COPS and Fox 29 teach viewers to fear immigrants

Dear Friends, Family, Community:

This weekend I saw an episode of the show COPS on Philadelphia TV station Fox 29, that shocked and angered me. The episode blatantly teaches its viewers to fear immigrants simply because they could be undocumented. So, I immediately wrote a letter to Fox 29 and Langley Productions, Inc., which produces COPS, and I urge you to do the same if you care to fight for the removal of such misinforming, hate-rousing television shows.

The episode in question

(Click here to view episode. Will only be on
hulu.com for 29 days after airing, July 31st).

The Letter

FOX 29
330 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

Copy:
Langley Productions, Inc.
1111 Broadway
Santa Monica, CA 90401

July 31, 2010

Dear Fox 29,

On Saturday, July 31, 2010, at 8:00 p.m., I had the unfortunate experience of tuning into your station to find the show COPS featuring the criminal arrest of a young, undocumented Mexican man for having flown over a border. The show taught us viewers the lesson that "illegal aliens" are bad, untrustworthy people who should be treated like criminals.

It is true that people cross the border without legal documents in hopes of creating a better future for their families (like the young man in the show admitted in his confession), and it is true that many of them are arrested and deported. But rather than represent this reality, COPS demonizes these people with the same level of disrespect and hate that they reserve for drug dealers and murderers. This is the same kind of misguided hate that is regurgitated by homophobic and racist people. Would you air a program that teaches hate for people based on their ethnicity or sexual identity?

Rather than teach its audience about the realities of law enforcement and immigration, COPS miseducates the public about immigrants in a time when immigration is an important issue in our national dialogue. Moreover, part of this dialogue on immigration is fueled by xenophobic hatred towards Latinos--the same fuel that has ignited hate crimes against Latinos and other immigrants nationwide.

I am offended by this program and will make sure that all of my friends, family and community members are aware that Fox 29 has chosen to air such a hate-mongering, anti-immigrant television show as COPS. I urge you to begin to check the programs that you air for content that teaches hate and racism, and eliminate them from your station.

Risking Deportation for the Cause

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contacts: Juan (407) 602-8675, Flavia de la Fuente (949) 910-6362 media@thedreamiscoming.com

DETAINED in Arizona: Four Student Immigrant Leaders

Peacefully Resist Current Immigration Law, Urge Passage of DREAM Act

As of 6:00 PM PST today, Mohammad, Yahaira, Lizbeth and Raul, an Arizona Resident, have been arrested and detained after their day long sit-in at Senator John McCains Office in Tucson, AZ. Tania, who was not detained, has been designated as spokesperson and will be relating the experiences/thoughts of the group during the action.

Senator John McCain offered the students a meeting in order to discuss the Dream Act, however, the students recognize that this is insufficient and that immediate action is needed to pass the DREAM Act!

Tucson, Arizona. May 17th, on the anniversary of landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education, Arizona law enforcement arrested four undocumented leaders of the immigrant student movement in addition to Arizona native Raul Alcaraz. Lizbeth Mateo of Los Angeles, California; Tania Unzueta of Chicago, Illinois; Mohammad Abdollahi of Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Yahaira Carrillo of Kansas City, Missouri; were detained Tucson, Arizona, after staging a sit-in at Senator John McCain’s office. With this challenge to local and federal law, these youth hope to highlight the urgency of legislative action in Congress, and catalyze mass grassroots mobilization to pass the DREAM Act before June 15th.

These four leaders are risking deportation from the United States in the hope that this action will make a significant contribution to the fight for immigrant rights. In response to the onslaught of enforcement-based immigration law, they staged a sit-in at Senator McCain’s office, and urged congressional leadership to champion the DREAM Act and the values it represents: hard work, education, and fairness.

Lizbeth, 25, an organizer with DREAM Team Los Angeles, states, "There are already ten other states across the country considering immigration legislation similar to Arizona’s: legislation that is anti-family, anti-democratic, and anti-freedom. Police states and enforcement are quickly becoming the standard, and we are running out of time. We are going to pass the DREAM Act because it is based on freedom and equality."

Mohammad, 24, co-founder of DreamActivist.Org, a resource web portal for undocumented students, said in a statement: "Never in our history has it been American to deny people their civil rights. We have decided to peacefully resist to encourage our leaders to pass the DREAM Act and create a new standard for immigration reform based on education, hard work, equality, and fairness."

At least 65,000 undocumented immigrant youth graduate from high schools every year, and many of them struggle to attend institutes of higher education and the military. The DREAM Act will grant youth who traveled to the United States before the age of 16 a path to citizenship contingent on continuous presence in the country, good behavior, and the attainment of at least a two-year university degree or a two-year commitment to the armed forces.

"During the civil rights movement, African-American students were arrested for sitting down at lunch counters. We’ve been detained for standing on a sidewalk. We can't wait any longer for the DREAM Act to pass," said Tania, 26, co-founder of the Immigrant Youth Justice League, and immigrant rights organizer in Chicago.

All four are leaders in their own communities and have dedicated years to work for immigrant rights, legalization for undocumented immigrants, and the DREAM Act. “Dr. King spoke of a dream of equality overcoming fear. Well, the fierce urgency of our dreams has overcome any kind of fear we may have had before. We can’t wait,” concluded Yahaira, 25, a founder of the Kansas Missouri Dream Alliance.

National Press Conference
Tuesday May 18th
9 AM Pacific, 11 PM Central, Noon EST

In front of Senator John McCain’s office:
407 West Congress Street
Tucson, AZ 85701

I have been doing this lately at work. How sad.

The link below will take you to a recent Onion Article entitled...

'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder
January 19, 2010 | Issue 46•03

Dreaming of Civil Rights

Tonight I saw the movie Papers about undocumented immigrant youth in the United States of America.

Imagine being a kid--maybe 5 months old, maybe 10 years old--and your parents move you to a new place. Of course, you follow them. You adjust to the new place, new friends, maybe new language, new habits...the younger you are the easier the adjustment. Then when you and your high school friends and classmates are in your senior year and everyone is applying to colleges or for jobs, you learn that you can't. You're "illegal."

So what do you do? Some yell "go back to where you came from!" But you're not really sure where that is. You don't know anyone there, and you don't even speak that place's language very well. You're an American kid...at least you grew up like one and you feel like one.

There are many undocumented youth in the United States that came to the country not by their decision but that of their families. They often work hard in school. Some become the valedictorians of their graduating class, boyfriends, girlfriends, club leaders, even AP National Scholars. But once they graduate high school, there is no more support for them here, in the country of their childhood. Worse, there is only contempt and barrier after barrier. No in-state tuition, no student loans, no work, no driver's license, no ID and no path to legal residency is available to them.

Where are they to go?

The Dream Act was introduced in 1999 to allow youth to apply for temporary legal resident status, to be turned into permanent legal resident status after the individual has earned at least a two-year degree in college or served in the military. It has not been signed into law...yet.

Learn more about the 2009 Dream Act here.

Sign the online petition to support the Dream Act here.

1.5 million people sign the Employee Free Choice Act

American Families United

On Monday, February 2, 2009, twenty-five members of the organization American Families United (AFU) met in Washington D.C. to fight for the right to keep their families together. AFU, based in Ardmore, PA, has 1,300 members in the United States who are citizens or permanent residents who are separated from their spouse, and in some cases their children, due to a deportation order. Rather than being due to any serious crime, many of these deportations are a result of simply remaining in the U.S. with one's spouse beyond an expired visa or for having arrived to the U.S. undocumented years ago.

One major difference between these cases and other cases involving undocumented immigrants is that the individuals who are making the complaint also vote in the U.S. The U.S. citizen wives and husbands who stayed here, removed from their legal spouse, went to the capitol to speak with their senators and representatives about their problem.

The constituents spoke to their lawmakers in legal terms and also told their personal stories from their hearts. One constituent of Texas explained that he lives separated from his wife, who faces the permanent bar, and his three kids who live in Mexico. The reason is a false declaration of citizenship made when she attempted to cross the border, coerced by her U.S. citizen ex-boyfriend who had told her what to say. Years later she was caught trying to cross to Houston to take care of her sick husband for two weeks. In comparison to her permanent bar of entry to the U.S., drug-trafficking immigrants can obtain as low as a three-year bar of entry.

The message that these husbands and wives brought to their congresspersons is that they make a law that provides waivers to those undocumented immigrants who have U.S. citizen spouses. In some conversations with lawmakers, people quoted the Bible verse Matthew 19:6 on marriage: "So they are no longer two, but one. What therefore God has joined together let no man separate."


AFU has specific suggestions for legislation on this issue. Instead of automatically deporting the undocumented spouse for 10 or more years, the organization calls for waivers that weigh the pros and cons of the spouse's residency in the U.S. versus his or her deportation.

For example, if the person has been here for ten years, owns property, has a company, has two citizen children and has no criminal record, then his situation favors a waiver so he can stay and support his American family in America rather than be sent away. Currently spouses of citizens only receive a waiver if they can prove "extreme hardship" - which local bureaucrats tend to define as a serious illness of the citizen spouse. The default action is deportation.

The AFU members visited a total of twenty-five offices at the capitol, speaking with their senators and representatives, republicans and democrats. They explained that they want a new bill that will protect their families, and they want it as soon as possible.

To the democrats who want comprehensive immigration reform, the spouses said that while politicians wait for years for that reform to happen, they need to act now on a smaller bill simply to protect families. To the republicans who do not want blanket amnesty for undocumented immigrants, the spouses explained that their problem is not about amnesty, but about family values.

At the end of the day, the AFU members gathered together to discuss the conversations that they had with the lawmakers - some with optimistic messages and others with disheartening messages. Nevertheless, giving up is not an option for these U.S. citizens who have been made to choose between their country and their husband or wife. They will not stop protesting until they can live together in their country with their family.

If you would like to know more about AFU or communicate with the organization, please call 215-868-6551 or visit their website www.americanfamiliesunited.org.

or, Start a Petition

Change.org

Division 5 votes in the rain, literally.

I worked as a volunteer English-Spanish interpreter today during the election at Philadelphia's Ward 1, Division 5 today. I didn't do any interpreting since there was no need for it. But I did enjoy the experience of getting to know the poll workers and the process of making elections happen. And boy do I wish I had my camera on me to show you what I saw.

On today's cold gray morning, I arrived at the polling place surprised to find that it was nothing more than a garage. I mean a small house garage full of junk, that wouldn't even fit a whole car inside. The poll workers managed to squeeze two voting machines into the garage and set up their table on the sidewalk and street in front. Luckily, the judge of elections had a tent to put above us so that when the rain started (around 11am), we could keep ourselves and the paperwork dry. Luckily, the temperature was only in the fifties and not freezing today. Luckily, we felt no wind today. Luckily, we were across the street from the previous election-day facility so the neighbors could find it easily when they went to the door of the old polling place.

This leads me to the question: How the hell does the city set up a voting situation like this? Here's how it happend: The tenant of the building across the street - which used to host the voting machines on election day - fled, and the new tenant didn't want to lend the building as a polling place. "The ward people," explained one person there today, wanted the neighbors to vote at the school, but the school in their division is not accessible to people with disabilities. One elderly man with a swollen foot, who voted before 8:00am this morning, had trouble just walking down the street and stepping onto the curb to get to the garage. Setting up the polls inside of the school would have prevented many of the elderly and people with trouble walking from voting.

So what did they do? They got the guy on the corner across from the old polling place to let them use his garage. The judge of elections copied and hand-delivered a message about the change of location to each door in the division. The garage owner shoved the junk to the sides and asked us to give the cats water if the meowing from inside the house bothered us while he was out. There were enough electrical sockets to plug in the voting machines and one lamp inside the garage; more stress on the outlet might have overloaded the circuit. When I left around 4:30pm, they were still trying to figure out how to illuminate the table for the poll-workers as the sun went down behind the overcast skies, and how they might plug in an outdoor heater. It's now rainy, fifty-two degrees and pitch-black outside, with one and half hours to go before polls close.

Those three poll-workers, the judge of elections and the two volunteer interpreters who traded shifts pulled it together today to make sure that the people in their division voted. While they were quite angry about the situation, they were very kind to their neighbors, the voters. Even though they care about providing their neighbors with a place to vote (they have been working the polls in that division for 10-20 years), each one of them said this would be their last year putting up with such an inadequate system. Although I suspect that most of them will be there again for the primaries in May, they may soon keep their promise to quit.

Neighbors didn't seem so surprised that they were screwed today. One recalled the story of a large pothole - due to a gas explosion - remaining in their street for two years before neighbors themselves barricaded the street until the city fixed it. This is very different from what happens in the wealthier neighborhoods and of course in the tourist-magnet of Center City.

Way to go Philadelphia. Way to let oversight screw over a small group of people who work hard for very little because they believe in the improvement of their community. Neighborhoods like this one are complained about for being dangerous and dirty. Every now and then the volunteers from the universities or other non-profits go in planting trees or doing some other once-a-year service. But when neighbors themselves want to improve it, they city, instead of doing its part, discourages them. Come on, Phila, you can do better than this.

Trickle Up

Many wealthy people like to agree that when money accumulates in a few rich hands, it's a good thing for everyone because that money eventually "trickles down" the pyramid to the rest of us.

In the face of our current economic recession, I can't help but wonder why the politicians and news anchors tell us that we are in a recession because mortgage companies gave out faulty loans, instead of asking why it is that such a large portion of our population cannot afford a mortgage in the first place. This leads to another question: how did our nation's economy come to be measured by the financial situation of grand companies on Wall Street rather than by the financial situations of the people in the neighborhoods? It is the same kind of thinking that puts the economic well-being of the country in the hands of a few large companies' presidents and pretends that the money will eventually make its way "down" to us and improve our lives.

Here's how I see it. The economy is junked because the people have been exploited. We cannot afford health care or other basic needs without bringing ourselves into debt. Since we cannot buy things like houses, we bring those companies involved in housing down with us. Those companies, in turn, bring down other companies around them. The effects are trickling up, not down! When the people are well, the country (or should I say Wall Street) is well and vice versa.

There is only so much exploitation that the people can take from a few abusers in power. We are finally seeing the abusers get infected with our own financial illness. When we stop seeing our country as bigger than us and begin to understand that it is us, then we can start to take the power back. If we can send financial strain up the pyramid, just think of what else we can trickle up that way!

Follow this link to my favorite explanation of trickle down.

Levees

Hurricane Gustav is brewing in the Caribbean, and it has Louisianans scared for their homes and lives ever since 2005's levee-breaking, city-destroying flood caused by Hurricane Katrina. The Army Corps of Engineers is fooling with the levees in New Orleans, and they say that they're not ready for another flood yet. I got a tip for y'all: All levees are subject to collapse. People of Baton Rouge and the rest of Louisiana beware: not only Lake Pontchartrain, but the Mississippi and all the rest of the waters just might reclaim what once was theirs.

After Katrina's floods destroyed New Orleans a scientist at the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia handed me a copy of a Scientific American article from 2001 explaining the connection between levee-lined waterways and erosion, and its potential to flood the city, which we would witness four years later. Louisiana loses between 25 and 35 square miles of its coast to erosion each year. Ever since we walled in the river, it no longer floods over into the coastal marshes to distribute its sediment deposits evenly across them - coastal marshes which we have turned into cities and towns. Instead, the sediment flows straight into the Gulf of Mexico; and when storm surges arrive, there is little barrier between the high waters and the sunken city.

Rivers do not naturally stay in one place, they slither across the landscape like snakes. Walling them up has its consequences. The land that we intended to save from the river is now being lost to the gulf. And that is not our only problem; the water will continue to fight our human-made barriers, tearing apart what we build up. We are hurting the land, and we are hurting ourselves.

Nevertheless, the cities are already there, lined up along the river from Minnesota to Louisiana. I don't recommend getting rid of the cities, but I do agree with Uncle Edwin, born-and-raised in New Orleans, who proposes that instead of walling up the rivers, we wall up ourselves. Let the water flow as it will around the cities and farms without entering them - a sort of Venice-style Delta. It involves angering some land "owners," but the politicians had better deal with it. The important thing is restoring the Delta and letting the river loose in a safe way. If we don't do it, we're setting ourselves up for further disaster.

Some sites with information about the Delta and Louisiana Coast:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=drowning-new-orleans-hurricane-prediction
http://dnr.louisiana.gov/crm/coastalfacts.asp
http://www.pbs.org/now/science/neworleans.html

On Being A Young Educated Woman

In answer to the question: "Why doesn't she aim higher?"

I taught in public high school for two years because it seemed like the right way to share with others what I'd learned about life and positively influence the up and coming generations. It was all that and more. Teaching also confirmed my experience that life is about relationships and that, trite as it sounds, knowledge is power. I also learned that mentoring and teaching over one hundred young people requires absolute dedication.

I grew tired of dedicating my time at home to these amazing young people who deserved no less than that commitment. I had no time for the other activities and people in my life that I love. Since I left the school, I've earned my place in two music gigs and counting; made new friends; traveled northeast and southwest; found the greatest boyfriend in the world; reconnected with long-lost friends and family; hand-sewn my first bag; grown my first garden; and started cooking real meals again.

Meanwhile, my new possible employer tells me that he fears I'm overqualified for the position of office manager at the non-profit organization focused on bicycle promotion and youth empowerment. Why isn't it okay to choose a job that will pay my expenses, satisfy my mildly OCD need to organize things, support a wonderful mission, and give me experience running a non-profit organization? Is work supposed to be about giving yourself the biggest headache or gaining the highest bragging rights? Well, not for me.

Some might say that my reaction is the privileged middle-class child syndrome; some might say that it's a lack of ambition common to my sex; others might say I'm a crazy liberal. Call it what you will based on your demographic of choice. I've gotten a taste of many different lifestyles, and the best one I know is the one that lets you do what you love and be with whom you love.

I am not trying to climb any ladder. We're already on the escalator of time, and the number of floors is limited. If there is anything that I am ambitious about, it is to increase my musical experiences and improve this talent because I love it, not because I hope to make a fortune or become the number one anything. If I can crack into the music scene of the musicians that I admire, then I will be very happy to make music with and learn from them. Meanwhile, I will continue to work alongside people who are struggling to make positive change in our community.