This story was originally published at Prism.
During his presidency, Donald Trump targeted some of the most vulnerable immigrant communities in the United States—including populations that were granted temporary protected status by the federal government because they came from countries afflicted by natural disasters, war, and other dangerous conditions. This included Liberians.
This story was originally published at Prism.
Watching Alabama workers mount one of the “largest and most aggressive efforts to unionize Amazon” was the first time many Americans saw the powerful labor organizing that is happening in the South, a region of the country that is home to anti-worker laws rooted in racism. But Juan Miranda says the movement in Alabama was just a snapshot.
A Georgia detention center with the second-highest COVID-19 rate in the nation recently expanded the population of immigrants it detains to include women.
In a statement to Prism, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed that as of Jan. 27, the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, detains 11 women. This is an increase from December when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Stewart had two women in custody.
In the early 2000s while writing her book, The Farmworkers’ Journey, which explores the farmworkers’ binational circuit that stretches from the west central Mexico countryside to central California, Dr. Ann López said she remembers having an epiphany at her computer. “Surely if the American public knew how farmworkers were treated, they wouldn’t tolerate this horrific abuse, right?” Sadly, this remains to be seen.
Back when it was safe to fly, I always dreaded the landing. As a recovering Catholic, I still do the sign of the cross out of impulse, a long-lingering tic that convinces me I’m making myself safe.
Rita Blalock has worked at a North Carolina McDonald’s for 10 years, taking the bus to and from work each day. During the COVID-19 crisis, the 54-year-old has continued cranking out food while suffering from cataracts, risking her health and her life for $10 an hour. Blalock does not have health insurance, and the multibillion dollar company that employs her does not offer her paid sick time or hazard pay to work through the pandemic.
In a historic move Tuesday, the Army said it fired or suspended 14 officers and enlisted soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, and ordered policy changes to address chronic failures of leadership that contributed to a widespread pattern of violence, including murder, sexual assault, and harassment. A separate probe was also ordered into the base’s Criminal Investigation Command unit that is responsible for investigating crimes at Fort Hood.
In the weeks leading up to Monday’s Supreme Court confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, there was a slate of reporting about abortion and religious communities. Much of the reporting was ahistorical, inaccurate, and failed to convey that Coney Barrett was not confirmed despite her inexperience and extreme views, but because of her inexperience and extreme views.
When Prism spoke to poet, spoken word performer, and disability activist Maria R. Palacios, she was “nervous and excited” to film four original performance pieces as part of We Love Like Barnacles: Crip Lives in Climate Chaos, a show focusing on the ways that climate change is disproportionately affecting disabled people and other marginalized communities.
From behind the walls of Philadelphia’s First United Methodist Church of Germantown, Oneita Thompson has read articles about the importance of mutual aid during the COVID-19 crisis and watched livestreams of the nationwide uprising as part of the Movement for Black Lives. Her internet connection is her only real contact with the outside world, and relying on mutual aid—in other words, the kindness of strangers—is currently her only means of survival.
It has been almost eight months since the first COVID-19 cases hit the United States and there has been a national shift in how essential workers are viewed. Once heroic headlines—uplifting the workers who kept the country running and fed—are now bleak. Essential workers are being treated as “sacrificial lambs,” New York Magazine recently reported, and thrust “into positions they were never meant to fill.
Growing up as a child in southeast Los Angeles, I don’t remember a single summer in which I wasn’t enrolled in the reading program at the Downey City Library. Multiple times a week, I would skip through the electronic doors holding my father’s hand, the air conditioning coaxing us into the entryway where we were greeted by a display case featuring the latest children’s books.
The state of sexual health education is dire in the United States. Currently, only 28 states and the district of Washington, D.C., require sex education and HIV education, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Even more alarming, of these 28 states, only 17 require their sex education curriculum to be medically accurate and only one state requires instruction on consent.
A California federal judge on Wednesday denied non-profits’ attempt to join a long-standing class action and intervene on behalf of children detained alongside their parents in family detention centers.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee’s decision came after attorneys with ALDEA –The People’s Justice Center and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) filed a motion to intervene July 20.
July 9 was the anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, “the linchpin of the current constitutional system” that allowed for birthright citizenship, granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people and promising equal protection of the laws. More than 150 years after these promises were made to African Americans, the country has yet to deliver on them.
This week, the family of an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who sustained serious injuries in an accident was able to stop his deportation from a Pennsylvania hospital—a deportation organized not by federal immigration authorities, but by the hospital itself.
On May 10, A.V. (initials of the patient used to protect his privacy) was seriously injured in Philadelphia when a man on a motorcycle crashed into him.
For 40 years, the reproductive justice organization Taller Salud has been providing direct services to Puerto Rican survivors of gender-based violence and intimate partner violence. Founded in 1979, Taller Salud is the longest running feminist organization on the island.