#my entire family is undocumented-- if not in the process of becoming citizens

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[emerald-studies]

Diverse Perspectives | Discussion 3

I sent some questions to @jasperwhitcock​ for her perspective as a POC woman and daughter of an immigrant.

[ It is required to participate and watch/read these discussions, in order to follow me. Participate or get tf out. We aren’t performative in my lil’ area on Tumblr.

This discussion isn’t representative of an entire population or meant to be super professional. It’s to share different perspectives and also is an opportunity for me to practice what I preach: intersectionality. If you’d like to participate in this series please send me a pm or an ask and I’ll get back to you ASAP. We can do a written, audio, or video interview.]

As a mixed person, do you feel isolated from your community?

J: If you mean community as in the community I currently live in, I’m fortunate enough to live in a very diverse place. Surrounding the city of Houston, there’s a lot of prejudice integrated into a lot of the suburban neighborhoods, but in terms of the city itself, I think the POC communities really uplift and support each other. I’m a concert photographer when there’s not a pandemic, and I’ve always appreciated the way latinos and black artists are respected in the indie community. Houston’s a very rap/hip hop/R&B city, so black artists are especially celebrated. There’s also great latinx bands that I know, latinx venue owners/employees, and latinx brands connected to the indie community. We’re very well represented in this area.

If you mean community as in the latinx community, I wouldn’t say isolated, but depending on the day, I might say that I can feel distanced at times. This isn’t particularly due to the latinx community itself, so much as it may be a distance that I create in my head. As a mixed person, I think there are times where you can feel confused on where you belong. I’ve brought up the quote before from the Selena movie, where Selena’s father Abraham is speaking on the potential difficulty of Selena being accepted in Mexico because of the fact she is Mexican American: “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It's exhausting!” It can be difficult at times to navigate your sense of belonging when you are in between two cultures because you want to recognize that you may have privileges someone of full Mexican descent may not have, but at the same time, your life is still very much defined by being Mexican and having Mexican blood while living in America too. You’re definitely not absolved from having latin experiences. Latina stand up comedian Anjelah Johnson made a joke in her stand up about there being a Latinx hierarchy. She said that Spanish speaking latinos are better than the rest of us who are not fluent in Spanish (such as herself), and it was funny because sometimes you do feel that that can be true. My tías will always ask me why I’m not fluent in Spanish, and my mom will be like “yeah, why don’t you?” and I’m always like… because y’all didn’t teach me! My parents speak Spanish to each other at home. My father is not only fluent in Spanish, but his Spanish is oftentimes superior to a lot of Spanish speakers according to my mom and my tíos. He used to teach English in Mexico, so there is no reason that my sister and I shouldn’t have been perfectly bilingual. The reason they didn’t teach us as children is because they didn’t want us to be speaking Spanglish. (Spoiler: it happened anyways). Around white people, I definitely feel that I am not a white person. I feel very much latina in a group of white people. But then around latin people, I sometimes feel white enough to feel a sense of shyness. I definitely feel more at home with latinx people, but overall in both groups, I definitely feel that I am mixed.

It doesn’t happen often, because I think although the majority of latinx people have pride in their background, the hyperawareness of our identities right now is relatively new, but there have been instances of latinx gatekeeping the latin identity. Growing up, I didn’t think about what I was labelled as or think about how my family structure is different to other families. I didn’t consider how in some areas, it is an abnormality to have an immigrant parent or a parent with an accent. I definitely noticed that my family was different, but I didn’t understand why until much later. My mom, her sisters and brothers, and my primos… They don’t live their lives with the awareness of being defined as Mexican immigrants. Of course, they again have pride in where they came from. They live as Mexicans and engage in Mexican culture, but overall, the way the youth today has really grasped onto the labelling of our identity is kind of a new thing. There are some young latinx people who do try to quantify and measure whether or not your experience is valid. I know it comes from a place of protectiveness of their own experience, but it’s ridiculous to gate keep because something that really characterizes latin culture is our warmth, our sense of family, our willingness to embrace other people as part of that. If you’re of latin american descent, you have a place in the latinx community.

Since your parents don’t have college degrees, do you believe college is important and/or necessary?

J: I think it depends! I think a lot of immigrant parents really push for their children to get a college education because they see that as opportunity, particularly when they did not earn college degrees themselves. I think college can be important depending on what you want to accomplish, but I also think it’s not completely necessary. For my career path as a photographer/videographer, I chose not to do college. I do think I would have enjoyed college because I like learning, but because it was something unnecessary for my job, I couldn’t justify the time invested or putting my parents into a difficult financial situation. Especially because my college education would have overlapped with my sister, and I saw how difficult it was to juggle handling my sister’s student loans. For my sister’s career path (she is studying to be a nutritionist/therapist to help teenagers with eating disorders), college was necessary.

Your Mom has been stuck in the US, unable to return to Mexico for awhile, has your Mom’s experience with immigration changed your views in some way?

J: As context, my father lived in Mexico for a decade and married my mom in Mexicali. They hadn’t planned to move to the United States, but when they came to the US to marry here so that she could have citizenship and be able to visit his family, there were complications that made it to where she couldn’t leave the country. Luckily, the time she was unexpectedly stuck in the United States didn’t last super long! Long enough to become comfortable enough to decide to settle down in California, but we have been able to travel to Mexico often. I think it really highlights how unnecessarily complicated a lot of the processes regarding immigration are. The people in the country who are very malicious about undocumented immigrants love to jump to saying, “well, why can’t they just become an American citizen?” when the reality is that every process in place has a lot of complications. Not everyone has access to the resources to be able to make these transitions happen smoothly. Also, the time it takes to acquire your visa is not an overnight thing. People severely underestimate the difficulty involved.

What do you think about the “hard-working immigrant” stereotype?

J: I hate the idea that immigrants work hard because they’re low-skilled, but I do love that there is a lot of pride in how motivated immigrants are. It’s always been a ridiculous claim that immigrants are taking American jobs. Immigrants work the jobs that the majority of Americans have no interest in doing, especially the people that make this complaint. For a country that prides itself on working to make your dreams come true, Americans neglect to recognize that immigrants have a drive that most Americans don’t have.

Which parent do you feel more connected to? Your Mother who’s an immigrant or your Father who was born in America?

J: I really do feel that I am a coalescence of both my parents, so I think I feel equally connected to each of them. I feel a very strong emotional connection and concern for my dad because his mental health suffers a lot. His mother had bipolar depression at a time where mental health was even more stigmatized, and she endured a lot of ridiculous, merciless treatments that are no longer utilized today. When he was nine years old, his mom committed suicide, and this was an event that really defined his life forever. I think that kind of heaviness passes down through your family. When my dad is not doing well, I feel really imbalanced and emotionally impacted even if I’m not home to witness it. It’s kind of like that idea of an invisible string tethering you to someone, and it’s a weight that I carry always. However, overall, he’s a very positive person. When he is going through his kind of manic highs, he’s a lot more of what I recognize of who my dad is. He’s creative, a musician, and deeply caring for other people. His mother’s death has empowered him to really try to make a difference and “paint a picture of a better tomorrow.” I’m a lot like my dad in personality, but in disposition, I’m so much like my mom. She’s tough and outspoken at home, but in public, it takes awhile for her to open up. My mom’s very selfless, kind, and very much shy and quiet. She definitely exemplifies a lot of the sacrifice that you see many immigrants make. I do like both sides of my family, but I definitely feel more at home with the Mexican side. My dad’s side is loud, vivacious, and very much funny, but I feel extremely shy around them. My sister and I have always felt a tiny bit left out. I think they’d be hurt to know we feel this way, but I definitely don’t think they do anything to intentionally enforce this division. But I think it developed because there is a bit of a cultural disconnect between my aunts and my mom. It’s also very interesting to me that when they first met my mom, my mom didn’t speak any English. It’s fascinating to consider how it might change your perception of someone to go from not being able to communicate with them to watching them learn your language. My mom enjoys the time that we do spend with my dad’s family, but she’s kind of the odd one out in that her humor isn’t the same and her experiences are so different. I think that my dad’s sister and brother’s families were able to connect in a stronger way, so sometimes my mom, my sister, and I feel just a little isolated. In those moments, I feel the most aware of my Mexican background. With my mom’s side of the family, it’s a lot more comfortable. My dad’s able to develop his humor in a way that translates well into Spanish, so he fits in very easily.

You’ve lived in a “Blue/more liberal” state and a “Red/more conservative” state, which state has affected you more?

J: Definitely the red state. Seeing how intensely and ridiculously conservative some southern people are has really radicalized me in a way. I feel overwhelmingly liberal because there’s a defensiveness that develops when you’re in a space like this where you have this intense disbelief that people hold the ideas that they do. Especially because in Texas, black and latinx culture is a major contributor to southern culture. There’s a lot to be said about how black culture shapes the south, but because I’m latina, I’m focusing on latinx culture with this question. White conservatives want our food, they want our work, but they don’t want us. I don’t understand how anyone can be all #TacoTuesday one day, and then the next, be anti-immigrant. If you really want Mexicans out of your country, then maybe you should start living your life without any Mexican influence. Stop eating Mexican food. Clean your own pool and mow your own lawn. It’s ignorant to speak down on immigrants when their life would be so altered to be rid of immigrants. They rely on immigrants. Their lives are shaped by immigrants and built by immigrants.

(I had to chime in here: )

 Are you proud of your parents?

J: Absolutely. As a young teenager, I had a lot of problems with my parents. I think I still have issues I’m working through as a result, but now that I’m older, I really do feel a deep sense of admiration and respect for them. Growing up really makes you view your parents differently and understand them as people rather than just as parents. I held onto a lot of anger and resentment, but I’ve come to truly see how they really did do their best. They’ve worked very hard, and I think not having everything that kids around me did really helped me grow into a more grateful person.

Have you faced discrimination for your race?

J: Of course, but in all honesty, it really rolls off my back. I think hate that is personally directed at me doesn’t bother me, but the discrimination that does affect me is anything directed or related to my mom. I remember my parents had a customer who made a really ugly complaint to my father about my mom’s english. My mom essentially handles most of the written communication with their business, and she still speaks and types in broken english often. The majority of my parents’ clients are latinx, so it’s typically not an issue, but it’s unbelievably offensive and ridiculous the assumptions people will make about your intelligence based on your english. The customer had no idea that the woman she’d been communicating with was my father’s wife rather than just an employee. It’s really sad how someone can see someone as unworthy of respect until they’re tied to a white man, and then they’re suddenly apologetic. This is another extremely mild example, but I’ll get a few laughs when I mispronounce something or don’t know how to say certain words. People always find it funny as though it’s embarrassing –– and it definitely can be –– but people forget I learned english from a woman who speaks two languages.

As the child of an immigrant, how has the anti immigrant talking point affected your mental health?

J: I think the toll the anti-immigrant bias in the United States has on immigrant children is a relevant conversation to have, but I think I’m very lucky in that I feel very tough in the face of that ignorance (which is not to say anyone whose mental health suffers as a result is not tough!) If anything, I feel pity for the people who are so hateful that they see other human beings in such a derogatory and entitled way. Similar to what I said before, my outrage really comes from a place of defensiveness for others. The talking point doesn’t hurt me, but it hurts me that people can speak about my family and my community the way they do. It hurts me that there are other immigrant children who have to work as hard as their parents to make their sacrifices worth it, and people are so insensitive as to not respect that. I’m pretty strong, but it does break my heart when my people are disrespected. If someone were to say something to me, that’s fine, but if i saw someone mistreating a little mexican lady in the store… I may be 5’3 but that don’t mean I won’t come for your ass. Okay, in all honesty, I’m really not a violent person. I’m more of a rise above kind of person because the hate someone has in their heart is not worth our time, but some people do need a chancla thrown at them to learn some respect.

In your opinion, in what ways does the Latinx community need more support?

J: I think because the latinx community is so much so composed of hard workers, people really need to support latin businesses more. That’s a direct way to impact latin lives. There’s an abundance of latin small business owners in every category. So many white kids love going to Cozumel for Spring Break and love wearing sombreros on Cinco De Mayo, but then the rest of the year, they have no care or respect for the authentic culture. For every dollar a white man makes, hispanic women still make statistically less than white women, asian women, black women, and native women. We gotta back up these businesses. Choose local taco shops or restaurants over chains. Choose online shops and Mexican boutiques over fast fashion. And this applies to everybody. We can always support black business or asian businesses over large competitors. It really does make an impact. I also think a lot of latinx children need access to better mental health resources. I’m lucky in that because my father struggles with mental health issues, mental health in my family wasn’t exactly a taboo, but in a lot of latin families, mental health is something that is hard for older parents to validate. Latin children need those resources. A simple google search of “latin mental health resources,” bring up a bunch of organizations that you can support. I think every POC community needs to be boosted right now because although we’ve been under attack, conversations about minority communities are being had by white people right now. We have their attention, and we do need their support to enact change because they have the power as the oppressor. We need to be going to bat protecting black people right now because of the insane damage the community has been enduring at the hands of police, and we need to be protecting immigrant children from what’s happening to them at the border. I know the election is extremely controversial right now, but I would urge anyone who has the ability to vote to really consider the importance of doing so. People love to be cynical about how our votes don’t matter, and I understand that cynicism, but a lot of immigrants don’t have the luxury of voting when the results of the election will directly impact their lives. I hate that there is no option of a president that will perfectly support POC communities, but there are options whose party is far more aligned with supporting and protecting POC communities than Trump is. Trump spews hate and fuels racism and prejudice. He calls Mexicans rapists and black protestors thugs. He encourages the blaming of the coronavirus on the asians in our country. He does not need any help winning the election. We need to get this hateful man out, and I strongly encourage anyone who can vote to do so.

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Let’s have a discussion! Did you learn anything new from this conversation?

Let me know here.

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To close out each post, I’d like to write a lil’ paragraph about the person I talk with:

I’m so lucky to have you as a friend darling. You always bring a smile to my face when we chat. You’re funny and so smart. I admire you deeply for being able to share your perspective in a clear way. Thank you for putting up with my 2 am messages lol 🖤🖤🖤🖤Your continued support makes me feel safe and very, very, loved. I hope I encourage the same feeling with you. 

You’re the best babe,

-Faithxx

[nataliesnews]

The law tearing Palestinian families apart 5.7.2021

The law tearing Palestinian families apart

The controversial Citizenship Law is supposedly about maintaining Israel’s security. In reality, it’s a tool to engineer Israel’s population.

BySamah SalaimeJuly 2, 2021

Palestinian women wait to cross Qalandiya checkpoint as an Israeli security officer stands guard outside the West Bank city of Ramallah August 28, 2009. (Issam Rimawi/Flash90)

In 2003, at the height of the Second Intifada, the Israeli government passed an emergency order titled “The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Emergency Order).” Since then, the legislation has taken on many names: the family reunification law, the demographic balance law, the “security threat” law. But the goal of this law has remained the same: to prevent Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza from marrying Arab citizens of Israel, and thus obstructing their path to Israeli citizenship.

The so-called Citizenship Law harms thousands of Palestinian families in Israel. It has been renewed every year since its passing — until this year. The order is set to expire on July 6, and currently the government does not have the parliamentary majority to re-extend it. While several MKs from the center-left Meretz and Labor parties have made their opposition to the order clear, it is unclear how they will vote next week when the law comes up for a vote in the Knesset.

Asmahan Jabali is one of those affected by the law. She was born in Taybeh inside the Green Line, but her parents were from Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank and were never registered as Israeli citizens or residents. As such, Jabali was registered as a West Bank resident, even though she has only ever lived in Israel. She married her partner, also from Taybeh, 26 years ago, and they have three children together. But her legal status in Israel was never sorted out. She has been undocumented, an “unlawful resident,” her entire life.

 “Every year at around this time, I feel unwell, physically and mentally. I break down,” Jabali says. “Deep down, I know that the law will pass, but there’s also always a spark of hope that humanity will win out, and that someone in the Knesset will come to their senses and understand how much their voice can affect my life and the lives of thousands of women.”

Jabali is intimately familiar with the hardships caused by this law. She knows that children who are out of status can only attend school as guests, that they cannot receive matriculation grades, and that they cannot go on to attend college in Israel. She describes what it is like to try and run a household under the shadow of this law, and sets out the agonizing path people like her need to take in order to pass the law’s many “steps:” from being undocumented to becoming a temporary resident, then getting an ongoing residence permit, then full residency, and finally citizenship, which is never granted to any Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza.

Each of these steps has profound implications on everyday life. There is a drastic difference between a residence permit that doesn’t allow for a driving license and one that does, or one that grants the right to work and one that does not. If someone works without the proper permits, tax and insurance payments reach unmanageable sums.

“It’s not just that I couldn’t go to college or earn a living, I’m also completely dependent on my partner, and I’m not alone in that respect,” says Jabali. “I’m lucky, as I have a partner who can support the family alone. What can a vulnerable woman who is less fortunate do with a partner who is violent or unemployed?

“Deep down, I know that the law will pass, but there’s also always a spark of hope that humanity will win out,” says Asmahan Jabali, an undocumented Palestinian affected by the Citizenship Law. (Courtesy of Asmahan Jabali)

“Imagine that your child falls over at school and shows up at the hospital bleeding, and you need to sign paperwork in order for them to undergo surgery,” Jabali continues. “Then they tell you that you are not your child’s guardian and that they can’t take your signature. What do you do when your child is waiting to have surgery and because of the ‘emergency order’ the doctors won’t treat them? I experience these situations every day in the shadow of this law. Then there’s the fact that as a family we don’t have the right to fly abroad together. I’m not allowed to fly out of Israel with my children, we can’t have ‘family holidays.’”

Jabali acknowledges that her situation is, relatively speaking, better than that of women who pay exorbitant sums for health insurance, yet who nonetheless discover that they are still not entitled to expensive treatments, such as cancer therapies.

And it’s not just medical treatment that is expensive. In order to settle their children’s legal status, every mother has to take a paternity test to prove that the father of her children is the person she is seeking to live with. This places a heavy burden on families, who need to pay thousands of shekels for each test, and sometimes repeat tests for the same child. No matter that it seems logical to do a paternity test for just one child in order to prove that both parents and their offspring deserve to live under the same roof.

 Israeli soldiers obstruct a symbolic wedding party in protest of the controversial Citizenship Law, near the Hizma in the occupied West Bank, between Jerusalem and and the Palestinian city of Ramallah, on March 9, 2013. (Issam Rimawi/Flash90)

Hilda Qadesa, a 48-year-old resident of Lydd who is also affected by the law, describes how the “emergency order” strips couples of the right to public housing if one of the partners is a resident of the occupied territories. And even if both partners work, they are not entitled to a mortgage.

For the past 22 years, Qadesa has been married to a man from Ramallah, and she is an activist against the citizenship law. Her partner was supposed to become a citizen just before the law passed in 2003, and the process has been stalled ever since, forcing the family to begin the application process from scratch.

Three years ago, as part of then-Interior Minister Aryeh Deri’s attempts at alleviating the situation, the government issued 1,500 residence permits — including the rights to work, drive, and obtain social security and health insurance — to those who began the naturalization process prior to 2003. Qadesa is not, however, getting worked up about the compromise currently being proposed, which would similarly issue residence permits including the right to work and drive to those who applied for citizenship before 2003.

“The previous interior minister did this, and then MK Osama Saadi [Joint List] helped us present the most difficult cases,” Qadesa says. “The minister can grant these permits at any time, with no need to do favors for Mansour Abbas [Ra’am]. The humanitarian committee they’re talking about is always running, and they didn’t [give out any permits]. This [compromise] is idle talk to allow Ra’am and Meretz to go back on their word. Qadesa is referring to the “humanitarian committee” that was appointed as part of the passage of the 2003 law, and which has the authority, in exceptional circumstances, to grant legal status to those affected by the law. Adi Lustigman, legal counsel for Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, has represented hundreds of families in their legal battles with this law. She confirms that many women are negatively impacted by this law, and that the humanitarian committee almost never confers legal status, even in the most drastic cases in which women are in life-threatening danger and have nowhere to go in the West Bank. According to Lustigman, both the right and the left have rejected thousands of petitions filed on humanitarian grounds.

 Prime Minister Naftali Bennet with with head of the Ra’am party Mansour Abbas in the assembly hall of the Israeli parliament on June 21, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Only those with family in Israel can petition the committee. It can grant temporary residence or a temporary identity card which confers rights upon the holder. But Lustigman notes that the committee almost never wields this authority, except for in cases that reach the courts and which put pressure on the Interior Ministry. And the committee cannot grant citizenship or permanent residence status.

The law has a profound impact on Palestinian women whose partners are undocumented or who are undocumented themselves. It can sabotage relationships and a couple’s ability to have a normative and functioning family. Sumaya Abu Zar, also from Lydd and who married her cousin from Gaza 20 years ago, says that he insisted on being present at the birth of their third child, even though he did not have a residence permit.

“One of the nurses realized that he couldn’t fill out the forms and that he didn’t have a blue [Israeli] identity card, so she called the police who arrived and arrested him, even as I was experiencing severe labor pains,” Sumaya says. “I gave birth alone, and went into a deep depression. I had three children and didn’t see my husband for two years, until he managed to leave Gaza and enter the West Bank, and from there came back to us.

“My baby didn’t have a father for the first two years of her life, and it continues to be traumatic for the whole family. My husband is a diligent worker, a talented gardener, I opened a business in my own name, and drove him around for years because he was barred from driving,” Sumaya continues. “That was my role — morning, noon, and night — to take him around from place to place, and take care of our children in between. Since we received the residence permit, my life as a woman and a mother has completely changed.”

Lustigman is representing a family in which the woman has been living in Ramle for almost 30 years, but continues to only have temporary status due to the law. Her son was seriously injured by Israeli Jews in a nationalist attack and another daughter has a severe disability. But because of the law she needs to renew her permits every year. She struggles to visit her parents who emigrated abroad, and the humanitarian committee is yet to respond to her.

Palestinian women cross the Qalandiya checkpoint, outside of the West bank city of Ramallah, on June 23, 2017. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

The state argues that Palestinians who have been naturalized through family reunification have been involved in hostile activities. But Lustigman has been grappling in court with this claim for years. “The data has never backed up the law’s supposed security rationale,” says Lustigman. Rather, she adds, the law has always been about demographics, meaning, maintaining a Jewish majority.

“No effort has been made in the past few years to support the security claims [of this law],” Lustigman continues. “The law is causing serious and sweeping harm to [people’s] basic rights, in all areas of life. Its existence is unacceptable in a supposedly democratic country. It’s no wonder that nowhere else in the world has a similar law that discriminates according to people’s origin.”

Israel claims that it knows how to identify Palestinians who are security “threats,” and it deploys this so-called expertise when it issues work permits to tens of thousands of Palestinians every day. There is nothing preventing the state from applying these methods to similar adjudications regarding Palestinian couples, who have lived in Israel for decades and present no security threat whatsoever.

It’s unclear why the state cannot grant citizenship to women and mothers who pose no danger other than being possessed of a womb. They “threaten” only the population registry and the Jewish character of the state. If the law is required to maintain the security of the Jewish state, how can extreme-right Knesset members oppose ratifying it? How dare they harm national “security?”

We need to call things by their name. The purpose of this law is to control Palestinians and engineer the terms of their citizenship and presence in this country. It preserves and perfects 2021-style apartheid, which maintains a hierarchy of people who live here: at the top are the pure Jewish citizens, below them undocumented Palestinians, and perhaps beneath them asylum seekers and migrant workers. That, in my view, is the essence of the law. Demographics, and nothing else.

Hassan Jabareen, the general director of Adalah, which has submitted countless petitions against this “emergency order,” says that the law is one of the three most racist pieces of legislation in Israel, alongside the Absentee Property Law and the Jewish Nation-State Law. “The state has repeatedly struggled to address the fact that no other country in the world that bars entry to a couple because [one of them is] of a different nationality,” Jabareen says. 

Even apartheid South Africa, Jabareen adds, lost a famous court case involving a Black woman whom it had banned from her white boyfriend’s neighborhood. “The right to family unity won out over apartheid laws, which segregated Black and white [South Africans],” he says. 

Jabareen believes that the issue of the citizenship law will be examined by a special UN Human Rights Council committee, which is also supposed to investigate the most recent war on Gaza and the accompanying violence against Palestinian citizens in May. “This is the first time that an international body is getting involved in [matters concerning] Palestinian citizens of Israel, and not just the West Bank and Gaza,” he says. “The testimonies of those affected by the citizenship law will provide important material for opposing Israel’s policies against Palestinians wherever they are, and perhaps then we can start discussing the real question, which has persisted for 73 years: Is Israel a democratic state or an apartheid state?”

I’m a woman who loves people and stories about simple folks like myself. They are the protagonists of the stories I write. You’ll hear a lot of criticism from me about Israel’s leadership but also creative solutions to problems that affect us all. Things that I’ve learned from life, in no particular order: sewing, criminology, cooking, social work, gender, fashion design, education and administration, embroidery and a little law — at least until I started dozing off in class. You’ll hear more about the connections between all of those things eventually. I can proudly say that I enlisted in the most gentle — and largest — army in the world, which tries to lead the longest and quietest revolution in human history: the feminist revolution. As a first step I started the AWC (Arab Women in the Center) NGO, which I manage pretty much on a volunteer basis. I was born 40 years ago to a refugee family Sajara in northern Israel (known today as Ilaniya), and most of my close family live in refugee camps in every corner of the world. I dream of the day when there is peace, some of them return, and we can build a home. We will have calm Jewish neighbors with whom we fight only about the question of whose dog (the Jew or the Arab) made a mess on our shared street. Until then I will be living in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam raising my three boys together with my partner Omar, and no, we don’t have a dog.

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Prime Minister Naftali Bennett sits with Labor Party head Merav Michaeli in the plenum hall of the Knesset, Jerusalem, June 2, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Sometimes you need to give credit where it’s due. And to the credit of Israel’s center-left parties, they had prepared their constituents in advance for the fact that entering the new government — which, in any composition, was going to rely on a clear right-wing majority — would have to involve making serious compromises.

A few days before the last election, Health Minister and Meretz head Nitzan Horowitz himself said “we will agree to make compromises to send Bibi home.” In the name of that same compromise, Labor chair Merav Michaeli agreed to relinquish top portfolios in order to sit in a government headed by a right-winger who once represented the settler movement, and who won the same number of seats as her party.

Meretz and Labor were required to foot the bill earlier than expected. Only two weeks after its inauguration, the government has already shown how far it is willing to go in order to reach a compromise with the outlaws of the Eviatar outpost in the occupied West Bank, in a shameful surrender that has once again rewarded the criminal behavior of the settler movement.

Political compromises are intended to enable the promotion of one’s core ideological demands, while making certain concessions on less critical issues. And to do this, red lines must be drawn. I am not a Meretz voter, but it seems to me that the party’s voters are entitled to a clearer understanding of its leadership’s red lines, particularly given their disgraceful silence in the face of the Eviatar compromise. If deepening the theft of Palestinian land, expanding the occupation, and complete contempt for all legal or moral norms are not beyond their red lines, it is unclear what is.

Minister of Health and Meretz head Nitzan Horowitz arrives to the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, June 14, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Is religious coercion — one of the party’s foundational values — a red line? What about Netanyahu’s removal from power? Liberal Israelis could have easily voted for Avigdor Liberman, a right-wing nationalist who touts his liberal credentials, instead of Meretz and would not have noticed a difference when it comes to policy. If within only two weeks since the inauguration of this government, the differences between Meretz and Liberman have blurred almost beyond recognition, we are facing a very big problem.

But the crucial point in this story is not the compromise in the Eviatar affair, but the very essence of compromise in Israeli politics. In general, political compromises tend to be made by the strong toward the weaker party: men “compromise” over women’s rights, straight people “compromise” over LGBTQ rights, and in Israel, above all, Jews “compromise” over Palestinian rights.

In their moment of truth, the center-left Zionist parties — who during election cycles passionately court the Arab voice (Meretz’s last campaign focused heavily on opposing the occupation and the settlements), while promising to take care of their Arab interests — feel completely comfortable sitting around the table with other Israeli Jews and negotiating the extent to which the most basic rights of Palestinians can be denied.

Israeli settlers seen walking through the settlement outpost of Eviatar, West Bank, June 21, 2021. (Sraya Diamant/Flash90)

This goes beyond the occupation. The Knesset will next week vote on the family unification law, a “temporary order” that for 18 years has been renewed in order to ban Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza who marry Israeli citizens from living permanently in Israel with their spouses, while denying them a path to citizenship. This order has turned the lives of thousands of Palestinians into a daily hell and presents them with the inhuman decision between tearing apart family members or leaving their land entirely.

At best, Israeli Jews will yet again sit on both sides of the table and negotiate over the right of Palestinians to fall in love, marry, and lead a normal family life in their homeland. Although Meretz saved some of its dignity and has announced that it will not support the law, others will certainly keep their mouths shut in the name of that sacred compromise.

The recent decision by a number of leading human rights organizations to declare that Israel maintains a single apartheid regime between the river and the sea, including within its official borders, was received with anger by the Israeli public and the political establishment. But one must be voluntarily blind not to see how deeply these intra-Jewish “compromises” on Palestinian rights are a profound expression of the apartheid logic that undergirds Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy.

This goes far deeper than the denial of the rights of citizens in the occupied territories: the Citizenship Law deprives Palestinian citizens within the State of Israel — those who supposedly enjoy its glorious democracy — of the most basic right that is naturally reserved for every Jewish citizen of the country, and even Jews abroad.

Palestinians present their documents to Israeli Border Police members as they make their way through Israeli Qalandia checkpoint, West Bank. April 16, 2021. (Flash90)

This shameful racist law, whose supporters have tried to disguise its demographic aspirations under the cloak of “security,” is further proof that under Israel’s apartheid regime, as far as the Palestinian public is concerned, the distinction between national and civil demands is meaningless. A young woman from Nazareth who falls in love with a man from Ramallah and wants to build a life with him does not do so as a political statement. She is simply demanding the basic right that every Jewish citizen of Israel enjoys. After all, the neighbor of that young Palestinian, a Jewish woman living in a nearby town who falls in love with a Jewish man from the settlement of Ofra near Ramallah, can marry him and live with him in her town without trouble.

If Israel insists on scrutinizing the security aspect of granting citizenship, then — as Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi noted at a recent Knesset committee meeting on occupation and apartheid — the number of Jews who were granted citizenship under the Law of Return and who committed acts of terrorism against Palestinians in fact far outweighs the Palestinians who were granted Israeli citizenship and committed acts of terrorism against Jews.

Israel’s proclaimed logic would therefore require the immediate abolishment of the Law of Return. But an apartheid logic that seeks to establish Jewish supremacy — including demographic supremacy — means there is one law for Jews and another for Palestinians. All of this takes place within the tradition of internal Jewish compromises over Palestinian lives, and with the approval of the Supreme Court of the Jewish apartheid regime.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (right) and Ra’am Mansour Abbas attend a discussion in the Knesset, July 01, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

One cannot understand these compromises without taking into account the positions and compromises of the Islamist Ra’am party, which opted to join the government last month. It is true that Ra’am also has to make difficult compromises to ensure the continued existence of this government. The party’s Knesset members remained silent in the face of the Eviatar agreement, although one can only assume they were not pleased with it. But without criticizing or supporting Ra’am’s decision to back the government, it is worth examining the list of demands it put forward before entering the coalition — not only to understand the party’s red lines, but to learn something about the reality that forces a Palestinian party in Israel to remain silent while the rights of Palestinians are trampled upon.

In exchange for equitable education budgets; the possibility of receiving building permits; the recognition of villages, some of which existed before the establishment of the state; and an end to home demolitions of Arab citizens, Ra’am must stay mum on Palestinian rights in the occupied territories. In exchange for these basic rights, which should be a given for every citizen of every democratic state, the MKs of Ra’am are required to allow the government to do whatever it pleases to their brethren across the Green Line. This is not called political compromise. This is called apartheid.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Zionist Left

Local Call

Citizenship Law

Ra'am

Meretz

Orly Noy is an editor at Local Call, a political activist, and a translator of Farsi poetry and prose. She is a member of B’Tselem’s executive board and an activist with the Balad political party. Her writing deals with the lines that intersect and define her identity as Mizrahi, a female leftist, a woman, a temporary migrant living inside a perpetual immigrant, and the constant dialogue between them.

Since you’re here…

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[karliznieto]

You're not American, so if you get sent back to your home country then good, if you want to be American then follow the proper steps, cause other wise you are stealing money from a system that you don't belong too, and as a Latina born and raised in the states I find it annoying, when thieves such as you and your family try to steal what doesn't belong to you, after all there are much better people in this country that need help and not leaches like yourself who think it's ok to steal.

I am in the process to become a citizen and as for ignorant people like you who don't understand the system it is not easy to become a citizen. I have been waiting for my application to even be looked at for over 15 years now. But I was lucky enough where there was a law that I qualify for to apply for citizenship but like I said it takes an extremely long time to even be considered. And as for my parents and I stealing government money. That's not happening we don't qualify for an government funding. My parents have never applied for welfare or anything similar to that. I have paid for my entire college education out of pocket and my parents pay taxes and so do I. It really irritates me when people just automatically insinuate that because someone is undocumented that they are automatically leeching from the government. Most immigrants are afraid to ask the government for help because of fear of deportation. So please educate yourself before you makes uneducated comments like the one you just made.

[everlarkficexchange]

Sanctuary

Written by: @titaniasfics

Rating: T

Prompt 27: Katniss’s father is an undocumented worker, Peeta is a sympathetic federal agent sent to investigate or an employer willing to do anything to help. [submitted by @567inpanem]

Author’s Note: I’m late (as usual) but I went for the second option on this one. I jumped at this prompt because of my own feeling about this whole situation. Hope I didn’t hijack a lovely prompt by being politically didactic. I relied on my experiences with my family regarding picking fruit and the migration of workers as they follow the different harvest, together with the research on how the ICE conducts raids in this current political climate. It’s a different world from when my grandfather was a migrant worker.

A million thanks to @eala-musings for betaing this piece for me, @567inpanem for the amazing prompt and to @everlarkficexchange for hosting this challenge!

Katniss worked quickly at the conveyor belt, hands flying over the apples. She was one in a line of several workers stretching at intervals of two feet to either side of her, all separating fruit that would be packed and shipped to chain supermarkets from apples that would go to the factories for juicing and processing.

As far as part-time work, it wasn’t too bad. The pay was decent, though it was somewhat repetitive, even monotonous. She’d have made more money at the diner in the next town, but her family only had one car and it was easy to get a bus from Panem Community College to the Mellark’s Apple Orchards.

Before the semester had even started, her father had spoken to Mr. Mellark and gotten her this job for after her classes and on Saturdays during the apple harvest, so she couldn’t very well up and quit. They needed the money and she wasn’t about to make him look bad by not working hard.  Her scholarship wasn’t enough to cover all of her expenses to boot. So while her classmates from were up in lake country, enjoying the remaining warm days before the chill of autumn set firmly in, she was sorting and boxing fruit with the other migrant workers who’d made their way north to work this harvest.

She couldn’t remember her native country - her family had come to Panem - and District 12 - when she was only five years old. But she and her sister, Prim, had learned English and done all their schooling in their new country, and could speak both English and Spanish fluently.  Her mother was a citizen, having come to the US as a teenager, and spoke well but with an accent. But her father had had to learn English on his own, speaking well enough to be understood but it would never be perfect. Katniss was always pestering her father to go to the free Adult ESOL classes at the local library, but he always had one excuse or another for why he couldn’t go. However, the real reason was clear to everyone at home - he was afraid of getting caught by the ICE and being deported out of the country.

His fear had turned into paranoia with the election of Cornelius Snow, an open racist with a history of nationalist tendencies.  The political rhetoric had become more hateful, allowing people to express their less noble feelings in a way they never could before. He brought his hatred to bear on undocumented immigrants, leading to the passage of stricter anti-immigration laws and travel bans.  Soon, there were more round-ups and raids, putting the entire community on alert.

Mr. Everdeen did everything he could to shield his family from these realities, but he could not hide his fear from his oldest daughter, who watched him become more hesitant to go to public places. He followed the news obsessively to the point where Katniss often conspired with her mother and sister to distract him from what was happening in their country.

Katniss’s mind continued to spin as she worked, thoughts meandering as aimlessly as the apples that rolled unevenly down the chute. Her only interruption was when she glanced up from her work and caught sight of the owner’s youngest son, Peeta Mellark, watching her. He did that a lot lately, and she didn’t know exactly what to think of it. Her mother always said he was the best of the three Mellark boys, and possibly the best of the entire Mellark clan, including the father, who was himself well known for treating his workers well, and the mother, who did not.  Perhaps because Peeta, more than the other two boys, had practically grown up among the children of migrant workers, he had never been rough or abrupt with them the way the older boys and their mother could be.

Katniss nodded towards him, in response to which his eyes promptly flitted away, a slight pink rising above the collar of his shirt. He did that all the time too, which gave her a queasy feeling that was not altogether unpleasant. She pursed her lips together and shoved her braid roughly behind her shoulder as her arms moved quickly, her mind returning to her work as she made instant decisions about where each of the hard, sweet fruit would end up. She was down the line a bit so much of the fruit had already been culled, but still, she had to pay better attention to make sure nothing got by her.

The bell for second lunch rang and Katniss stepped gratefully away from the belt and washed her hands in the sink. She walked to the loading dock, which was now empty, leaving a yawning opening the height of a semi-truck container, granting her an expansive view of the property beyond. Row upon row of apple trees stretched like a bobbing ocean of green before her eyes, around which were interspersed workers with their wide-brimmed sun hats and enormous aprons bulging with fruit. It was soothing to wait there for her father to come in with the other field workers, after which they’d head off to the outdoor benches to have lunch together. On the days Katniss didn’t work, her father took his lunch and ate in the field, but when Katniss was there, he always came in and took his lunch with her so she wouldn’t be alone.

She was particularly hungry today and slipped her hand inside of her lunch bag, searching for one of the empanadas her mother had made them the night before. Wrapped in a colorful picnic napkin, it had lost the heat that had made them so tender, but Katniss relished the taste anyway.  She was so engrossed in her snack that she didn’t hear Peeta’s approach until he was right next to her.

“Hi,” he said, startling her.

“Oh, hi,” she said around with a mouth full of tasty ground beef and pastry.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were eating,” he said with a smirk.

She swallowed hard, wiping her mouth with the bright-colored napkin. “I…I’m not…I wasn’t eating,” she said, balling the paper and strangling it in her fist.

He pointed hesitantly at her chin. “Really? I think you have some of that thing you weren’t eating on your face,” he said, stifling a laugh.

Katniss rubbed her chin with the near-shredded napkin. How much more idiotic could she be? “Thanks,” she muttered.

Peeta let out a chuckle, the scowl on Katniss’s face likely keeping him from actually following through with a loud guffaw. He turned his gaze out to the field and she followed his line of sight. It was a gorgeous, fall day - hot but lacking the fierce bite of the summer sun.  He sighed loudly, shaking his head.

“Today would have been a great day to go up to Ash Lake,” he said.

Katniss raised her eyebrow in surprise. “I thought the exact same thing not five minutes ago.”

He smiled. “You want to go up there sometime…you know…with me?  Us?” he stammered rapidly.  “I mean a group. You know.  Some friends of mine. You and me?”

Katniss blushed, her stomach giving a sudden flip. He was the boss’s son. The Mellarks never really socialized with the workers, especially the undocumented ones like her father. She bit her lip, unable to form words. She realized she’d waited too long to answer when his face fell slowly, though he struggled to remain nonchalant.

She forced her mouth to move and answered, “I’m free tomorrow.”

His face lit up, and his eyes, which were an unreal color of blue, became luminous with excitement. “That’s great! I’ll pick you up and we’ll drive up together.”

Katniss nodded, feeling a current of warmth course through her body. She looked up at him as if really seeing him for the first time - his incredibly defined features covered in a down of blond hair, lashes that were so long and fair they disappeared in bright light. Solid and strong, she found she couldn’t take her eyes off of him - and realized she didn’t want to.

A commotion in the manager’s office caught both of their attention. She turned reluctantly away from him to listen as first a low murmuring discussion was followed by raised voices, which cut through the mechanized sounds of the conveyor belts.

“Something’s happening in Dad’s office,” Peeta muttered. He turned to her, worry marring his features. “Stay here. I’ll find out what’s going on.”

He raced down the steps and made his way quickly across the packing room. Katniss strained to look between the metal columns and undulating machinery to see what was the matter but she couldn’t. Finally, her curiosity got the best of her and she descended the stairs also, ready to sneak around the office and eavesdrop when Peeta appeared again, sprinting towards her.

“Federal agents,” he muttered. “ICE. It’s a raid. There’s nothing we can do for the packers and I can’t use the radio. You have to stop the pickers from coming in off the fields.”

“Papá,” Katniss said, feeling the color drain from her face.

“I know. Your father and the other men could get caught. Go! Tell them to hide in the old warehouse. They won’t bother to go out there. I’ll stall them but there’s about a dozen of them and they’re getting ready to move through the main orchard.”

She nodded frantically, taking off with as much speed as she could muster. She ducked between the large trees, branches heavy with their sweet fruit. Just a short distance away, she could already see the men chattering between them, some wiping their foreheads, all of them walking into a trap.

Sleek black cars were making their way up the path that led to the orchards, prompting Katniss to pick up speed. She waved her arms, at the same time trying desperately not to shout or draw attention to the men for fear of giving them away to the agents now swarming the fields, herding in other workers. Her father, who walked a little ways back behind the foreman, froze, staring at Katniss as she nearly collided with him.

“La immigración. Nos tenemos que ir, Papá. If they catch you…”

He nodded, passing the word to the other workers who were in his condition. She tugged at his arm when he tried to move back the way the men had come.

“No, this way. Peeta said we should go to the old warehouse.”

“Peeta?” he said in surprise.  

“Yes! He’s trying to help but we have to move. Now!” she insisted as she pulled her father away.

The crew of men veered away from the processing building, sneaking quietly among the older, gnarled trees along the edge of a narrow dirt road. They walked for what seemed like an interminable amount of time until they reached a decrepit building that had once been the imposing structure of the original plant. The roof was half-caved in and Katniss heard the scurrying of mice and other creatures within. Her skin crawled at the idea of their proximity to her, but she pushed forward, helping her father over the threshold, though he was a strong man and could still pick Katniss up with one hand.  

Crouched down, they waited, listening to each sound with suspicion. Their alertness became exhausting as the afternoon wore on.

One of the men, Thom, spoke in a hushed whisper. “Why don’t we take the small dirt road that goes west, until we get to the next orchard?  I don’t like just sitting here.”

“I live too far away,” responded Mr. Hawthorne, an old friend of her father’s. “Plus they might be expecting some of us to try to leave that way and could be waiting for us.”  He was one of many workers dependent on the company bus to bring them to the fields each morning.

“Peeta said we’d be safe here. Let’s just stay put,” Katniss said. Her father nodded in agreement.

She leaned against her father’s shoulder, absorbing the familiar smell of sweat and fruit on his clothing. It had gotten so bad the last few months, even before Snow’s election, with agents appearing at the doors of people’s homes, posing as police officers and taking whomever was inside. Men and women forced to return to a country which, in many cases, they no longer had any connections. Mothers and fathers deported and forbidden to return for 15 years, young children left to wonder why their parents were no longer with them.

She felt a sickening knot tighten in her stomach at the thought of her father being sent away for so long. She and her sister were both citizens. Her mother had a green card. But the process for her father had gotten more and more complicated with the passing years. Contrary to popular opinion, it was very difficult for an undocumented worker already in the country to get a green card without being forced to leave the country first. And Katniss’s father had been unwilling to leave his family under any circumstances. She would never be able to thank Peeta enough for protecting them the best way he could.

By mid-afternoon, they were dozing off, having eaten the lunches they’d brought with them, sharing with those who had nothing to eat. A rustling sound in the overgrown grasses beyond the building caused Mr. Everdeen to straighten in alarm but Katniss was already on her feet, creeping quietly to look out of the glassless windows. She perked up when she saw the blond hair, medium build and loping gait that was so very Peeta and stepped out of the building to meet him. He smiled when he saw her but his face was drawn and tired.

“They’re gone,” he said.

She turned and signaled for the men to come out of hiding.

“Thank you,” Mr. Everdeen said, shaking Peeta’s hand vigorously. Peeta nodded, greeting everyone, accepting their gratitude. They made their way back to the plant, but Peeta slowed his pace until he was next to Katniss.

“They took away at least fifty workers,” he whispered. “ Besides the fine, which dad doesn’t care about, they went through the employment records.” He shook his head, looking anywhere but at her. “Katniss, we have to let go of so many people.”

“But why?” she asked, making sure no one, not even her father, heard her.

“It’s called a ‘silent raid,’” he said with a mixture of disdain and anger. “If they don’t catch you during an actual raid, they get into employment records and force employers to fire any suspicious employees.”  Peeta looked around at the men, exhausted from the work and stress, as they lumbered through the trees and it became clear to Katniss that he was furious. “They are trying to make it impossible for those without papers to work. Meanwhile, employers can’t get enough workers because the ‘good citizens of Panem’ who whine and cry about their jobs being taken away would never actually lower themselves enough to go out in these fields and break their back to pick fruit.”

Katniss put a hand on his arm.  “What’s going to happen now?”

Peeta shrugged, then stopped to face her. “I don’t know. You’ll be okay. But your father…”

She froze, staring up into his anguished eyes. “You let my father go?”

Peeta frowned. “We had to.”

The knot of dread in Katniss’s stomach became so unbearable, she thought she might become ill.  

“I’m so sorry,“ he said, his eyes now unbearably sad.  

“I know you are,” she answered, backing away slowly. She turned and ran towards her father, hoping she wouldn’t do something stupid like cry in front of him.

XXXXX

Mrs. Everdeen took the news of her husband’s dismissal better than Katniss did. They’d saved a small emergency fund. Katniss thought she could pick up more hours at the packing plant and there was still her mother’s income as a cashier in the local drug store.  But it meant that Mr. Everdeen would have to travel to another district, to find seasonal work. He’d be gone for months at a time again.  The Everdeens didn’t do well with extended separations, but if Mr. Everdeen didn’t find work migrant somewhere else, the whole family might have to move again, which would put both Prim and Katniss in a predicament with their school.

“I don’t see any other choice but for me to stay in District 11 for a while,” Mr. Everdeen said after dinner that night. He helped Katniss wash the dishes while Prim dried and put them away. Mrs. Everdeen sat at the table, sipping her tea, resting after having prepared dinner.

“Isn’t there somewhere closer to us than District 11? It’s seems so far away,” Katniss complained.

Her father shook his head as he ran water over the soapy plates. “They say that District 11 is a Sanctuary District. It’ll be safe for me to work there. And eventually, I’ll bring all of you to be with me, too.”

“It’s not fair!” Katniss exclaimed. “Maybe I can transfer to a school there…”

“No,” her father said firmly. “Your scholarship is for PCC. For me, the most important thing right now is that you finish college. I won’t move you until you graduate.”

“But that’s two more years!” Prim interjected.

“I know, mijita,” he said gently, resting his damp hand on her head. “But we all have to make sacrifices. I’ll only go away for the season and then come back home. The time will fly.”

A knock at the front door forced a heavy silence on everyone.  Katniss made her way down the narrow corridor and peered into the peek hole in the door. She let out an audible gasp as she fumbled with the lock and opened the door.

“Peeta!” she said almost breathlessly, stepping aside to allow him to enter.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. Mr. Everdeen gave him a vigorous handshake and asked him to take a seat.

“You’re always welcome,” Mrs. Everdeen said. “We’ll never be able to thank you enough for helping Katniss and her father.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” he said, though he flushed with pride at her words. He glanced at Katniss, who could not stop staring at him, and let his eyes drop when they made contact with hers.

“I’ll prepare some tea,” Mrs. Everdeen continued.

“No, don’t worry —” Peeta said but she was already half-way to the kitchen, the sound of water running as she filled the tea kettle. Mr. Everdeen chatted amiably with Peeta until she returned with steaming cups of fragrant tea and cookies. Peeta dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a card.

“It’s been a really tough day,” he began, clearing his throat before he spoke again. “We were, I mean, my family, we were so sorry to have to let so many workers go. There were so many people who’d been with us for years. Here,” he handed the card to Mr. Everdeen. “We’ve been trying to reach out to other growers. There’s a foreman’s position, just north of the border in District 7. It’s a longer commute each day and it’s lumber, not apples but it’s a smaller operation, and they haven’t had a lot of interference from the ICE.”

“You found Papá a job?” Katniss asked, dumbfounded.

“Well, I mean, it’s his if he wants it. My father talked to the owner already. You know, these actions don’t help the business owners, either. And it’s not right to attack people who are just trying to make a living.”

Mrs. Everdeen looked from her husband to Peeta before bursting into a silent fit of tears. “This means you won’t have to leave.”

Mr. Everdeen shook his head. “How does this really help me? Just because the ICE haven’t been there doesn’t mean they won’t show up —”

“Yes, but District 8 is moving towards becoming a Sanctuary District also. The leadership has promised that they will not assist the ICE in harassing workers.” Peeta looked Mr. Everdeen in the eye. “You’ll be safe.”

Katniss’s father bowed his head, rubbing his eyes as discreetly as he could. “Thank you,” he said, trying to keep himself composed. Prim threw her arms around him while Katniss stood behind him, patting his head.

“You don’t know what this means to us,” Katniss said quietly.

Peeta shrugged, clearly embarrassed by the attention. “It’s the least we could do.”

When he’d emptied his tea cup, Peeta took his leave, to the accompaniment of tearful hugs and thanks. Katniss followed him out the house and onto the porch. When she shut the door behind her, she stood before Peeta uneasily, trying again to make her treacherous mouth work.

“If… you hadn’t…hadn’t done what you did…my father would have had to leave…and we would have had to leave eventually.”

“I know,” he said. “It wasn’t without…self-interest,” he said, shoving his hands deeply into the pocket of his jeans.

Katniss gave him a small smile. They stood in another long, awkward silence, during which time they both found the wood planks of the porch to be of riveting interest. Finally, Peeta made to speak again, but Katniss found herself in motion, stepping forward and stopping his speech with her lips. She couldn’t even describe how her lips had ended up on his but almost without conscious volition, her arms were curled around his neck, pulling him down to her. She felt the slow winding of his arms around her waist, pressing her against him, first gently, then with more fervor.  Katniss felt herself getting lost in a violent wave of heat that didn’t end when he pulled back to stare at her.

“Are you sure?” he croaked out, his voice heavy with feeling.

“Am I sure about what?” she asked, trying not to stare at his plump lips, or think about how soft and warm they felt against hers.

“About…kissing me. Don’t feel like you have to. I would have helped you anyway.”

Katniss lips twitched in amusement before tugging him back towards her. “That just makes me want to kiss you even more.”

[revlyncox]

Our Young Nation

This sermon was prepared for the UU Congregation of York, July 2, 2017, by Rev. Lyn Cox.

The soundtrack to the Broadway show, Hamilton, has given me a new way to embrace my country and, by extension, Independence Day. I love America, I am glad to be American and I am staying put. The love I have for my country is so strong that it demands honesty, and I think there are honest truths in song and story that are worth hearing. Today’s offertory, “Dear Theodosia,” is from Hamilton. In the song, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton sing to their newborn children.

You will come of age with our young nation

We’ll bleed and fight for you. We’ll make it right for you.

If we lay a strong enough foundation

We’ll pass it on to you.

We’ll give the world to you And you’ll blow us all away

Someday, someday.

 In Hamilton, the roots of America are brought to life through a multiracial cast. The presence of diverse speakers and singers reminds us that people who have non-Western European ancestors have been here as long or longer than people whose entire claimed ancestry comes by way of Western Europe. The exploited labor, stolen land, and unattributed genius of People of Color and Indigenous people is soaked into the walls of the most cherished shrines of our country. Our country was built by people whose descendants are at risk in this climate of racism and xenophobia. History is more complex than some of us have been led to believe, and it is a history that we all share.

There’s a line in the play just before the Battle of Yorktown, where Lafayette, born in France, and Hamilton, born in the British West Indies, observe, “Immigrants. We get the job done.”

I’m told that the line never fails to bring wild applause from audiences. It has become the title for a coalition of immigration justice organizations for which Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda is helping to raise money and awareness. 

The line, “Immigrants, we get the job done,” reminds us that some of the best things about the United States are contributed by its newest residents. Suspicion, harassment, and discrimination against immigrants does not become us, nor does help our country succeed. In particular, people of faith remember that it is a spiritual and moral imperative to welcome the stranger.

The premise of the show echoes Langston Hughes’ point that America has never fulfilled the fullness of its promise to African Americans, Native Americans, the poor, and the oppressed; and yet we have an opportunity to embrace what America can be, which is liberation for all of us. The idea of America is exciting, and we have had the chance to achieve great things in this ongoing experiment. Yet we also have to acknowledge that neither the work nor the reward of building this country have been distributed equitably.

I am grateful that the values I believe to be at the core of our shared national identity lend themselves to change and growth. I see courage every day among Americans of every generation. It is this courage that will give us the strength to face the mistakes of the past, the structural oppression we live with today, and the repairs necessary to bring us closer to the American dream of liberty and justice for all.

Within the narrative of the show, Burr and Hamilton say they are starting a new nation. They see themselves as starting fresh. Yet we are always building on the past. There are errors that we are compounding or reacting against, there are elements of progress that we are trying to advance further, there is a culture that we enter into that is open to reshaping, yet in no case is there ever a blank slate. The good news is that each moment in the story of a government or a people or a community is a new moment. It’s not a moment divorced from the past, but a chance to take what we have been given and to come into closer alignment with our deepest values. We are always a young nation.

Another thought that makes the song, “Dear Theodosia,” so poignant is that these two men, who disagree on a great deal, both want to leave behind something that will allow their children to flourish. They both want so much to give the world to their children.

I think this is the common ground for many people who put their hearts and souls and minds and bodies into activism or government or service to this country. Whether we are parents or not, there are people we care about coming up behind us, and we want to make room for them to live to their fullest potential, to be part of something larger than themselves that they can be proud of.

For me, knowing that younger people need us to expand liberation and equality as much as possible prevents me from exercising the privilege of willful ignorance. I can’t ignore how much there is left to do, I can’t retreat into my own fortress, I do not want to sleep through the revolution, because the next generation is counting on me. I pledge to stay present to the struggles of our young nation.

When we’re in a reasonable-people-can-disagree kind of discussion about what’s best for our country, coming back to the question of what we want for the next generation and why might be the thing that keeps us at the table. That’s not possible in disagreements where one or more sides fails to acknowledge the human rights or worth or dignity of one or more of the other sides, but if you’re in a place of mutual respect and dialogue, it’s worth a try. What is it that you want to pass along to the next generation? Who do you love that motivates you to help this country become the best it can be?

On the other hand, this question can reveal where we are holding on to “us vs. them” thinking. Who are we including in the next generation we want to pass the best possible legacy on to? Who are “our” kids? My personal answer certainly includes my own children, but it doesn’t stop there. I’ve told the story before of visiting the U.S. Capitol building with Dreamers, young immigrant students who are undocumented and unafraid. Hearing them sing the national anthem brought home to me viscerally that the Dreamers are our kids. They are in our churches and our classrooms and our scout troops.

When we are strategizing for our collective liberation, we need to be especially attentive to those who are not valued in society at large. Let’s lay a strong foundation and pass it on to immigrant children, whether they are documented or not. Let’s make the world safe and sound for Black children, whose lives matter. Let’s do whatever it takes to welcome and include young people with disabilities. Let’s give the world to all of our children, making sure every child has security of food and housing and education. Let’s swear to be around for the kids who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, agender, asexual, gender fabulous, and every variety of queer and questioning. All of these are our kids. These are our family and neighbors and students and loved ones. We see you. We value you. We celebrate you. I’m dedicating every day to you. We’ll bleed and fight for you.

This is the America I love and the America that I want to grow in strength and purpose. The young people who are “our kids,” this diverse and creative and powerful young generation, they are losing patience with built-in societal obstacles to their full thriving. Our young nation is ready for change. The American promise says that we can do better. I believe we will do better, and we will get there more completely when we lift up the voices and leadership of those who are most impacted by structural oppression. As Langston Hughes wrote:

Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

We need each other. Every kind of liberation is bound up with every other kind of liberation. We have said and sung and taught for over two hundred years that we want America to be the land of the free. This is a worthy goal. Listening to the people who are most affected by the not-yet part of the dream will help us get to the place where everyone is free. We cannot get there except together.

There will be mistakes. We will mess up. As a Universalist, truly I say to you that making a mistake does not mean that you are a mistake. I believe that we are all beloved of the Divine, and that humanity will find reunion and harmony with the Eternal and each other in the fullness of time. It is that unconditional love that frees us to admit when we have missed the mark and allows us to choose a different direction.

When we perpetuate the myth that America is already perfect, or that it was perfect once and we have to turn back the clock to a more homogenous and cruel time to restore that perfection, we disrespect one of the greatest fundamental values of our country, which is that we can grow and change. A process of amendment was built into the constitution. Participation of citizens in the regular transfer of power is integral to the concept of democracy. Learning and adapting are treasured elements in our national DNA.

Another myth, one that we are sometimes entranced by even here, is that all of history is a continual and inevitable march toward progress. We act as if victories are permanent, and tell the story of our nation as a straight line, onward and upward forever. Yet we know that there are setbacks. I don’t have to tell the civil rights workers of the fifties, or the peace activists of the sixties, or the women’s liberationists of the seventies, or the anti-nuclear marchers of the eighties that sometimes you move forward and sometimes you find your movement fighting the same battles over again. I say this so that we remember not to dwell in discouragement. Carla Christopher was here last week, sharing some spiritual practices for maintaining joy when a world of liberation, health, and safety for everyone seems far away. I urge you to listen to it on our website if you missed it.

We’ll need those spiritual practices. There is room for joy, even knowing pursuing the dream of what America can be will involve challenges. I’m going to borrow a few more words from another song in Hamilton, “History Has Its Eyes on You.” The song is a speech from General Washington to Alexander Hamilton. Here’s the second verse:

Let me tell you what I wish I’d known

When I was young and dreamed of glory

You have no control

Who lives who dies who tells your story

I know that we can win

I know greatness lies in you

Just remember from here on in

History has its eyes on you

 People live and people die as we try our best to become the America that can be. Even our youngest activists have lost people. We all have. People I have marched with and strategized with have gone on to be part of the cloud of witnesses too soon. Some of them didn’t have access to the care they needed, or the daily stress of oppression was too much for their heart, or violence cut them down, or the demons that told them they were not welcome in this world finally got to them. The love I have for these ancestors fuels my energy for making this world better just as much as the love I have for the generations to come. I want to honor the work they have done, and I don’t want others to suffer in the way they did.

 There will be losses and setbacks, but that does not mean all is lost. You have no control what happens to your story, but you do have some influence when you tell your story for yourself, when you write and draw and paint and drop verses and quilt your truth for others to see. Honoring the generations from the past and living your story to the fullest will help keep the flame alive during losses and setbacks. I know greatness lies in you.

 Let us be unafraid of our mistakes and our imperfections and the enormity of the task before us. Let us hold on to the vision of what we can be together, even when there are setbacks. We will fail, and we will try again, and we will get there together. Let us be moved by love for all of our children to lay a strong foundation, and upright and true foundation to support a house of abundance and hope and joy. Let us celebrate the idea of America, one that leads us onward to the day when we may fulfill our dream of liberty and justice for all.

So be it. Blessed be. Amen.

[deactivatedashe-s]

My List of Stories

Secret: zero: 

Anthony Slaughter has been living alone on the side of a cliff he carved out, completely self-sufficient, for the past ten years. Before he knows it, he’s chasing a thief into an electric trap and is waking up to the world he never had the chance to learn from. The leader of the guild he fell into looks like someone from the past… No, he is that person. He needs to get out of here before they discover his secret.

Litheliun: 

This is why he didn’t want to travel past Earaat. Ziren and Riden have been travelling the continent together for a good portion of their life. All it takes is some poor management of a ship and suddenly Ziren is running across the world in order to reunite with the person who holds his greatest secret. Along the way, he runs into those who barely even seem to connect with his goal. Unfortunately, they all carry bits and pieces of a history that had been lost in time, a history that may relate to his grey-eyed partner a little too much.

Eternal: 

The sequel to Litheliun. Nearly 600 years after Ziren and Riden disappeared, life continues on. The people they left behind live their lives. However, they never did fully finish what they started. Leia returns to the scene larger and more powerful than ever. Phiran and the daughter of the queen regent, Melody, are forced to leave behind the invaded Capital of Oshiean and seek out the help of the Spirit Catalysts. Along the way, Phiran unearths facts about himself and others that were buried in time. Guilt, grief, and chaos reveal themselves in spades as they all wonder how it came to this. 

Millennium War: 

The prequel to Litheliun. Tens of thousands of years prior to the course of events that make up Era of Realisation is the true history behind the one known as Riden Olivyon. It all starts with the era known as the Millennium War. Reidoux Youthly lives a life of tragedy. Her life begins a secret. Too shortly into it, she’s already lost most of it. Emotions are detached and revenge consumes her. She’s destined to fail but not before she places a curse on the world that cursed her very existence by name.

Short Stories: 

This is literally just random instances in the lives of the Litheliun crew during, before, between, and after the events. It consists of a poetic summary of Reidoux’s PoV from beginning to end, the events leading up to Liluna and Chiron’s marriage, TJ and Diamante’s own love life, Ziren’s narration between Litheliun and Eternal, and more. 

re:Meetings: 

Day’s past is a mystery. He is an aberration. He leaves a vague impression of recognition on many of the people he comes across yet none actually can place it. His only clue is a small, irremovable band around his left wrist with a circular charm. When the independent group that had taken him in, Evani, is blackmailed into taking part in another war after their empire had fallen from the last one six years ago, Day decides to assist them in a plan to escape. Unfortunately, that entails befriending the king of the country that reduced them to a small village… Where is this melody coming from?

Meetings: 

The prequel to re:Meetings��(ironically). Amale has been trying to protect itself from the Evanence Empire’s attempt at imperializing the peninsula for the past decade. On one side of the war, a young prince and his retainer fight for their country against all odds. On the other side, a noble lady sneaks her way into the army to assist her fiance. Somewhere in between, a boy assassin falls in love with an unfortunate bystander. None of them know that fate plans to tear them all apart.

Lock and Key: 

It was World War IV in 2107. It lasted for only seven days, but it was enough to send the world into watery apocalypse. The human population went from a striking 9.7 billion to just 2.3 billion. Magic. That was the cause. No one knows how it was discovered or why they just suddenly knew it. However, there’s a journal floating along the water that explains it all. It’s locked, but the search for the key has begun. Avery James knows more than anyone else on this watery abyss of a godforsaken planet. She’s determined to return the books to the hands of its rightful owner. 

Valentia: 

Riddle was a rescued slave that caters to the royal family. After years of being trapped in the dark, he finally has some semblance of a normal life. After being framed for a crime he didn’t commit and pinned to a wanted criminal with the ironic name of Rhyme, suddenly he wonders why he ever wanted a normal life. This is fun! While running across the dimensions, he meets invaluable friends and discovers secrets about himself and his past. Yet, he can’t shake the illogical phrase Rhyme whispered to him when they first met. “You’re a valiant knight, aren’t you?” Riddle didn’t even do anything when they met. 

Fantys Aurea: Academy: 

Skylar Davit is a villain. That’s a fact that will never change. It may have been pure chance that his school burnt down but transferring to the greatest hero academy in the country with his cousin and partner-in-crime was a decision that he doesn’t regret. His roommate may be a clusterfunk of saturated primary colours and white that suffers from casual existential despair and hyperactivity and his cousin might be insinuating something he doesn’t really get but he’s not planning on leaving… After all, too many of students and faculty here in Phantom Rhea Academy are too suspiciously related to what made him become the villain he is. 

Game of Chase: 

A spin-off of Fantys Aurea. The heist was supposed to be fun. Curse the spirits, Alice’s cold just had to destabilise her power, huh? Skylar and Sora somehow end up dimension hopping after an artefact of unimaginable power. Skylar just wants to go home already and take a break from Sora’s unending pining. Why should he care if some random dimension blows itself up? It’s not like they’re the one dimension hopping. Why does Sora need to have a hero-complex?!

Fantys Aurea: University:

A collection of short stories that occur after the events of Game of Chase and FA:Academy when Skylar decides to attend college as a Psychology Major. The others are self-sufficient or making their wages already. At least he's not alone... If only the personified definition of cheery despair would pay attention to him!

Godly Affairs: 

Meth is a god. That is a fact of the universe. What kind of god is he? Well, that’s the mystery. His mind is a blur, a jumble of colours like the empty pocket universe he’d been trapped in for aeons. He vaguely remembers the sound of playful laughter and the impression of metal working. Finally freed from his prison, he resides in the Aurea Pantheon’s other-world until he can assist him like the weapon of mass-destruction they believed he was before they discovered his amnesia. He wants to discover who he is but his only lead is the arcane god who resides in the Mirrored Forest.

Caelus: 

Caila’s country was falling apart from a civil war. Her servants had forced her to hide and before she knows it, she’s falling through space and time. Alex, Alice, Anthea, and Aias live in the heart of the Forbidden Forest, hidden. They’ve lived for centuries after having left their mark as the Heroes of Legend in the world of Caelus. They never expected visitors in the form of two escaped slaves, one a fae and the other a human from Earth?! All of them are speechless until Alice pipes in. “Welcome to Caelus, the world of stories, my Princess.” Now, their goal is to return Caila to Earth before it’s too late.

Ever After: 

The spin-off shorts of Caelus. Like the Litheliun Short Stories, these are narratives of the lives of the Caelus crew any point in their lives undocumented in the main story. It follows their lives before the prodigy twins created the interdimensional portal that drops Earth humans into Caelus and changed the destinies of everyone involved. It also narrates their lives afterwards.

Dragons: 

The first part occurs in their youth. A group of youths had ventured into the forbidden caves and soon found themselves whisked through the sky and surrounded by the dragons who live there. Out of the many children, only three found the courage to live amongst the dragons while the others dug deeper and created a civilisation for themselves within. The second part deals with the lives of those three children after discovering they had been brought to the future and that their dragons had returned to the past. They willing restart their lives, separated… Good thing dragons have a tendency to be immortal.

Falling in Wonder:

In a particular city forgotten by the outside world, there is a trio of heroes against outside forces, a trio known as Wonderland. What happens when a stranger from the outside shows up and begins to disrupt the daily lives of the citizens in Memory Coast? This person is different. He is different. He will begin something new.

Most of these stories are not available online. However, you can find the unfinished, original (and very cringe-worthy) drafts of Secret:zero, Litheliun: Short Stories, re:Meetings, Valentia (then named Never Give In), Secrets Behind Lock and Key (rewrite and original), Caelus, and Falling in Wonder on my Wattpad account here! The original draft of Litheliun is complete and currently in the process of being rewritten. If you’d like to read the first eleven chapters of the original draft, you can look through the early stages posts of @ahotcupoftea for those. For the entire draft, please message me. Actually, if you’d like to read any of the unpublished drafts for all or any of the stories I have, please message me and I wouldn’t mind sharing or posting them!

P.S. Secret:zero, like Lock and Key, is a rewrite of the story I titled Secret but with a different execution and narration. That one can be found on a much older and much more cringe-worth account from my middle school years. Secret has a similar plot line to Zero but the original took place in a werewolf universe under the PoV of Lucas (the leader) while Zero takes place in a fantasy-guild-esquire universe in the PoV of Anthony (the betrayer). Lock and Key (rewrite) can be considered the sequel to the original. The original has a set-up like a journal and is quite literally the journal that Avery looks for in the rewrite. However, the original sequel was meant to take the PoV of the author of the journals.

[gringochamo]

A Glitch in the system

Have you ever gone to a new school, a new job, or a new city and just thought you didn't belong? I think we all get that feeling sometimes in our lives, some more than others. Story time! I am 22 years old, born in Venezuela, raised in Miami,USA. As a matter a fact I've lived in the US for 21 years, I only left Venezuela at a few months old. So in my heart I always felt American, after all my whole education is based on the American system, my first language was primarily English, and yet I, after all these years of living there, am still not a citizen or even a permanent resident. I am an undocumented resident, and because I am Venezuelan-born I could not easily become a resident. If I were for example Cuban, I would've been granted residency very easily (no offense to all Cubans though, I love y'all and your cafecitos). And so growing up, especially in recent years where the words "undocumented immigrant" are seen as some bad word,it affected me. Certain politicians saying that I, "steal jobs" and "take away American culture" and much much worse, really had an affect on me. Almost like I wasn't American enough, despite me knowing only the American way. Heck, I can't even speak Spanish very well. It was extremely hurtful. And if I ever wanted to become an American, I had to go back to Venezuela and come back with documents so I could get my green card I was already in process of getting. All due to circumstances that are entirely not my fault because I wasn't old enough to wipe the drool off my chin when I got to America. Of course, upon arrival of Venezuela opened me up to a whole new world of complications and pain. Instantly I was being judged that I wasn't Venezuelan enough. I was too "gringo". Too American. "You can't be Venezuelan if you can't speak Spanish." A trip to Venezuela that was originally planned for 2 weeks, has gone on for almost 5 months, and counting. I couldn't leave because not only of a cruel, corrupt and unjust government not willing to help me; but also because I'm just not Venezuelan enough. Lightheartedly family would joke around "haha you're not Venezuelan or American, you don't even exist, you're not a person." Although they meant no harm, behind the smile I showed them I was in deep pain. The constant thoughts came in, "I shouldn't even exist", "I'm just a bother to everyone", "I don't belong anywhere", "I have no home". That last one was the one that haunted me for a long time. It was a feeling I couldn't shake. It took a long while, but I was talking to my girlfriend and I was saying how I don't exist to Venezuela or to America, and then she said "Chris, you exist to me." It was then I realized, it doesn't matter what two flawed governments say, home truly is where the heart is. As I foolishly thought that I didn't belong anywhere, in the hearts of my friends, family, and anyone else I've gotten close to in Miami, Venezuela, any where else I am home to them as they are to me. The people that love you never leave you because they are in your heart and you are in their's. It doesn't matter if they're next to you or thousands of miles away, you always have a home. Don't ever feel like you don't belong anywhere, because whether you realize it or not, you belong in the hearts of people that have and will love you all your life. God blessed us with the people in our life and with His presence so against all odds we are never truly alone. I'm still fighting this round of my life to get back to my physical home in Miami, but I know now that no matter where I am, no matter my circumstances, I know where I belong.

[project1461-blog]

The illusion of freedom

Saturday, on my morning walk with my dog, I see my neighbor’s gardener, and his son, Gustavo, who comes help his father, on weekends. He gives my dog a biscuit, and loves the kisses he gets in return. This has become our Saturday ritual. And I always ask Gustavo if he’s had a good week in school. Whenever I’ve seen Gustavo he has been all smiles. I learn that he loves baseball, and math and Pokémon. He’s no different than my grandson, who is also eight. But this last Saturday Gustavo was not smiling.  He nodded hello and went back to raking, no cookies for my dog. I ask his father if everything is ok and I learn that ICE picked up a family member, and they are very worried. I can see it in Gustavo’s face. He is worried. 

It’s not safe out there. There are knocks on the front door, people are being pulled over because they fit a profile, plain-clothes officers, from ICE, are snooping around workplaces. It’s stressful to drive, and you worry if you will be pulled over for something you didn’t do. Even though the law says that you are not required to show your papers, you’re worried the police will ask. And it’s up to the cops to decide if they are going to turn suspects over to ICE.   

This kind of persecution is happening all across America. And Gustavo has every right to worry about who he talks to. This proud young man no longer knows who to trust. What happens when those who are apart of our everyday life, the familiar faces we have come to know and care about, start to disappear?

The mood is unsettling. People are whispering about where to hide.

I didn’t expect this widespread fear in Los Angeles. I thought we are a sanctuary city? But what does that mean?

Enrique Marones, director of the Angel Border project, explains that sanctuary cities are nothing new. We in LA have been a sanctuary city since the Reagan administration. Being a sanctuary city is misleading. The city does not have the authority over the federal government but can object to providing their law enforcement to assist ICE. Enrique underscores that everyone who is arrested and detained is entitled to a trial before they are deported. Those arrested are given two choices: sign a paper that says they will not re-enter the United States and they will be brought back to the country of their origin (which usually means they drive you to the Mexican border). Or if you ask for a trial that will mean a long wait in detention, often six months to a year, or longer. Immigration courts are beyond backed up. Trump’s machine has a business opportunity here because they will be contracting with private prisons, demanding a big increase in the need for detention centers.

LA Mayor Kevin Garcetti is opposed to asking his police force to work on behalf of immigration and customs enforcement. He does not endorse the practice of rounding up undocumented, law-abiding citizens. Since Trump signed his executive order Garcetti has gone out of his way to temper the fears of the Latino community. He holds meetings at high schools, and offers ways that his office can help families, who are victims of the recent and ongoing, round up. He can’t stop the detentions and the subsequent deportations. But his office has told me that they are providing information on how to procure legal aid and also how to help children who come home to an empty house, if their parents are taken.

Mayor Greg Stanton of Phoenix is in a tough spot. Phoenix cannot be a sanctuary city because of SB 1070, the controversial law that was passed in 2010. It was partially repealed in 2016, but a portion of the law is still on the books. But Mayor Stanton refuses to uphold the 289 (g) portion of SB 1070, and will not allow his police force to work tandem with ICE enforcement. Mayor Stanton is proud of his diverse city and is seeking multiple ways to offer help to the Latino community.

After days of speaking to immigration lawyers and human rights advocates on the struggles of undocumented immigrants, all agree that there is a humane problem regarding the back log of cases in immigration courts across the country. There is a shortage of judges. Until President Trump and his Justice Department, and Attorney General Sessions, can truly grasp the necessity of hiring new judges, the problem is only going to get worse, especially given the increase in new arrests.

We all may be familiar with the case of Sara Beltran Hernandez, 26 who has been in detention since November of 2015. Last January Sara asked for asylum to escape violence in El Salvador. Sara has been in detention waiting for her trial. She began complaining of headaches a few months ago. Then suddenly she got dizzy and passed out. She has a brain tumor. Sara almost died before she was brought to the hospital. Once the condition was ‘considered’ under control, immigration officials brought Sara back to detention, refusing to allow her to go stay with her family in New York to get treatment for the tumor.

Amnesty International released this statement:

"We are asking for immediate humanitarian parole. We can’t wait for a bond redetermination hearing. She doesn’t have days, she has hours ... we need her to get out,” Zuniga said. “This is the 13th day she has not had this surgery, and we do not understand why. People like Sara who are seeking asylum for horrific violence should not be treated like criminals while their cases are processed. We must do everything we can to ensure protection for people who are fleeing violence."

Story after story is coming out, like that of Jeanette Vizguerra, a mother of four who is now living her life in the sanctuary of a church basement in Denver to avoid deportation.

Daniel Ramirez Medina, 23-year-old a DACA recipient, had twice been granted deferred action and employment authorization under the DACA program. ICE picked him up on a charge of being in a gang. ICE has no standard by which to prove Daniel’s affiliation to a gang but just mentioning a possible gang affiliation will not bode for him in court. Daniel has a three-year-old son.

"Undocumented immigrants who wind up in removal proceedings are not entitled to a court-appointed attorney, the standard rules of evidence do not apply, (and) hearsay can come in."  -- Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School

Josue Romero Valasquez’s case stands out because he is like a lot of average American teenagers. He hangs out with his friends, at the skate park. He is a good student. He got a scholarship to art school, and is considered gifted. Josue wants to become an architect; he mentors younger kids to teach them art. Two weeks after Trump’s executive order, Josue, a DACA recipient, was stopped by San Antonio police. He was on his way home from the skate park. Was he stopped because of profiling? The cops searched him. The officers found a half of a joint in his pocket. He was arrested and turned over to ICE. Fortunately for Josue, the pro bono legal defense fund, RAICES, agreed to represent him. Jonathan Ryan is handling Josue’s defense. So far he has been lucky and continues to be protected under DACA. There is a misdemeanor B charge, for the small amount of marijuana. He is clearlyno threat to his community.

Josue’s case got the attention of the press. Most of those arrested, wont have the visibility of these early DACA cases. Although DACA has not been repealed, as yet, all of those in the program are frightened.  Every person who signed up for this protection gave immigration their personal information. They have reason to be worried.

Homeland Security has called for raising the number of immigrants ICE incarcerates daily, to 80,000 people. Mother Jones magazine recently interviewed ACLU attorney Carl Takei, who gave them this statement: “Last year, ICE detained more than 352,000 people. The number of detainees held each day, typically between 31,000 and 34,000, reached a historic high of about 41,000 people in the fall, as Customs and Border Protection apprehended more people on the southwest border while seeing a simultaneous rise in asylum seekers. But doubling the daily capacity to 80,000 would require ICE to sprint to add more capacity than the agency has ever added in its entire history. And we don't know if 80,000 is where he'll stop."

We are at the beginning of this. It will never be okay to let our guard down, and moreover not to put ourselves in the way of an injustice, to try and protect those who are at risk. We are witnessing a rounding up, in huge numbers, of hard working, decent human beings. This series of cases describes but a microscopic example of the harassment hundreds, even thousands, are experiencing every day now.

I was inspired by California State Senator Kevin de León when he recently said, "I can tell you half of my family would be eligible for deportation under the executive order, because if they got a false Social Security card, if they got a false identification, if they got a false driver’s license prior to us passing AB 60, if they got a false green card—and anyone who has family members, you know, who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification. That’s what you need to survive, to work.”

[artseanauti]

K-3 Visa Advocacy Letter

The Honorable Bernie Sanders United States Senator (D-VT) 332 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Sanders, Under the current administration, the number of pending immigration cases have sky-rocketed from 521,445 cases in fiscal year 2016 to a staggering 1,066,563 cases as of the first quarter of fiscal year 2020. The processing times for applications at USCIS are steadily increasing, and over the course of the last year, they’ve increased from a maximum of a 10-month wait to a minimum of 16.5 months at the Vermont processing center, even after a massive internal workload transfer. Let me be clear, these processing times only reflect the wait for the I-130, the first application of many in an extensive screening process, one which has some horrific reports of gross negligence resulting in families being separated for upwards of five years.

The K-3 visa was introduced in fiscal year 2000 in an effort to address a massive backlog of pending immigration petitions for spouses. The number of pending cases that effectuated the need for the K-3 visa was only 300,000 cases, and I say only when you compare that amount to the current quantum which exceeds one million cases, though both figures are appalling. And yet, this civil emergency has not been addressed by the current administration, nor has any presidential candidate made it a priority or has promised to offer families impacted by these infinite processing times any alternative solutions, nor have any shown an intent to do so. In fiscal year 2018, only six K-3 visas were issued out of 768,257 pending cases, which is a likelihood of 0.00078% chance of success, which is better than the 0.00056% chance that it is now given that the amount of pending cases is continuously increasing. Immigration experts now refer to the K-3 visa as obsolete, even though the need for them is more imminent now more than ever. Instead, USCIS will convert K-3 visa petitions to CR1/IR1s instead, if not deny K-3 petitions altogether, which requires a family to wait for USCIS to make a determination on their I-130 petition before being able to officially apply to come to the United States, thus making CR1/IR1 visas more-or-less obsolete and insubstantial in the contexts to which they apply.

What tends to happen with nearly all K-3 visa petitions, even when couples meet the eligibility requirements, the petitions are intentionally delayed in processing to give time for the I-130 to process, thus forcing families to be separated for the full duration of a prolonged, grueling application process without any resolve, and to live in a purgatory of distance and despair. Forced separation like this often results in financial hardship and even marital hardship. International travel is not a sustainable option for most families. Also, meeting the income eligibility requirements for spousal sponsorship is an added burden to these families, in addition to the astronomical costs of the green card application process and while having to maintain an entire household’s expenses off of a single income for the duration of the separation, at least in the majority of cases.

I married my husband on December 28th, 2018 in Bijeljina, Bosnia and Herzegovina. We spent the first full year of our marriage separated, minus a few days following our wedding before I had to return home to Florida. My husband was finally granted a B1/B2 visa to come visit me in the U.S. in December of 2019 as a tourist, which we are grateful for. Despite the blessing of being able to be together for even a short while, I’m bearing the weight of supporting us financially by myself. Sure, I break through the minimum income poverty threshold to sponsor him and to be able to support the two of us, but only by a few thousand dollars a year. Recently, when the COVID-19 stimulus package was dispersed, I only received $1,200 even though I am legally married and supporting my spouse. He isn’t a U.S. citizen or permanent resident at this time but make no mistake that my income supports him whether he is abroad or whether he is stateside as a “tourist.”

In addition to supporting my spouse and maintaining our household expenses, I’m a full-time college student who covers the overhead expenses of school and the cost of books out of pocket. I’m also a full-time healthcare worker who has been on the frontlines through the COVID-19 pandemic. Though my husband is not unemployed as a result of the pandemic, he is unemployed because as immigration laws will have it, he is ineligible to work in the U.S. The same anxiety and struggle that is being felt by so many American families with a spouse currently laid off of work is the same anxiety and struggle we shoulder on a good day without a pandemic. I’m a 4.0 student at a state university mounting on debt just as fast as I fork out my income to international travel costs and domestic expenses. I have a full scholarship and am still forced to take out federal student loans each semester to make up the deficit in our household income for my husband, otherwise I’d have to abandon my scholarly pursuits to work two plus jobs.

In Bosnia, workers average $300 per month and live in multi-generational households to manage the cost of living. That is not an option for me here, nor will my husband’s menial wages from his country, especially given the exchange rates, make even a small dent in our expenses, nor do they afford him the ability to live comfortably there before contributing to our household expenses here, let alone after. My husband has a bachelor’s degree in a practical field and still cannot earn more than $300 per month in his country. Most non-menial jobs require a year of unpaid internship before being hired, at which point due to their own broken system, workers are let go and other interns are hired in their place as to avoid having to compensate as many workers as possible. The first year we were together, I was faced with the decision to either make my car payment or to be able to afford a small trip to see him in Bosnia when we just couldn’t bear to be apart any longer. I have been there three times, each nearly bankrupting me. This month, April of 2020, we are going to submit a K-3 visa application despite the unlikely odds of it being approved because our situation isn’t sustainable.

If you’ve received this letter, it is not because you are personally accountable for this issue or even obligated to hear my grievance, but I chose you because at one point, on other civil matters, your voice reached me and inspired me to become an active citizen, an advocate for people. I have served my community as a healthcare worker, my country as a combat medic in the U.S. Army, and now I aim to serve others impacted by this civil emergency. It may not be an emergency that lands millions of people in the hospital or worse, but it is one which is frequently disregarded and worsening day-by-day. It hurts to say the least. Sometimes I feel like there’s no one out there advocating for me or others like me. I have a feeling as though I became a pariah the day I petitioned for my husband, assumed by my own government to be none other than an imposter or scam artist. The treatment of families by USCIS is indicative of that as well. I have never encountered crasser treatment in my life, and I was in the armed forces, so that should be very telling.

Senator Sanders, all I ask of you is to help me spread awareness and get people talking about this. You have a powerful voice that resonates through and empowers others, and you play an integral role in progressive politics in our country. America needs immigration reform because we have a broken, oppressive system. The K-3 visa, if no other action taken, should at least be reinstated to its full capacity as it was in fiscal year 2000. Families like mine are imminently suffering, and all I ask of you is to help me make this a public, nonpartisan topic of discourse. Our elected leaders are dedicating more time to processing deportations and witch-hunting undocumented immigrants than they are on processing immigration applications for those who are playing by the rules – us.

Warmest Regards,

Adriana L. Richard Public Administration Student University of Maine at Augusta

[garancefranke-ruta]

Too close for comfort: How social media changed how we talk to (and about) each other in America

Illustration by Yahoo News; source images: Getty Images, Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News

WASHINGTON — “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore,” Donald J. Trump thundered at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

“Here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.”

Though fact checkers disagreed with his assessment that it was a lie-free convention, Trump’s from-the-podium denunciations of political correctness during the campaign resonated loudly. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either,” Trump told Megyn Kelly at the Fox News debate in response to questions about his offensive comments about women. He would later dismiss his shockingly crude comments to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush as “locker room talk.” As former White House adviser Steve Bannon recently told Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes,” “People didn’t care. They knew Donald Trump was just doing locker room talk with a guy. And they dismissed it. It had no lasting impact on the campaign.”

Offensive speech, true speech, politically correct speech – America has for the past two years been having a national debate about what the appropriate boundaries of public discourse ought to be. At the heart of this conflict is not just the question of who says what about whom, and how frankly, but a fundamental transformation in the technologies of speech over the past decade that has changed how the conversation itself is conducted. These changes have decreased perceived freedom of speech at the same time that they have magnified once marginal positions to create a novel public speech environment that can seem at once stiflingly conformist and shockingly extreme. And in the process of carving new public squares out of the once private realm of social ties, the new social technologies have made politicians of us all, subject to the same strictures on speech that formerly only truly public figures had to be concerned with.

“Our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and friends to now becoming a source of news and public discourse as well,” noted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in his lengthy February letter to the public.

“Big tech’s incursion into public/civic life,” Slate tech columnist Will Oremus has called it and similar efforts from other major firms.

Social media has, by design, fundamentally reshaped how we have conversations with each other, moving casual speech from the auditory ether to the realm of the written. And it has vastly expanded the audience for conversations that used to happen in small communities of relatively similar people, replacing them with one-to-many interactions with people who potentially have a wide array of views, and weak or even no direct personal ties.

From secret Facebook groups to support Hillary Clinton to Twitter pile-ons to the Alt Right’s provocative “free speech” tours at college campuses, we now are living in a world transformed by a massive decline in undocumented and uncontested speech — for most of human history, the very cornerstone of how we existed in society.

* * *

  The transformation has been astonishingly swift. 79 percent of online American adults used Facebook in 2016, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center right after the election, and 24 percent used Twitter. Overall 86 percent of American adults use the internet, meaning that 68 percent of American adults were on Facebook in 2016 – and 76 percent of those checked in daily. Twitter users skewed younger and better educated than Facebook ones overall.

Just eight years ago, these social networks were so far from dominant that Pew didn’t even mention Facebook in its post-election analysis of how voters got their information, lumping everything digital into a single “internet” category. But we can get some sense of what’s changed from their early 2009 observation, “Usage of social networking sites has nearly quadrupled over the past four years—from fewer than one in ten online adults in early 2005 to more than one in three today.” And most of that would have been Facebook, as by 2010, only 6 percent of the adult population, or 8 percent of the adult online population, was using Twitter.

Illustration by Yahoo News: source images: Getty Images, Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News

While for early adopters it may feel like the social networks have been with us since the mid-2000s, in point of fact they were not very well-developed or widely used when Obama was elected president.

Overall, only “55 percent of all American adults went online during the 2008 election season to get news or information about the campaign, to communicate with others about politics, or to contribute to the online debate,” Pew found. By 2014, the average Facebook user had 338 friends and cited “sharing with many people at once” as the top reason for using the network and the numbers using Facebook was on track to surpass the one-time all digital category. Importantly, Pew found as early as 2008, “those who are most information hungry are the most likely to browse sites that match their views.”

That observation was at the heart of a slew of articles and books dating back to technology columnist Farhad Manjoo’s oft-overlooked but analytically important 2008 book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, which located the new success of campaigns of what we would today call fake news — like the 2004 Swift Boat attacks on Sen. John Kerry — in the ability of partisan actors to manipulate the newly fragmented and increasingly digital media ecosystem.

“In the last few years, pollsters and political researchers have begun to document a fundamental shift in the way Americans are thinking about the news,” Manjoo argued, in words as timely today as their were more than nine years ago. “No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another; we’re also holding different facts. Increasingly our arguments aren’t over what we should be doing…but instead over what is happening.” The new fights would be over “competing visions of reality,” he predicted, correctly.

MoveOn cofounder Eli Pariser continued the argument in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, blaming personalization as well as fragmentation for the failure of the digital utopian dream.

“For a time, it seemed that the Internet was going to entirely redemocratize society,” Pariser wrote. “Bloggers and citizen journalists would single-handedly rebuild the public media. Politicians would be able to run only with a broad base of support from small, everyday donors. Local governments would become more transparent and accountable to their citizens. And yet the era of civic connection I dreamed about hasn’t come. Democracy requires citizens to see things from another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.”

“Left to their own devices, personal information filters are a kind of autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown,” he warned.

At the same time our speech is more public and potentially contestable than ever before, we are increasingly cocooned in digital media worlds that reflect and reinforce our own views. And we increasingly live in physically atomized and homogenized communities that reflect our own values back to us, as Bill Bishop so well documented in 2004’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

These dynamics work in dark synergy to amp up political polarization. Also contributing to the divisions are two political cycles’ worth of gerrymandering that have led to a congressional map where seats often are more vigorously contested from the intra-party extremes in primary cycles than by opponents across the aisle.

We are surrounded by a world that reflects us online, except that our once private speech utterances now increasingly take place in micro-publics, where we are forced to patrol the boundaries of our filter bubbles, defriending and muting and blocking those who intrude upon or take exception to our worldviews.

***

  The effort and drama involved in defending what is said online — the ever-present tension between competing world views and different speech communities that are now endlessly visible to each other — at once drives people away from the new public squares and radicalizes those who witness the fights within it.

There have been many famous cases of individuals driven from the most public of the new digital public squares, Twitter. Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones left Twitter after becoming the target of a broad harassment campaign, though she later returned to using the service. “Twitter, for the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out,” wrote author Lindy West in January, explaining why she was leaving the site. In return for what she shares with the world, “I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.”

Her real reason for leaving, “wasn’t the trolls themselves … it was the global repercussions of Twitter’s refusal to stop them,” she wrote, in words that take on additional weight after Charlottesville:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now – how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? – and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad”, and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

Meanwhile Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, has cited the public vilification of publicist Justine Sacco over an offensive tweet about AIDS and Africa as a turning point in his own political evolution. “It was an awkward joke; an attempt to be edgy in the hands of an amateur comedienne that fell flat. But it whipped up the social justice hate mob into a frenzy,” he wrote in 2016.

Complaints and asides about our new digital speech communities are a daily part of living in them. “Every time I get off Facebook I feel like I need to decontaminate. That site is toxic,” wrote Jordan Uhl, one of the organizers of June’s March for Truth on Trump’s Russia ties, on Friday. “I wanted to write about [Hillary Clinton] and engage rigorously with her ideas far more than I did. But I didn’t. In part, I did not have the energy to deal with the inevitable backlash, from corners right and left,” writer Roxanne Gay admitted in the New York Times. One of the largest Facebook groups of Clinton supporters was a secret (or open secret) group because women wanted a place to express their views without being pounced on for holding them. “As much as possible,” group founder Libby

Chamberlain told the Washington Post, “it removes the risk that they’re going to be attacked for their views.”  “It’s become a thing now, where I see one of my peers tell their story, then get dogpiled by 22yr olds for furthering problematic narratives,” wrote David Wynne about his generation of queer men, who experienced a different world than do young gay and lesbians today. Lesbian author and filmmaker Sarah Schulman went so far as to write a book, Confict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, to take on the contemporary culture of “overreaction to difference.” “The mere fact of the other person’s difference is misrepresented as an assault that then justifies our cruelty,” she charges in it.

As Facebook and other tech companies come under increasing scrutiny for their lack of oversight of the public commons they have created, and the space they’ve allowed to trolls, bots, and foreign agents with disruptive intent, it’s worth also considering the role they’ve played in creating an environment seen as stifling the speech of both liberals and conservatives.

For good and for ill, we now live in an environment of highly contested speech, where more people than ever before in human history can see and publicly react to the different views around them.

****

  In many ways, the underlying dynamics cannot solely to be laid at the feet of the tech companies. Benjamin Barber argued in his seminal 1992 Atlantic magazine article Jihad vs. McWorld, later a book of the same name, that the rise of global culture fueled the rise of defensive tribalism and fundamentalism as traditionally isolated communities were forced to defend their old ways and cultural identities in the face of a homogenizing media onslaught.

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

Barber was writing in a world dominated by television, but the echoes of his argument hang over the debate about today’s digital world.

“Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community,” wrote Zuckerberg in his letter. “This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.”

Barber’s broad theory was the opposite of the technocratic utopianism of Zuckerberg and other digital leaders. Proximity and visibility can increase conflict, as old ways of living feel themselves to be under assault and people dig in to defend their views. Globalism gives birth to reaction, the vision of a world community leading to a hardening of the lines around those viewpoints that the broader global community cannot or will not absorb. In a diverse world, as in a diverse nation, there will be competing visions of the best life and deep disagreements about who should wield power.

“Rhetorically, the tech companies gesture toward individuality — to the empowerment of the ‘user’—but their worldview rolls over it,” argues Franklin Foer in his just-released book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, a deep look at the changes wrought by the foursome Europeans call GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These big tech companies “are shredding the principles that protect individuality,” he argues. “Their devices and sites have collapsed privacy; they disrespect the value of authorship…they hope to automate the choices, both large and small, that we make through the day.”

They believe “we’re fundamentally social beings, born to collective existence” but in fact they are an example of the twinning of “monopoly and conformism,” actors that marry corporate “concentration” and intellectual “homogenization” into a powerful new threat to the very idea of individuality.

Facebook itself is grappling, more than a decade after its founding, with some of these issues. As individuals feel themselves to be threatened by being thrust into direct, seemly intimate conversations with those they disagree with, the divides between them often only harden and they seek out communities of agreement.

“Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign,” Zuckerberg noted in his February letter.

“Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on.” Facebook would be rolling out tools and a new focus on “safe” and “meaningful” groups to built these alternative communities.

The big question is if it’s ever going to be possible for this kind of reconciliation and shared understanding to happen online, thanks to the inherent dynamics of the medium he helped create.

  * * *

It can be harder to see other people as real in a world that is all-too-often virtual, where people are performing for an audience, where there are grave questions about whether the communities we are partaking of are real, and where people routinely say things to each other with a vehemence and passion that’s as much a factor of the distance between them as their actual intentions.

But the past year has also seen some astonishing examples of the collapse of seemingly hardened online identities in the face of physical reality and real human society, governed by actual laws. And the law takes comments made online seriously, even when those who make them insist they are merely performing in character before their micro-publics.

In Charlottesville, a young white man ripped off his Vanguard America White shirt when confronted by a crowd. “I’m not really white power, man, I just did it for the fun,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

What happened? A reporter asked him. “Scared the shit out of me,” he replied.

He was there because “it’s kind of a fun idea,” he later explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”

So-called “crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell made the sort of threats in a crowd he had made online as the manager of what he told a judge was “a racist podcast,” and now sits in a Virginia jail, bail having been denied as he awaits trial on charges of pepper-spraying someone during the melee in Charlottesville. His lawyer sought to play down his aggressive and racist statements at the rally as the performances of a shock jock, although the crimes he is charged with seem consistent with those sentiments.

“Pizzagate” gunman Edgar Maddison Welch pled guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon and transporting a firearm over state lines after firing an AR-15 in a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant that had become a magnet for bizarre online conspiracy theories. He was sentenced to four years in jail.

And most recently, former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli had his bail revoked by a judge for posting a comment to his 70,000 Facebook followers offering a $5,000 reward to anyone who could snatch a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour.

“The fact that he continues to remain unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions or words demonstrates to me that he may be creating ongoing risk to the community,” said U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, explaining the decision to hold Shkreli.

“This is a solicitation of assault. That is not protected by the First Amendment.”

And yet it – and the defense of those actions — is the sort of thing we see online all the time: the idea that what he was doing lay somewhere between joking and trolling. “He did not intended to cause harm,” Shkreli’s attorney Benjamin Brafman said. “Being inappropriate does not make you a danger to the community.”

The judge disagreed. But ultimately the legal system cannot be the forum for adjudicating speech in the public square; it has an interest only insofar as other criminal accusations have become part of the picture.

Will efforts by the digital companies themselves be the solution? In the wake of the Charlottesville march, many internet providers have sought to shut down radical forums and cease to give platforms to white supremacist groups for online organizing.

This may force those groups to use older tools to organize and spread their message.

But “no-platforming” steps by the big companies also reinforce the message that fuels grievance from extremists, and raises concerns that the big tech companies, having created new public squares, are now taking on a role stifling of speech in the name of politics.

And so the free speech fights roll on, gathering in-real-life opposition as they go. Digital provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, banned from Twitter, and other Alt Right figures are headed back to Berkeley, California, next weekend, where they will surely be met by angry Antifa protestors and students who object to their presence. And where we will see again what these online fights look like when made flesh.

_____

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