New America Media - Ethnicities

For SF Immigrants, Mirkarimi Case Exposes Private-Public Faultline

2012-03-29T08:00:00Z

Eliana Lopez’s tireless public defense of her husband, embattled San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, is typical behavior of abuse victims, say anti-domestic violence advocates. But, for editors of the city’s ethnic media, her behavior also reflects a desire all too familiar to immigrant communities here: the need to keep the family together, at all costs.

The case has been headline news ever since Lopez’s neighbor went public with her allegations of a New Year’s altercation and her videotape of a bruised arm resulting from it. Mirkarimi’s effort to dismiss the story as a private affair led to calls by anti-domestic violence advocates that he be held accountable for his actions. The media has tracked developments daily, from the charges against Mirkarimi to Mayor Ed Lee’s announcement that he was suspending him from his position as sheriff.

Ethnic media that serve the city’s immigrant populations offer a glimpse into the conversations taking place among immigrants who account for almost 35 percent of the city.

“The family is paramount, and it’s important that they keep their relationship working,” said Esther Chavez, vice president of U.S. sales for the Filipino news site INQUIRER.net. “If there is an argument in the family, it doesn't have to be seen from the outside,” she said. “If you report it to the police, what will happen to the family? The family will be broken up.”

“Domestic violence cases are underreported in general and in the Filipino community in particular,” added Cherie Querol Moreno, editor-at-large and webcast anchor of Philippine News. “Filipinos typically do not discuss relationships beyond the bedroom or the home.”

The consequences of this silence can be deadly, said Querol Moreno, who is also the founder and executive director of ALLICE Alliance for Community Empowerment Kumares and Kumpares, a non-profit organization that works to educate the community about domestic violence.

Filipino media are using the political scandal to draw attention to the issue of domestic violence in their community. In its section “Pinoy Abroad” (Filipinos Abroad), Manila-based GMA News Network is running a series of articles on gender-based violence. One article examined emotional abuse, considered one of the most common types of domestic abuse, laying out the tactics of emotional abusers and how women can cope.

In the Chinese community, the Mirkarimi case has also opened up a discussion on how domestic violence is traditionally viewed.

“The Chinese community has to realize that domestic violence is illegal in Western society,” said Kai-ping Liu, city editor of the Chinese-language newspaper World Journal.

In Chinese culture, he said, domestic violence can be seen as the norm. A husband who beats his wife, for example, may be seen as acceptable as long as it does not cause grievous bodily harm, he said. Many Chinese parents also choose to use physical punishment as one of the ways to discipline their children.

“The Ross Mirkarimi case is an opportunity to educate the Chinese community -- especially new Chinese immigrants -- that domestic violence should not be allowed in mainstream culture, [even] when it may be seen as a private matter,” said Liu.

Which is exactly how some continue to view it.

Vandana Kumar, publisher of India Currents, said when her magazine first covered domestic violence in the early 90s, “readers were incensed at us -- did we not have better things to talk about? Did we not have a rich history to share with the world? Why talk about issues that are strictly personal?”

Attitudes have changed since then, she says. “People are more willing to recognize that domestic violence actually exists in the Indian American community.” She says groups like Narika – where Kumar volunteers – and Maitri, which helps South Asian women dealing with domestic violence in the Bay Area, “deserve a lot of credit for starting this conversation and creating awareness about it.”

Still, while the issue of domestic violence spans all communities, the Mirkarimi case hasn’t resonated as deeply with Indian Americans.

“Minority communities feel connected to an issue when one of their own goes through it,” said Kumar, noting that the Lakireddy case in Berkeley generated a lot of discussion about the issue of trafficking in the South Asian community here. “I don't think the Mirkarimi case has generated the same kind of discussion in the Indian American community.”

Lopez, meanwhile, has gotten a lot of attention from the city’s Spanish-language media.

The former Venezuelan film star was honored in February by the Mission District’s four-year-old Latin Business Network for co-producing the weekly Spanish-language radio show “Hecho in California con Marcos Gutierrez” on 1010 AM. She later appeared on the program insisting that the scandal over alleged domestic violence was the result of political persecution against her husband.

“Now just a minute,” wrote editor Maria Mejía in a column entitled “The Mirkarimi Telenovela.”

“If we all know about her problems with Mirkarimi and saw the bruise the sheriff allegedly left on her arm after a New Year's Eve argument, it’s because she showed it to a neighbor and asked her to record it.

“In other words, things didn’t start from political persecution; if anything, they began with an indiscretion on her part. The best-kept secret is never told.”

Now that it’s out, word is spreading fast.

A coalition of anti-domestic violence groups launched an online “crowdfunding” campaign to raise money for a billboard that reads in part, “Domestic Violence is NEVER a private matter.”

Media outlets from Univision to the Philippine News, meanwhile, covered the first billboard’s unveiling on Feb. 16. Last week the coalition put up five more billboards in Spanish.

But the Mirkarimi case isn’t just about alleged domestic violence; it is also about holding politicians accountable for their actions, noted Janna Sundeyeva, editor of the Russian-language newspaper Kstati.

For some Russian immigrants in San Francisco, she said, the Mirkarimi case harkens back to memories of politicians in the Soviet Union.

“We came from a country where leaders behaved exactly this way,” Sundeyeva explained, “so we recognize the signs of this behavior easily and that saddens people much, much more than domestic violence.”

“The Mirkarimi case started dialogue [in San Francisco’s Russian community], but not about domestic violence,” said Sundeyeva. “It is dialogue about the sheriff abusing his power, and how city officials will react to this fact.”

Additional reporting by Rochelle Riva Bargo, Odette Keeley and Summer Chiang.

Domestic Violence? Don’t Call the Sheriff—Look to Health Reform

2012-03-28T08:00:00Z

SAN FRANCISCO -- The text message that the wife of San Francisco’s newly elected Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi sent her neighbor and confidante, Ivory Madison, clearly shows how a doctor’s examination room is often perceived as a safe haven, a sanctuary, to a victim of domestic violence.

“Hello Ivory,” said the message from Eliana Lopez, which San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Aguilar-Tarchi read out in court, while seeking a restraining order against Mirkarimi. “I’m not going to call the police. I’m going to open a record with my doctor.”

When emotional and physical trauma eats away at the souls of domestic-violence victims, they often do not know where to turn. It’s not uncommon for recent immigrants such as Lopez, who have not yet built up a social network around them, to turn to a female neighbor for sympathy.

Law Offers Health Approach to Abuse

A provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the health care reform law before the Supreme Court this week, could help establish a public-health approach to family abuse, rather than one based strictly on law enforcement.

“For some women,” observed Lisa James, director of health at Futures Without Violence, a national nonprofit working to end violence against women and children, “going to the police is not the right choice at the moment.”

This is especially true for immigrant women, many of whom come from countries where law enforcement officials are not necessarily viewed as their protectors. Lopez, especially, could not be blamed if she had little faith in the police, given that her husband was the sheriff himself.

A couple of decades ago, the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence (PCADV) figured that domestic-violence victims are more likely to open up to their doctors in the confines of a medical setting.

That led to the launch of its domestic-violence screening program through its Medical Advocacy Project. The project trains medical staff on how to screen, counsel and refer victims to domestic-violence programs.

ACA to Cover Screening and Counseling

Starting this August, women nationwide will benefit from the preventive services provision in ACA that will do just that -- provided, of course, that the Supreme Court justices don’t upend the law.

ACA requires that all insurance plans provide free preventive services with no copayments, which means it will also have to cover screening and counseling for domestic abuse.

Health care providers will be able to screen women and help identify unsafe situations. They will be able to provide women with tools and resources for escaping dangerous relationships.

“Catching domestic violence early can save a woman’s life and those of other family members, as well,” noted Dania Talanker, senior health policy advisor with the National Women’s Law Center, in Washington, D.C.

Advocates for preventing domestic violence say that when a victim at a high risk of being reassaulted or killed receives intervention services, her risk declines by 60 to 70 percent.

Because the head and face are among the most common targets of intimate-partner assaults, victims of domestic violence should be provided early intervention to curtail the incidence of traumatic brain injury, as well as suicide. Research has shown that 90 percent of all injuries related to domestic abuse involve the head, neck and face.

Domestic Violence No Longer A “Pre-Existing Condition”

The other provision in the ACA that women’s rights advocates are lauding prohibits insurance companies from viewing pregnancy or domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition.” That’s something insurers have done for years.

Insurance companies defined domestic violence as a pre-existing condition on the grounds that victims tended to use emergency room services more frequently. Thus, argue insurers, these victims are at “high risk”-- and more expensive to insure.

Under ACA, an insurance firm can no longer discriminate against — and re-victimize — a domestic violence survivor by denying health insurance coverage.

Nicole Lindemyer of the Pennsylvania coalition called these provisions in ACA a “victory for women.”

“It’s a paradigm shift from seeing domestic violence as simply a criminal justice issue and now recognizing it for what it is: a public health issue.”

Parents: The Missing Engine Behind School Reform

2012-03-26T08:00:00Z

Traducción al español

한국어

中文翻譯

Modesto E. Abety-Gutierrez, President of The Children's Trust (with the mic), along with other panel speakers, including (from left) Liz Looney, Service Manager with City Year Miami; Principal Pablo Ortiz with Miami Edison Senior High School; School Board member Raquel A. Regalado with Miami-Dade County Schools; Dr. Lenore Rodicio with Miami Dade College; Mc Nelly Torres with Florida Center for Investigative Reporting; and Lucie Tondreau, a parent and Haitian community advocate and Parent.

A series of first-ever forums brought front line education reformers and community media representatives together in Atlanta, Memphis, Miami and New Orleans. The consensus was clear: improving schools is a civil rights issue but will become a movement only when parents are fully involved -- and a movement in which media must play a more compelling role.

“It’s a right for the children to have an education,” said Elise Evans, co-chair of Southern Avenue Middle Charter School in Memphis. “It’s a civil right.” Her demand was seconded by Marleine Bastien, executive director of the Haitian Women of Miami, Inc., who questioned how parents could be adequately informed unless community media are fully engaged in covering education reform issues.

New America Media, a national consortium of ethnic news organizations, convened the forums to foster a better communication exchange between education reformers and news organizations serving communities most impacted by low-performing school systems. The results of the recently released NAM poll, which surveyed 1400 parents of K-12 students in eight southeastern states about the quality of their children’s education, served as the impetus to spark the symposium in each city.

Conducted in seven languages, the poll found parents overwhelmingly satisfied with the quality of their children's education and with high aspirations that their children would not only attend college but pursue advanced degrees. However, the data show that six of the eight states surveyed are in the bottom half of math scores when compared to other states within the United States; seven are in the bottom half in reading. Yet, parents showed no sense of urgency or outrage. “How is it possible,” asked pollster Sergio Bendixen, “that parents seem to think the quality of their children’s education is okay?”

Though the poll did not include questions about where U.S. students ranked internationally, Bendixen’s presentation underscored the decline of America’s educational competitiveness by showing data that placed the U.S. students 18th in math, just behind Estonia, and, at 17th, trailing Poland in reading. Chinese students now hold the top spot in both categories. The U.S. rankings were markedly lower from only a few decades ago when the country ranked either number one or two respectively.

“The signals are starting to turn in the right direction in terms of how important the quality of education is,’ said Kent McGuire, president of the Southern Education Foundation. “We’re starting to appreciate that the competition is global in nature.”

Atlanta Forum Focuses on Undocumented Students

McGuire, who served as the lead-off panelist in Atlanta, the venue for the first symposium, urged parents to demand accountability and to “ask for the evidence” of whether the school system or purported reforms are working, particularly because of the demographics in the Southeast. “Kids of color are the ones we do the least well with,” he said, noting that their numbers will continue to grow.

Angelo Hurtado said the media could assist in dispelling stereotypes ethnic students often embrace about their inability to succeed. However, Hurtado, co-founder and vice president of H.O.P.E. (Hispanic Students Promoting Education, Inc.), said the most pressing issue for many of her peers was the looming passage of a state bill in the Georgia House that will mirror the Senate’s SB 458. The legislation would effectively bar undocumented students from receiving an education at Georgia’s public colleges and universities.

“Not only undocumented students are being affected by this, but documented students as well,” Hurtado said, explaining that, collectively, these students form one community. Other speakers in Atlanta also decried the legislation as short-sighted and contrary to the goals of education to yield productive members of society. Many in attendance agreed that the media should devote greater attention to the legislation and expand their coverage of education in Georgia.

William Teasley, Director of Evaluation and Research at Atlanta Education Fund, challenged ethnic media in particular to become advocates of education reform, in part because it “reaches audiences our traditional media and our traditional organizations have trouble reaching.”

New Orleans and Ethnic Media

Though reaching audiences remains an essential priority for all media, the resilience of ethnic media in New Orleans during and since Katrina in 2005 serves as a testament to the art of the possible. Yet, covering education reform there may prove as critical a role for a city experiencing profound changes in the redesign of its school system.

Panelist Neerav Kingsland, Chief Strategy Officer at New Schools for New Orleans, explained that 80 percent of the city’s students are now attending charter schools and student test scores, while not a comprehensive measure of success, are trending upward. In terms of academic achievement and preparation for careers, “10 to 20 percent of the open enrollment schools in the state are where we want them to be,” Kingsland said, but he was confident that within five years New Orleans schools would soon surpass the state’s in terms of performance.

Kingsland said it is useful to remember how far the school system has come, citing the travails of a New Orleans high school senior and valedictorian about ten years ago who had repeatedly failed the then-required 10th grade level math exit exam. “Those stories are increasingly few and far between,” he said.

Dr. Andre Perry, Associate Director for Education Initiatives, Loyola University, expressed concern about using test scores as a true measure of a school's success. In his opinion, New Orleans schools have achieved only modest gains.

He was particularly adamant about the need for media to take the time to understand what data means in the context of quality of life issues. “If you increase test scores, what does it mean when you can’t get a job,” citing lack of access to transportation or other resources that often weigh heavily on a graduating student’s success.

“Wealth is a causal factor of educational achievement,” Perry argued, not just a correlation, explaining that parents of poor children can less afford books and other resources that could prepare and assist their children at an early age. In addition, he noted that the analysis behind education reform is often miscast as a black-white paradigm and that a media focused on closing the achievement gap will miss the real story, the goal of attaining excellence but one attuned to the cultures of communities. He asked how is it possible to read an article about “success in schools” in a local newspaper and “three kids murdered” in the same edition?

Success Stories in Memphis

At the Memphis forum, attendee Marcus Matthews, University of Memphis Coordinator of “Teen Appeal,” a newspaper written by and distributed to the city’s high school students, concurred that media’s role in helping parents understand data and context is crucial. As an example, he noted that some parents may not know that the ACT exam, a test that measures college readiness, is not scored on a scale of one to a hundred. He recalled a student who scored a 26 on the ACT but, when Matthews asked him about attending college, said, “I haven’t applied.” Matthews said it was plausible “that the parents may be thinking, ‘26 out of a 100, that’s an F.’” On the ACT scale of 36, a score of 22 in math and 21 in reading indicate college readiness.

Matthews said the media can help assist in finding and documenting the lives of young adults who have the academic capacity to pursue higher education but who never did: “We don’t know where they are; we don’t know what they’re doing,” but media also should tell their audiences about the individual success stories of Memphis city school graduates.

Similarly, Paris Byrd, a high school student in Memphis said it is important that media seek out the opinions of students who are “experts on their own education; that’s not being paid attention to.”

The City of Memphis is slated to merge its public school system with the county’s public schools. More than a few panelists and attendees said the media will play an even more vital role in explaining the issues at stake to parents given the scale and complexities of the impending union, especially for immigrant parents who may be unfamiliar with the American public education system, much less the key elements of education reform.

Mark Sturgis, Memphis Director, Stand for Children, said, “Media has a moral responsibility around this issue to advocate for a system to provide equity and equality for all children, and, if the media is not doing that, it’s a problem.”

College, Job Readiness at Issue in Miami

At Miami Dade College, which also served as the host for the concluding symposium, Lenore Rodicio, Executive Director of MDC3 Student Success and Completion Initiatives, captured part of the disconnect between the expectations of parents in the NAM poll and their children’s capacity to perform academically upon graduating high school.

She said more than 70 percent of students coming to Miami Dade for their first year of study are “testing as deficient in one or more academic areas and the greatest number of them is in mathematics.” However, she said the recognition of the need for reform has brought elected officials together with business and community leaders to find ways to address education in ways that will enable graduates to be better prepared for the jobs available.

Several panelists, however, stressed that collaboration alone, though useful, will be insufficient in addressing the myriad number of issues that impact education. For panelist Lucie Tondreau, a parent who represented the Haitian community, the failure to pass the DREAM Act results in the inability of many teens from her community to have the legal means to pursue higher education. “Those minds are being wasted,” she said.

The Miami dialogue highlighted several issues on display at the other symposia, including the need for more adequate and better directed funding for education as well as the call for media to hold education administrators more accountable to the public. McNelly Torres, Co-Founder & Associate Director of Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, agreed with those objectives but said that media’s unique role in explaining the need for education reform could only be achieved by media accurately reporting on what’s going on in the schools, talking to students and to parents as well. “You need,” she said, addressing media members directly, “to be out there on the battlefield.”

To read more about the poll and the roundtables, please click here.

California Earns B- for Openness, D- for Access

2012-03-22T19:00:00Z

How does California score when it comes to transparency and political corruption? According to a new study released earlier this week ranking states in terms of their political openness the answer is: not bad at all. When it comes to access to public information, the picture is less rosy.

The Golden State ranked fourth on the “Corruption Risk Report Card,” earning a B- overall. The nationwide State Integrity Investigation included several categories and looks to “expose practices that undermine trust in state capitols.” Good news for government watchdogs and former elected officials alike.

The state received a D-, however, for access to public information, a grade that surprised a few and one most agree must improve soon.

Carol Shull was one of a number of journalists brought on to help with the investigation. Examining California’s corruption risk, she noted that while laws like the 1968 California Public Records Act, designed to provide greater access to information from public agencies, work well on paper, “they can be administered by the departments very differently.”

The head of San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (SOTF), Hope Johnson, agrees. Describing California’s D- in public access to information as a “relatively legitimate” grade, she echoed Shull’s concerns. “We have some good public records laws in California, but the main issue is enforcement, and it’s also dependent on leadership”

She also stressed that public awareness is an equally significant factor.

“A lot of people don’t know what their rights are, and some people also just don’t see the relevance. They ask, ‘Okay, well how does this apply to me?’ [Accessing public information] isn’t that exciting, but it’s very difficult when you’re in the position and need it. It’s even harder for journalists working under deadlines who need the information in a timely manner,” she explained.

“If nobody is worried about it [the process], there will be a delay in turning over the requested information until it’s not useful,” she said, adding that in some instances the public has taken legal action against government agencies to obtain requested documents that should have already been available.

“It ends up costing tax payers a lot of money,” said Johnson.

A Steep Price to Pay

Johnson cited a case heard in October of 2010 by the SOTF, which advises the city’s board of supervisors on matters of open government.

According to minutes from the hearing, an employee with a local public affairs agency submitted a request in June of 2010 for records pertaining to then District Attorney Kamala Harris. The employee, Johnson notes, received only two of the 11 documents and even those did not come until September, after a court battle that cost the city some $7500 in legal fees.

Daniel Newman, executive director of MapLight, a Berkeley, Calif. based nonprofit research organization that tracks campaign financing, told New America Media that the “lack of an agency enforcing the public records act is a detriment” to open government, but added that he would rank California “at about a C, simply because there is a right of access available and a right to collect attorney’s fees [if the requestor is successful in taking legal action],” he said.

In December of 2008, MapLight and The First Amendment Coalition (FAC) filed a lawsuit against the Office of Legislative Counsel of California under the California Public Records Act to obtain electronic database records of how state lawmakers vote, which was denied upon request in July of that same year. MapLight and FAC won public access to the database in a June 2009 settlement.

The Need For Improvement

Shull pointed out that making people go to court to appeal decisions denying them access to public information was a factor in giving California such a poor grade. “We were expecting states to have set up a separate commission or organization to review those requests,” she said.

The ease with which the public can get access to information that is legally available to them is another challenge that contributed to California’s low grade.

Most top level elected and appointed officials must file statements of economic interest -- disclosing gifts they receive, as well as stocks and investments they hold, income earned that is not from the state, and property they own -- with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). However, other state, city, and county officials, such as city managers or planning commission directors, file those statements locally.

Currently there is no way to consolidate all of that information and analyze whether there are interest groups involved in activities throughout the state. Ann Ravel, Chair of the FPPC, says the group must have access to copies of all statements of economic interest, in order to increase transparency and help the public get access to information.

“People need to know that information so that they know whether their public officials are making decisions in their best interest,” she said.

Johnson with the SOTF noted the State of California could benefit from a statewide ordinance or an administrative section of the court reinforcing rights to accessing all public records, thereby reducing violations of open government. But she added it would need to be something “not in the purview of politicians.”

Assemblyman Warren T. Furutani (D-South Los Angeles County), a strong advocate for ensuring communities are politically engaged and adequately informed, especially regarding bilingual services, echoed the concerns of good government advocates.

“There is a gap between the policies and practices,” he said. And while acknowledging that budget cuts and subsequent understaffing are valid concerns, Furutani stressed “this is not an excuse for not complying.”

The assemblymember pointed to a November, 2010 audit of California’s Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act, which requires that all state agencies translate materials into any language spoken by 5 percent or more of those served and hire bilingual staff. The audit, he said, found that eight of the 10 state agencies audited did not have procedures in place to update their bilingual services to reflect the changing needs of their clients.

Still, despite the shortcomings, laws such as the Bilingual Services Act are cause for optimism, says Furutani.

“People want to know how their dollar is being spent, and I think that’s a good movement.”

Suzanne Manneh also serves on San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force Committee

Latinos, Blacks Come Together in Alabama March

2012-03-08T21:00:00Z

Ed. Note: Latinos, Blacks and a host of civil rights, labor and immigrant rights groups are participating in a historic reenactment of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. The event marks the coming together of a broad movement for a renewed call for civil rights in America. A core part of the agenda will demand the repeal of Alabama’s vehemently anti-immigrant law, HB56. The march continues from March 4-9. On March 8, immigration rights will be the focus of the marchers. On March 9, a rally will be held at the steps of the State Capitol.

Media Training Conference Looks at CA's 2012 Election Issues

2012-03-06T19:49:53Z

Is 2012 the year that California’s ethnic electorate becomes the decider in the state’s future? And If so, what will that mean for hot-button issues like tax measures, criminal justice reform, the environment and healthcare?

These issues - and more - were addressed in detail during “Covering California’s 2012 Elections,” a recent media training symposium produced by New America Media aimed at ethnic media outlets. According to NAM founder/executive director Sandy Close, ethnic voters “are the make or break in 2012’s elections.”

That’s largely because for the past 24 years, California’s political trend has been more ethnic, more diverse and more progressive, for the most part, pollster supreme Mark DiCamillo said.

DiCamillo, who is with the Field Poll, presented slides, which illustrated how ever since the 1988 election, California has skewed Democratic in its presidential choices. That shift, statistics suggest, is almost entirely attributable to the growing influence - and population numbers - of the Latino electorate. The wedge resulting from the Latino effect currently represents a double-digit chasm.

This gap, DiCamillo explained, is why Republican presidential candidates rarely if ever focus their efforts on California – and why President Obama is likely to win the state. An Obama victory, he said, could fuel a progressive surge led by the state’s ethnic voters for other ballot measures and Democratic candidates.

DiCamillo went on to outline the major political issues for California in 2012, a list topped by the possibility that, due to redistricting, more Congressional seats than normal - as many as four to six - could be in play, which could have national implications if those seats are won by Democrats.

Additionally, three new tax measures, possible referendums on the death penalty and the three strikes laws and various environmental issues could all go before the voters this November – choices which could shape the state’s future in no uncertain terms.

The importance of the ethnic vote, for example, is evident when looking at the death penalty, which is opposed by high percentages of African Americans and Latinos.

“The perception is that the death penalty is applied more to ethnic criminals,” DiCamillo said, explaining that ethnic voters’ poll numbers tend to reflect this personal stake in the issue.

DiCamillo was followed by expert criminologist and University of California, Berkeley, law professor Dr. Barry Krisberg, who discussed the interesting economic direction resulting from the realignment of California’s prison system, which is linked to tax measures.

“If you spend money on criminal justice, that means you don’t spend it on healthcare, home care and education,” Krisberg said.

One eye-opening moment for many in attendance came when Krisberg noted that while crime is a bread-and-butter political topic, frequently referenced by conservative candidates, in actuality, “crime rates in California are lower than when Eisenhower was president.”

This prompted Close to add, “Crime, frankly, like immigration, has been a hugely polarizing issue.” Meanwhile, Krisberg noted the “gross racial disparity” of the criminal justice system.

Other panelists included social justice activist Jakada Imani, tax specialist Lenny Goldberg, policy researcher Pamela Heisy, reporter Aaron Glantz, ethnic law advocate Chris Punongbayan, environmentalist Julie Christian-Smith and PR veteran Don Solem, who discussed everything from the impact of ethnic voters on climate change to how to track campaign contributions to the extent with which the Occupy message has resonated with the general public.

One reason for that, Punongbayan said, is the reality of the white middle-class “catching up to where people of color have been at” economically, due to foreclosures, unemployment and other factors historically associated with ethnic minorities. Whether that will be a compelling enough reason to usher in the “millionaires tax” or other reform measures which speak to the 99 percent/1 percent Occupy meme, however, remains to be seen.

Deportation Could Mean Death For Gay Ugandan

2012-02-29T09:00:00Z

Traducción al español

SAN DIEGO, Calif.— Joseph Bukombe spent his entire life hiding his sexual orientation from friends and family in his native Kampala. Today he is fighting an American immigration system that doesn’t believe he’s gay.

In March 2011, the Board of Immigration Appeals—which decides appeals based on paper reviews of cases—denied Bukombe’s petition for asylum based on his sexual orientation, saying he failed to provide credible testimony attesting to the fact that he is gay. Bukombe is fighting his deportation order.

The 35-year-old chef-in-training in San Diego says he fears for his life if he’s deported because Uganda is not a safe place for gays. “If I’m sent to Uganda, I fear I will be tortured, imprisoned or killed,” Bukombe explained.

Such fears are grounded in personal experience and public scorn – at times violent -- of homosexuality in his native country.

Earlier this month, Uganda’s Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lotodo called for the arrests of the organizers of a gay rights conference, saying gay people should go home “and suffer their illness from there,” according to news reports.

Bukombe’s saga illustrates the trouble of gay immigrants from the Middle East and Africa who flee persecution back home because of their sexual orientation. Upon arrival in the United States, many fall outside the stereotypical boundaries of gay life in this country and thus struggle to prove their homosexuality in court.

“They [immigration courts] may be asking, ‘Do you go to gay bars? Do you have relationships?’” said Shannon Price Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “[These are] things that gay people might do in the U.S. but not people in other countries, or they would be killed.”

Tortured

Bukombe married in 2005, two years after arriving in San Diego on a six-month tourist visa. He recalls hoping the marriage would “change” him. But it didn’t, and he eventually told his wife the truth, though he still could not bring himself to tell family back home, or for that matter, some of his African friends here.

“I did what most people do back home,” Bukombe said. “I lived a double life.”

It was only in the courtroom that he dared open up. A timid Bukombe told the judge that his relatives had tried to beat the gay out of him. In his testimony, he described how when he was 8 or 9 years old, his aunt and two neighbors tied him up and then beat him until he bled. His aunt thought she was doing him a favor.

“They were beating the homosexual demon out of me,” Bukombe explained. “They squeezed my penis and testicles so hard I had to have one of my testicles removed.”

They tried burning his genitals. His aunt grabbed a piece of burning wood from a cooking stove. When Bukombe wouldn’t stand still, she sizzled his leg. He couldn’t walk for days. His aunt told him he would die if he ever told anyone.

The young boy remained quiet; the fear that relatives would find out he was gay outweighed his fear of the beatings.

“I was afraid I would get into more trouble,” he said.

Punishable by Death

Bukombe came to the attention of immigration officials in January 2010, when he was arrested in the parking lot of a San Diego fast food restaurant on a DUI. In court, he began to recount for the judge the persecution gay people, including some of his friends, experienced back home.

“They look at you like if you have a disease and nobody wants to come near you,” Bukombe said of Uganda, where legislation was introduced in 2009 that would make gay sex punishable by death.

While the bill was tabled after international outrage, the climate in Uganda remains hostile. Currently, male-male relationships there are punishable with 10 years or more in prison, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.

Worldwide, same-sex relationships are illegal in 75 countries, according to the San Francisco-based Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, most of them clustered in the Middle East and Africa. In seven of those countries, being gay is punishable by death.

Despite these dangers, Bukombe’s petition for asylum was denied, a fact he attributes in part to his attorney’s inexperience. As a result, he’s now navigating the complicated web of immigration law without the assistance of legal representation.

“It’s a huge problem for LGBT people who are in the asylum process, finding attorneys who know what they’re doing; who are competent,” says Minter, noting that a number of his clients come seeking help after the attorney they initially hired missed a deadline or failed to show up for a court hearing.

Generally, non-citizens arrested for a crime have the right to government-appointed legal representation for criminal charges. But those facing deportation don’t have that right.

For Bukombe, this has meant struggling alone against a complicated, foreign legal system. He recently submitted a request for legal representation with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, cognizant of the fact that without a lawyer his chances of winning on appeal are slim at best.

“It’s very difficult without an attorney. The government has all the resources to discredit you,” said Grace M. Gómez, an immigration attorney with the Law Offices of Gómez & Lackey in Florida who has successfully helped LGBT clients obtain asylum. “If you are not educated, not familiar with the language and the law, it can be very difficult.”

An End to the Nightmare

Bukombe still has nightmares from the 23 months he spent locked up in the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. He says while there, agents regularly pressured him to sign deportation papers.

“We have your travel documents,” one agent told him after he was forcefully woken up and brought into an empty room to be interrogated.

“I was begging for my life,” Bukombe recalls. “I said, ‘No. I can’t do that. That would mean I’m signing my death warrant. I don’t want to die.’”

One agent later threatened Bukombe with jail time of four to nine years for refusing to sign the papers. “Being in prison here for nine years is better than going back and dying,” Bukombe replied.

He was released in December. Since then he’s been working as a chef at the Flavors of East Africa near San Diego State University.

On a recent Friday, he stood outside the restaurant and spoke about his hopes for the future.

“I’m praying every day that the situation gets better back home so that people like me can be free,” he said.

Until then, he adds, he will continue his fight to remain in this country, a fight that could mean the difference between life and death.

This story was made possible through funding from the Rosenberg Foundation’s California Immigration Reporting Project at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It is part of NAM's ongoing 'Stories From the Diaspora' series.

NAM Hosts Briefing on Affordable Care Act

2012-02-28T10:00:00Z

SAN FRANCISCO – While some say health care reform may not have gone far enough, the “three big things” it delivers are greater protection for consumers against insurance companies through the new health Patient’s Bill of Rights, expansions in health care coverage and control of health care costs.

“(The Affordable Care Act (ACA)) is the biggest thing that has happened in health care policy in generations,” asserted Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a non-profit health advocacy group as he gave an overview of the act and its impact on California’s communities, at an ethnic media briefing here.

“Implementing it,” he said, is the law of the land and has a direct impact on all our communities.”

That was the resounding assurance given by Wright and others on the front lines of health care, at the briefing New America Media organized at its headquarters here Feb. 21. Sixteen ethnic media representatives from the Bay Area attended.

As things stand now, Californians, especially people of color, are more likely to be uninsured, some because of “big holes” in Medi-Cal -- the state’s name for Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for indigent families, pregnant women, seniors and those with disabilities.

“You may be penniless, but if you had no children, you were denied enrollment in Medi-Cal,” Wright said, noting that hole in that public safety net has been closed by the ACA that was signed into law in March 2010. Approximately two-thirds of California’s 7 million uninsured are now likely to qualify for Medi-Cal, even those who are childless.

And for the first time, Americans who earn less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level (which is approximately $14,000 for an individual and $29,000 for a family of four) will be eligible to enroll in Medi-Cal, Wright pointed out.

Additionally, starting January 1, 2014, no insurance company can deny legal residents health coverage because of pre-existing health conditions. An estimated 50 to 129 million non-elderly Americans have some type of pre-existing health condition, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Many of them were locked out of the insurance market because of that.

But even before 2014, Americans with pre-existing health conditions can get health insurance through the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), a temporary high-risk pool program created by the new law. Around 1,700 Californians have so far enrolled in the state’s PCIP since it went into effect last March, Wright noted.

Luisa Buada is executive director of the East Palo Alto-based Ravenswood Family Health Center, whose clientele is largely from the Hispanic, Pacific Islander and black communities. Many are either underinsured or uninsured, Buada noted, saying her clinic has been ahead of the curve in health care reform by taking steps to transform it into a “health home” facility, thereby saving San Mateo county hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One of the strategies under the ACA is to try to contain the costs of unnecessary hospital admissions and readmissions soon after discharge, by providing ongoing care by physician-led teams coordinating primary, acute and behavioral care in a “health home” setting. Ravenswood has begun doing that.

“They prevent people from going to emergency rooms,” Buada said, noting that health homes focus on “wellness rather than on illness.”

Panelist Mike Odeh, a policy associate with Children Now, said that families should be made aware of such provisions in the ACA as banning insurance companies from denying children with pre-existing conditions coverage, as well as placing annual dollar limits on their coverage.

Another provision that should be well publicized is that children can now remain on their parent’s employer-sponsored insurance plan until they turn 26.

He said there are currently about 700,000 children in California who are eligible for health care coverage but aren’t enrolled, mostly because their families don’t know about all the programs out there or because of such systemic barriers as lack of language skills.

It is those same barriers that are keeping many families from taking advantage of the Healthy Kids program that currently operates in some 30 California counties and is open even to children who are undocumented, Odeh said.

A small business owner in San Francisco, Virginia Donohue, talked about how the ACA has given her some financial relief in wanting to do the “moral” thing by her 25 employees

When she opened Pet Camp back in 2000, she said, insurance coverage for her employees cost her $30,000 per year, with no cost to her employees. Today, because insurance companies have been raising the cost of premiums at will, she is spending $90,000 on coverage that “is not as good,” with her employees picking up 20 percent of the cost of their premium.

Thanks to the ACA, last year she was able to get the 35 percent federal tax credit employers with 25 or fewer full-time employees can now get on their insurance cost.

Starting January 2014, small businesses that purchase coverage through
the Small Business Exchange will get a tax credit of up to 50 percent of
what they pay to cover their employees.

“It would be great to let small business owners know of this,” Donohue said.

J. Mario Preza of the Spanish language publication Yo Soy News noted after the briefing that information presented at the event was not known to many in the Latino community.

For more information about Healthy Kids, call 1-877-KIDS-NOW (543-7669).
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Suspensions at Richmond High Plummet

2012-02-28T09:00:00Z

RICHMOND, Calif. – By this time last year Richmond High had recorded close to 500 suspensions. This year the school, which caters to one of the poorest and most underserved student populations in the Bay Area, has halved that number through an approach inspired by the Restorative Justice movement.

“We have to stop the ‘school to prison pipeline’,” says Millie Burns from Catholic Charities East Bay, a non-profit organization working closely with Richmond High’s staff to implement the Restorative School Discipline Project in conjunction with The California Endowment’s Healthy Richmond initiative.

“And we know a lot [of that work] has to center around the schools,” Burns adds.

Staff and students alike at Richmond High attribute the school’s success – suspensions have fallen from 486 in January of 2011 to 290 this year – to its adoption of Restorative Justice practices that were initially focused on the criminal justice system. Such practices emphasize reconciliation and, when applied to a school setting, give students the opportunity for redemption in place of expulsion.

Recent headlines have focused on the topic of school discipline, revealing that across the nation, the number of students suspended and/or expelled each year has increased steadily since the 1970’s.

In California, the use of “zero tolerance” policies – which emphasize disciplinary measures such as suspending or expelling troublesome students – became even more widespread in the 1990’s as districts responded to a growing public fear of violence, weapons and drug use on high school and middle school campuses.

The student became a “super predator” in the parlance of the times.

According to the Department of Education, California schools issued 778,084 suspensions and expulsions in the 2009-10 school year alone, the last year for which data is available on the state education website. That comes out to over 11 percent of all enrolled students in the state.

“We know that dropping out and school failure [are] the precursors for a life-long involvement in violence and poverty,” explains Burns. “We now have evidence that introducing the philosophy, approach and practices that are now known as ‘restorative’ gives people different ways to respond in all aspects of their relationships with kids.”

Burns says the old way of doing things at Richmond High clearly weren’t working, adding that the new system she’s helped to put in place fundamentally changes the way teachers and administrators respond to student conflict and wrongdoing.

The restorative approach, says Burns, is all about personal relationship building with the kids and providing them with support to overcome challenges.

“When conflicts happen, we are all harmed. We want to focus on the cause, have logical consequences, and hold ourselves as a community -- wrong doers and victims -- accountable.”

Sophomore Eugene MacDonald admits he’s never gotten on well with his teachers. On one occasion last year he got into it with an English teacher for something she said.

“I just blew up right in her face,” he says. “She tried to throw me out after that and I started cussing, throwing paper and going bad.”

A week later MacDonald was brought in to see Buzz Sherwood, and was invited to participate in a restorative justice discussion circle. “We did the circle and all my teachers were there and I got along with them. I found out more about them as we were in the circle. I actually did good last year.”

Sherwood, who retired from teaching in 2007, now coordinates the Restorative Discipline Project at Richmond High.

“I’m not in charge. I’m merely the elder that facilitates the process,” says Sherwood.

“One of our first big cases was a girl fight that was [played out] on Youtube. It was one of those [conflicts] that dated back to the 8th grade...”

“They never fought again,” Sherwood notes, adding the aim of the program is to fundamentally reshape the way the students see themselves and their peers.

“There’s the drama, the hating on people, all the stuff that goes on… we’re trying to change the way people think about their relationships with each other, how they listen to each other, how teachers interact with students and how students interact with teachers.”

Before the new policy, Sherwood says the school spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with petty fights. Now, he says, staff work on training the general student population, offering one-day sessions for students and faculty members.

“What everyone likes about the circle is that everyone gets to be heard, everybody gets to tell their understanding of what happened,” explains Sherwood. "In the circle we come to a solution that is acceptable for everyone. And that is unique for a lot of young people.”

17-year-old Nathaniel House plays on the school football team. He’s a running back on offense and a cornerback on defense, and hopes to make it to the NFL one day. After an altercation with another student he was brought to Sherwood’s office.

“He had us sit down and talk about it," says House, explaining that were it not for the intervention, he and the other student “probably would have fought and been suspended, came back and been more heated.”

The process, says House, made him more conscious of the repercussions of his actions. "That’s pretty much what the circle is, it gives you the mindset to think about what you do before you do it.”

Such reactions are proof of what Sherwood says is a “hunger” among the students for a better way. “In their youth they don’t really know what that might be… [this new approach] opens the possibility for a new way of being and they really embrace it.”

Poverty, Homelessness Rising Sharply Among Florida Students

2012-02-27T09:00:00Z

Andres Francisco Miguel, 9, worked on his spelling during a lesson at Warfield Elementary School in Martin County. The school, where 97 percent of attendees qualified for free and/or reduced meals in 2011, has many students for whom English is a second language.

Since the economy collapsed in 2008, Florida’s student population has become poorer each year — with almost all school districts in the state experiencing spikes in the number of kids who qualify for subsidized meals.

Children have become homeless at alarming numbers as well.

Homelessness among school-age children has soared from 30,878 in the 2006-07 school year to 56,680 in 2010-11. Homelessness for children of all ages, including those too young for public school, was 83,957 in 2010-11, up from 49,886 in 2006-07.

The adverse effects of the economic downturn are having a significant impact on Florida’s public school system, in which over 56 percent of students enrolled in the 2010-2011 school year qualified for subsidized meals.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed data relating to poverty rates, homeless students and subsidized meals for all school districts before the financial crisis began up to and through the 2010-11 school year. The widespread increase in these three poverty indicators paints a picture of a state that has become much poorer after the Great Recession.

Advocates for the homeless say external factors driven by poverty — such as lack of housing, low wages, foreclosure and unemployment — place Florida and its public school system at a critical juncture.

Children living in poverty are more likely to have behavioral problems, complete fewer years of education, and, as they grow up, tend to experience more years of unemployment, according to poverty experts and research by the American Psychological Association.

“I think that we are growing a Third World in our own back yard,” said Ellen L. Bassuk, founder and president of the National Center on Family Homelessness, an advocacy and research organization in Needham, Mass. “We look at developing countries, but we don’t look at our own country.”

Students considered homeless by the U.S. Department of Education include those who have experienced loss of housing and are currently staying with a relative, neighbor or friend. It also includes students living in motels, hotels, Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, trailer parks or camping grounds, as well as those living in emergency or transitional shelters and awaiting foster care placement.

Even as resources have dwindled in recent years, schools have increasingly become safe havens for needy students.

Ken Gaughan, supervisor of school social services at Hillsborough County Public Schools, said the school district partners with charitable groups, churches and government agencies to provide referrals for children in need.

“We have always had poverty in this county, but now we have a new group,” Gaughan said, noting the increase of working and middle-class families that have fallen into poverty. “They are embarrassed and sometimes they don’t know how to ask for help.”

Poverty Grows

More than one in five children (15.7 million) lived in poverty in the United States in 2010. In Florida, 924,000 children lived in poverty.

The number of students slipping into poverty has affected all 67 school districts in the state, with poverty growing hand-in-hand with unemployment.

Palm Beach County saw the biggest increase in poverty rates among large school districts, rising 66 percent from 2007 to 2010. Other large and medium-sized school districts showing big increases during that time included Orange (60 percent), Polk (58 percent), Hillsborough (52 percent), Osceola (48 percent), Seminole (42 percent), Broward (33 percent) and Miami-Dade (32 percent).

But this upward trend also affected small school districts such as St. Johns and Collier, where the number of poor students doubled in four years.

Poverty has also affected Martin County Public Schools. The school district experienced the largest increase in student poverty in the state, from 2,198 children in 2007 to 3,796 in 2009, a 73 percent jump.

While the increase in poverty rates has helped school districts obtain more federal funds — by adding more schools to Title I, a federal supplemental program intended to help educate low-income students — officials said the funding doesn’t compensate for deep cuts at the state level, a trend since 2007.

“If these numbers [poverty rate] keep growing, it would be difficult for Florida to deal with the population and provide extra services,” said Karen Hawley Miles, president and executive director of Watertown, Mass.-based Education Resource Strategies, which helps school districts develop ways to use resources more effectively.

A Silent Problem

Widespread poverty in the state has left thousands of children homeless in Florida, with growing numbers of families struggling to feed their children and provide homes.

Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., said ignoring this crisis could have devastating consequences.

“You can only expect so much from a child if they don’t receive what they need at this stage of their lives,” Duffield said. “You need to eat, sleep and be warm and safe. These are all basic things.”

In Florida during the past five years, homelessness among public school students ages 5 to 17 jumped 84 percent. During the 2010-11 school year, the most recent year for which statewide data is available, 56,680 students were reported homeless.

Duffield and other advocates said these numbers are likely low since homelessness is difficult to quantify.

“There are some kids that might not be at school,” Duffield said. “And there might be homeless kids who are still going to school but haven’t told everybody.”

Christina M. Savino, a homeless liaison in Orange County Public Schools, talked about the growing problem in Central Florida.

“Every day we get new students. It might be two or five, but every day we have an increase of identified homeless students,” Savino said. “Whether they just became homeless or the school just found out, I don’t know, but the numbers increase every day.”

Miami-Dade had the most homeless students with 4,406 in 2010-11, followed by Orange (3,387), Hillsborough (3,659), Lake (2,992), Pinellas (2,915) and Polk (2,446).

“Most of these kids are not going to graduate from high school,” said Bassuk, who is also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “And that would put them at risk and on a vicious cycle. With all the budget cuts across the board, the number of homeless students will continue to grow.”

Feeding the Poor

More students attending public schools are receiving free and low-cost meals, a reflection of the current financial hardship affecting thousands of families in the state.

Their numbers have risen to more than 1.4 million in the 2010-11 school year — up from more than 1.2 million in 2007-08. Subsidized meals or free and/or reduced meals are the accepted indicators of poverty in public schools.

Of 67 school districts in Florida, 64 reported three-year gains in students eligible for subsidized meals.

Some of the state’s largest school districts — Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange, Duval, Palm Beach and Polk — have traditionally had the highest numbers of students in poverty. Over half of students in these seven school districts qualified for free and/or reduced meals in 2010-11. Miami-Dade was at the top, with 7 of 10 students qualifying for free and/or reduced meals.

But increasing poverty has also affected smaller school districts in Florida. In Nassau and Monroe, the number of students qualifying for free and/or reduced meals increased 24 percent from 2008 to 2011. St. Johns and Santa Rosa reported 23 percent and 22 percent jumps, respectively.

Students in families with incomes up to 130 percent of the poverty level — or $29,055 for a family of four — are eligible for free school meals. Children in a four-member household with income up to $41,348 qualify for a subsidized lunch priced at 40 cents.

Mary Kate Harrison, general manager of student nutrition services at Hillsborough County Public Schools, said the biggest gains of children eligible for subsidized meals have come from middle and high school students. Over half (55 percent) of the 194,525 students enrolled in Hillsborough County in 2010-2011 were on the subsidized meal program.

“It has gone up dramatically for the past three or four years,” Harrison said.

And there are no signs that these numbers will decline any time soon. Some school districts including Hillsborough (60 percent), Orange (60 percent), Broward (59 percent) and Miami-Dade (73 percent) have reported additional increases in 2011-12.

When asked if she worries whether many children in her district go to bed hungry, Harrison responded: “That’s always a concern when they go home.”

Muslims Outraged by NYPD Surveillance

2012-02-24T21:12:13Z

A recent Associated Press report that revealed that Muslim students at several East Coast universities were the targets of investigation by the New York Police Department has sparked outrage within the civil rights community.

“This is abject lawlessness by the NYPD and the latest in a long line of revelations about the NYPD’s civil rights abuses,” Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told India-West.

Buttar noted that New York’s police force had acted far outside their jurisdiction by investigating Muslim students at campuses as far away as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. The students being investigated had shown no probable cause or committed suspicious activity, he asserted, noting that there was no oversight into NYPD activities.

The BORDC has joined with other civil rights organizations who are demanding New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s resignation. Additionally, said Buttar, the New York City Council needs to pass a series of reforms limiting what law enforcement officials can do.

In a report dated Feb. 18, the AP – using documents it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request – reported that Muslim student associations at several East Coast campuses, including Yale, Rutgers, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, were being monitored daily online, primarily through their Web sites, blogs and even e-mails.

In one instance, an NYPD agent accompanied several New York University students on a whitewater rafting trip, recording conversations into the students’ files and instances of praying during the day-long trip.

Secret “MSA” reports were prepared weekly by NYPD agents for review by Kelly. The AP posted one weekly MSA report online, signed by NYPD Officer Mahmood Ahmad, which detailed Muslim student events at 12 college campuses.
Tariq Hussain, who attended Rutgers University from 2000 to 2008 for undergraduate work and law school, told India-West he was both shocked and outraged by the revelation.

“The NYPD was doing surveillance on people who were doing nothing at all,” said Hussain. “It is shocking to me that the Constitution was completely ignored by the police. This is not even close to being legal,” he said.

Hussain, now a corporate attorney, said he was not aware that surveillance of Muslim students was occurring at his campus. “I’m shocked and outraged, but this doesn’t surprise me.”

“We consider ourselves Americans, but we’re not seen that way by law enforcement officials,” said Hussain. At a Feb. 21 press conference, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg remained unapologetic about the NYPD’s actions. “We have to keep this country safe. This is a dangerous place. Make no mistake about it,” said Bloomberg.

“It’s very cute to go and blame everybody and say we should stay away from anything that smacks of intelligence gathering. The job of our law enforcement is to make sure that they prevent things. And you only do that by being proactive,” said the mayor.

“You have to respect people’s right to privacy. You have to obey the law. And I think police officers across this country, federal level, state level, city level do that.”

Interestingly, Bloomberg correlated intelligence gathering by the NYPD to protecting the rights of the media. "You are not going to survive. You will not be able to be a journalist and write what you want to say if the people who want to take away your freedoms are allowed to succeed," Bloomberg asserted.

“It’s interesting that spying on Muslim students protects freedom of the press,” Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council of American Islamic Relations, told India-West.

“This is sending a chilling impact through the Muslim American community – that you can be investigated just for breathing while Muslim – and it’s designed to have that impact,” said Hooper.

CAIR has also called for Commissioner Kelly to step down and has asked for a complete investigation of NYPD activities with regards to the Muslim American community.

Yale president Richard Levin said the university's police department did not participate in any monitoring by the NYPD and that the university was unaware of surveillance activities. "I am writing to state, in the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States," Levin said in a statement.

The Rutgers University Muslim Student Association also issued a press release decrying the spying by the NYPD. “We are outraged at this violation of civil and legal rights. There is absolutely no justification in religiously profiling university students who attend this institution to attain intellectual liberation and positively contribute to American society,” said the statement.

Race and Sex-Based Abortion Ban Hijacks Civil Rights

2012-02-24T09:00:00Z

As members of immigrant families, as women of color, and as mothers ourselves, we were appalled when the United States House of Representatives introduced HR 3541 late last year. This legislation, which could come to a floor vote soon, cloaks itself in the language and names of civil rights heroes, but is in fact a duplicitous attack on the health, dignity, and human rights of all women of color, including immigrant women.

When Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act” (better known as PRENDA) late last year, civil and women’s rights advocates were left scratching our heads. A quick analysis of the bill made it clear that this legislation, which purports to ban “race- and sex-selection abortion,” would limit a woman’s access to safe abortion care, punish providers for a woman’s perceived race and motivations, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women, Latinas, and African-American women.

To understand this bill, it’s important to separate the two major components at play. First, the bill would ban something the sponsor calls “race-selective abortion” by punishing providers with fines and jail time. This ban relies on the insulting and plainly false assertion that when it comes to reproductive health, a woman of color is not willing or able to make the best decision for herself and her family. PRENDA would force abortion providers to racially profile their patients and interrogate them to determine subjective motivations behind the decision to end a pregnancy.

Secondly, this bill would ban “sex-selective abortion.” This portion of the bill exploits son preference, a symptom of gender inequity that is prevalent in countries like China and India. Women who appear to be from these countries and their providers would face the same intrusive process Latina and African-American women would—a provider would be expected to read a woman’s mind before performing an abortion or risk possible jail time. As international experts have said, the real problem is gender inequity, a pressing issue bans like this do nothing to address.

Immigrant woman would be especially hard hit by this law. Instead of addressing racial inequalities or gender discrimination, this bill relies on the harmful assumptions that Latinas and African-American women are unfit to make parental decisions and that API women practice “backward” traditions. We reject these racist assumptions because we know that women are the backbone of immigrant communities and provide invaluable love, care, and support to their daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, and other members of their extended families. All women, including women of color, have the right to control the number and spacing of their children.

We also know that immigrant women already face numerous barriers to accessing health care of any kind, including reproductive health care and abortion, and this ban would make an already difficult situation far worse. For Latinas or API women immigrants with limited English proficiency, a simple misunderstanding with a provider who doesn’t speak the patient’s language could result in denial of care. An immigrant woman who is a migrant worker, lives in a rural community, or lacks transportation may only have access to one abortion provider, if any, and only for a limited time. Burdening providers will only widen the disparities our communities face in obtaining care.

This bill is an attack on health, dignity, and justice for immigrant woman and indeed all women, thinly—and offensively—cloaked in the language of civil rights. Rather than improving the lives and status of women and people of color, this bill would simply make it harder for a woman to access safe, legal abortion care. More than 60 percent of women who obtain an abortion already have at least one child, and these mothers and their children suffer when they are denied the health care they need.

We urge Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) and the other proponents of PRENDA to abandon this disingenuous and dangerous bill, and instead join true civil rights leaders in Congress in passing legislation that would help our communities and empower women of color to make the decisions that are best for their families. Immigrant women face disparities in health care access and outcomes, low wages and unfair working conditions, and a lack of culturally and linguistically competent service and health providers.

If the policymakers behind PRENDA truly wish to advance an agenda that Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass could support, they will advocate for greater access to health care, comprehensive immigration reform, and economic and educational opportunities for our communities.

We are happy to help them so do. We’ll be waiting for their phone calls.

Jessica González-Rojas is Executive Director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH). Miriam Yeung is Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF). NAPAWF and NLIRH are Steering Committee members of the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights (NCIWR).

New America Media's IMMIGRATION MATTERS column regularly features the views of immigration experts and advocates.

Mexico Tourism Booming Again, Despite Violence

2012-02-23T09:55:00Z

MERIDA, Mex. – Despite relentless coverage of the Mexican drug war by U.S. news media over the last several years, tourism to Mexico is rebounding strongly.

Following three years of sharp decline that began in April 2009, when fears over H1N1 – the virus commonly known as “swine flu” -- effectively shut down most of the nation to foreign travel, visitors arriving in Mexico by air jumped to 22 million in 2011. That number is expected to increase again this year, as worldwide interest in the “end of time” 2012 phenomenon -- the ancient calendar of the Maya ends in December 2012 -- shifts into high gear. The end of the calendar cycle has generated worldwide interest, resulting in a variety of end-time theories, documentaries and even a big-budget Hollywood film.

During the peak of the H1N1 crisis in 2009, Mexico came to a halt as schools, museums, shopping centers and movie theaters were ordered shut, causing hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors to cancel their vacations and trips. While averting a public health crisis, the forceful action taken by Mexican authorities had unintentionally sent the tourism industry into a tailspin.

Since then, the combination of global economic recession and drug-related violence had only exacerbated the decline in tourism.

Today, that is all changing.

"We envisage that 2012 will be a record-breaking year for Mexico in terms of tourism numbers," says Rodolfo Lopez-Negrete, Chief Operating Officer of the Mexico Tourism Board. "Mexico's tourism industry is undergoing a stunning transformation -- based on a bold strategy of diversification -- focused on promoting a broader range of tourism products (i.e. cultural tourism, adventure travel and health related-tourism) aimed at attracting a new breed of global consumer."

Even the U.S. State Department has begun to recognize the nuanced nature of “safety” in Mexico, issuing Travel Advisories that reflect what the vast majority of visitors are likely to encounter on the ground in Mexico: “Millions of U.S. citizens safely visit Mexico each year for study, tourism, and business, including more than 150,000 who cross the border every day,” the State Department reports in its most recent advisory. “The Mexican government makes a considerable effort to protect U.S. citizens and other visitors to major tourist destinations, and there is no evidence that Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) have targeted U.S. visitors and residents based on their nationality. Resort areas and tourist destinations in Mexico generally do not see the levels of drug-related violence and crime reported in the border region and in areas along major trafficking routes.”

Over the past two years, Mexicans have worked to create exceptional travel experiences for visitors. In the southern state of Oaxaca, for instance, the political tumult and street protests of recent years caused by a teacher strike have settled down, and that area of the country is again experiencing a tourism boom, evidenced by frequent advertisements in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker and various travel magazines. Outfits like Oaxaca Culinary Tours are showcasing both food and mescal – an increasingly popular liquor distilled from a variety of cactus found in Oaxaca called maguey. And popular restaurants, like Casa Crespo have built up international followings with menus that feature artisanal food made with local ingredients.

As tourism rebounds in Mexico, more balanced coverage is being reported in the U.S. media. The New York Times, for instance, recently profiled Oaxaca as a “safe” location in its “36 Hours” travel series. The exposure generated tremendous buzz on social media sites, with Americans wanting to know more. As a result, the image of Oaxaca as a colonial city defaced by graffiti and engulfed in labor unrest now seems a distant memory, replaced by a charming place filled with fine foods, artisans making wonderful crafts – from wood carvings to delicate jewelry – and visitors intent on sampling some of the finest mescal produced in the state.

Nothing, however, currently compares to the growing foreign interest in the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico’s southeastern region and the ancestral home of the Maya. When “36 Hours in Merida” – Merida is the capital of Yucatan state -- was published two months ago in the New York Times, it generated a great deal of buzz among travel agents. The Merida Bed & Breakfast Association even fashioned an “ideal” weeklong itinerary in Merida to help answer the many questions they were receiving from Americans inquiring about what to do while in town.

In fact, interest in Merida has increased so much that there is now a dedicated series of books for Americans wishing to relocate there. Edited by Eduviges Montejo, The Essential Guide to Living in Merida routinely sells out on Amazon.com. “Not a day goes by without emails from Americans with specific questions,” Eduviges Montejo said. “These queries help shape how each new edition will evolve. For example, we’re now listing a section on bakeries, slow food markets and gourmet shops in the guide, since that’s what readers ask about.”

The Yucatan is also earning a reputation as the place to go to learn about chocolate. In July 2011 the Eco-Museo del Cacao opened to the public, the first ecological park that tells the history of chocolate, from the evolution of the cacao tree to the discovery of chocolate by the indigenous peoples of Mexico, to its ascendance as a delectable food enjoyed around the world. The Eco-Museo del Cacao is a multi-million dollar investment, primarily by Belgian investors. The artisanal chocolates made in Merida found a loyal following after American Express published a story in their magazine, Departures, in September 2011, and now the sweets, called Ki Xocolatl, are being sold on Amazon.com.

The increase in tourism to the peninsula has also acted to diversify the region’s image. What was once an industry that revolved around the flashy discoteques and resort hotels of Cancun, is now becoming the ultimate destination for a more hip and discerning traveler. “Welcome to Tulum, a destination so popular with the fashion crowd this time of year that it almost feels like Fashion Week,” Bob Morris reported in the New York Times last month. “While Teva-wearing backpackers look for sea turtles and New Age naïfs look for nirvana, the fashion obsessed don’t have to look at all to find one other. They are everywhere, artfully dressed down in high-peasant style.”

Growth in tourism has been so robust that a new airport is being planned to accommodate the overflow from Cancun’s international airport. “The infrastructure to support a new airport is in place,” says Shawn Bandick, a Canadian realtor in Playa del Carmen. “They’re putting millions of dollars into infrastructure.” The Maya Riviera International Airport will be near Tulum, closer to the resorts of Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, Tulum and the “eco-parks” to the south.

The resurgence in tourism reflects not just a renewed interest on the part of American travelers, but also a strong influx of European visitors. According to Mexico’s Tourism Secretary, 2011 saw increased tourism from Spain (6 percent), Italy (10.5 percent) and France (12.4 percent), to go along with the United States (10.6 percent, despite a 3 percent decrease in air travel) and Canada (9.1 percent). Even more astounding are the increases in tourism from China (30 percent), Russia (55 percent) and Brazil (66 percent).

What the numbers and new media coverage show is that the world is beginning to shift it’s view of Mexico as a destination -- not just for cartel bosses and traffickers, but for travelers seeking refuge from a troubled and troubling world.

Voter IDs: The ‘Hanging Chads’ of 2012

2012-02-23T09:00:00Z

WASHINGTON – A gathering of activists, journalists and voting rights advocates met recently to discuss the growing number of states that have adopted what many see as discriminatory voter registration laws. Such policies, they argue, do more to limit rather than expand democracy, threatening to disenfranchise millions in the lead up to the November elections.

Citizen journalist Faye Anderson was among those gathered at last week’s symposium, hosted by the Center for American Progress. Recalling the controversy over determining the intent of voters who may have incompletely punched paper ballots during the 2000 presidential race, she voiced the likelihood that voter photo IDs will become “the hanging chads of the 2012 election.”

Describing herself as a “chief evangelist” for the Cost of Freedom Project, a grass-roots voting rights initiative, Anderson called for national organizations, community activists and individuals to harness technology and social media to educate voters about how to comply with the new laws.

The Freedom Project is currently developing mobile phone apps in order to inform voters about the ID requirements in the states where they reside.

According to Nicole Austin-Hillery, D.C. Counsel and Director of the Washington, D.C. Office of the Brennan Center for Justice, the dramatic change since before 2011, when only Georgia and Indiana required a voter photo ID, will “seriously impact the next presidential election.”

Austin-Hillery estimated that as many as five million Americans – mostly elderly, young and minorities -- may be impeded from voting in November and that the states where more restrictive voting measures have been enacted represent 60 percent of the votes of the Electoral College.

“Nine states will not allow you to vote without a voter ID,” Austin-Hillery said, noting that at least 15 states have sought to tighten voting ID laws. Other barriers being erected include: the elimination of early voter periods; shortening the time during which absentee ballots can be filed; and curtailing ways in which voter registration drives can be conducted. Historically, registration drives have been a primary tool for registering minority and young voters.

Though only 11 percent of Americans currently lack a photo ID, Austin-Hillery explained that the percentages rise when viewed through different lenses. For example, 18 percent of Americans over 65 lack a photo ID as well as 25 percent of African Americans. Women whose last names may have been changed due to marriage will be disproportionately impacted as compared to men.

“Thirty four percent of women lack proof of citizenship that has that current legal name,” she said.

College students studying in states other than their own will be affected as well. Erica Maye, Communications Specialist at The Advancement Project, noted that though many students, if they have not registered to vote when they turned 18 years old in high school, register in college and receive IDs there. However, many college IDs do not list addresses and under many new voter registration laws, a photo ID must include an address.

“One way I think we can mitigate these effects is by using some of the on-line tools that we know young voters have been to a lot,” Maye said, referring to such sites as “Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube.” Maye also encourages the proliferation of on-line educational videos to enable students to determine the steps they need to take to be in compliance with new voting laws.

Data cited in the Brennan Center’s report, “Voting Changes in 2012,” show that, with one exception, the states that recently passed restrictive voter ID laws now boast Republican-controlled state legislatures. A number of these states have experienced a growing immigrant presence and several, like Texas, have sought to contain the potential voting impact of the Latino voting age population through redistricting initiatives or, like Alabama and Arizona, have enacted harsh anti-immigrant legislation.

“It’s not surprising,” said Eric Rodriquez, “where you see the overlap of states where there’s anti-immigrant legislation, you also see a lot of issues related to voter fraud, targeting immigrants, citizenship requirements, proof of ID requirements, et cetera.”

Rodriquez, who serves as Vice President, Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation, National Council of La Raza, said immigrants often become scapegoats during periods of transition. “The Latino community is on the cusp of really becoming more influential in critical states and elections.”
He said the fear and concern generated within those states by those who have traditionally held power is being given voice on the national stage, in part, by the meteoric rise of the Super PACs, which allow an unlimited flow of money into issue advocacy campaigns during an election cycle.
Money also has long played a key role in state politics.

Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorofChange.org, said he plans to use the influence and reach of his organization to target the corporate money that supports the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that develops model state legislation and was especially instrumental in sponsoring government-issued voter ID laws.

“ColorofChange, about three months ago, launched our campaign against voter suppression,” Robinson said. His organization, which claims 800,000 members as the largest on-line African-American political advocacy group, is initially targeting 12 of ALEC’s corporate contributors. Through letters, phone calls and discussions with those 12, “none of the corporations will be able to say they didn’t know what they were supporting,” he explained.

“We will hold these corporations accountable for the idea that they can’t come for black folks’ money during the day and take away our vote at night.” In essence, the campaign will tie specific corporate brands to voter suppression.

While the panelists noted that voter ID laws proposed in states covered by the Voting Rights Act may be rescinded by the U.S. Department of Justice, to rely on the speed of the federal government to act or on future changes in the composition of state legislatures to refine now existing laws is to put democracy at risk in November.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistated the membership count for ColorofChange. The figure has been amended to reflect the actual number.

Nationwide, States Move to Ban Shackling

2012-02-22T09:00:00Z

PHOENIX, Ariz. – A movement to ban the use of shackling women detainees while pregnant or in labor is growing across the United States. And it’s drawing support from conservatives and progressives alike, who denounce the practice as tantamount to torture.

Lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle in states as far ranging as Arizona, Florida, Iowa and Massachusetts have gotten behind bills either to curb or prohibit the use of restraints on female prisoners, fueling a larger nationwide trend.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long decried the practice as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.” In states where there are no policies restricting their use, however, the shackling of pregnant women during labor or post partum is “done as a matter of routine,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“Really, what you want to see is that the default is pregnant women are not shackled in this circumstance unless there is a documented security risk,” Kolbi-Molinas stressed.

14 States Ban Practice

Since 2010, the number of states with laws banning some form of the practice has more than doubled to 14, according to the ACLU. The states are: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.

In none of these states have there been “documented instances of a women in labor or delivery escaping or causing harm to themselves,” said Kolbi-Molina.

For women’s rights advocates, the threat extends beyond the mother’s health to that of their unborn baby. According to ACLU statements, even while a woman is not in labor “handcuffs and ankle shackles can prevent a pregnant woman from breaking a fall or impede her ability to protect herself if she trips or loses her balance.”

Lisa Marie Cookingham is an Arizona obstetrician working in Maricopa County. During a hearing on a proposed bill seeking to ban the practice statewide, she recalled once delivering a baby for a detained woman six-and-a-half months pregnant at the time.

“When I asked guards to please take the shackles off they refused my request,” said Cookingham. After much pleading they complied, though the baby was born with an irregular heartbeat, something she attributes to the premature birth and the delayed delivery.

While groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have also spoken out against such shackling, lawmakers in Florida continue to wrestle with the issue. Last year, the state’s Department of Corrections opposed a measure that would have banned the practice.

Nationwide, however, there’s been support from correctional institutions and jails to regulate shackling. In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Prisons barred the shackling of pregnant inmates in federal prisons except when necessary for security concerns.

Kolbi-Molina applauds that policy and says it should serve as a model for states.

“In general what you want to see in these policies is limitations on shackling not only during labor and delivery, but during transport, including post-partum recovery while at the hospital,” she added.

Immigrants, Minorities Most Vulnerable

The debate has recently spilled over into the rapidly expanding network of immigrant detention centers.

As recently as 2010, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not maintain a specific policy on the practice of shackling. Today the use of restraints in medical circumstances, including those involving pregnant women, is restricted beyond extraordinary circumstances, when their use must be documented and approved by medical personnel.

Even though there are no national data on the number of women incarcerated during pregnancy, the Bureau of Justice estimated in 2007 that roughly five percent of all women in state prison and six percent in county jails are pregnant. Women of color and immigrant women make up a significant portion of both groups.

“It’s an issue about health and dignity, and it disproportionately affects Latinas and women of color,” said Verónica Bayetti Flores, policy research specialist at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group that also supports the ban on shackling.

This issue of shackles first came to Bayetti’s attention through the 2008 case of Juana Villegas, an undocumented immigrant detained in a routine traffic stop in Nashville, Tenn. Villegas was nine months pregnant at the time. Officers transported her from the county jail to a nearby hospital in shackles after she went into labor. She eventually delivered her baby while in restraints.

Villegas was later awarded $200,000 in compensation by a federal judge after she sued the county for damages suffered during her detainment.

In Arizona, increasingly punitive laws against undocumented immigrants brought the issue of shackling to the attention of conservative state lawmakers. Senate Bill 1184, sponsored by State Sen. Linda Gray, a Republican, would prohibit correctional facilities from using restraints on pregnant inmates during their third trimester or who are in labor.

The bill makes an exception in cases where the detainee represents a credible flight risk or when medical staff request the use of restraints.

A similar bill is moving through Arizona’s House of Representatives, sponsored by Republican Cecil Ash.

Authorities in Massachusetts, meanwhile, are expanding anti-shackling through a Democratic-sponsored bill that seeks to include minimum standards on pregnancy and childcare-related education.

In California rights advocates are looking to enhance existing laws.

“We have examples that show the current law is not being followed,” said Valery Small Navarro, a senior legislative advocate for the ACLU. The organization is working to expand California’s current restriction on the shackling of pregnant detainees beyond transportation to labor and post-partum recovery.

ACLU is also pushing to restrict the use of certain types of restraints when needed for security reasons.

Cruel, Unusual and Unconstitutional

Shackling has been deemed a violation of the Eighth Amendment in several court rulings, while a slew of recent lawsuits, including one filed in December by Miriam Mendiola of Arizona, could add fuel to the movement to ban the practice altogether.

Like Juana Villegas, Mendiola was detained by police officers in Maricopa County. She was later transported in shackles to a nearby hospital, where she was given a C-section while still restrained.

Her case could get a boost from a 2009 ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the use of shackling on an Arkansas woman violated her civil rights.

From an international perspective, the practice of shackling of this kind is universally condemned as torture. In 2006 the United Nations Committee Against Torture alerted the U.S. government that shackling during childbirth is a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The U.S. is a signatory to that treaty and was urged to comply.

“For a while there wasn’t much movement on this,” said Kolbi-Molinas, who added that once it gained traction in several states, a consensus soon emerged. “Everybody should be able to agree that this is a dangerous and unnecessary practice,” she said.