Dear Casa
San Jose Amigos,
Welcome
back to our weekly message! Here’s
what’s new:
Your help is much needed:
Please attend these
meetings, and help our Latino community attend:
The Welcoming Pittsburgh Initiative out of Mayor Peduto’s office is
holding 4 meetings in May and inviting community members to join the discussion
and offer ideas. We encourage everyone
connected to Casa San Jose to attend, particularly our Latino families. The dates, times, and places are below.
For the meetings on
the 18th and 23rd, we need Spanish-speaking volunteers to call, representing Casa San Jose,
a list of 5 immigrant community members to tell them about the meeting, and if
they agree to go, then to arrange to pick them up and escort them to the
meeting. If you’re willing to do this,
please email office@casasanjose.org or call 412-343-3111 (and leave a
message if nobody answers.)
· MAY
17th, 6-8 PM CITY OF ASYLUM 40 W. North Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15212
· MAY 18th, 6-8PM CLP BEECHVIEW
1910 Broadway Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15216
· MAY 23rd, 6-8 PM THE ALLOY
STUDIOS 5530 Penn Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15206
· MAY
25th, 6-8PM YWCA GREATER PITTSBURGH 305 Wood Street Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Attorneys are joining
the Team: Last week we asked for volunteer lawyers (who
are not immigration attorneys) to join our Rapid Response Team - THANK YOU to
all of you who responded! To get set up,
please respond to the Doodle poll that Monica sent you. We still need about 10 more to be on call one
day a month for about a 3-hour period, so if you can do this, please contact Monica at monica@casasanjose.org.
Many thanks to Jeimy
Sanchez for all the
hard work she did to make the Cinco de Mayo celebration a success!
Political action (some of these are the same as last
week, but they’re still needed)
Finally a
pro-immigrant bill in the PA Congress – please ask your state representative to
co-sponsor: On April 28, Rep. Christopher Rabb introduced
the Police and Community Safety Act, which “allows law enforcement officers to
do their jobs without federal interference,” in other words, won’t require them
to work with federal immigration authorities and thereby lose the trust of
their local communities, spend less time on protecting the public, and incur
legal and financial burdens. Find your representative here (which looks them all up for you from City Council to DC.)
Monica is still
planning a visit to Harry Readshaw’s office to try to talk him out of
supporting anti-immigrant bills in the PA House. Are you in his district? (Find out here – scroll down to enter your
zipcode.) If so and you can help, please contact her at monica@casasanjose.org. THANK YOU to all of
you who have responded so far. Monica
will be in touch soon with a date.
Say Thank You to
Senator Bob Casey (contact here) for his swift and strong action when he
discovered that ICE was about to deport a Honduran mother and child who were seeking asylum due to
death threats, and held at Berks Detention Facility awaiting a judicial ruling. Lawyers were preparing their case as she and
her son were hauled away. Sen. Casey
immediately protested to the head of DHS, the White House Chief of Staff, and
the President, and got on Twitter to spread the word and gather support. It ultimately didn’t succeed and the refugees
were swept away within hours, but he showed his compassion, outrage, and vehement
support.
A related action item: please
contact Governor Wolf and ask him to shut down Berks County Detention Center
(BCRC.) This is one of four
detention centers for immigrant families, where children as young as two weeks old
have been incarcerated. Many of the families currently at BCRC have been
unjustly held for more than a year. The Shut Down Berks Campaign is a grassroots coalition
fighting to shut down this facility and end family detention. Governor Wolf
Has the Power to Immediately Shut Down Berks – please use this form from PICC to get more
information and contact the Governor.
In other news:
Casa San Jose just
sent a busload of people to the PICC Statewide Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Convening on May
7-8.
45 people from our area, ranging in age from 14 to 52, went to the
event in Harrisburg to learn to build a vibrant immigrant rights movement and
make our state more just and inclusive.
We’ll report on that next week.
The Pittsburgh MayDay
March on May 1, despite torrential downpours and
tornado warnings, still mobilized over 300 people to march in the rain to the ICE
office and then to the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers building, where
marchers gathered with all the sponsoring organizations and listened to
stirring music and inspiring speakers.
Several people witnessed ICE surveillance along the route. If you were there, many thanks for braving
the storm to stand up for immigrants and workers!
“Our Story” episode 8: “Six swept up by ICE”
Here’s how we found out about
what happened Tuesday: a 15-year-old boy
called his Woodland Hills school and told someone that ICE picked up his
stepfather Eduardo (we’re using disguised names here) that morning. The Vice Principal then called Casa San Jose,
and Monica mobilized the Rapid Response Team.
What they discovered was this:
ICE had just picked up 6 men in North Braddock.
ICE had been looking for one man,
Tomás. He had been in a car accident in McKeesport about a week ago, and
apparently ICE got information about him from the McKeesport police. Tomás has
a U.S. born spouse and children and has been in the country for around 20
years.
ICE discovered which house Tomás
was staying in, went there to pick him up, and seeing 5 other men who looked
Latino in the immediate area, picked them us as well. ICE put them all in a van and started driving
around, stopping in a Burger King parking lot, when Eduardo, the boy’s
stepfather, who has a pending asylum application, told them he had a lawyer;
they let him go. They took the
others - Tomás, Daniel, Juan, Emiliano
and Alejandro - into custody. Later ICE
informed the team that Tomás, Daniel, and Emiliano were transferred to their
Cambria facility and Juan was transferred to the Allegheny County Jail; they
let Alejandro go (possibly he had documents.)
The Rapid Response team had a
good deal of trouble finding out this much – ICE is demanding that the form
lawyers need to submit to represent the client and get information about him or
her (G-28) be signed first by the client, but if the client is already in
custody, there is almost no way to get it signed, so this is a Catch-22. We don’t know any more at the moment – four
of these men are now either in custody or possibly on the other side of the
border: ICE is working that fast. (See story in this message about Senator
Casey.)
Suggested if you’d like to read or see more:
·
This
piece about immigrant worker conditions is enlightening, appalling and
unforgettable: Exploitation and abuse at the
chicken plant, from
The New Yorker.
Thank you for
joining us!
