Recently in Massachusetts Category

This week, thanks largely to the efforts of Rev. Christopher Hope, the Cambridge City Council unanimously passed a resolution in favor of the DREAM Act.  The Cambridge Chronicle has a little bit more:

The Cambridge City Council passed a resolution Monday night supporting the DREAM Act, legislation that would allow undocumented youth a path to citizenship on the condition they complete a college degree or two years in the military.

Immigrant Renata Teodoro, 22, who moved to this country from Brazil 17 years ago, told the Council her family had been deported, and she works to pay her own way through school.

"Civil rights are as relevant right now as they were 40 years ago," said Christopher Hope, a member of the Pentecostal Tabernacle and a member of the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, who is helping local immigrants who are part of his congregation. "Civil rights is an unfinished project."

Jen Thomas - Cambridge Chronicle (3 August 2010)

Despite the lack of mainstream media coverage on this resolution, Michael DaSilva of the Bean Media was there, thankfully, to record some of the speeches that were given in support of the DREAM Act, including a rushed speech by yours truly.  The best speech, by far, was delivered by Christopher Hope. 



I feel very strongly that he should become a national spokesperson for the DREAM Act.   

In case you missed it, the Associated Press recently covered our request for a meeting with Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.).  We are asking Sen. Brown to meet with us before April 17.

Harvard College Act on a Dream has been trying to meet with Sen. Brown since he was first elected at the beginning of the semester.  We were told that his office was a mess the first couple of months, but we were finally asked to fax our meeting request to his office.  We sent the fax on March 5, 2010. 

After not getting a commitment to a meeting for over a month, we were forced to take our meeting request public.  We joined forces with the Student Immigrant Movement to set up an online petition which already has over 100 signatures (please sign it if you haven't done so, yet).  The online petition resulted in coverage from the AP, and now our request is all over the web.  We were happy to hear through the AP that his office has received our meeting request and will shortly ask for more information from us.

Still, it's going to take a lot more than an AP article and a hundred petition signatures to secure a meeting with Brown.  Here are some things you can do to help:

1. SIGN the petition at change.org and ask all of your friends and family to do the same, especially if they are Massachusetts residents. 
2. CALL Brown's D.C. office (202-224-4543) and his local office (617-565-3170) to ask whether or not Brown will meet with us before April 17.
3. JOIN the Facebook group and ask your Facebook friends to do the same
   
4. HELP us fight any misinformation or nativism that you see online regarding our meeting request.   

(Peter Pereira / New Bedford Standard Times)

When Ricardo Gomez Garcia was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New Bedford, it served as his death sentence.  For one of the factory managers charged in the raid, Gloria Melo, it ended in a $500 fine. 

Garcia's story is one of the most heartbreaking stories I know.  He was picked up in the now infamous New Bedford raid, resulting in his separation from his wife and his U.S. citizen autistic son.  He fought desperately to stay in the U.S. and be reunited with them.  When he was finally deported after six months of detention, he had his mother in Guatemala sell her house for $5000 so he could pay a coyote to return to the U.S. 

Garcia's family in Guatemala reported he wasn't feeling well and they urged him to stay but he left anyways.  He arrived in New Bedford on Oct. 28. He was able to spend 12 hours with his wife and his son before he died.  His throat closed up.  Today is the anniversary of his death.  Garcia fought for seventh months and 26 days to be reunited with his family.  12 hours is more than most unauthorized migrant families get.  Garcia's story is an epic tale of love and suffering.

Garcia died for the "crime" of casting off the chains he was born into and pursuing his happiness in another country.  Almost exactly one year later, the Associated Press is reported that two of the factory managers charged in the New Bedford raid won't even see the inside of a prison cell.

The Boston Globe reports on the latest Border Patrol recruiting drive here in Massachusetts.  While everyone else gets laid off there's no shortage of jobs that further militarize the U.S. 

It's funny, nativists don't want 'Mericans speaking Spanish, but it looks as though fluency in Spanish is a must for the Border Patrol.  Here's another interesting statistic:

About 53 percent of agents are Hispanic, about 45 percent are white, and about 1 percent are African-American, officials said.

Rachana Rhatti - Boston Globe (3 August 2008)

It seems the Latinos that nativists frequently target are not only dying for them in Iraq, but they're also doing the work for them protecting the border.

(Full Disclosure: I am a consultant for the online component of the Welcoming Massachusetts campaign)

The Boston Globe did a good piece on the Welcoming Massachusetts campaign, today.  My favorite part of the article is the picture that went with it, taken by Globe photographer David I. Ryan:



The article also got some good messages out there.

If you opened your newspapers in Massachusetts today, you read that Governor Deval Patrick revived the in-state tuition debate in Massachusetts again through his sweeping education reform.  Predictably, the Boston Herald jumped all over it and published not one, but two heavily slanted articles, publishing lies that I've addressed in an earlier post.

I wish I could be writing this post praising Deval Patrick for expending political capital on what he himself has said is a matter of "simple justice":

"It makes good sense for us economically, and for me it's just a matter of simple justice," Patrick said during a lunch with reporters yesterday. "We don't say to these kids they can't go to state colleges and universities; they can go. What we say to them is that they have to pay a different rate from the kid who sat across the aisle from them all through middle school and high school."

Lindsey Parietti - Daily News Transcript (25 June 2008)

But then I read the fine print of The Patrick Administration Education Agenda, and though I still have questions, I'm fairly sure, at least using the language in the report, that the newspapers were wrong.

This post was originally written for MTV's Choose Or Lose Street Team '08.

Picture: Gov. Deval Patrick celebrates the defeat of the proposal to ban marriage equality in Massachusetts (14 June 2007)

Katherine Patrick, the daughter of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, is a courageous youth.  In the last year she has come out as a lesbian to her friends and family, and last week she came out to the whole world.  18-year-old Katherine Patrick did a sit down interview with Bay Windows, "New England's largest GLBT newspaper", to make the announcement, and the news has since been written about by the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, the Associated Press, and countless other news outlets that reach across the globe.

I've been away for a while doing work for the pro-migrant community and work that will get more exposure for this blog and all of its amazing writers.  Something that's been taking up a lot of time is videos for MTV, but I finally made my first decent one and had it featured on the front page of the Choose Or Lose website.  Click here to see it.

When anti-migrant organizations talk about "Attrition Through Enforcement", keep in mind that this is what they mean.  For everyone that advocates enforcing unreasonable and broken laws, for everyone that says, "what part of illegal don't you understand?" realize that this is the sort of country you are creating.

I've written about this trend before but it has gotten worse. Immigrant communities in the Boston area are in a heightened state of fear as people impersonating law enforcement officials barge into their homes and extort money from them.  The Boston Herald documents several reports of this oppression.  The latest suspects are pictured in this post:

One of the last anti-migrant politicians that had a chance at winning the presidency will suspend his campaign, according to CNN.  I hope I don't need to remind people of Mitt Romney's contradictory deportation-only approach to undocumented migration that he made a centerpiece of his campaign.