Tag: immigration

19 year-old Herta Lluso is going to be deported from the US on August 19.  Unless, of course, we can get ICE officials to grant her a stay of deportation.  That’s where you come in.

Herta’s case is a strong example of just why we need the Dream Act:

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (The “DREAM Act”) is a piece of proposed federal legislation that was introduced in the US Senate, and the US House of Representatives on March 26, 2009. This bill would provide certain illegal immigrant students who graduate from US high schools, are of good moral character, arrived in the US as children, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment, the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency. The students would obtain temporary residency for a six year period. Within the six year period, a qualified student must have “acquired a degree from an institution of higher education in the United States or [have] completed at least 2 years, in good standing, in a program for a bachelor’s degree or higher degree in the United States,” or have “served in the uniformed services for at least 2 years and, if discharged, [have] received an honorable discharge.” “Any alien whose permanent resident status is terminated [according to the terms of the Act] shall return to the immigration status the alien had immediately prior to receiving conditional permanent resident status under this Act.”

Wiki.

Passage of the Dream Act, however, won’t solve Herta Lluso’s deportation, because she’ll be gone, deported to Albania, long before it passes unless we get a stay of her deportation.  What we need to do is get a stay of her deportation.  And we need it now.

I found Herta’s story at dreamactivist.org:

My name is Herta Llusho, I am 19 years old, and I writing this because I am about to be deported.  I was born in Albania and was brought to the United States when I was 11 years old.   With the help and support of my family, I have struggled through more than seven years of legal proceedings to find a way to stay in this country legally.  Despite our best efforts, on August 19, I will be removed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from the only place I know as my home.  I will be sent back to a country that has become a foreign place to me.  I don’t even speak Albanian well anymore.  My only hope of staying here is for as many people as possible to ask DHS to delay my deportation until the DREAM Act is passed.

My parents brought me to the United States because they believed in the promises this country had to offer. To them it was the land of opportunities, values, and ideals. They were faithful believers of the American Dream, meaning that through hard work, education, and good character their children could accomplish anything they wanted. In fact, they believed in it so strongly that they sacrificed their own lives, as well as their relationship to make it happen. My dad stayed in Albania with the hope of relocating to the US, while my mom left everything behind in pursuit of a better life for her children. To this day, even after many years of struggle and sacrifice, they still believe that it is all worth it, and so do I. I have been truly blessed in the many opportunities I have received. The United States has made me the person I am today. I would like nothing more than to contribute to the country that has given me so much.

You can read her entire story at Citizen Orange.  And you can listen to her tell it here (audio is not great, so turn it up):

There’s not a lot more to say about why Herta should be kept in this Country.  It’s obvious. She is the kind of person we want in this Country.  It is our loss to deport her.

Let’s stop this deportation. Suggested action steps are here.  Please do what you can.

——————

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Last week I posted a diary about LGBT legislation before Congress, suggesting that all was not doom and gloom in the fight for LGBT rights.  Now there’s more good news coming down the pipeline: on Friday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) posted on its website the words that activists have been waiting years to see:

Title: Medical Examination of Aliens: Removal of HIV Infection as a Communicable Disease of Public Health Significance

With this we move one significant step closer to getting rid of one of the worst and most discriminatory bits of immigration law currently on the books: the HIV travel ban.

On Wednesday morning, June 3, at 10 a.m. the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA). (If you are in town, the hearing is in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.) C-Span does not have Wednesday’s television schedule up yet, but the Committee website offers a webcast of the hearing.

UAFA would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow a citizen to sponsor a same sex partner for citizenship.

This might be one of those bills that ultimately goes nowhere or it may fundamentally change the course of both the gay marriage and immigration debates. Follow me below the fold for more on this bill.

Finally, some action is being taken against the management of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, IA, the site of one of the largest raids of undocumented workers in U.S. history when 389 people were arrested on May 12th of this year.

Federal immigration agents arrested Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the plant, on Thursday.  Rubashkin is being charged with conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for financial gain, aiding and abetting document fraud, and aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.  He resigned shortly after the May 12th raid.  If convicted on all counts Rubashkin faces up to 22 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.

Duke has an essay over at The Sanctuary about Nancy Pelosi’s latest capitulation, this time on the subject of immigration.

According to the essay, Pelosi was talking about comprehensive immigration reform and decided to throw under the bus the idea of a real path to citizenship for many of the 12 million undocumented workers in this country.

The link in the essay to the LA Times article is not working, but here is the money quote:

…Pelosi also said Congress would have to tackle the politically sticky job of overhauling immigration laws in the new Congress, after a bipartisan measure collapsed last year.

The estimated 12 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally “are part of the U.S. economy. We cannot send them all home, and we cannot send them all to jail, so we have to address it,” Pelosi said.

Any solution would have to be bipartisan, she said, so it may require sacrificing some of Democrats’ past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

“Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally,” Pelosi said. “I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn’t.”

As Duke states, the egregious policies of the Repubs have drawn Latino immigrants in waves to the Democratic Party.

Yet here we have Pelosi, once again, speaking of capitulation and calling it “bipartisanship.”

We learned from Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas in his devastating essay (posted by Duke in its entirety at Sanctuary), that there were horrible travesties of both the law and justice itself in how the Postville, Iowa raid was executed.

As Dr. Camayd-Freixas said, speaking of his conversation with one of the immigration judges who had no choice but to rule as a rubber-stamp for the ICE:

As a citizen, I want our judges to administer justice, not a federal agency.

Yet that is exactly what happened.  A federal agency administered “justice” and the defense attorneys and judges were helpless to change anything.  As a result, an entire town was ripped apart, economic devastation ensued, and as we now see (h/t woc phd by way of symsess’ great roundups at Sanctuary), the human rights abuses continue:

Women were deeply impacted by the raids. First, female workers at Postville were part of the round up. The lost access to their children, including babies that were still nursing, without warning nor concern. For others, many of the primary or main source of income in their household was permanently removed. In many cases, the raids also labeled these women as undocumented, ensuring that they could not work. Others, afraid of being deported in a raid, did not return to their jobs. The result is that most of the women are also unemployed and unable to be employed.

For women who did not immediately hear about the raids, there was also the fear and confusion about the location of their sons and husbands. Some women went for days without knowing what had happened. As fear turned into confirmation that men were being held for deportation, women’s anxieties and stressers went up.