El Magonista Newsletter | Vol. 10, No. 41 | November 15, 2022

Today, there is an avalanche of comments floating in the media landscape with analysts of all colors trying to explain why Latinos recently, against all expectations, especially in the Trump era, began to mass desert the Democratic Party.

A fashionable explanation is that Latinos are moving away from the Democrats by becoming too progressive, for being out of the air by clinging to the issues of "social justice" and fighting "cultural wars" that only attract white people with university education, instead of focusing on the main economic interests that today directly affect Latinos, their working class interests and even their middle-class priorities.

Another favorite explanation highlights the supposed traditional social conservatism of Latinos that does not agree with the exaggerated cultural progressivism of the Democrats.

As for the latest explanation, a recent exhaustive survey on the attitudes of Latinos with respect to abortion showed that, contrary to the superficial assumptions regarding this mostly Catholic demographic group, Latinos are significantly more LEFT than whites on this issue.

And, firstly, if we review the list of economic policy priorities that would benefit the Latino working class, Latinos again register preferences that are much more LEFT than whites in things like universal health insurance, free university tuition, affordable housing, and living wages.

Suggesting that Latinos are indifferent or repelled by issues such as climate change and LGBTQ rights is simply absurd, especially among young Latinos, under 45 years of age. The issue of police brutality is also something that deeply worries Latinos, but the progressive side of establishing strong community controls rather than the conservative side... READ MORE

WASHINGTON, D.C. —  Tawheeda Wahabzada was tired of hoping she would ever have a permanent place in the country that had been home for nearly her entire life. So in February 2020, after hosting a “self-deportation party” where she said goodbye to her friends and family, she left the U.S.

Wahabzada, 32, moved to Toronto, where she was born to Afghan refugee parents before they joined extended family in Nevada, where she grew up.

She thought starting over would be exciting, that she’d be busy making new friends, exploring her new surroundings and traveling. Instead, the pandemic shutdown kept her indoors and Wahabzada had to face the full weight of her decision. Lonely and isolated, she wanted to make sure others in her position wouldn’t have the same experience.

“I basically had to confront the consequences,” she said. “But I made myself a promise: If I’m 30 and I still have DACA, I’m going to leave. I can’t wait for an idea. I spent my 20s in this survival mindset and I couldn’t really enjoy life.”

Since 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals has protected from deportation more than 800,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, allowing them to work, drive and travel legally. But the program, which now has fewer than 600,000 enrollees, never offered a pathway to citizenship. It was “a temporary stopgap measure,” then-President Obama said when he introduced DACA in 2012.

A decade later, the program and the lives of many of its enrollees are hanging by a thread. A small but growing number of DACA recipients, disheartened after years of instability, are voluntarily moving to countries where they can acquire permanent legal status. Some, like Wahabzada, are going back to where they were born; others have transferred jobs or applied for student programs in unfamiliar places.... READ MORE

WASHINGTON— On Monday, October 31, 2022, the Department of Homeland Security’s final rule (PDF) to preserve and fortify Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) went into effect. The final rule’s implementation means that DACA is now based on a formal regulation, thereby preserving and fortifying the program while the program remains the subject of litigation in court. Previously, DACA was based on a policy memorandum that then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano issued on August 15, 2012. Since its inception in 2012, DACA has allowed over 800,000 young people to remain with their families in the only country many of them have ever known and continue to contribute to their communities in the United States.

Under the final rule, USCIS will continue to accept and process applications for deferred action, work authorization, and advance parole for current DACA recipients. Due to ongoing litigation, USCIS will continue to accept but cannot process initial DACA requests.

“This final rule is our effort to preserve and fortify DACA to the fullest extent possible,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas.  “Ultimately, we need Congress to urgently pass legislation that provides Dreamers with the permanent protection they need and deserve.”

“Implementation of the DACA final rule illustrates USCIS’s continued commitment to Dreamers,” said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ur M. Jaddou. “While court orders prevent us from adjudicating requests from initial applicants, we will continue to carry on the important work of renewing and continuing protections for current DACA recipients, as outlined in this final rule.”

The final rule is a product of careful review that considered the more than 16,000 comments received during the public comment period. It codifies existing DACA policy, with limited changes, and replaces the guidance set forth in the 2012 Napolitano memorandum (PDF).

The final rule affirms that:

Current DACA recipients’ deferred action, employment authorization, and advance parole will continue to be recognized as valid under the final rule.
DACA is not a form of lawful status but DACA recipients are considered “lawfully present” for certain purposes.

Non-citizens who meet eligibility criteria, clear all national security and public safety vetting, and are found to merit a favorable exercise of discretion may be granted deferred action and obtain renewable two-year work authorization. Given pending litigation, however, the Department is currently barred from granting deferred action to any new DACA recipients.

On Oct. 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a July 2021 decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas declaring the 2012 DACA policy unlawful. The Fifth Circuit, however, preserved the partial stay issued by the district court in July 2021 and remanded the case back to the district court for further proceedings regarding the new DACA rule.

On Oct. 14, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas issued an order extending its injunction and partial stay of the DACA final rule.

Current grants of DACA and related Employment Authorization Documents are valid, and USCIS will accept and process renewal DACA requests and accompanying requests for employment authorization under the final rule.
 

The words spoken by several prominent elected Mexican, Latina(@) officials in 2021, and recently revealed on tape, were prejudicial, discriminatory, mean, and hurtful to everyone they were directed at. But they were not expressed by racists, or white supremacists as some people who have written or spoken about this incident have claimed. 

We know the social, political history and the core values of Martinez, Cedillo, De Leon and Herrera. Cedillo, along with former Mayor Villaraigosa, and Senator Durazo were all part of CASA, a national immigrant workers’ rights organization, which fought from 1972 to 1986, to gain amnesty for all immigrants in the US with the passing of the 1986 Amnesty IRCA Law signed by then President Reagan. In1994 Cedillo, then the leader of SEIU Local 660, along with the LA Federation of Labor spearheaded the fight against Governor Wilson’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187. All of the elected Mexican/Latina(@) officials participated in the mega immigration marches in 2006,  including the now famous “Day Without An Immigrant” on May 1, 2006 where over 1.5 million people marched in the streets of Los Angeles, joined by millions more across the country, against the racist immigration Sensenbrenner Bill. 

Cedillo, once called “ONE BILL GIL”, fought for nine years to pass a law giving undocumented workers the right to drive in the state of California. He made it safe for families to take their children to school, to shop, drive to work, to go to playgrounds, and beaches without the fear of being detained and deported.

Kevin De Leon has been an immigrant’s rights defender since his early days in the late 1980’s working at One Stop Immigration. He has been a tremendous fighter for the environment and workers’ rights in California. During De Leon’s time in the Senate, he took on President Trump and his allies on immigration and helped pass landmark legislation establishing sanctuary in the State of California. He became the target of racists and white supremacists throughout the state. He was constantly receiving death threats... READ MORE

No issue better illustrates the difficulty of immigration reform than the plight of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, who were brought to the US as children. Years of congressional inaction have left these migrants subject to capricious court rulings that threaten to force some of them to leave the only country they’ve known — which is why President Joe Biden needs to press lawmakers to make a deal to protect the Dreamers now. With a change in control of Congress looming, they may not get another chance.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program was created in 2012, via an executive order by President Barack Obama. It protects undocumented immigrants brought into the country before the age of 16 from deportation, allowing them to study and work legally in the US and renew their status every two years. Since its inception, the program has enrolled more than 800,000 young adults — at least one-third of whom have been in the US since they were 5 — and benefited the country as a whole. DACA households pay $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in state and local taxes annually... READ MORE

The study found an improvement in birth weight for babies born to immigrant moms from 2012 to 2015, when DACA started.

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Fresno State and the University of California San Francisco have finalized a study that compares the birth weight of babies born to mothers who are US citizens versus mothers who aren't.

The study began in 2017. Researchers focused on Mexican Immigrant moms in California who were eligible for DACA.

The goal was to find whether or not certainty in their legal status had an impact on healthy birth weight.

The study found an improvement in birth weight for babies born to immigrant moms from 2012 to 2015, when DACA started.

Numbers then show a decrease in birth weights following threats to DACA.

"That is a very big claim to make and that is why we were studying birth records from all of California," says Tania Pacheco-Warner, who is a co-director for Central Valley Health Policy Institute at Fresno State.

Tania has been working on this study for years.

She explains, "What we see in studies like these is that external things that happen, like policies in the country, are some things that are affecting the mother."

Tania is an immigrant mother herself but is a naturalized citizen. Her legal status has given her a feeling of stability.

But says she felt uncertain herself during the 2016 Presidential elections.

Tania mentions, "When DACA was being tied into the larger immigration debate and even questioning people who were already citizens like me, naturalized citizens, that was very stressful for me."

For Tania, immigration policies like DACA are important to protect students.

She mentions, "We have wonderful graduates in our community right now working as teachers and professionals in our community that are making great contributions, but don't know what is next for them... READ MORE

(NNPA) – Of all the eligible voters in our country, just 10% actually do, according to a recent Unite America Institute study.

Don’t you want to be in that minority?

You have to register first.

And if you think you’ve missed the deadline, no you haven’t.

You can still call up the Secretary of State’s office and register for a provisional ballot.

You will count in California.

Don’t miss the boat. You’ve got to vote, especially in this political age of denial. From election denial to DACA denial to now student loan forgiveness denial, there’s a lot of denial being thrust upon us.

It makes the upcoming midterm elections more consequential that even the last presidential election — the one that some Republicans insist was stolen but wasn’t.

If the election deniers ride the Big Lie to victory, as hard as these last two years have been, expect things to get even harder and nastier with the deniers possibly in the majority in both chambers of Congress.

Democracy will feel worse than ever because it will be barely a democracy.

How does democracy denial sound?

People of color surely don’t need more motivation to vote. It’s already gotten personal.

Are you a Dreamer? A Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient? Do you know someone who is?

A few weeks ago, the Fifth Circuit appeals court declared DACA illegal. Ultimately, the decision to save DACA, or to establish a pathway to citizenship, relies on Congress.

You can decide who goes to Congress before they decide who to deport.

Are you another kind of dreamer, the kind looking at a college degree as your ticket to opportunity? Remember, you stretched, got into a pricier school, and got that student loan.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, acting on an appeal from six Republican attorneys general from Southern states, blocked President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

That’s where up to $20,000 in debt relief could come to student loan borrowers if they make under $125,000 a year... READ MORE

After 20 years of living in the United States, Pamela Chomba and her sister – both DACA recipients – decided it was time to buy a house where they lived in Washington, D.C. But that same year, 2021, a lower court judge in Texas made a decision that threatened to upend their whole lives when they ruled that the Obama administration had illegally implemented the program.

“Even the euphoria of having something that you can touch, that you can say, ‘This is my home,’ is put into question,” Chomba said. “What kind of economic certainty and security do I have to continue living in my home, to continue feeling economically independent?”

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program granted undocumented immigrants work permits and protection from deportation for those who emigrated to the country as children.

Earlier this month, Dreamers, or DACA recipients, received a temporary reprieve when a three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that DACA had been implemented illegally but the program should remain in place... READ MORE

A team of researchers conducted the study on 50 Tampa Bay residents living in limbo as threat of deportation looms.

In 2016, University of South Florida researcher Elizabeth Aranda was wrapping up a project on young adult immigrants. She had conducted interviews with troves of people, all willing to share their stories of life without permanent legal status.

But on the morning that former president Donald Trump was elected, something changed. One of Aranda’s interview subjects didn’t show up for a scheduled meeting. In fact, she never heard from him again. It kept happening.

Throughout his campaign, Trump had made a crackdown on immigration a key issue. He promised harsher penalties for people living in the United States without permanent legal status, and crushed the hope that many carried for a path to citizenship.

His takeover resulted in new waves of fear and uncertainty for immigrants — especially for those who arrived to the United States as children and had been granted protections under former President Barack Obama that Trump was aiming to undo... READ MORE

We must think about the consequences of Senate inaction in human terms. Ending DACA will shatter the lives of nearly 2 million people in our country who were brought here as children.

We are running out of time to save DACA, a program created in 2012 to provide temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of childhood migrants who know no other home than the United States. DACA has strengthened our economy and is supported by 75% of the American people. 

Still, a decade-long right-wing attack on the program is reaching its conclusion in court, where the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling that DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was unlawful, meaning the end of the program is almost certainly near.

The stakes could not be higher. The end of DACA would uproot the lives of 600,000 DACA recipients in addition to the more than 1.3 million migrants eligible for the program. (The Trump administration stopped new DACA applications as part of its anti-immigrant agenda.)

Aside from ending the antiquated filibuster, there is only one path forward: We need 10 Republicans in the Senate to join Democrats and pass the American Dream and Promise Act, a bill that provides legal stability and a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and eligible migrants. But Republicans have already signaled that they will kill the bill if they take control of either the House or Senate next year. That’s why we need to pass it now... READ MORE