Speak Out at Berkeley City Council Meeting Nov. 13
Stop the Deportation of Berkeley’s Benavides-Pineda Family!
Stop Trump’s Child Separation and Indefinite Family Detention Policies!
Shut down the concentration camps! Free all immigrant detainees!
No ban, no wall, sanctuary for all!
Pass the Federal DREAM Act! Defend DACA and TPS!
Speak-Out at the Berkeley City Council Meeting
November 13, 2018 6pm
City Council Chambers, 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way
Help Organize to Stop the Deportation of the Benavides-Pineda Family!
Click HERE for a Hard Copy Flyer of this Post
Click HERE to Download a Hard Copy of the Petition to Circulate and Gather Signatures
Click and Share the Link Below to Gather Signatures Online on Change.org
TinyUrl.com/PetitionAsylum4BenavidesPineda
The Benavides-Pineda family (from left to right): Leo, Annelise, Simon, Rafael, and Oriana are all members of the Berkeley community, and they need our help to win asylum from being deported back to the harsh political and humanitarian crisis they fled from in Venezuela. Leo and Oriana attend Berkeley High School. Victor Pineda, Annelise’s cousin and the family’s sponsor, is a member of UC Berkeley’s faculty and former ASUC Senator at UC Berkeley.
In the past 1-2 years, the Benavides-Pinedas entered the United States with legal travel documents. Active members of the opposition movement in Venezuela, Rafael and other family members have been physically beaten, tortured, attacked, and threatened for protesting the Maduro regime. Rafael Benavides, Annelise Pineda and their three children Simon, Leonardo and Oriana are part of the mass exodus of political refugees from Venezuela, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, seeking shelter in the United States and several other Central American, Latin American and Caribbean nations.
Rafael Benavides applied for asylum for himself and his family on November 12, 2017. Only days later, while vacationing in Southern California, the Benavides-Family accidentally drove across the border to Mexico, a common mistake on a confusing highway. This accident has put the family in an impossible and unnecessary situation, where, despite their pending asylum process, they were detained and placed in deportation removal proceedings.
After spending 8 long months in a Georgia immigration detention center, Rafael Benavides was finally released from detention. Despite tremendous pressure to give up and sign self-deportation papers, Rafael’s courage and persistence remained strong. His resolve was strengthened by the determined efforts of family and friends to mobilize support for Rafael. Together with BAMN, they publicly circulated petitions in the schools, spoke at city council meetings and to the media, gathered support letters from community members and educators and mobilized outside of the immigration court hearings in San Francisco. All this made it possible to stop Rafael’s deportation to certain death, reuniting him with family and friends where he belongs in Berkeley, California.
The struggle to stop Benavides-Pineda family from being deported is not over. They are still in deportation proceedings, and will have more hearings in immigration court in San Francisco in the upcoming months. But they are closer to victory than ever before because of their public struggle. The Berkeley community that they are now part of has helped to reunite them, prevented their deportation, and also shed light on the plight of thousands of Venezuelan family exiles in the United States.
Here in Berkeley, the most militant community of the Resistance, the Benavides-Pineda family’s courage, together with the leadership of BAMN, provides an urgently needed example that the movement can generalize and implement in order to win in the next months to come. Trump continues to expand his brutal child separation policy, tripling the tent city child concentration camp in Tornillo, TX and announcing his intention to restore the vicious policy of indefinite family detention through converting abandoned military bases into prisons to hold immigrant families for years at a time with no guarantee of even a bail hearing, much less freedom.
The political and economic situation in Venezuela continues to deteriorate at a rapid pace, in part because of the direct intervention through sanctions by the Trump Administration, laying down the groundwork for a military coup and even more turmoil. People like the Benavides family who have had the courage to speak out and act against injustice in Venezuela, continue to be repressed, and in the worst cases tortured and killed. Massive food shortages, a dearth of medical supplies and services, and rampant violence has led to an outpouring of 2.6 million exiles to flee Venezuela in a desperate bid to survive. In the US, the number of migrants seeking asylum from Venezuela is almost 3x as many as from any other country. And yet the Trump Administration continues to turn its back on them and has, in fact, placed Venezuelans seeking asylum on the fast track for deportation.
We cannot rely on the cynicism or the political games of the mainstream political politicians. The national leadership of the Democratic Party is an ineffective and shameful opposition to obscene criminal abuses of Trump and the Republicans. In some cases they have enabled his attacks, more worried more about scoring votes for themselves rather than victories against Trump. They have religiously maintained their political policy in regards to Trump, “oppose, but not obstruct.” Their only obstruction has been to hold back the only power capable of stopping Trump, the national Resistance.
Any illusions of reliance in the legal system to provide justice and safety for refugees also evaporates as Trump appoints dozens of right wing federal judges prepared to carry out his only concrete policy of mass deportations of immigrants. It’s even worse now with the gross appointment to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, a sexual predator and anti-immigrant ideologue who believes in giving free rein to Trump’s presidential authority with no legal restrictions whatsoever.
The last line of defense of justice and equality in America is the brave and independent leadership in action of the national movement of resistance against Trump. The mass independent actions of the movement have stopped Trump’s worst attacks like Trump’s first Muslim ban with mass demonstrations that shut down airports rendering his attack a dead letter in practice. The particular militant leadership from the ranks of the black, Latina/o, and LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and women continue to be a source of inspiration and direction for our movement.
Join us to hear the Benavides-Pineda family speak of their experience in their fight against deportation and for citizenship rights. But also, as we draw lessons of the victories we’ve had, the challenges we now face and also of the opportunities, we will have to win asylum for the Benavides-Pineda family and all other asylum seekers and to defeat Trump.
Picket and Fill the Immigration Court Hearing for the Benavides-Pineda Family
THURSDAY, JAN. 24, 2019
2:00PM Picket, 2:30PM Hearing
S.F. Immigration Court, 100 Montgomery St. (near Montgomery St. BART), Suite 800 before Judge Hayward
Sponsored By:
* Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality
By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)
* Women’s Empowerment Club – Diablo Valley College
* Associated Students (ASUC) – UC Berkeley
www.bamn.com/endfamilydetention Facebook.com/bamnpage california@bamn.com (ASUC sponsored)
