El Magonista | Vol. 11, no. 10 | March 23, 2023

In a recent New York Times opinion article, Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council asks: “How did President Biden go from denouncing the immigration policies of his predecessor to following in his footsteps by proposing a regulation that would make the vast majority of current asylum-seekers ineligible?”

She acknowledges, however, that if the exceptions in the regulation are real, large numbers of people will remain here to pursue their cases.

According to Lind, the answer is that the number of border apprehensions went up, which historically has been viewed as a crisis.

The increase in apprehensions was only part of it. Biden also has been under pressure from challenges to his border policies in court. For instance, in Florida vs. USA, U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell, II, concluded that Biden’s parole + ATD (Alternatives to Detention) practice is unlawful, and vacated it.

Wetherell found that Biden “has turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country by prioritizing ‘alternatives to detention’ over actual detention and by releasing more than a million aliens into the country — on ‘parole’ or pursuant to the exercise of ‘prosecutorial discretion’ under a wholly inapplicable statute.”

Moreover, I don’t think Biden has changed course. He seems to still be trying to keep his campaign promise to secure our country’s values as a nation of immigrants, the two main ones being to welcome asylum seekers and find alternatives to detention. Wetherell’s decision shows how far Biden has gone to keep that promise... READ MORE

Southern California’s latest storm didn’t dampen the spirits of over 300 workers who gathered in front of a school bus yard in Van Nuys before dawn on Tuesday, the first day of a planned three-day strike.

Standing at the edges of the picket line at 4:30 a.m., Max Arias beamed. 

“I’m inspired by them,” said Arias, the executive director of Service Employees International Union Local 99. He wore Adidas sneakers, blue jeans and a black hoodie jacket that kept his silver-framed glasses dry from the cold rain pounding down on the picketers. “Once you learn you have power, it’s not easy to take it away. They’ve shut the district down!”

The union’s 30,000 members — Los Angeles Unified School District bus drivers, mechanics, custodians, food workers and others — are asking for a 30% wage increase over four years, plus $2 more per hour for the lowest-paid employees. They make an average of $25,000 a year in a city of astronomically high rents.

The teachers union is striking in solidarity, shutting down the schools for 420,000 students. It’s the first time the two unions have gone on strike together.

Arias grabbed a small sign that read “Respect Us” and slipped into the crowd. Sometimes, he led chants. Sometimes, he joined them. Sometimes, he jumped out of the line to embrace people or offer support. “This is you trying?” Arias joked, impressed by a chant leader who said she wasn’t trying hard enough. “I’d hate to see you doing!”

This week’s historic strike is the culmination of a years-long strategy that Arias describes as “internal organizing” — getting workers to realize they have far more power than they ever imagined.

“You’re asking, you’re not demanding,” he said. “You can get to incremental change, but you’re never going to get to serious change unless you somehow can shock the system... READ MORE

Application fees for citizens, permanent residents hoping to sponsor family for permanent residency — known as a green card — would increase by 33% to $710.

Nearly 7,000 comments were submitted in response to a proposed increase in U.S. visa fees, with the majority voicing fierce opposition and concerns.

Last week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ended public comment for a proposed fee increase unveiled by the Biden administration in January. The deadline for public comment was initially set for March 6, but was extended another week until March 13 due to a technical issue.

Under the proposal, application fees for most categories of immigration to the United States would increase. Some fees, like those for employment-based visas and family-based immigrant applications, will face dramatic increases.

Application fees for U.S. citizens and permanent residents hoping to sponsor family members for permanent residency — known as a green card — would increase by 33% to $710, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Fees for marriage-based green card applications could double from $1,760 to over $3,640, USCIS citing the higher cost of proving a valid family relationship exists. Requests from U.S. citizens seeking to bring their fiancés to the U.S. would increase by 35%, from $535 to $720... READ MORE

For 20 years, the Department of Homeland Security has made life a nightmare for millions — but Dreamers like me have seen that there’s another way.

The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, turned 20 this March. It was launched in 2003, right around the time I moved to the United States from the Philippines at age 6. I didn’t yet know the impact this gargantuan department would have on my life.

I loved my life as a new American. I learned English quickly, read TIME magazine for kids, and embraced my new red, white, and blue terrain. In those early post-9/11 years, I even shared the belief that strict immigration enforcement was necessary to protect our country from outside “Others.”

It hadn’t occurred to me then that, as a child whose family overstayed a tourist visa, I was one of those “Others” too. But gradually, that became all too clear.

As I grew up, I watched news of ICE raiding homes and separating families that looked a lot like mine. While my classmates traveled abroad for summer vacation, I stayed tucked away in my family’s Chicago apartment. Afraid of coming face-to-face with police or immigration authorities, I started to fear all authority figures — even my school principals.

But after 10 years of this, a new window opened: the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an Obama administration policy to help Dreamers like me stay in the country legally. I studied the qualifications and meticulously compared them to my life story. I checked all the boxes. I applied right away.

In the decade since, I’ve seen both the bad and good of U.S. immigration policy.

On the one hand, I felt a sense of belonging among the 600,000 Dreamers who qualified for the program. I relished being able to drive a car and work a job as soon as I could.

As a high schooler I committed my life to learning, telling my story, and advocating for immigrants. I even got to tell a packed audience at the 2013 National Immigrant Justice Center Human Rights Awards, including members of Congress and Supreme Court judges, that DACA changes lives for the better.

On the other hand, DACA wasn’t as secure as we’d hoped... READ MORE

DENVER —  Kevin Priola was a Republican before he could even vote.

Inspired by Ronald Reagan, he preregistered with the GOP at age 17. He joined the College Republicans at the University of Colorado in Boulder — a true act of faith in that liberal stronghold — and was elected to the Legislature in 2008, where he’s served ever since.

But Priola slowly grew estranged from the GOP, seeing it as more authoritarian than conservative, and last August he became a Democrat.

“I couldn’t stomach it,” Priola said of his old party, “and associate with that style and brand of politics.”

He’s hardly alone.

In the last two decades, the Republican ranks in Colorado have shrunk drastically, to just a quarter of registered voters, as the once reliably red state has turned a distinct shade of blue.

The transformation is part of a larger political shift across the West: along the Pacific Coast, through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona, into the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and New Mexico. Once a Republican bulwark, the region has become Democratic bedrock. That, in turn, has reshaped presidential politics nationwide.

With a big chunk of the West — California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington — seemingly locked up, Democrats are free to focus more heavily on the perennial battlegrounds of the Midwest and venture into once-solidly Republican states such as Georgia.

Over the next several months I’ll visit several of those western states to explore the forces that remade the political map... READ MORE

When Jamie Rocha and her family first visited the swath of undeveloped land in the Monterey Hills late last year, the grass was dead, the ground muddy.

But on a recent Thursday, after drenching rains in Los Angeles, the grass was a rich green and purple lupine lined the path. Coyotes roamed nearby, sniffing the ground before disappearing below the hillside’s sloping edge.

The afternoon calm belied the family’s excitement. On this day, they were walking on what would one day be their land, 12 acres that had been purchased by the region’s only Indigenous charter school and returned to the Gabrielino Shoshone Tribal Nation of Southern California, the area’s original inhabitants.

“It’s mind-blowing, just to have a dedicated space [for] the Indigenous ways and education,” said Rocha, a member of the tribe, which has long struggled to find a place to practice its ceremonies in congested Los Angeles County. “I wish my grandmother was here to see it.”

In August, the Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory of North America bought the land for $800,000 with the help of grants and nonprofit funding. The K-12 charter school in El Sereno intends to act as a steward for the land and establish the Chief Ya’anna Learning Village. 

The complex is named for Ya’anna Vera Rocha, a late chief of the Gabrielino Shoshone Tribal Nation and Rocha’s grandmother.

Having such a space “always seemed kind of impossible,” Rocha said, “because you know, our territory is prime real estate... READ MORE

The story of Joaquín Murrieta — the legendary Mexican Robin Hood who inspired the story of El Zorro — has endured and evolved over almost 200 years. To the American authorities in California during the Gold Rush, he was a notorious criminal, but to Mexicans, he was El Patrio: the patriotic avenger who came to symbolize defiance of U.S. oppression.

The facts of Murrieta’s life are elusive, but the story really begins with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, between the United States and Mexico.  The terms which ended the Mexican-American war forced Mexico to cede more than 50% of its territory — including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico; most of Arizona and Colorado; and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.
 

That same year, Murrieta, at age 18, migrated from Sonora, Mexico, to California with his wife, brothers and three of his brothers-in-law to prospect for gold during the California Gold Rush.  By all accounts, Murrieta was a successful forty-niner, but as a Mexican, he suffered persecution and discrimination. 

Cherokee novelist John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), who wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit” in 1854, says an assault in 1849 changed Murrieta from a peaceful miner into an outlaw.  

Murrieta and his family were attacked by a group of U.S. miners who stole his land and home, hanged his brother for a crime he didn’t commit, horse-whipped Murrieta and raped and murdered his young wife. 

At the time, authorities in California were engaged in efforts to expel Mexicans from California and turned a blind eye to such attacks. 

Murrieta complained to the authorities, Ridge says, but only suffered more outrage and so decided to avenge his family himself. He vowed to kill every “Yankee” he encountered.

He and accomplice Manuel García, who was known as “Three-Fingered Jack,” formed a gang: The Five Joaquíns, consisting of Murrieta and four other members all named Joaquín. García functioned as Murrieta’s right-hand man.

They quickly moved from horse theft to assaults, robberies and murder.  It is said that in the next few years, they stole more than US $100,000 in gold and 100 horses and killed more than 19 men, including those who had attacked his family. 

After robbing their victims, it was said that Murrieta’s gang would distribute the gold they stole among the poor. The legend of this Mexican Robin Hood grew as more and more stories circulated about Murrieta giving stolen gold to those who needed it most. It made him popular with Mexicans but a dangerous threat to the American authorities.

In 1853, California Governor John Bigler decided to put an end to Murrieta and his gang. An 1853 bill passed in the state legislature labeled The Five Joaquíns criminals and authorized the hiring of 20 California Rangers — all veterans of the Mexican-American War — to track them down. Bigler also put a bounty on Murrieta’s head to incentivize people to turn him in. 

No one did... READ MORE

Benito Juárez is the only individual to have a federal holiday in Mexico. But he is not the father of his country like George Washington, so why?

Juárez’s time was a few decades post-Independence, during a century filled with coups d’etat, flamboyant personalities and foreign invasions. His secular sainthood comes from a lifetime of struggle and establishing the ideals that would shape modern Mexico — even if they’re not always followed.

The post-Independence century was about what Mexico would be. Would it continue its monarchistic ways (favored by the Conservatives) or would it embrace Enlightenment ideas (favored by Liberals)? 

The question began even before the War of Independence started. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 horrified the elites of New Spain but also showed that the mother country was not invincible. Miguel Hidalgo’s career as a rebel began by plotting a return of Ferdinand VII to the throne; only later would he demand the ouster of Mexico’s Spanish government.

The Spanish army’s final exit was engineered not by Hidalgo or the mixed-race mestizos who shed much blood but rather by the opportunistic Spanish general Agustín de Iturbide, who would crown himself emperor in 1822. Liberals were appalled, but Conservatives were not happy either; they wanted someone of royal blood. 

Less than a year into Iturbide’s reign, he was ousted by then-Liberal Antonio López de Santa Anna, and the 1824 Constitution was adopted. But over time, Santa Anna became more dictatorial, arguing that Mexico was not ready for democracy... READ MORE