As someone who unapologetically wears brownface every day, I find the hysterical front-page revelation of Justin Trudeau’s 2001 experiment with brownface pretty underwhelming. I also find the reaction to it on the part of various brown-faced Canadian politicians to be a transparent instance (so to speak) of grandstanding. If ever there was a case where policy ought to trump a supposed matter of character in politics, this is it–not so much because policy always trumps character in political matters, but because the supposed matter of character involved here is so morally inconsequential that just about anything trumps it. Continue reading
Tag Archives: immigration
Not Born in the USA
I did the last of my immigration-enforcement events yesterday at Felician–this one really a mini-event, intended for my seminar-sized criminal justice class. The guest speaker this time was my former Felician student Maria Lopez-Delgado.
Quick intro: Maria graduated as a philosophy major from Felician in 2013 (thesis topic: “The Marxian Critique of Capitalism”; advisor: Khawaja), went on to law school at UNC School of Law, did a stint at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, and for the past year or so has been back in North Carolina with North Carolina Legal Aid’s Battered Immigrant Project, where she works with victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.* Since she was in North Carolina and we were in Jersey, we spoke by Google Video Chat. Continue reading
She Fights the Law and She Wins
Joyce Phipps, Esq. is the founder and director of Casa de Esperanza–a non-profit legal aid and social service organization in Bound Brook, New Jersey, created to serve immigrants and refugees. I met her last February at the vigil for immigrant detainees I described in an earlier post.
We met more or less by chance: lost in thought, I wandered away from the vigil to prowl around the perimeter of the facility, and poke at its edges; Joyce, who was doing the same thing, noticed me, and struck up a conversation. It took just a few minutes of conversation to convince me to invite her to Felician to talk about her work defending the rights of immigrants and refugees. It took less time for her to accept. Continue reading
Felician Events: Policing, Deportation, and Immigrant Rights
Three event announcements for people in the New York/New Jersey metro area (this announcement amends and supersedes an earlier one I put up):
Policing from a Cop’s Point of View
Thursday, November 8, 2018, 1-2:15 pm
“Ray’s Place,” Main Auditorium, Education Commons Building
Felician University’s Rutherford campus
227 Montross Ave.
Rutherford, New Jersey 07070
We live in a climate of opinion that is highly critical of the police: charges of racism, brutality, procedural irregularity and the like abound. But what is the experience of working police officers? How do they experience what they deal with on the job, and what do they think about the criticisms commonly made of them?
We’ll hear answers to these and other questions from four local police officers: Louis Mignone, a former detective for the West Orange Police Department (now an adjunct in Felician’s Department of Criminal Justice); Julie Ann Zeigler, a sergeant for the Rutherford Police Department; John Russo, Chief of Police for the Rutherford Police Department; and John Link, former Chief of Police of the Clifton Police Department (and an adjunct in Felician’s Department of Criminal Justice). The event is free and open to the public.
#SaveBasit: From Deportation to Death Sentence
A moral disaster in the making. Please share and consider signing the petition and/or making some other sort of contribution.
Students have launched an urgent campaign to save their teacher who faces the death penalty in Egypt following what human rights groups say was a sham trial to punish him for political activism. His asylum application was just denied and he was put in immigration detention two weeks ago.
Backgrounder from northjersey.com. Backgrounder from HuffPost. From Carbonated.TV. Editorial from the Newark Star-Ledger. From Jersey City Patch.
Change.org petition, signed by PoT’s own David Riesbeck and yours truly.
I’d like to think that the prospect of an actual death sentence will get as much coverage as the hypothetical hanging that got Kevin Williamson fired from The Atlantic. But I somehow doubt it. These deportation cases have all become a dime a dozen. Continue reading
Here’s to Your Thin Blue Line
Step 1: show your respect for law enforcement by slapping a sanctimonious sticker on your car.
Step 2: disrespect the law by parking your car illegally. Continue reading
We Contain Multitudes (or: “Give Us Your Wretched”)
I got two or three memos in my inbox today, depending on how you count them.
Memos 1 and 2 came from the Office of Mission Integration and Campus Ministry, with the request that we encourage our students to participate in their upcoming events, expressing support for illegal immigrants currently detained and awaiting deportation:
Sr. Antonelle Chunka will be in the Cafeteria in Obal Hall on Monday, February 12 at 1 pm, to discuss the ministry to immigrants in the Elizabeth, NJ detention center. Sister was part of the John Paul II Lecture Panel on Undocumented Immigration we held here at Felician last Spring.
All are welcome.
THIS IS CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING IN ACTION!
February 14: Join Campus Ministry and First Friends of New Jersey as we hold vigil outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in solidarity for those being detained due to their immigration status.
We will gather at the Rutherford Campus, first floor of Education Commons building at 4:45 pm and leave campus by 5:00 pm. Vigil begins outside the Elizabeth Detention Center at 6:00 pm.
Memo 3 came from the Dean of Students, with the request that we encourage our students to participate in an upcoming webinar on the many career paths available to officers in federal law enforcement, notably careers involving the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants:
Now’s the Time for “Never Again”
A piece of advice: if you see a sign like this on a telephone pole in your neighborhood, rip it down.
A “Blood and Soil” sign in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Photo credit: Dario Gal
Don’t just leave it up and take a picture of it, and don’t bother calling the police to investigate. No one has a right to put a sign of any kind on a telephone pole without authorization of the owner, much less a sign of this kind. You’re not violating anyone’s rights by taking it down. If you have a genuine “civic duty” as an American, it’s to express your rejection of the politics of “Blut und Boden“–Blood, Soil, and Master Race–before it takes hold more powerfully than it already has. Continue reading
One Little Victory
Most of the news we’ve recently been hearing about immigration in the United States has been bad, but every now and then a bit of good news emerges. Here’s an instance of the latter.
About a year ago, a journalist told me the story of a young Pakistani immigrant in a terrible situation, asking me to write a letter of support that might help her get out of it. I contacted the person in question, heard her out, sat down to write her a letter of support, and sent it off to her lawyer. A few weeks ago, the woman told me that her application to remain in the United States had been accepted, and the orders to deport her had been lifted. With her permission, I’ve reproduced the letter I wrote for her, one of several she used to make her case to the immigration authorities. In the interests of privacy, I’ve changed her name.
Cold As ICE
From an article about a deportation proceeding in Monday’s New York Times:
Adding to the sting, immigration officers refused to let the twins or his wife give him a final hug goodbye, Ms. Hopman said.
“They told us they no longer provide that courtesy,” she said, “because they don’t like emotional scenes.”
In other words, federal law enforcement officers can’t seem to do what police officers, paramedics, firefighters, doctors, nurses, therapists, family-law attorneys, and funeral service workers do every day: deal with honest expressions of intense emotion. They have no problem breaking up families; they just have trouble observing the emotions that arise when they watch the effects of their handiwork.
The right likes to taunt “Social Justice Warriors” as “snowflakes,” but the SJWs I know are a lot tougher, and a lot less hypocritical, than officers like these. And yet it’s law enforcement that keeps making its insistent demands for our “respect” in a climate of opinion supposedly stacked against them.
Well sorry, but I can’t respect people like this–people too cowardly to endure the emotions that arise when they break up other people’s families. It’s hard to respect people who demand Stoicism of the victims while demanding a “safe space” for those who victimize them. The people responsible for these policies should perhaps remember that there is no “safe space” from moral judgment. They can’t seem to endure tears. Perhaps they should confront contempt.
Policy of Truth 