
Multiple active duty families have contacted Military Times with fears that their spouse or dependent will be deported while they are deployed, and veterans have contacted the paper worried that despite their military service, their family will be split apart.
My office recently learned the shocking revelation from @HHSGov that reunification could mean placing a separated child with ANY long-term sponsor — regardless of whether it’s their parents, other family in the US, family back in their home country or in long-term foster care.
If true, this interpretation blatantly ignores the terms of the court order. The federal government has also recently admitted that reunification is being used as a bargaining chip to induce parents to agree to voluntary deportation.
We cannot trust that these families will actually be reunified. Today I led a group of six governors in demanding @HHSGov & @DHSgov take responsibility for the dire effects of the “zero-tolerance policy” and trauma inflicted on nearly 3,000 children.
Here the link to the letter, signed by the governors of Washington, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.
*snort*
Cue “sad Trump” blaming Pompeo for the loss of “His Nobel Peace Prize.” “Oh well, Pompeo did the best he could. You really can’t expect any better. He really tried. But if I had been there….”
This New York Times piece includes a lot of information you can find elsewhere, but here’s what was startling to me:
“Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members.”
You know, no matter how bad you think it is, it’s always going to turn out to be worse. I was assuming they just weren’t keeping good enough records at the separation point; and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that in a lot of cases they didn’t. But at least according to the Department of Homeland Security sources they talked to for this article, in a significant number of cases Health and Human Services/Office of Refugee Resettlement actually did keep records–and then Customs and Border Patrol erased them:
“In fact, the Health and Human Services agency charged with overseeing the care of migrant children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, established such procedures, which included identification bracelets, the issuance of registration numbers and careful logs to keep the records of parents and children linked.
But those precautions were undermined in some cases by the other federal agency that has initial custody of apprehended migrants in the first 72 hours after they cross the border — Customs and Border Protection. In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.”
Why would CBP delete information about family groups? Oh don’t worry, says the article, they weren’t doing it ON PURPOSE:
“Officials cautioned that this was not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, but a belief that it made more sense to track cases separately once a group of migrants was no longer in custody as a family unit, these sources said.”
I don’t see how tracking individuals separately PRECLUDES also hanging on to the information about how they’re related. I think there is a contingent of CBP people out there who decided that having their children irretrievably lost in the system would be part of these asylum seekers’ “punishment.” I cannot prove this; but that’s what I think. For THIS administration, we have to reverse the old saying, and assume that we cannot attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to malice.
Yeah, well, it only makes sense to delete that information if you weren’t expecting any attempt at reunification. Not only that, but we’ve got multiple reports that families at the border were being told that to expect that their children would be adopted by American families.
To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past, like the airlifts out of Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. Then, masses of unaccompanied children were suddenly labeled orphans and became the focus of a deafening campaign in the U.S. to rescue them through inter-country adoption, even as Haitian adults were being warned not to try to come themselves.
Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis weren’t groundless. There was reason to be concerned. The former head of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama warned that some of the children who’d recently been separated would remain separated “permanently” and potentially be adopted. Reports surfaced of mothers who were told that their children would be adopted as an incentive to “behave.” On Tuesday night, the Daily Beast reported that the threat of adoption has become weaponized, as a Guatemalan mother detained by Customs and Border Protection earlier this month was allegedly presented with the ultimatum that if she didn’t abandon her asylum appeal, she would be jailed for a year and her daughter put up for adoption. And conservative figures deeply hostile to immigrant families, like Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, toggled between mocking the detention of children as akin to “summer camp” and calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.”
Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.
The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures…
Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them…
To become citizens, the service members need an honorable service designation, which can come after even just a few days at boot camp. But the recently discharged service members have had their basic training delayed, so they can’t be naturalized.
Margaret Stock, an Alaska-based immigration attorney and a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who helped create the immigrant recruitment program, said she’s been inundated over the past several days by recruits who have been abruptly discharged.
All had signed enlistment contracts and taken an Army oath, Stock said. Many were reservists who had been attending unit drills, receiving pay and undergoing training, while others had been in a “delayed entry” program, she said…
Stock said the service members she’s heard from had been told the Defense Department had not managed to put them through extensive background checks, which include CIA, FBI and National Intelligence Agency screenings and counterintelligence interviews. Therefore, by default, they do not meet the background check requirement.
Harry isn’t quite out of his teens when it fully hits him—the war, the blood and the guts spread across the corridors of Hogwarts, the screams and sobs, the nightmares, the shadows that never seem to leave him.
It’s too much.
He gets a flat in London—Muggle London. Hermione and the Weasleys give him space. Kingsley ensures the wizarding world gives him privacy. Not that some aren’t reluctant. Rita Skeeter releases articles every day, wondering when their Boy Who Lived will return.
But Harry doesn’t see those articles.
He tries to forget who he is for awhile.
His flat is cozy. He stuffs it with plants and paintings and books. He has a cat (or three). He wears sweaters and blazers with corduroy pants. He goes to the market every morning to buy fruits and vegetables. That’s where he meets the kindly old woman who lives down the street.
She lived through World War II and so many other wars, wars that Harry has never experienced but can only imagine.
She goes to his house and she goes to hers. There’s always tea and small cakes and dinners and cocoa—apparently she believes that a teenager needs cocoa—and baking and reading and knitting.
Harry uses magic to brew the cocoa one day, not realizing that she’s standing in the doorway. She calms him by telling him that she knows all about magic.
Their conversations shift after that. They talk about their favorite creatures and how hard it was to watch them perish before their eyes. They talk about the wall that seemingly gave way to let them enter the magical world. They talk about lions and friends and family and love and betrayals and life and death.
“When did you leave?” Harry asks one day.
She pauses, a hand resting on his cat’s head. After a moment, she looks up with a heaviness in her eyes, a heaviness that Harry sees when he looks in the mirror everyday.
“I was young,” she says. “Younger than you are now. But I had already grown up. I didn’t want to leave, not really, but it became too much.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Some days I do, some days I don’t.”
“Yeah…”
It’s a few months later, when he’s helping her shovel the first snow from her walkway, that he asks, “Did you ever try going back?”
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t,” she says, shoving a cup of cocoa into his hands. “I was shut out as soon as I hesitated.”
He pauses, nearly dropping the cocoa, before whispering, “That’s horrible.”
“What about you?” She escorts him inside, her cane tapping against the floor that he’s magically heated to warm her feet. “Would you be welcomed back?”
“Oh, yeah,” Harry says. “Til they turn on me because they don’t like the color of my shirt or because I sneezed the wrong way or because—you name it.”
She laughs and he smiles.
“Imagine that,” she softly says. “Rulers of our worlds and we’re not even allowed in them.”
“Imagine that.”
He does go back to the wizarding world, of course, but he never forgets his London flat. He visits the street from time to time, knowing that Susan Pevensie will be there, ready to push a cup of cocoa into his hands.
Actually, according to the 1923 Supreme Court interpretation of the Naturalization Act, you could also become a naturalized citizen if you were of African descent. 1924 was when Native Americans were included. Gotta exclude those Asiatics, though. But this is too complicated to put in that one line so… yeah.
I wanted Steve and Bucky to be in more worker strikes, but apparently the biggest ones in NYC were either immediately post-WWII, or in 1911 following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and most of the protestors were Jewish women who worked in the garment industry. (And lbr, they totally missed the Civil Rights movement.)
Here’s the quick Wikipedia link to the child labor thing. 🙂 I learned so much making this comic!
Happy Birthday, Steve. The world is not that great right now, both here and in Marvel-verse, but let’s keep on trucking.
Hearseeno 