Since late January Aaron Bobrow-Strain, an associate professor at Whitman College in Washington state, has been circulating a weekly bulletin with a roundup of immigration news, action alerts, and background on immigration issues. The Immigration Action Bulletin has provided useful information and in-depth analysis on a host of important issues, including the “So-Called Border Security Order,” the “Invention of Illegal Immigration,” and “How Current and Proposed Immigration Enforcement Policies Undermine Public Safety and Encourage Criminals.” It already has nearly 700 subscribers, and we strongly recommend it to Politics of Immigration readers. You can subscribe here. See the brief excerpt below.
Immigration Action Bulletin
Number 14, May 7, 2017Welcome to the “Immigration Detention 101” edition of the Bulletin.
The detainees of the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, Washington, are on hunger strike. Again. Their demands are basic and unadorned: better food and hygiene; an end to the $1-a-day labor program; and a solution for procedural backlogs that leave some detainees incarcerated for years awaiting the outcome of their legal cases. For compelling video testimonies from within the NWDC hunger strike movement, click here.While conducting research on the use of psychotropic drugs on immigrant detainees, Andrea Berg met Noemi, a 56-year-old pastor who spent almost a year at the NWDC. Noemi ended up detained after fleeing her home town in Guerrero, Mexico, to seek asylum in the United States. In Mexico, Noemi and her husbanded had founded an anti-gang youth program. The work had a profound impact in kids in their home town, but angered local criminals. Threats, intimidation, and the failure of the Mexican state to protect Noemi and her husband, left them no choice but to flee to the United States.
“If it wasn’t for the violence, the killings, I would stay there,” Noemi told Andrea.[…]
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