National Day of Action for Immigrant Rights
Defend DACA and TPS!
Trump Must Resign or Be Removed!
Shut Down Contra Costa West County (Richmond) ICE Detention Center
Saturday, Dec. 2nd, 2017 at 12pm
(5555 Giant Hwy, Richmond, CA)
Contact BAMN if you need transportation
* Defend DACA! Pass the Federal Dream Act Now!
* Defend Temporary Protection Status (TPS) and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status Now! No Deportations!
* Shut Down All Immigrant Detention Centers! Free All Immigrant Detainees from Detention Now! Humane Conditions for All detainees!
* Make California a Real Sanctuary State! Make UC Berkeley a Sanctuary Campus!
* Trump Must Resign or Be Removed!
* No Muslim Ban! No Wall!
* Take Action to Stop ICE Raids and Deportations! If You See ICE “La Migra” Don’t Walk on By
* Full Citizenship Rights Now for ALL Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers! Open the Borders!
* Universal Healthcare for ALL in California and the Nation!
* No War with North Korea
For Printable Flyers of this Post, Click Below
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It is time for the Movement that has fought and won important victories against Trump since his inauguration, to come back into the streets, rise again to the level of the immigrant rights movement of 2006, and deal a final blow to Trump’s presidency. BAMN is making a National Call to Action on December 1 and 2 to demand that Trump Resign or be Removed, to Defend DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, TPS (Temporary Protected Status), Special Juvenile Status, to stop the raids and deportations, and make our communities REAL Sanctuaries for immigrants. This month’s one-year anniversary of Trump’s election should be the occasion for the movement to defeat him once and for all!
BAMN will be holding our Bay Area Protest Rally at the West County Detention Center in Richmond California, following the public exposure in an article in the SF Chronicle by women immigrant detainees of the racist and inhumane conditions inside the jail, risking backlash sure to follow. West County Detention Center in Contra Costa County has a 6$ million a year contract with ICE. Out of the 800-people jailed, a quarter of its population are immigrants fighting to stop their deportations. The abuses inside the facility exposed range from locking detainees in cells without toilets for up to 23 hours a day and denying them access to showers and medical care, to denying access to toilets, forcing them to use plastic bags instead. One of the detainees, Dianny Patricia Menendez from Honduras, begged to deported, forced to abandon her case and her right to stay here in the U.S. with her family. These abuses are prevalent in detention centers all over the country where immigrants are pushed through racist abuse to self-deport, to discourage people from fighting their own deportations. Nancy Mayer, an immigrant from Mexico wrote a letter signed by 27 other detainees in September 2017, exposing the conditions inside the jail, even before the first SF Chronicle article in November was published. Since the letter and article were published, there’s been increased abuses including denying meals to detainees who have spoken up. The backlash is not deterring people from continuing to speak up about the jail mistreatments and fight their cases to prevent their deportations. We stand with the demands of the brave immigrant detainees inside West County Detention center for humane conditions for all detainees while they fight for their right to remain here. The movement of resistance to defeat Trump and his racist anti-immigrant policies and attacks inside and outside detention centers must grow and continue through bold collective actions.
Defending DACA is the key to defending all immigrants and defeating Trump. ¡Si se puede!
Building on our strongest victories is our most powerful tactic to defeat Trump. DACA is the most important gain of the immigrant rights movement. The fact that Trump delayed ending DACA for 6 months, giving Congress time to act, rather than outright abolition of the program, is because of the great strength and popularity of the DREAMers. Immigrant youth have garnered the broadest, most popular support and national attention because of their bold leadership in the direct action and mass mobilizations it took to win DACA in the first place. In 2006, millions across the country led by young immigrants, took to the streets and defeated Bush’s anti-immigrant attack within weeks. The sleeping giant awoke. That movement came alive in the early weeks after Trump took office, preventing some of his worst attacks, and in September to protest the ending of DACA. We must come out in mass numbers now to defend DACA, force Congress to pass the DREAM Act and stop all the deportations.
Two months after the massively unpopular ending or “phasing out” of DACA, the Trump administration has just announced another widespread attack on immigrants, threatening to end TPS for 325,000 immigrants from 10 countries, including El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Syria, Somalia and Nepal, many who have lived here 20 years, have children here, jobs, businesses – their lives are here and many have nothing to go back to.
Immigrants with TPS were exempted from deportation after natural disasters devastated their countries, and TPS protections have been renewed routinely since then, in some cases following additional natural disasters. Now, the Trump administration shamelessly claims that conditions in those countries have improved and no longer justify protection from deportation. In reality, conditions are far worse. Man-made natural disasters have reached massive proportions due to global warming, leaving many parts of the world uninhabitable and creating more refugees than ever in human history. The only real solution is open borders and securing permanent and full citizenship rights for all immigrants and refugees.
The official announcement that came out Monday, November 6, as with DACA, does not abolish outright all TPS protections. It ends the protection for Nicaraguans, giving them until January 2019 to leave the country, and leaves people from the other countries in limbo, extending and deferring the decision to some future time. This tactic of delays, and taking away the rights and status of immigrants group by group is meant to paralyze our movement by creating at the same time generalized fear that anyone of us could be next, and the false hope that some of us will be spared, or that Congress will intervene to stop Trump.
As long as Trump is president, no immigrant community is safe from deportations, none of us are safe from violent attacks by Trump racist and bigoted supporters, and we all fear the possibility of Trump starting a deadly nuclear war with North Korea. This means we all have an urgent reason to unite together and fight until we win. Rather than becoming paralyzed by our fears and false hopes, the best way to stop Trump, defend DACA, TPS and win a permanent pathway to citizenship for DACA students and immigrant families, is to act now, and act decisively.
We must be our own heroes. We cannot rely on politicians to defend DACA or to impeach Trump, no matter how much they talk about it. They are cynical and dishonest at worst, and weak at best. We have seen the Democrats and Republicans play political football with the DREAM Act and “Immigration Reform” for too long to rely on them now when so much is at stake. We can win greater and lasting victories on the strength of our own power. We know this is possible — we’ve done it and we can do it again. ¡Si se puede!
Our Strength Is Trump’s Weakness
Trump has made a succession of mass attacks on specific groups of immigrants one after the other – DACA, TPS, young refugees with Special Juvenile Immigrant Status who came as unaccompanied minors, and longstanding immigrant communities from Iraq, Cambodia, Cuba, China, and Vietnam, and others, who were never targeted for deportation until Trump because they would face torture and death if they returned. This series of attacks are desperate attempts to show his racist supporters that he can carry out mass deportations, which is all he has to offer them. So far, because of the resistance of our movement, Trump is failing to reach the high numbers of deportations that Obama did, despite Trump making more arrests. Immigrant bashing is the only real strength of the Trump regime, but it’s also Trump’s greatest weakness. It is the only issue that can tear him down as quickly as it built him up. Now is the time to tear him down along with the racist and fascist movement that he has emboldened.
Build Community Defense Guards to Stop I.C.E. Raids: If you see ICE/“La Migra,” Don’t Walk on By!
The movement in California won the great victory of making California the first sanctuary state in the country. So Trump and ICE are lashing out by threatening large raids further into immigrant communities, since they can’t rely on raiding the jails. That has made our community defense guard tactic – the “Don’t Walk on By“ campaign – crucial to keep ICE out of our communities. Building community defense is the best way to make sanctuary real, meaning our communities have been made safe for immigrants, with and without papers, and unsafe for ICE kidnappers.
Detroit is already leading the way in building community defense against ICE, with the Chaldean and Muslim Iraqi communities’ direct action to free the hundreds of Iraqi Refugees who were rounded up by ICE on June 11 to be deported to Iraq to their certain death. Trump hoped this would be a quick operation that could add to his deportation numbers. But instead a quick mobilization of the family members, BAMN and other community members gathered at the ICE office at Mt. Elliott and Jefferson and physically blocked the ICE prison buses, confronting ICE and the police, and gaining support from people driving by. We were able to stop the bus for an hour from leaving to take our people to the detention center. Although the bus finally was able to speed by us, this mass militant action created a
huge national scandal for Trump and has meant that not a single person has been deported to Iraq. The continued resistance of our movement both in court and in the streets, has meant that their cases are clogging up the immigration courts, giving us time to build our movement to stop their deportations and free them from detention. That fight to physically block the ICE prison buses was the most valiant struggle of Detroit so far against Trump and set the national standard for what it means to stop deportations By Any Means Necessary.
TRUMP MUST RESIGN OR BE REMOVED!
Millions of Americans know and fear that as long as Trump is president there is a terrible danger that he could launch a war with North Korea that could lead to a nuclear World War III. A weak Trump administration crumbling in the White House – with an untamed Trump demagogue that cannot hold his tongue or twitter fingers, who now openly defends KKK and fascist terror after the horrific events of Charlottesville, including the murder of Heather Heyer, with his most vicious supporters cowering in their houses and fuming on the internet – cannot be sustained. But Trump and his policies can only be decisively defeated by being forced to resign or to be removed by a mass movement. There is nothing automatic to the process of ending Trump’s failed Presidency and ending the racist attacks that his Presidency engenders, both here and around the world. He will not simply collapse under the weight of his own stupidity. It is up to our movement to WIN – to BEAT Trump and the racists!
