Pro-immigrant groups will deliver our May 1st message of “First 100 Days” calling for just legalization in the first 100 days of the new administration and an “immediate stop to the raids” to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado on August 26 and the Republican National Convention on September 1st in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Members of the national pro-immigrant network, Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) will attend both conventions. As part of this national network, Voces de la Frontera will organize a larger presence at the nearest convention to our state: the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, five hours of distance from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It is urgent that our message of justice and equality for immigrants be heard by both presidential candidates and political parties because each day the situation is getting worse.
With the increase of raids and detentions, little by little, more light has been shed in the English language media about the abuse of human, civil, and labor rights in these detention centers. What writer Roberto Lovato describes as, “the guantanamization of immigrant detention centers inside the United States.”
The parallel abuses of non-citizen people abroad and inside the United Status have two forms: one, in the abuse of a human being in which there are confirmed cases of deaths due to lack of medical care, physical abuse, bad conditions, denial of civil rights such as communicating with an attorney, the jailing of children, and the lack of government accountability.
The second parallel is the private, for-profit corporations that are benefiting from these politics and the criminalization of immigrants. The same companies that are receiving millions of dollar for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan such as Halliburton, Boeing, GE, Management and Training Corporation and Corrections Corporation of America are the same companies that are benefiting from government contracts for building the wall, militarization on the border, and the construction and management of detention centers. The current administration has ties with some of these companies (such as Halliburton and Carlyle) that are getting reach from other people’s misery.
Cases that come to our office, always recount how arrests are carried out as if it were a military operation: they come into your home, rifles pointed to all family members (including kids) and when they take a loved one the family doesn’t know where they took them. For all practical purposes, this is a “legal” kidnapping, a form of psychological terror, where family members frantically try to find out the whereabouts of their loved one.
But there are people of conscience that are seeking a change. A delegation of Witness for Peace is walking from Chicago to St. Paul; they will arrive in Racine on July 18 where they are organizing a protest in front of Congressman Ryan’s office and they will arrive in Milwaukee on July 21st. If you would like to join either of these local events or the trip to St. Paul please call Voces de la Frontera at 414-643-1620 to sign up.
We need to combine efforts to organize the vote with accountability of our elected officials in order to change the political direction of this country: where human rights and justice for all workers are respected.