Category: Uncategorized

By Greg Moses

IndyMedia Austin / Houston

With the joyful news of an Ibrahim family reunion tonight–as father Salaheddin returns home from his lockup in Haskell–we remember two other families of Palestinian heritage whose lives were trashed by hardline immigration enforcement.
First we remember the Suleiman family whose deportation to Jordan has exiled twin citizens of the USA age four.

“They definitely would like to come back,” says Riad Hamad of the Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund, who purchased the plane tickets that allowed the family to leave at their own expense.

“They didn’t want to leave the country, but they did want to live, and that’s why they left,” explained Hamad over the phone Friday afternoon. The 61-year-old father of the family, Adel, was receiving such inhumane treatment in Oklahoma jails that he feared for his life.

Adel was born into a Palestinian refugee camp during the 1948 displacement of the Palestinian people, then in 1967 he was driven from the West Bank by war. And in 1991 he fled Kuwait when the first Gulf War hit there. Now he waits for his furniture to catch up to him in Amman, Jordan after being thrown out of the USA.

In Dallas, Adel and his spouse had their future before them.

“They had just purchased their first house,” says Hamad. “They put down $20,000.” Now the furniture from that house is all they have. Hamad will have the furniture shipped to them next week.

“This is a disaster for them,” says Hamad. “The furniture will provide a sense of continuity.”

Are they interested in returning to the USA?

“Yes they are,” says Hamad quickly. “It’s not like they wanted to leave the country.”

A relative who saw Adel at the Dallas airport on Jan. 29 as he was being deported with his exiled daughters said he looked like a famine picture.

The pre-dawn operation that uprooted Adel from his American dream was called “Return to Sender.” But who sent Adel to America? And why should he not be invited to return with profound apologies from even the President himself?

Hamad remembers trying to cheer up 17-year-old Ayman Suleiman, who was worried what would happen to his education.

“I told him I have paid tuition for 20 Palestinian students to complete college and I would pay for his too,” says Hamad. “When Ayman heard me promise him an education, he dropped his head down for a minute or so to hide his tears.”

“Get to Jordan, I told him. Find a high school and tell me about your college plans.”

Hazahzas

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement abruptly notified Hazahza family relatives Wednesday night that a mother and son would be release from the T. Don Hutto prison, Hamad was called to pick them up.

Hamad knew the mother, Juma, because he had brought her favorite food to prison–Zaazatr. From the prison authorities she requested a tomato, “but she didn’t see a tomato in three months.”

As Hamad drove Juma and her 11-year-old son, Mohammad, from the Hutto prison he heard the boy ask, “Mama am I dreaming?” First thing he asked for was a hamburger.

Juma and Mohammad were last reported resting at the home of a relative in Dallas after a long night of driving made necessary because airlines would not issue them tickets since they lacked proper identification upon release.

The rest of the Hazahza family sits at the prison in Haskell–father Radi and four adult children: 18-year-old Ahmad, 19-year-old Suzan, and 23-year-olds Mirvat and Hisham. They are the ones to free next.

As for the Ibrahim children who tonight will see their father for the first time since early November, Hamad remembers the first time he saw them.

“I saw those children behind bars and I was not allowed to touch them,” he said.

“Even if I was a donkey with no feelings, I would hear this story and be moved.

As a child in Beirut more than forty years ago, Riad Hamad would look out the window at camps filled with white tents.

“What are those tents, Daddy?”

“Those are the Palestinians, Riad. They are waiting to return home.”

**************

Note: to see daily videos from Palestine via laptops that Hamad has donated, visit marhabafrompalestine.com

Email from John Wheat Gibson, 3:17pm

Tonight the Ibrahim children will be in their own home in Richardson, Texas with their mother and their father. I just received a call from Salaheddin Ibrahim, to tell me he was in a car on his way home from the prison in Haskell.

Plato says “Tyranny grows in dark places.” Thanks to all who helped shine the light on the benighted Frauenlager and the persecution of Palestinians by the U.S. government.

This project will be over when the U.S. government stops putting children in prison, stops torturing prisoners, and stops funding the murder of children abroad, so that no child has to flee his or her homeland.

“In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Thomas Jefferson

John Wheat Gibson Or, here’s how the AP breaks the news:

Authorities offer tour of immigrant detention center

02/10/2007

By ANABELLE GARAY / Associated Press

Showing off playgrounds and computer labs, officials at a rural immigration detention center that held a Palestinian family for three months disputed civil rights attorneys outside who called the facility unsafe and dehumanizing.

The tour of the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former state prison near Austin, came a week after the Ibrahim family was released when a federal immigration board agreed to reconsider their request for asylum.

Attorneys for the Ibrahims, who arrived in suburban Dallas in 2001, say the five family members felt humiliated by the conditions at Hutto. Court papers allege that 5-year-old Faten Ibrahim was yelled at and threatened because she didn’t stand still during head counts.

But during a rare glimpse inside the facility to the media, Hutto officials disputed allegations that detainees are threatened with solitary confinement and shackled.

“We’ve done a number of things to soften the facility and make it family-friendly,” said Gary Mead, assistant director for detention and removal at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Immigration authorities opened the facility last year hoping detention would serve as a deterrent to illegal immigration. The facility houses roughly 400 men, women and children either awaiting deportation or seeking asylum.

Families are housed in adjacent cells and there’s no use of force, ICE officials said.

Children attend school during the day and have access to a computer lab and libraries. There’s a playground surrounded by two layers of chain-link fencing, parts of which have barbed wire at the top.

“This is a work in progress. We’re trying to turn it into the best family facility,” Mead said.

But advocates say many of the people housed at Hutto left repressive and violent regimes in their home countries, only to be incarcerated in the U.S. after seeking asylum.

“The entire facility is dehumanizing and inappropriate for children,” said Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU of Texas.

Graybill said ACLU officials have requested to tour the facility but has not be granted permission.

Attorneys representing some of the families detained at Hutto say that clients have complained of inedible food, weight loss and inadequate classroom instruction for their children.

Kids have been told that if they misbehave, they will be separated from their parents, Graybill said. She spoke while holding a drawing from a 7-year-old detainee that read “HELP, I hate this place.”

The Ibrahims were released after a federal immigration panel ruled that escalating violence in the Palestinian territories since Hamas came to power was grounds to reconsider the family’s asylum request.

The order issued by the federal Board of Immigration Appeals came more than two years after the Ibrahim family’s initial request for asylum was denied.

On Friday, Salaheddin Ibrahim, the family’s father, was released from a separate detention center near Abilene, said his brother, Ahmad Ibrahim.

Attorneys for the family said no date has been set for a new asylum hearing.

Republican U.S. Rep. John Carter, whose district includes the Hutto facility, said in a statement that the center “offers the optimal solution to our nation’s growing illegal immigration problem” and that he has been assured the center is “running in an appropriate and humane manner.”

ICE and Hutto officials said they are working to build more classrooms and portable buildings, and to remove barbed wire around the facility.

__

Associated Press writer Thomas Peipert in Dallas contributed to this report.

Latino Civil Rights Organizations File Legal Action to Improve Bilingual Education Programs in Texas

MOTION AVAILABLE IN WEB LINKS SECTION UNDER "BILINGUAL LAWSUIT"

San Antonio – MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and META, the Multicultural Training, Education and Advocacy, Inc., filed a motion on behalf of LULAC and the American GI Forum seeking to require Texas to monitor, enforce, and supervise the State’s bilingual education and ESL program for English Language Learner (ELL) students in Texas pubic schools. GI Forum State Commander Paul Herrera stated “Texas has failed to ensure equal educational opportunities for the over 600,000 English Language Learner students in our public schools. The State’s neglect of its duties has failed these students for 25 years and now it’s time for the State to stop the passing the buck and address its failures by implementing the program the way it was meant to be.”

The motion, which was filed in the United States Eastern District Court of Texas, seeks further relief from the Court under its continuing jurisdiction in the landmark case of US v. Texas. The motion comes 25 years after the State promised the Texas Court to implement effectively a bilingual education program for all ELL students.

Roger Rocha, Texas President of LULAC added, “The Texas Education Agency is abandoning its duty to oversee the program, resulting in thousands of English Language Learner children being pushed out of the very system meant to educate them. This is a recipe for disaster not only for our students, but for the future of Texas. Instead of wasting time looking at failed theories from other states, it’s time for the TEA to roll up its sleeves and make sure that our own program does the job.”

Founded in 1968, MALDEF, the nation’s premier Latino civil rights organization, promotes and protects the rights of Latinos through advocacy, community education and outreach, leadership development, higher education scholarships and when necessary, through the legal system.

META is a national legal advocacy organization that for over 30 years has devoted itself to improving the education of English language learners and immigrant students.

February 9, 2006, PRESS RELEASE

By Rodrigo Saldaña Guerrero
TCRR Columnist from Mexico

Among the most characteristic features of Modernity is the trend to think of history as a linear movement, decided beforehand. It tends thereby to simplify the horizon of thought. Instead of admitting an indefinite number of options that weave an extremely complex but enormously wealthy landscape of possibilities for human minds, this way of thinking solidifies into dogma the fashionable ideas. It considers unthinkable the notion that a dominant current of thought might be altogether on the wrong track. Progress can not go wrong, it maintains.

This trend leaves out of consideration a huge number of interesting options. It also ignores parts of the population that do not adhere to the conventional wisdom. They will have to come round, or else they will be left aside by the ineluctable march of history. I want to point out here to two regrettable consequences of this simplifying.
For one thing, it tends to neglect the value of doing a job well. If market is the king of economical history, betting on it is the only important aspect. How well you administer your business is of no importance whatsoever. If, contrariwise, government intervention is where the future of the economy lays, the skills of public managers is similarly unimportant. History is on your side, and you can not but conquer. I think, on the other side, that you build micro economical factors and they will produce, on time, the macro economical ones. Deciding what macro economical model is right is senseless, unless you take into account its generation from the micro economical level.

I suggest that private and public managers are doing, in general and in Mexico at least, a bad job. Even if the model they have chosen was the right one, in other words, they would be implementing it badly. We have neglected a vital point: helping people develop the skills to do jobs well, any jobs. Most Mexican politicians lack political skills, most Mexican administrators lack managerial skills. Most important skills, furthermore, are communitarian ones. They do not appear in the abstract: they exist to do concrete things. Helping people find their true calling and develop the relevant skills, without knowing in advance what kind of configuration or gestalt they will build with them, but knowing what tasks of human relevance we need to perform, would be a better approach to development.

This approach has to start from the ideas, desires and feelings of everyone concerned. I think that the idolatry of progress described before tends to ignore them, as I have already said. I see in many countries that for the different sides of the political battlefield people on the other ones do not matter. The right side will win, and what the rest of the people feel about it is negligible. Their right to look for other lines of personal development is trampled upon, or their activities along those lines are brushed aside as negligible. This cast of mind tends to personify the State as a Leviathan, a rather strange thing to do complacently for people who supposedly abhor totalitarianism.

In many countries a lot of the citizens do not vote, and of those who do a very sizable percentage side with the opposition. The winning party considers its victory, nonetheless, as crushing and definitive. Besides leaving behind a scandal ridden mess, as other Republican ages have done (the Grant, Harding and, to a lesser extent perhaps, Nixon, presidencies), the Reagan-Bush years will leave an inheritance of division and perhaps hate in the U. S. To act as if the whole people backed them, when in reality a large part of it bitterly opposes them, is surely a receipt for disaster.

But U. S. Republicans are not the only ones to follow it. In several countries a political section is pushing for an agenda of change in legislation pertaining to religious or sexual matters as if being in power was the only important point. What they need to accomplish success is a cultural revolution, but what they are trying to accomplish is just a political coup. Years after a Center Left coalition ended the reign of the Chilean Right, quite a lot of voters continue voting for this option. This means to me that the Socialist-Democratic Christian Coalition has not achieved a clear cultural victory. The issues of the past have not been really resolved. This does not prevent the sympathizers of the winning coalition cheering unreservedly for their triumph, as if it had been truly definitive. The situation in Mexico is even worse.

During the decades of six-year reigns, when a fascist corporativism masquerading as revolutionary nationalism stifled any outside forces (or, at any rate, tried to) there was very little dialogue going on in Mexico. This regrettable lack continues today. The Mexican Left inherited from Marxism several convictions. One is that it is the natural and indisputable representative of the people, another that the State was hopelessly alienated until the Proletariat came to power by force. As a result of this, the Left did not try to convince the people that it was right: history was sure to do the job.

The Left gets in Mexico the votes of a very small percentage of the population, but aspires to impose its agenda on the whole country, anyway. Another feature it inherited is a tendency to a monolithic unity. This cast of mind does not inspire it to remedy that lack of dialogue described above. All this helps make the political scene, in a difficult election year, a contest for power between closed factions, rather than an opportunity for a shared effort in democracy building.

A large part of our world adores growth, considers it inevitable and, also, the solution to any problem around. The growth thus idolized is abstract growth. What we know about it is only that it will happen. The growth there is in a given situation, on the other hand, is a concrete growth. It has very definite features. They are not very nice ones. It generates jobs for people who do not exist (young, experienced, with fantastic school achievements, and who, having all those assets, are looking for jobs) and leaves without jobs more and more real people. It produces things people really do not need instead of those we do need, and it demands that we buy all those things we do not need and can not afford, to keep the economy going.

In other words, the growth we do have is not the solution of our problems, but rather one of their main causes. As far as the political horizons of Latin America are concerned, the trouble is compounded by the fact that this growth has little or no relation with what we really want, need, can. Human development should stem from this that we want, need, can, from the concrete circumstances and human scale in which we live. And these are communal circumstances: this is a trip we must do together. Is the mess we live in, in a large part, the result of trying to conduct it separately, each on our own?