It goes without saying that the saddest element in the current enforcement of immigration laws is the apprehension, deportation or abandonment of children.
Stories surface every day of parents who were apprehended and fearing the same for their children, say nothing about their children at home. They hope a relative or neighbor will eventually realize their children are alone and will take care of them until they can be reunited. According to a new report released this week in Mexico City by the Population, Border and Migrant Affairs Commission, for every three adults deported
Read moreWorldwide, people are suffering the effects of skyrocketing food prices. Mexico - where over half the population are poor - is part of this global disaster that, according to the World Bank, has already impoverished an estimated 100 million people. As Frances Moore Lappé of Food First indicates, this is perhaps the largest human rights crisis in decades; however, it is altogether avoidable because it is the product of bad policy. Mexico's vulnerability and the impacts on its population are easily anticipated as the result of eroding Mexican food security under U.S.-backed trade
Read moreBEHIND THE THICK GLASS THAT RUNS THE LENGTH of the Yuba County Jail's visitation corridor, Tatyana Mitrohina's eyes glisten, and then fill with tears as she recounts the last time she saw her son. "During the visit, he climbed into my arms and fell asleep with his head on my shoulder while I walked around with him," she remembers.
Two months after that visit, Mitrohina was sent to the Yuba County Jail in Marysville, California, hours away from her 2-year-old son, who is in foster care. She was convicted on charges that she had hit him. While she does not deny the charges, she does
Read moreJuxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico - For almost half a century, migration has been the main fact of social life in hundreds of indigenous towns spread through the hills of Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states. That's made the conditions and rights of migrants central concerns for communities like Santiago de Juxtlahuaca.
Today, the right to travel to seek work is a matter of survival. But this June, in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of Oaxaca's Mixteca region, dozens of farmers left their fields, and women weavers their looms, to talk about another right: the right to stay home.
In
Read moreEL PASO - Dozens of Mexicans - including police officers, businessmen, at least one prosecutor and a journalist - are asking for political asylum in the United States in a bid to escape a wave of drug-related killings and kidnappings south of the border.
Under U.S. law, fear of crime is not, in itself, grounds for political asylum.
But the increase in asylum applications from the areas torn by drug-cartel violence - and the willingness of asylum-seekers to sit behind bars in the U.S. for months while they await a decision - are an indicator of how bad things are in Mexico
Read moreMaria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez died in May after suffering a heat stroke while pruning grape vines at the San Joaquin County vineyard in California. Jimenez was a seventeen-year-old undocumented worker who had migrated from Oaxaca, Mexico to work in the United States. She was working in the fields with her fiancé and was pregnant at the time of her death. As an undocumented worker, Jimenez's death points to the often severe realities faced by non-status agricultural workers in the US.
Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), migration from Mexico to the
Read moreThe city council of Aurora, Colorado is considering two ordinances that would regulate how day laborers seek out work. The city is proposing to restrict the locations of offices set up to help the day laborers, and limit how they gather to meet prospective employers. Last week, local tensions escalated when members of the anti-immigrant group the Minuteman Project held a day-long protest directly in front of a busy intersection where day-laborers often gather.
The city council of Aurora, Colorado is considering two ordinances that would regulate how day laborers seek out work. The
Read more1) Statement by Cynthia McKinney, Power to the People presidential candidate
in the United States, in solidarity with the people of Mexico in their
struggle to defend their Oil and Other Natural Resources
2) Cynthia McKinney Speaks at May 1st Immigrant Rights Demonstration in San
Francisco
3) Cynthia McKinney on "Free Trade" and Immigrants' Rights
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1) Statement by Cynthia McKinney, Power to the People presidential candidate
in the United States, in Read more
Barack Obama's candidacy has changed America's cultural compass; nobody can deny it after coming across the JFK comparisons and the term "black Camelot." A new paroxysm is spreading: the "obamagasm," definable as a rush of delight in imagining Barack rather than George as our leader. But our fearless man of color may be headed for a brownout in a race against McCain. Latino voters will be a tough battleground.
Gore and Kerry won a majority of the brown vote, and Obama will likely beat McCain among Latinos. The problem is that "winning" among Latinos is not enough to win. Since we
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for Immigration Reform