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This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.
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Sanctuary activists face new challenges under Trump’s second term—but their work has always entailed great personal risk.
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New guidance from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the immigration court system, calls for immigration judges to expedite reviews for asylum seekers by means that legal experts say would violate their due process rights. The new directive, authored by EOIR acting director Sirce Owen and issued on April 11, tells judges to take…
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WASHINGTON – Twelve U.S. House representatives have introduced a bipartisan bill that would expedite the ability of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities facing persecution in China to seek asylum in the United States.
The Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act would lend further American support to the 12 million Uyghurs in the northwestern Xinjiang region who are suffering under what Washington has labeled a “genocide.”
“The brutal persecution of Uyghurs by the Chinese government is a human rights crisis,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat and co-sponsor of the bill who represents the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, home to one of the largest Uyghur diaspora populations in the United States. The bill was introduced on Tuesday.
“I have personally heard from Uyghur constituents in my district about their deep concerns for their relatives attempting to flee atrocities,” he said. “I’m proud to lead this bipartisan initiative to provide those enduring unthinkable oppression with a pathway to expedited refugee status and asylum.”
Since 2017, China has rounded up an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in concentration camps and subjected many to forced labor, forced sterilization and torture, based on the accounts of Uyghurs who have escaped and investigations by the United Nations.
Beijing denies committing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and says the camps are vocational training centers that have mostly been closed.
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican who also sponsored the bill, called the Uyghur genocide “one of the most horrific crimes against humanity we have ever witnessed.”
“Our refugee system is designed to provide protection to those who need it most,” she said. “We should prioritize those that are able to escape the systematic persecution and torture Uyghurs and other oppressed minorities are suffering from in Xinjiang.”
The legislation would give a higher priority designation — called Priority 2, for refugees of special humanitarian concern — to Uyghurs seeking asylum in the United States so that their cases might be handled more quickly.
The bill also seeks to protect Uyghurs who have fled to countries besides the United States by directing the U.S. secretary of state to prioritize diplomatic efforts in those countries, which often face pressure from Beijing to deport Uyghurs to China.
Last month, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs, who had been in an immigration detention center for a decade, to China, where activists say it is likely they will face punishment and imprisonment.
The United States has taken various steps to punish China for its treatment of the Uyghurs.
Under the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the United States has banned a total of 144 Chinese companies suspected of using Uyghur slave labor from exporting to America.
A third sponsor, Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat and a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “the U.S. has a responsibility to help Uyghurs seeking to escape these atrocities by expanding refugee pathways and resolving the backlog in Uyghur asylum cases.”
The bill has to overcome many legislative hurdles before it becomes law. Despite the bipartisan backing, its hopes of passage remain uncertain. The current U.S. administration is looking to scale back immigration to the United States and suspended the refugee admissions program on its first day in office.
Edited by Malcolm Foster.
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Thousands of Syrian Alawites continue to seek sanctuary at a Russian air base, fearing for their lives in the wake of a series of horrific sectarian massacres carried out by Syrian government-affiliated extremist armed groups.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday that about 9,000 people were seeking refuge at Hmeimim, an air base established by Russia as part of its 2015 intervention in the US-backed war that began in 2011 to topple the Syrian government of former president Bashar al-Assad.
Thousands of people have been sheltering at the Hmeimim Air Base near the coastal city of Jablah since 7 March, when extremist militants went from house to house in predominantly Alawite towns and villages, killing residents and looting and burning their homes.
The post Thousands Of Syrian Alawites Shelter At Russian Base appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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If Indi Tisoy has a single dream, it is to reach the United States. Her desire is so strong, in fact, that she waits at the border because it makes her feel closer to that dream. Tisoy, who is a member of the Inga Indigenous community, left the Colombian Amazon’s Putumayo department with her family when she was 12 to seek better economic opportunities in the city of Bucaramanga.
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In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe.
Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right to asylum.
“I didn’t know what I walked into,” Olsen says.
Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, has condemned Greece’s harsh migration policies and the way its government is targeting activists like Olsen. But she says Europe as a whole is also to blame.
“The whole notion of migration is a dirty word now,” she says. “The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now.”
This week on Reveal, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin podcast studio ACB Stories take us to Greece, where refugees and human rights defenders face legal and sometimes physical attacks from authorities trying to seal the country’s borders.
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As we move into 2025, we look at how the world is cracking down on migrants and asylum seekers, and the dangers they face when trying to flee their countries due to persecution, economic conditions, the climate crisis and more. As Greek prosecutors open a murder investigation of “unknown perpetrators” following a damning exposé of the deadly crackdown on asylum seekers by the Greek coast guard, we revisit the BBC film, Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? The investigation revealed evidence the coast guard routinely abducted and abandoned asylum seekers in the Mediterranean Sea. The film found the Greek coast guard caused the deaths of dozens of migrants over a period of three years, including of nine asylum seekers who had reached Greek soil but were taken back out to sea and thrown overboard. “We really have no real clue about the true numbers of the people that are crossing [the Mediterranean Sea]. Many people don’t make it,” producer Lucile Smith told Democracy Now! in an interview last year, when the film was released. “And when people do arrive, they tend to disappear, because … if you are caught by the authorities in Greece, you will be most likely subjected to some very serious violence.”
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The right to asylum has been enshrined in US law since the 1950s. It’s meant to provide a safe haven for people fleeing violence and government persecution.
Laura Ascencio Bautista and her family have faced both in Mexico, where her brother Benjamin disappeared along with 42 others in 2014 after police stormed a bus from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.
In the years since, violence in her home state of Guerrero left Bautista desperate. She heard asylum was created for people like her. So she traveled north, headed for the perceived safety of the United States.
“I was told that if I went to the US border and told my family’s story and how it’s not safe back home, the United States could protect me,” she said.
Despite all the political hand-wringing about a crisis at the border, many Americans don’t understand what’s driving so many people from Mexico and other countries to come to the US in the first place. This week, Reveal senior reporter and producer Anayansi Diaz-Cortes takes us to a part of Mexico that many families are leaving behind—a place where fear is a part of daily life—and unwinds US policies that helped trigger the cycle of violence and migration that continues to this day.
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The Biden administration is reportedly considering making temporary changes to asylum rules issued earlier this summer harder to undo by increasing threshold numbers needed to end the rules to likely unattainable levels — effectively causing them to be permanent. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June changing how migrants coming to the U.S. could apply for asylum. Previously…
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In June 2021, Kamala Harris was on her first foreign trip as vice president, to Mexico and Guatemala. During a press conference with then-Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, she issued a warning to Guatemalans and others who were considering trying to enter the United States without proper documentation: “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and…
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The dishonour board is long. Advisors from Australia, account chasing electoral strategists, former Australian cabinet ministers happy to draw earnings in British pounds. British Conservative politicians keen to mimic their cruel advice, notably on such acid topics as immigration and the fear of porous borders.
Ghastly terminology used in Australian elections rhetorically repurposed for the British voter: “Turning the Back Boats”, the “Rwanda Solution”. Grisly figures such as Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak, showing an atavistic indifference to human rights. The cruelty and the cockups, the failures and the foul-ups. Mock the judges, mock the courts. Soil human dignity.
All this, to culminate in the end of the Rwanda Solution, declared by the new Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, as “dead and buried before it even started”. Yet it was a sadistic policy of beastly proportion, offering no prospect of genuine discouragement or deterrence to new arrivals, stillborn in execution and engineered to indulge a nasty streak in the electorate.
In April 2022, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, ostensibly designed “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”.
Mysteriously, British officials suddenly found Rwanda an appropriate destination for processing asylum claims and resettling refugees, despite Kigali doing its bit to swell the ranks of potential refugees. In June 2023, the UK Court of Appeal noted the risks presented to asylum seekers, notably from ill-treatment and torture, arguing that the British government would be in breach of the European Convention on Human rights in sending them into Kigali’s clutches. In November that year, the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion.
These legal rulings did not deter the government of Rishi Sunak. With lexical sophistry bordering on the criminal, the Safety of Rwanda bill was drafted to repudiate what the UK courts had found by denying officials and the judiciary any reference to the European Convention of Human Rights and the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 when considering asylum claims.
The bookkeeping aspect of the endeavour was also astonishing. It envisaged the payment of some half a billion pounds to Kigali in exchange for asylum seekers. The breakdown of costs, not to mention the very plan itself, beggared belief. The Home Office would initially pay £370 million under the Economic Transformation and Integration Fund, followed by a further £20,000 for every relocated individual. Once the risibly magic number of 300 people had been reached, a further £120 million would follow.
Operational costs for each individual kept in Rwanda would amount to £150,874 over the course of five years, ceasing in the event a person wished to leave Rwanda, in which case the Home Office would pay £10,000 to assist in the move.
With biting irony, the UK government had demonstrated to Rwanda that it could replace the supposedly vile market of people smuggling in Europe with a lucrative market effectively monetising asylum seekers and refugees in exchange of pledges of development.
By February 2024, according to the National Audit Office, the UK had paid £220 million to Rwanda, with a promise of another £50 million each year over three years. It was a superb return for Kigali, given that no asylum seekers from the UK had set foot in the country. When asked at the time why he was hungrily gobbling up the finance, Paul Kagame feigned serenity. “It’s only going to be used if those people will come. If they don’t come, we can return the money.”
With an airy contemptuousness, the Kagame government has refused to return any of the monies received in anticipation of the policy’s full execution. Doris Uwicyeza Picard, the central figure coordinating the migration partnership with the UK, was blunt: “We are under no obligation to provide any refund. We will remain in constant discussions. However, it is understood that there is no obligation on either side to request or receive a refund.”
In another statement, this time from deputy spokesman for the Rwandan government, Alain Mukuralinda, the sentiment bordered on the philosophical: “The British decided to request cooperation for a long time, resulting in an agreement between the two countries that became a treaty. Now, if you come and ask for cooperation and then withdraw, that’s your decision.”
In an official note from Kigali, the government haughtily declared that the partnership had been initiated by the UK to address irregular migration, “a problem of the UK, not Rwanda.” Rwanda, for its part, had “fully upheld its side of the agreement, including with regard to finances”. Redundantly, and incredulously, the note goes on to claim that Kigali remained “committed to finding solutions to the global migration crisis, including providing safety, dignity and opportunity to refugees and migrants who come to our country.”
The less than subtle message in all of this: Rwanda is ready to keep cashing in on Europe’s unwanted asylum seekers, whatever its own record and however successful the agreement is. Kagame has no doubt not lost interest in Denmark, that other affluent country keen on outsourcing its humanitarian obligations. While Copenhagen abandoned its partnership with Rwanda in January 2023 regarding a similar arrangement to that reached with the UK, it is now showing renewed interest, notably after hosting a high-level conference on immigration.
In opening the conference on May 6, the Social Democratic Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, speaking in language that could just as easily have been associated with any far right nationalist front, decried the “de facto” collapse of the “current immigration and asylum system”. Those in the Rwandan treasury will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.
The post Terminating Partnerships: The UK Ends the Rwanda Solution first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On June 18, President Joe Biden announced that he would be taking executive action to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens, providing them with a pathway to citizenship. This would extend protections, work visas and citizenship to potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of them DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients and Dreamers. In response…
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With much of the southwest baking under record temperatures, immigrants’ rights advocates worry President Joe Biden’s decision to effectively close the border to asylum seekers for the foreseeable future will endanger lives and further marginalize climate-displaced people seeking refuge in the U.S. Their concerns come as a heat dome lingering over Mexico and the southwestern United States has…
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is vowing to sue the Biden administration after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that severely restricts the number of asylum seekers who can enter the U.S. The order authorizes the immediate deportation of asylum seekers at the border if they did not enter the U.S. through a legal port of entry. It goes into effect when such border…
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President Biden has issued one of the most restrictive immigration policies ever declared under a recent Democratic administration. It will temporarily shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, deny asylum to most migrants who do not cross into the U.S. via ports of entry, and limit total asylum requests at the southern border to no more than 2,500 per day. The ACLU has threatened to sue the Biden administration over what reporter John Washington, who covers immigration in Arizona, calls an “excruciating and likely deadly” decision. “An illegal asylum seeker is a contradiction in terms,” Washington continues. “People have the right, according to U.S. law, to ask for asylum irrespective of how they crossed the border or where they are or what their status is. And this rule really flies in the face of that.”
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President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that authorizes officials at the U.S.-Mexico border to immediately deport asylum seekers if they have entered the country in any manner other than through a legal port of entry — a move that will put thousands of people who are fleeing persecution in their home countries in jeopardy. The executive order, announced by the Biden White House on…
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