British author J.K. Rowling, well-known for her Harry Potter books, recently came also in the news because of transphobic views.
This 16 September 2020 musical parody video from Britain says about itself:
The Rowling Stones – You Can’t Ever Be What You Want
J. K. Rowling’s Rolling Stones tribute band.
This 12 June 2020 video says about itself:
Black Lives Matter Protests Around the World
Protesters of all ages, all races, all backgrounds are showing up at Black Lives Matter protests out of love for their fellow human beings. Out of love for George Floyd. Out of love for Breonna Taylor. Out of love for all of the Black people who have lost their lives because of the color of their skin.
You can feel this love when you attend a protest. You can see it on the faces of the people all around you. You can hear it in their voices. Sometimes, it flows through the mass of people like a quiet undercurrent. Sometimes, it’s downright joyful. No matter how it’s expressed, it’s always potent, always powerful. And it’s going to change the world for the better. From New York City to Philadelphia, from Amsterdam to Paris, this is what it is like to attend Black Lives Matter protests.
By Linda Pentz Gunter in the USA, 16 September 2020:
Black Lives Matter accused of heralding a ‘lesbian, anti-family, anti-capitalist Marxist revolution’
The right-wing evangelical political figure Michelle Bachmann‘s outburst accidentally summoned a utopian vision for the US, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any wackier, we get the return of Michele Bachmann.
The Minnesota Tea Party Republican, who served in Congress between 2006-2015 and briefly ran for president, likes to extol the virtues of “American exceptionalism”. and claims the US is “the indispensable nation of the world.”
A self-styled evangelical Christian, Bachmann is now painting a rather different vision: the prospect of the country being run by transgender black Marxists.
Bachmann told a televangelist news show, which aired on September 1, that the Black Lives Matter movement consists of “transgender Marxists, transgender black Marxists who are seeking the overthrow of the United States and the dissolution of the traditional family.”
Not to be outdone, Pat Robertson, a bizarre televangelist himself, but apparently determined to give women a fair shake, quickly pronounced that Black Lives Matter would also lead to a “lesbian, anti-family, anti-capitalist Marxist revolution”.
The irony that Bachmann co-owns a mental health care practice with her husband could not escape notice as she uttered one of the crazier conspiracy theories currently in circulation on the right.
Or maybe, unwittingly, she and Robertson had just envisioned a new US utopia.
After all, what could be better than a government led by anti-capitalist lesbians? Or especially by transgender black Marxists?
Wherever they may be lurking in numbers sufficient for such a coup, transgender black Marxists truly understand discrimination. They are discriminated against in triplicate — for their gender, their politics and the colour of their skin.
They know that compassion is essential for a fair and just society. They are anti-racist and support acceptance and equal rights for our LGBT community.
They oppose an economic system based on inequality, believe in unions, condemn the exploitation of working people and want fair wages and an end to capitalist control of profit.
They envisage a world community, not one riven by boundaries and conflict. They want people to be accepted for who they are, what they believe, who they love and what they look like.
The fear-mongering Bachmann has no idea what it is to walk in the shoes of a black transgender person, Marxist or otherwise. Black transgender women are victims of heightened violence in the US.
However, in the US there is as yet “no formal data collection effort that can be used to describe the nature, frequency, or extent of transgender homicides,” according to a paper in the American Journal of Public Health. Most calculations rely on reporting by non-profit groups advocating on behalf of the LGBT community.
However, in that same paper, the researchers concluded that while transgender people overall may not be at greater risk of being murdered than the rest of the population, “young transgender women of colour almost certainly face a higher chance of being murdered.”
According to the US-based Human Rights Campaign, at least 22 transgender and gender non-conforming people — almost all Black transgender women — were killed in the US in 2019.
In June 2019, during her presidential campaign, Senator Elizabeth Warren, tweeted: “The murder of black trans women is a crisis. We’ll fight this, and we will continue to say their names.”
Bachmann claims to belong to the White House “faith advisory group”, which appears to be a figment of her vivid imagination. So, possibly, is her faith, as it is hard to discern a truly Christian sentiment amidst all her volatile hate speech.
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.
This 8 July 2020 video is called ‘We are the most homophobic country in the EU’: Poland’s election and the LGBT fightback.
From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 9 August 2020:
‘You will not lock all of us up,’ LGBT rights protesters warn in wave of Polish protest
PROTESTS against homophobia took place in Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, Wroclaw and other Polish cities on the first weekend since right-wing President Andrzej Duda was sworn in for a second term.
“You will not lock all of us up!” demonstrators chanted at the thousands-strong Warsaw rally, part of an intensifying standoff between the country’s LGBT movement and the government.
Mr Duda has called the LGBT movement the vehicle for “an ideology … even more destructive” than communism and ran on a pledge to “defend children” from it.
This 27 July 2020 Dutch video, with English subtitles, from Artis zoo in Amsterdam in the Netherlands says about itself (translated):
The Pride week has started. Nature is a lot more diverse than people think. ARTIS biologist Charlotte talks about gender reassignment and same-sex couples in fish, flamingos and giraffes. 🦩🐠🦒 ARTIS wishes everyone a great Pride. 🏳️🌈🌈 Nature can teach us a lot about sexual diversity, read our article at www.artis.nl/pride to find out more.
This 9 February 2020 video says about itself:
Only 8 male football players have come out as gay. There can be extremely negative consequences for male footballers who come out. Mocking, insults: homophobia is widespread in men’s football, and that clearly explains why only 8 male players have come out as gay.
Far more than eight male soccer players have come out of the closet. The video should say ‘8 INTERNATIONALLY WELL-KNOWN PROFESSIONAL players’.
An open letter by a British gay Prime League footballer today:
As a kid, all I ever wanted to be was a footballer. I wasn’t interested in doing well at school. Instead of doing homework, every spare minute I had was spent with a ball. In the end, it paid off. But even now I still have to pinch myself when I run out and get to play each week in front of tens of thousands of people.
However, there is something that sets me apart from most of the other players in the Premier League. I am gay. Even writing that down in this letter is a big step for me. But only my family members and a select group of friends are aware of my sexuality. I don’t feel ready to share it with my team or my manager. That’s hard. I spend most of my life with these guys and when we step out on the pitch we are a team.
But still, something inside me makes it impossible for me to be open with them about how I feel. I dearly hope one day soon I will be able to. I’ve known since I was about 19 that I was gay. How does it feel having to live like this? Day-to-day, it can be an absolute nightmare. And it is affecting my mental health more and more. I feel trapped and my fear is that disclosing the truth about what I am will only make things worse.
So, although my heart often tells me I need to do it my head always says the same thing: “Why risk it all?” I am lucky enough to earn a very good wage. I have a nice car, a wardrobe full of designer clothes and can afford to buy anything I want for my family and friends.
But one thing I am missing is companionship. I am at an age where I would love to be in a relationship. But because of the job I do the level of trust in having a long-term partner has to be extremely high.
So, at the moment, I avoid relationships at all. I dearly hope I will soon meet someone who I think I will be able to trust enough. The truth is I just don’t think football is ready yet for a player to come out. The game would need to make radical changes in order for me to feel able to make that step.
The Professional Footballers Association say they are ready to help a player to come out. And they have said they will offer counselling and support to anyone who needs it. This is missing the point. If I need a counsellor I can go and book a session with one whenever I want.
What those running the game need to do is educate fans, players, managers, agents, club owners basically everyone involved in the game. If I was to make that step I’d want to know that I would be supported at each step of my journey. Right now, I don’t feel I would be.
I wish I didn’t have to live my life in such a way. But the reality is there is still a huge amount of prejudice in football. There are countless times I’ve heard homophobic chants and comments from supporters directed at no one in particular.
Strangely it doesn’t really bother me during the matches. I am too focused on playing. It’s when I get back on the plane or the coach and I have time to think that it gets to me. As things stand my plan is to carry on playing for as long as I feel able to and then come out when I have retired.
It was great last month to see Thomas Beattie raise his hand and admit to being gay. But the fact he had to wait until retirement tells you all you need to know. Footballers are still too scared to make the step while they are playing.
For the past year I have been getting support from the Justin Fashanu Foundation, not least to cope with the toll this is all having on my mental health.
It is hard to put into words how much the Foundation has helped. It has made me feel supported and understood as well as giving me the confidence to be more open and honest with myself especially.
Without that support I really don’t know where I’d be now. I know it might get to the point where I find it impossible to keep living a lie. If I do my plan is to retire early and come out. I might be throwing away years of a lucrative career.
But you can’t put a price on your peace of mind. And I don’t want to live like this forever.
Dutch women’s national team lesbian football player Vivianne Miedema, playing in Britain, says: ‘Gay male Premier League players, please come out of the closet. Even just one man coming out will help lots of other players’.
The Dutch football league president says that professional football club bosses stop gay players from coming out of the closet for fear of losing money.
This 26 June 2020 Spanish TV video is about the 400 Pride flags in the small town Villanueva de Algaidas.
Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:
Spanish town celebrates Gay Pride Day with over 400 rainbow flags
Residents of a town in southern Spain have massively decorated their streets and houses with rainbow flags. It is in response to the municipality’s decision to remove a large rainbow flag from City Hall.
It has been there since Monday to support yesterday’s celebration of International Gay Pride Day. But three [probably right-wing] residents of Villanueva de Algaidas reported the flag as supposedly criminal. In Spain, only the flags of the municipality, state, country and European Union may be displayed on public buildings.
The rainbow flag was removed, but a former resident didn’t let go. Coincidentally, he had a surplus of flags. He wanted to sell them on Gay Pride day in [the bigger town] Torremolinos, but that event was cancelled due to the coronavirus crisis.
When he heard from his family in his hometown that the flag had been taken down at the town hall, he offered his flags to his former townspeople. Interest was great. More than 400 rainbow flags fluttered in the streets of the 4,200-people small town yesterday and today.
By Tom King:
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Seeker of justice in the here and now
TOM KING recommends a new biography of the great black writer and political activist James Baldwin
Living in Fire
by Bill V Mullen
(Pluto Press, £20)IN TRENTON, New Jersey, in 1942 the 18-year-old James Baldwin walked into a diner and ordered a hamburger and a cup of coffee. “We don’t serve Negroes here”, the waitress replied.
He left, calmly and without a fight, heading straight to an “enormous, glittering and fashionable restaurant” where he “knew not even the intercession of the Virgin” would get him what he asked for.
He went inside, repeated his order, received an identical reply and, lifting a mug full of water from the nearest table, threw it at the waitress. She ducked and it smashed against the mirror behind the bar.
“I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp,” Baldwin would later say of that day. “One was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder.
“I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”
Living in Fire, Bill Mullen’s biography of Baldwin — the first in over 10 years — gives a context to understanding the activist and writer against the upheavals of the last decade, as well as his often overlooked radical political commitments.
Baldwin was an angry young man, with much to be angry about. Born in Harlem on August 2, 1924, to Emma Burdis Jones and a father he would never know, he grew up in Depression-era New York in the neighbourhood where unemployment in the 1930s reached 50 per cent.
His mother later married David Baldwin, a factory worker and son of slaves, and they proceeded to have eight more children together. Baldwin, with both parents out working, often looked after them “with one hand and held a book with the other.”
His stepfather left New Orleans in 1919 “to save his life”, Baldwin recalls. “They were hanging niggers from trees… and my father left the South therefore.” It was the “Red Summer” of 1919, when African-Americans in cities such as East St Louis and Chicago were brutally beaten, even killed, by soldiers returning from the first world war, whose jobs they had filled in their absence.
Baldwin Snr was a fundamentalist Pentecostal preacher and, from the age of 14 to 17, Baldwin himself was a young minister and spoke from the pulpit regularly. It was formative in two critical ways, by inspiring a love for the language and poetry of the King James Bible and honing his oratorical skills.
The ubiquity of Harlem’s churches also led Baldwin to sympathise with Marx’s famous observation that religion was “the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.”
This dovetailed perfectly with Baldwin’s experiences of racial oppression: “Religion operates here as complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgement is not far off.”
But for Baldwin, this wasn’t good enough. He wanted justice in the here and now.
It was around this time that he came into contact with young teacher Orilla Miller, who recognised Baldwin’s talents immediately. Miller, a member of the US Communist Party, moved to Harlem to work for the Federal Theater Project and she took Baldwin to see his first play, Orson Wells’s production of Macbeth. Set in Haiti with an all-black cast, it’s considered a landmark of anti-racist US theatre.
This, along with the literature he was introduced to by Miller, including Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, lit Baldwin’s imagination and he began to write.
Baldwin’s sexual awakening soon followed his political one, with the loss of his faith and the realisation he was gay precipitating increasing tension with his father. At the age of 17 he moved to Greenwich Village, the New York bohemian quarter famous for its gay bars, including the Stonewall Inn.
There, Baldwin entered what he called “the most exploratory and economically tenuous period” of his life. He worked in precarious jobs such as meatpacking or waitering while working on his semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain.
He became more politically engaged, joining the Young People’s Socialist League around the time of the Harlem riots in 1943, when a white policeman shot a black soldier in the back, igniting a furious response from a community either living in dire poverty at home or dying in huge numbers fighting a war half-way across the globe.
Baldwin persevered as a writer and activist over the next few years. But he was poor, black, gay and left-wing. Apart from his gender, it’s difficult to imagine a less advantageous position in the US at the dawn of the cold war, when it wasn’t just communism that McCarthy sought to eradicate from US life.
He left the US at the age of 24 and would never properly return. He went to Paris where, energised by the culture and radicalism of the Left Bank, he thrived. He wrote Giovanni’s Room, perhaps his most famous novel, as well as the essay collection Notes of a Native Son.
He became more successful throughout the 1960s and engaged in the political struggles of that tumultuous decade. These were anchored for him around the civil rights movement, which he saw as allowing him to both identify with, and properly understand, international suffering.
“No black man in chains in his own country, and watching the many deaths occurring around him every day, believes for a moment that America cares anything at all about the freedom of Asia… every bombed village is my hometown,” he said of the Vietnam war.
And though he hoped the creation of Israel as a home for the dispossessed would prove a model for African-American emancipation, the colonial realities of that endeavour clearly angered him greatly: “The creation of the State of Israel was one of the most cynical achievements — really murderous, merciless, ugliest and cynical on the part of the Western nations,” he declared in 1970.
Though he found a strong political voice in Black Power, Baldwin’s sexuality caused tension within the emerging movement. He was referred to as Martin Luther Queen and Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Black Panther Party, accused Baldwin “in his real life and fiction of giving himself up to political sodomy from the white man.” …
The Black Panther Party expelled Cleaver, who turned to the right, joining the Moonie cult, the [historically racist] Mormons and the Republican party.
Living at this intersection between masculinity, sexuality and race, Mullin claims, drove Baldwin to a new awareness of women’s oppression. He corresponded with many feminist writers and became great friends with the scholar and poet Nikki Giovanni, with whom he discussed and argued about the gender dynamics of Black Power.
The twin oppressions of racism and homophobia clearly vexed Baldwin greatly. He recalled that he made David, the gay protagonist of Giovanni’s Room, white rather than black because he “could not handle both propositions in the same book.”
But he was unequivocal about what he considered the greater burden: “A black gay person who is a sexual conundrum to society is already, long before the question of sexuality comes into it, menaced and marked because he’s black or she’s black.
“The sexual question comes after the question of color.”
Baldwin, it seems, considered the gay-rights movement a middle-class phenomenon, devoid of the radical commitments that would effect lasting change. As Mullin points out, this is curious, considering the role that queer and trans people of colour, such as Sylvia Rivera and Martha P Johnson, played in the Stonewall riots, which Baldwin never wrote about.
And though the Aids crisis would compel Baldwin as a public figure to speak out against the Reagan administration’s apathy, as well as nursing a partner who would die from it, the epidemic would barely feature in his writing at all.
Towards the end of his life, Baldwin described himself, sadly, as an “ageing, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak.”
But he still seemed to enjoy visitors, jokes, laughter and discussion at his home in the south of France. “People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity,” Baldwin told Giovanni one day. “Straight cats invented faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves.”
Giovanni responds that love is a “tremendous responsibility”, to which Baldwin simply replies: “It’s the only one to take, there isn’t any other.”
By Ryan Williams in Wales:
Monday, January 27, 2020
Remembering LGBT people murdered in the Holocaust
TODAY, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Unison Cymru Wales will be remembering all those who perished in the Holocaust with a minute’s silence in our regional and branch offices.
We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community in commemorating the more than six million people murdered in a crime against humanity.
What is less well known is that alongside Jewish victims, many Romany Gypsies, people with disabilities and members of the LGBT community were also targeted by the nazis.
Berlin in the 1920s and early ’30s was home to a flourishing LGBT community, however, the rise of the nazi party changed that. It brutally cracked down on gay people, who they portrayed as a threat to society.
In the concentration camps, prisoners arrested for being “homosexual” were forced to wear a pink triangle on their sleeve as a badge of shame.
“Homosexuals” in the camps suffered an unusual degree of cruelty by their captors, including being used as target practice on shooting ranges.
Gay people were additionally used as subjects for nazi medical experiments, as scientists tried to find a “cure” for homosexuality.
Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested in nazi Germany as “homosexuals”, of whom 50,000 were sentenced, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.
Lesbians, bi women and trans people, whose experiences remain under-researched, were also targeted. It is unclear how many LGBT people perished in these camps.
After the war, the treatment of “homosexuals” in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries, and some men were even rearrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the nazi years.
It was not until the 1980s that governments began to acknowledge this episode, and only in 2002 did the German government apologise to the gay community.
In 2005, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Holocaust which included the persecution of “homosexuals”. Commissioned memorials around the world were adopted, including the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in Berlin.
Now, the pink triangle has been inverted and reclaimed as a symbol of queer resistance and liberation, as was done most visibly by US HIV/Aids activists in the 1980s.
The pink triangle symbolises the power of remembering the past, reflecting on the injustices that persist today, and the possibility of a future where people are not demonised for their differences.
Today LGBT+ people face an increase in hate crime and continued discrimination in Welsh communities and workplaces.
Unison Cymru Wales, with 100,000 members in public services across the country, is using its enormous reach to challenge prejudice and intolerance.
Anyone who faces discrimination should think about how a union can help and join our campaign for equality and respect for everyone.
Ryan Williams is Unison Cymru Wales LGBT+ officer.
USA: FOOTBALL COACH SUSPENDED OVER HITLER COMMENTS Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, suspended new football coach Morris Berger after he said in an interview with the school’s student-run paper that the way Adolf Hitler “was able to lead was second-to-none” and that “you can’t deny he wasn’t a great leader.” [HuffPost]
This 25 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:
Leaked FBI Documents Reveal Bureau’s Priorities Under Trump. Cenk Uygur and Ken Klippenstein, hosts of The Conversation, break it down.
From the Young Turks site in the USA about this:
Under President Trump, the FBI’s official counterterrorism priorities have included “Black Identity Extremists”, “anti-authority” extremists, and “animal rights/environmental extremists”, according to leaked Bureau documents obtained exclusively by The Young Turks. The documents, many of which are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive” and “For Official Use Only”, also reference a mysterious plan to mitigate the threat of “Black Identity Extremists” with a program codenamed “IRON FIST” involving the use of undercover agents. …
While the documents depict concerns about violent black extremist attacks, they do not cite a single specific attack — unlike white supremacist attacks, of which several prominent examples are provided. …
So grave did the Bureau consider the threat of black extremists that from 2019 to 2020, using new designations, it listed the threat at the very top of its counterterrorism priorities — above even terror groups like Al Qaeda.
The Trump administration considers anti-fascism to be ‘terrorism’; while anti-fascists have not killed a single person. The Trump administration considers the pesaceful Black Lives matter movement to be ‘terrorist’. While by far more most attacks killing and injuring people in the USA are by far-right white supremacists; a lot more than jihadist attacks. But does the Trump administration really consider nazi terrorists to be terrorists?
This 24 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:
Trump‘s DOJ Busted Spreading White Supremacist Propaganda
Trump’s Department of Justice is spreading white nationalist blogs to intimidate immigration judges. Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, and Aida Rodriguez, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.
“An email sent from the Justice Department to all immigration court employees this week included a link to an article posted on a white nationalist website that “directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs”, according to a letter sent by an immigration judges union and obtained by BuzzFeed News.
According to the National Association of Immigration Judges, the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) sent court employees a link to a blog post from VDare, a white nationalist website, in its morning news briefing earlier this week that included anti-Semitic attacks on judges.
The briefings are sent to court employees every weekday and include links to various immigration news items. BuzzFeed News confirmed the link to a blog post was sent to immigration court employees Monday. The post detailed a recent move by the Justice Department to decertify the immigration judges union.
A letter Thursday from union chief Ashley Tabaddor to James McHenry, the director of the Justice Department’s EOIR, said the link to the VDare post angered many judges.”
Read more here.
Trump Clears Employers To Fire Transgender Workers
Trump’s Department of Justice filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to allow employers to be able fire employees who do not comply with gender stereotypes.
Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian and Richard Eskow hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.
“Thirty years ago, in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court held that “sex stereotyping” is forbidden by a federal law banning employment discrimination. “We are beyond the day”, Justice William Brennan wrote in the court’s plurality opinion, “when an employer could evaluate employees by assuming or insisting that they matched the stereotype associated with their group.”
Nevertheless, the Trump administration filed a brief last week asking the Supreme Court to bring back the day when an employer could evaluate employees by assuming or insisting that they matched the stereotype associated with their group.
The Trump Justice Department’s position in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC wouldn’t nuke Price Waterhouse entirely. But it would severely weaken protections against sex discrimination, and give employers broad new authority to fire employees who do not comply with stereotypes about how people of a particular gender should appear.”
Read more here.
WHITE SUPREMACISTS ARE BIGGEST DOMESTIC TERRORISM THREAT White supremacy is the greatest domestic terrorism threat facing the U.S., Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected Garland’s argument. [HuffPost]
By Niles Niemuth in the USA:
Three immigrants die in US custody in three days
6 June 2019
Three immigrants died in US custody in the three days between Saturday, June 1, and Monday June 3.
There is far more involved in these and many other deaths of immigrants than tragic oversights by individual agents or mismanagement by particular detention centers. It is US government policy that innocent people—men, women and children—should suffer and die in order to discourage others fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries from seeking refuge in the United States. The risks are calibrated to outweigh any “pull factors” that attract workers to make the harrowing and often deadly trek through Central America and across the Mexican desert into the US.
Johana Medina Leon, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker from El Salvador, died Saturday at the Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, after being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody for nearly two months. Medina Leon had been held at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico, a detention facility half an hour north of El Paso operated on behalf of the federal government by the for-profit Management and Training Corporation (MTC). The Otero facility is notorious for reports of assault, sexual harassment and medical neglect.
According to the Nation, Medina Leon had spent months in Juarez on the Mexican side of the border waiting for her asylum claim to be heard. She was forced to remain in limbo in Mexico due to new restrictions implemented by the Trump administration before she was finally admitted to the US on April 11 by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and transferred to ICE custody several days later.
Despite repeated complaints of ill health, Medina Leon did not receive medical attention until she complained of chest pains and requested an HIV test on May 28. She tested positive for the disease and was transferred to the hospital. ICE quickly processed her case and approved her for release on parole. Four days later she was dead.
Early Sunday morning, a 33-year-old man from El Salvador died after being detained by CBP agents near the border in Roma, Texas. An official statement notes that agents called Emergency Medical Services after the man began to suffer from what appeared to be a seizure. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.
On Monday, a 40-year-old woman from Honduras died after she was arrested by CBP officers for crossing the border in Eagle Pass, Texas, outside the official port of entry. The woman collapsed at a Border Patrol facility and an ambulance was called to take her to a hospital, where she died.
Medina Leon and the still unidentified man and woman join six immigrant children who have died in federal detention since September. They are all victims of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
Internal ICE documents published this week by the Young Turks news website show that agency administrators were aware that multiple deaths in ICE custody were entirely preventable. They show, for example, that ICE agents have repeatedly failed to treat detainees for drug and alcohol withdrawal, leading to unnecessary suffering.
A memo sent on December 3, 2018, by an ICE supervisor to acting Deputy Director of ICE Matthew Albace outlines 18 cases where detainees where subjected to preventable harm, resulting in three deaths. ICE Health Service Corps “is severely dysfunctional and unfortunately preventable harm and death to detainees has occurred,” the supervisor noted.
The supervisor wrote that many detainees with serious mental illness were simply ignored, highlighting the case of Efrain De La Rosa, who committed suicide after a dozen notifications that he was suffering from suicidal ideation and psychosis. Such reports were routinely ignored, the memo’s author noted. Despite the warnings, De La Rosa was not given any medication and instead placed in solitary confinement, resulting in his death. The memo stated that De La Rosa “could have been saved.”
Immigrants are being subjected to inhumane treatment all along the line, guaranteeing that there will be more deaths.
A Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report found that 900 immigrants had been crammed into a facility designed to hold just 125 people. At the Paso Del Norte Processing Center in Texas, detainees in one cell were seen to be standing on the toilet in order to get breathing space and make room for others.
Meanwhile, children are being forced to sleep on concrete floors in cells designed for adults or on the ground outside at Border Patrol stations as they await transfer to detention centers run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NBC News reported this week that 37 migrant children spent between 23 and 39 hours in a van last July as they waited to be reunited with their parents after having been torn from them as part of the Trump administration’s family separation policy.
Increasing the hardships faced by children, the administration has directed the HHS to end services in migrant shelters which are “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety”, including English language courses, free legal aid and recreation programs.
Less than a month after being held at gunpoint and kidnapped in her home by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents, Betty Rendón, a grandmother, wife and aspiring Lutheran pastor was deported to Colombia last Tuesday, May 28, along with her husband, Carlos Hincapié. The couple had resided in their Chicago home for over 10 years before ICE agents detained them last month: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 