Let Us Celebrate Anew a Happy 4th of July: Edifice of Gold / Edificio en Oro

These poems I have published in several places now, but I would like to share them with you here to show you all that though our freedoms are presently threatened in this "land of the free & the brave," people -- asylum seekers from across the world -- still seek this land, even with all its threats to our liberties.

We need to fight for them, for our future, as we remember the words,

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Elegy to a Refugee Girl/Oda a una niña refugiada

It's been too long since I've written. My life has taken on too many changes, too many problems have come my way, and the little time I have left outside of work I use to help the asyum seekers I have grown to love passionately, and who are under attack, so fiercely, so wrongly.

What have we become as a nation?

Christ Bleeds in the USA Too 
El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico
© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

My poems "Elegy to a Refugee Girl / Oda a una niña refugiada" will be published in a book entitled Detained Voices / Voces detenidas, edited by M. Montserrat Feu Lopez & Amanda Venta, from Sam Houston State University. 

For Father's Day, for World Refugee Day, which this year falls on Wednesday, June 20th, all fathers should be with their children; all children should enjoy, with their families, the freedoms afforded to those of us in the free world.

Our wings are stronger than their hate...

Lots of schools, universities, and communities are fighting for DACA students -- and alongside them too -- but these endeavors do not take away DREAMers' hurt, their fear, their mistrust in a system that supposedly was going to protect them.

What happens to all the information the government now has of DREAMers? 

Will it use it to not only come after them, but also their families? And who will help their families now? After all, a huge part of DACA, for these students and dreamers, was being able to help in the day-to-day struggles their families go through, as they try to adjust to immigrant lives no one wants to acknowledge.

Photograph © Alberto Gutierrez. Courtesy of the author. 

Sombras brillantes en un mundo de obscuridad / Brilliant Shadows In A World Of Darkness

In today's world of American politics, what are we doing to our future? Are we stomping on the many varied voices of tomorrow, on future Masters students, PhDs, scientists, lawyers, doctors, educators? Are conservative politicians afraid of losing their majority? In Texas, at least, this Latino majority is an impending reality, as it already is in California. Thus politicians repress people and pass reactionary laws that only promote racial profiling. No matter what the trump administration says about security, we know they are afraid of losing their rule. 

They offer bleakness instead of light & unity...

La Madre Patria /Motherland
Courtesy © of En Pie de Lucha Performance

May Day: Helping with the Migration Crisis Across Borders

For May Day, I will take part in one of the many marches against what trump is doing to immigration (I don't capitalize trump's name because he is not worthy). You can too: look at marches going on in A Day Without Immigrants!  More so, however, I will add my two grains of sand by writing about what we can do proactively to help immigrants today. 

I was thinking that, since trump was elected, he at least had to have a majority. Though that was never the case and he won through electoral politics, his popularity has suffered even more so since his election. A case in point: I was food shopping in my very conservative neighboorhood supermarket (I know: what am I still doing here?), when I saw a little note left for me on my car bumper, in response to a sticker I have: "Immigrants & Refugees WELCOME." 

The note said, verbatim: 

"Thank you for your bumper sticker. Immigrants & refugees are our neighbors" 😉

From this, I gather there is hope for everyone here in the United States: we are still a welcoming nation! I think my advice on helping asylum seekers and refugees, then, will come in handy, for those of you who really want ideas on next steps... 

Teacher & DREAMer Tries to Explain Inexplicable to Children...

I can not imagine the pain of being a teacher today, especially in a multilingual school.

Having to speak with the refugees I help is quite difficult. Talking to young angels who do not understand the madness of the past few weeks seems to me impossible.... Worst, needing to reassure these same angels, when I find myself in the exact precarious limbo they fear is insufferable.

Yet Rosalía Salazar — graduate from the University of Texas, kindergarten teacher, and DREAMer — has to do just that.

DREAMer Rosalía Salazar with her kindergarten class

It has taken me a while to translate Rosi's message, since I have been busy with many projects and translations especially relevant to the wake-up call we've gotten, but her words are just as important today as they were the day she wrote them after the Trump election. 

The Justice of the Immigration Court & the Power of its Judge King

I went to an Immigration Merits Hearing at the Dallas Courts recently — the last hearing before an individual or family is deported or given asylum — and this young mother and child from Guerrero, Mexico lost, as asylum seekers in the majority of these cases do. Although the judge admitted that the young woman "might be in danger," he said he could do nothing about the consequences such criminal activity effects on these poor folk in the countries from which they are escaping. The actions perpetrated in such countries were individual criminal proceedings, not governmental undertakings, and thus the people who suffered individually were not privy to meriting asylum under our government statutes, according to the judge's ruling.

Ternura, by Oswaldo Guayasamin © 1989

How can these learned men say such a thing? 

As a majority, do these judges have blinders on? Do they not see the massacres committed by the cartels of Mexico, or the maras throughout Central America (that we deported!), gangs that have taken over entire populations, becoming a de facto, criminal and parallel local government, so that people in these countries cannot live in peace? 

These refugees are fleeing for their lives; they are not economic refugees, as the immigration courts so often want to make everyone believe, or as many judges delude themselves into thinking. 

Instead, judges deceive everyone — including themselves — by stating young mothers' stories as filled with discrepancies, their credulity doubtful, and their exaggerations tantamount: how can these "liars" and "illegal aliens" live in our midst, they proclaim? 

IMMIGRANT...

With the presidential race and all it stirs up in our collective pasts as immigrants — because we are all immigrants, even if some of us go as far back as the Mayflower — we will realize that we are all living on borrowed land, and if we learn to live together, we can learn that we are all one, and no borders need divide us. 

Kristian (right) joined a number of other community activists of all ages in Las Vegas 

to street canvass for the Bernie Sanders campaign this past February.

Some of us came later too, not in the early migrations but in more recent relocations, and especially today, we are still arriving, because the forced exodus from other lands — due to politics, warfare, poverty, displacement, or what have you — are all legitimate. 

Losing Paradise... Perder el paraíso

I’ll be off these next couple of weeks, a bit of repose after a long haul. 

Perder el Paraíso (Losing Paradise) by Tomás Sánchez, Cuban painter and engraver
http://tomassanchez.net/eng/work/paintings

But we won the asylum case for a young refugee mom with two children from Honduras, so I think I can take a little break before beginning again on a new case: a mother with two children who escaped from the Guatemala/El Salvador border. Her husband and brother-in-law were killed, and the maras — the gangs — tried to kill her son too, but their dog began to bark and saved him. 

I Do Not Exist.... UNDOCUMENTED!

I went to see the play Deferred Action this past weekend, a wonderful production about the trials and tribulations of the DACA movement, and the real lives it touches.

I hope the play catches on and begins to make its rounds in other cities: it is defnitely worth seeing.

Erik during the 2011 "I am a DREAM Voter" Campaign 

In any case, this play depicts the ongoing conflict brought on by the onslaught of deportation, and how DACA and the DREAM Act are trying to counter deportation's horrible effects. Millions of young people who were brought to the United States as children are now finding themselves in limbo, or their parents are in the crosshairs. Although the US government wants to deny these young people the only home they have ever known — the United States — they cannot call their home country their own either, because in most cases, they do not even remember it.

The Refugee Problem under USA's Rug in a Future Without Poverty

I have been too busy in the day-to-day to write anything much these days, but I did want to post my talk at the recent two-day conference presented by Future Without Poverty and dedicated to Reducing Global Poverty Through Grassroots Sustainable Actions. 

My husband Andrés L. Pacheco and I have been working with refugee populations at our southern border for the past few years, and we presented some of our findings during one of these excellent sessions. I am hoping to be able to post more in the future, but at least — for now — I can present my own, “The Chronic 'Refugee Problem' Under USA's Rug: Migration Along Our Southern Border." Andrés informally spoke about our process — what it is we do from beginning to end with the people we come into contact with — while I had a more formal, even if short, talk prepared. 

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We began to work with refugees when we went to the border to help out in McAllen, Texas, along with people from the entire city and beyond in the state and country, as well as interdenominational organizations who put aside their politics because what we were suffering at the border was a humanitarian crisis.

Are Refugee Children Lesser than Other Children?

I have recently been posting a myriad amount of articles on the atrocities of what is going on with detention centers nationally. With the help of activists, lawyers, and too many to be named, we were able to stop the government from continuing to license Berks County Residential Center in Berks, Pennsylvania, 

Texas has decided to turn up the heat, however, to make up for this "loss." It will now allow not only these notorious for profit centers to continue, but also it will allow them to become daycare facilities as well. 

Though no one is allowed to take photographs in Dilley, ICE certainly does.
How is that playing by the rules?

Virginia Raymond, immigrant lawyer, human rights activist -- ex adjunct professor -- writes to us the next steps we can take in this battle of David against Goliath, and she shows us her own example, so that we might emulate.

I urge all of us who care about our future as a free society -- comprised of diverse human beings -- to join in her call and write to any and all who will listen. 

Ana M. Fores Tamayo, Adjunct Justice

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To all of you who spoke or wrote in opposition to the Texas Department of Family & Protective (sic) Services (DFPS) proposed rule 40 TAC 748.7, which allows ICE and ICE-contract facilities to apply for licensing as "residential child care." 

Thank you. 

Refugees & Hysteria: A Modern Day Witch-hunt?

As the new year 2016 gets under way, and we have completed our good tidings to all, I tend to wonder what might be in store for the thousands of immigrants who suffer violence and displacement from their homelands either south of us — especially in Central America — or across the Atlantic. I wonder what awaits all refugees suffering the endless pain and miles of degradation as they journey toward hope, only to arrive at a land that does not welcome them. I wonder, if we were in their shoes, what would we feel? How would we react? What kindness might we show toward others sharing our same circumstances? How understanding might we become, if we were to suffer only one hour in their shoes?

Yet we have never had to.

Donated shoes at the Humanitarian Respite Center in MacAllen, Texas

© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

But if ever we had to suffer such indignities — like our parents, grandparents, or great grandparents did — we have most likely forgotten.

Although the Salem Witch Trials in Massachussetts may not have been initially traced to one specific immigrant or refugee, it was a well-known fact that between 1689 to 1692 Native Americans had been striking out against English settlements, so that many people were displaced, and there was an influx of refugees to the area near Salem. Thus the fear that surfaced everywhere in the general population — plain folk panicking with unfounded beliefs running amok because of "witches hiding as neighbors among them" — caused innocent women and one old man to end up losing their lives, based on groundless fears.