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CMSC's 2020 Advocacy for Immigrants' Mental Health Services
The CMSC is launching an initiative to advocate for immigrants’ mental health services, based on our 5-year experience relying upon group therapy sessions for the participants in our California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program, and the 3 Advance Parole Campaign advocacy trips to Washington, DC in 2019.
This initiative intends to inform and educate the public regarding the psychological crisis affecting the immigrant population throughout the U.S., due to a pervasive state of fear generated by the Trump administration since coming into office in 2017, the targeted acts of violence as the August 3, 2019 El Paso, Texas mass shooting at a Walt Mart store, and the hate-crimes aimed against immigrants, Mexicans and Latinos.
Moreover, this initiative will require the collaboration of mental health providers, social workers, and educators as volunteers to help us guide this effort towards providing specialized mental health services to immigrants.
Learn more about this initiative here
All the migrants we turned away
By ELORA MUKHERJEE, Los Angeles Times Op-Ed ~ FEB. 11, 2020
In June 1939, about 900 Jewish refugees sailed close to Florida on the St. Louis in hopes of finding protection in the United States. U.S. authorities refused to let the ship dock. Desperate passengers sent cables to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never responded.
A State Department telegram stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible in the United States.” Nearly all the passengers had already been refused admission to Cuba. Canada rejected them, too. They had no choice but to return to Europe, where 254 of the passengers were eventually killed in the Holocaust.
Eighty years later, a modern version of this tragedy takes place daily at our southern border. This time, most of these people are fleeing rape, assault, and death from the northern triangle of Central America — Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala — as well as political oppression in Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere. They are fleeing to save their lives and their children’s lives. They hope to find safety in the United States. When they get to America, U.S. authorities turn them around. Read full article
No more Immigrant Detention Facilities in McFarland or Anywhere Else
By Gonzalo Santos, The Bakersfield Californian, Feb. 16, 2020.
The ongoing attempt by GEO Group, the corporation that runs the 400-bed Mesa Verde federal immigrant detention center in Bakersfield for profit, to expand to McFarland to hold 1,400 more immigrant detainees, must be resolutely opposed.
For one thing, the State of California enacted a law last October (AB 32) that bans for-profit immigrant detention centers in our state, and while it allows any prior contract with ICE to continue until it expires, it explicitly bans "any extensions made to or authorized by that contract" [Section 9505 (a)]. GEO Group is fighting AB 32 in state court while seeking municipal permits to expand its detention facilities. Despite GEO's aggressive defiance, challenging this unequivocal state law, and defying the strong, unified will of the state legislature and executive branch is a losing proposition. The McFarland city officials, understandably hard-pressed to find revenues for their town, should not squander their own limited resources and community's respect betting on a dead horse. I told them as much at their January 21 hearing. Read Full Article
RELATED: An ICE Detention Center? You Picked the Wrong Town, Residents Say (New York Times)
Fiscal que fue indocumentado, busca ser juez en el condado de Los Ángeles
Por: Araceli Martínez Ortega | La Opinión – 15 de Febrero 2020
LOS ÁNGELES – Adán Montalbán, un fiscal del condado de Los Ángeles, quien fue traído por sus padres cuando tenía un año de edad a los Estados Unidos, y vivió muchos años sin documentos, hace campaña para ser juez de la Corte Superior de Los Ángeles
“Busco ser juez para ayudar a la gente y porque quiero que la comunidad se refleje en sus jueces. En la actualidad son muy diferentes de la población que es el 50% latina en California”, dijo en entrevista.
“Necesitamos más jueces latinos, y más gente de nuestra comunidad involucrada en el gobierno”, señaló
Montalbán busca ocupar el asiento que dejará vacante con su retiro el juez Richard Romero en la oficina 145 de la Corte Superior de Los Ángeles.
Update on the CMSC's Advance Parole Assistance Program
When our Advance Parole Assistance Program was launched on July 3, 2019, more than 182 applications were submitted. From those 182 DACA recipients that applied for our Advance Parole Assistance Program, only 68 applicants were able to proceed with the application process due to qualification requirements and/or lack of funds. But out of the 68 applicants only 33 submitted a humanitarian Advance Parole Application. Moreover, more than half of the applications have received an intent to deny letter, stating that “since DACA was rescinded on Sep 5, 2017, USCIS is no longer approving I-131 applications under the standard associated with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy.”
The USCIS statement contradicts the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California preliminary injunction ruling of January 9, 2018, which ruled relative to the status of the DACA program and Advance Parole eligibility for DACA recipients: “Nor does this order bar the agency from granting advance parole in individual cases it finds deserving, or from granting deferred action to new individuals on an ad hoc basis”.
We are trying to determine the criteria USCIS uses to consider a case to be deserving. Even after the court ruled that applications could be granted for deserving cases, USCIS is not exercising discretion on a case-by-case basis for DACA’s Advance Parole applications and is systematically denying all applications even those with urgent humanitarian needs.
Out of the 33 applications submitted, 13 cases have already been denied, and only 3 applicants have been able to secure the funds to apply for an I-290B Motion to Reopen and Reconsider. This application would allow for USCIS to reopen a case and reconsider their adverse decision, which has a filing fee cost of $675. Thus, preventing many applicants from reopening their case due to their lack of funds, while their family members’ health conditions worsens.
The following is a DACA recipient's experience of the application process and the emotional trauma they face after having their applications denied and not being able to travel abroad to see their ill family members.
“I think about the fact that my grandma needs the approval of my Advance Parole so that I may take care of her as she slowly recovers from an accident that left her immobile. I think about my mother who prays everyday so that DACA continues to be available so that I can continue and further my career. I think of my husband who has been worried for months dealing with our 601A waiver. He understands that in order to be granted a visa and thus a path to legal residency I must leave this country... My entire family understands that this may be a one-way ticket. In all these thoughts all I can see is a stack of papers filled with legal reasons on why I deserve to be granted all of my applications. A stack of doctor letters and graphic pictures from my grandmother's accident to prove that I have a humanitarian need for my Advance Parole application…Every time I sit at my desk, I can’t help but think my entire future is in the hands of an immigration officer, a stranger who is allowed to tamper with my future.”
– Gloria Sanchez Hernandez
UPCOMING EVENTS
TEACHER WORKSHOP: The expulsion of Mexicans and Mexicans Americans during the 1930s at the La Plaza de Cultura y Arte in Los Angeles, CA. To register, send your inquiry to education@lapca.org
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