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Category: refugees

  • Asylum seekers in Napier barracks ‘face blacklist threat for speaking out’

    Residents in the Home Office facility claim they have been told their applications will be ‘impaired’ if they talk to the media

    Asylum seekers held at the Home Office’s widely criticised military barracks in Kent claim they will be “blacklisted” if they speak out after last week’s high court ruling that the decision to use the site was unlawful.

    Staff employed by private Home Office contractors at the Napier barracks site at Folkestone have allegedly told residents that their asylum application will be impaired if they talk to the media about conditions at the camp.

    Related: ‘Sham’: 200 groups criticise UK government consultation on refugee policy

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Myanmar school strikes and a plane diverted to Minsk: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Denmark’s shocking departure from refugee protection

    On 3 June 2021 the Danish Parliament approved amendments to the Danish Aliens Act.

    The amendments will enter into effect if Denmark secures a formal agreement with a third country. This could see the forcible transfer of asylum-seekers and the abdication of Denmark’s responsibility for the asylum process and for protecting vulnerable refugees.

    UNHCR strongly opposes efforts that seek to externalize or outsource asylum and international protection obligations to other countries. Such efforts to evade responsibility run counter to the letter and spirit of the 1951 Refugee Convention, as well as the Global Compact on Refugees where countries agreed to share more equitably the responsibility for refugee protection.

    Already today nearly 90% percent of the world’s refugees live in developing or the least developed countries that – despite their limited resources – step up and meet their international legal obligations and responsibilities.

    UNHCR has raised repeatedly its concerns and objections to the Danish government’s proposal and has offered advice and pragmatic alternatives.

    UNHCR will continue to engage in discussions with Denmark, which remains a valuable and long-standing partner to UNHCR, in order to find practical ways forward that ensure the confidence of the Danish people and uphold Denmark’s international commitments.

    https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2021/6/60b93af64/news-comment-un-high-commissioner-refugees-filippo-grandi-denmarks-new.html

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Blaise Masinga: The Journey to Regaining Self-Power

    Photo from The Masinga Foundation: https://www.masingafoundation.org/

    In a room full of refugees and asylum seekers, Blaise Masinga is reminded of the time when he was in their shoes. He had fled from South Africa to Minnesota, leaving behind his wife and two children. Pain, trauma, and uncertainty are still on the forefront of his mind when he thinks about that time. Similar to the journeys of many other asylum seekers, Blaise’s path to safety and reunification with his family was long, unpredictable, anxiety-filled, and lonesome.

    South Africa had actually been his refuge after fleeing from his birth country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a teenager. He had built a life in South Africa. He attended university and received a degree in marketing from the Institute of Marketing Management. He married and welcomed the first two of his children into the world. He advanced in his professional career. By 2010, he achieved the opportunity to work as a business manager for a multinational company connected to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central Africa. Outside work, Blaise noticed many forms of racism and discrimination. As a refugee himself, he became an activist for immigrant and refugee rights. After spotting corruption in a work project, he spoke up. For Blaise, speaking out against injustices was natural, but it also made him a wanted man and became the reason he fled from South Africa in 2012.

    With his safety compromised, Blaise left his family, his home, his career, his community, his activism, and found himself empty-handed seeking asylum in Minneapolis. He didn’t know it at the time, but it would be four long years before he was reunited with his family. Remembering these years, he said, “I should’ve known that the process to win an asylum case in the United States is a long journey that requires patience. It was a painful experience to leave my wife and kids.” At times he felt helpless and had to regain his sense of agency over his life. “Let me be honest,” Blaise says with a smile on his face, “the first good resource I found was The Advocates for Human Rights.” The Advocates staff connected Blaise with a pro bono lawyer who helped Blaise win his asylum case. Through a social work intern at the organization, he was also connected to two other important resources that helped him through this difficult time: the Center for Victims of Torture that helped him meet basic needs, and the Mennonite church that provided him with a community. All of those combined gave Blaise the right tools to begin rebuilding his life in the United States. During this time, Blaise volunteered with many nonprofit organizations, and worked as a French to English interpreter for refugees, a cashier at Target and a bank teller. Blaise’s patience, stamina, and willingness to fight for himself all played a crucial role in him reclaiming his independence.

    The Masinga Foundation https://www.masingafoundation.org/

    Blaise gained asylum and built up his independence, returning to school in 2016 for a “mini masters” in Project Management from the University of St. Thomas. Still, he faced more challenges. The racial discrimination Blaise faced was like his experiences as a refugee in South Africa. “In the United States, someone judges you for your accent, but not your brain,” he began. “Don’t let your circumstances pull you back, because otherwise you aren’t going to win.” This resilience, and his experiences as a refugee, changed his vision and plans once again. He redirected his focus in 2018 and enrolled at Metropolitan State University to earn a degree in community development. “I believe we were called to make a difference in people’s lives,” Blaise said. This dedication to honesty and helping others, which led to him being forced out of South Africa, has been a driving force behind his work in community development. Blaise recently started his own nonprofit organization, the Masinga Foundation. Their work will focus on community empowerment for immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized communities.

    By Rielle Miguel, Undergraduate Student from the University of Minnesota and Spring 2021 Development Intern.

    The Advocates for Human Rights is a nonprofit organization dedicated to implementing international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law.

    Curious about volunteering? Please reach out. The Advocates for Human Rights has an opportunity for you.

    Eager to see change? Give to our mission, our vision, our work. Your gift matters.

    This post was originally published on The Advocates Post.

  • ‘Step up’ over Carterets food crisis, PNG minister warns rich nations

    By Richard Ewart on ABC’s Pacific Beat

    Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Climate Change is calling on the international community to take responsibility for a food security crisis in the Carteret Islands, and some of the other remote atolls of Bougainville.

    Minister Wera Mori recently returned from a fact finding mission to the region and he was “horrified” by what he saw.

    He said the PNG government was taking steps to ensure that food could be grown elsewhere, and supplies to those who need them were maintained.

    But he said that in the long term, industrialised nations, which he accused of causing the climate change related crisis in the first place, needed to step in and assist with measures to prevent the islands from slipping any further under the waves.

    “One of the big islands, part of it has been covered by the sea, so basically now instead of one island, you have two,” Mori told ABC’s Pacific Beat.

    “Parts of Bougainville, south-east of Solomon Islands … we have coastlines that have been washed away.”

    Republished from ABC Pacific Beat.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Refugee who works on NHS front line slams Priti Patel’s immigration plans

    An NHS worker who has spent the pandemic helping save lives on a Covid-19 ward says Priti Patel’s immigration plans will see refugees like her turned away from the UK.

    Mariam, from Eritrea, is determined to help people and has been working exhausting 12-hour shifts in a Leeds hospital assisting coronavirus patients, sometimes four days in a row.

    But figures released on Tuesday suggest that two in every three women and children who the UK would accept as refugees now would be turned away in future under proposed new government rules.

    Coalition group Together With Refugees is calling for a more effective, fair and humane approach to the UK’s asylum system.

    The Home Office said the figures released by the group “wrongly conflate” refugees with people arriving via an “illegal route”.

    Mariam joined the health service after coming to Britain in the back of a lorry in 2009, fleeing persecution and imprisonment in Eritrea.

    However, Home Office plans to overhaul the immigration system may well have seen her application rejected because of her method of arrival, she said.

    Mariam told the PA news agency: “When I left Eritrea, I didn’t know if I was going to live or die.

    “I just knew I had to get out. Every day, I thank God for bringing me here, and secondly I thank the people of the UK who saved me.

    “Because I am alive and because I am in a safe country I promise to God that I will help anyone.”

    Mariam, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was granted asylum after her arrival in the UK and works as a clinical support worker, battling on the front line of the health crisis.

    When she contracted Covid-19, she thought “I am dying” as she struggled to breathe, but she recovered and returned to her work, driven to help people after seeing so many die in Eritrea.

    She said: “The UK gave me an opportunity and now I’m working. I don’t want to be dependent on the Government.

    “I’m working and if I’m asked to help, I will help.”

    Mariam said “the world knows what is happening” in places like Eritrea and called on the Government not to deport people claiming asylum.

    Outlining her plans for immigration reform in March, Patel said: “For the first time, whether people enter the UK legally or illegally will have an impact on how their asylum claim progresses, and on their status in the UK if that claim is successful.

    “We will deem their claim as inadmissible, and make every effort to remove those who enter the UK illegally having travelled through a safe country first in which they could and should have claimed asylum.”

    The government’s New Plan for Immigration document claimed that, for the year ending September 2019, more than 60% of asylum claims were from people who are thought to have entered the UK “illegally”.

    Sabir Zazai, Together With Refugees spokesperson and a refugee himself, said: “Abandoning people fleeing war and persecution, including women and children, is not who we are in the UK.

    “These are people in fear of their lives. These are people like me.

    “These are also people like you, people who want to live in safety and dignity.”

    Together With Refugees is a coalition of more than 200 organisations, founded by Asylum Matters, British Red Cross, Freedom from Torture, Refugee Action, Refugee Council and Scottish Refugee Council.

    Immigration plans
    Prime Minister Boris Johnson with Shabnam Nasimi, founder of the Conservative Friends of Afghanistan group (Shabnam Nasimi/PA)

    Prominent Conservative voice Shabnam Nasimi says the Home Secretary’s plans risks punishing refugees.

    Nasimi, who was born in Afghanistan and founded the Conservative Friends of Afghanistan group, told PA: “I think putting refugees in the same box as European economic migrants punishes refugees, people who are fleeing war-torn countries such as Afghanistan for security and a safe life.

    “If we close our doors what does it say about Britain, particularly global Britain after Brexit?”

    She said Britain has a “responsibility” towards all those seeking refuge, including people from Afghanistan who still face persecution.

    Actor Joanna Lumley self-filmed a video, saying: “I’m supporting Together With Refugees because how we treat refugees reflects who we are. Together With Refugees is calling for a better approach that is kinder, fairer and more effective.”

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • ‘One name in a long list’: the pointless death of another West Bank teenager

    Obaida Jawabra was weeks from turning 18 when he was shot by an Israeli soldier, after a life shaped by arrests and imprisonment

    Route 60, the north-south artery that carves its way through the West Bank, is both the lifeblood of the region and a source of daily fear.

    Flanked in parts by 2.5-metre-high (8ft) separation barriers, military checkpoints and watchtowers crewed by Israeli snipers, the 146-mile highway that starts and finishes in Israel but passes Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank, has been the scene of many fatal attacks and violent clashes.

    Additional reporting by Kaamil Ahmed

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • War And Climate Disasters Displaced A Record Of 55 Million People In 2020

    Amid a raging global pandemic, a record 55 million people were displaced from their homes but still living in their countries by the end of 2020, according to the latest report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

    While the figures have been increasing steadily for over a decade, as per the Geneva-based center’s annual reports, ferocious storms, floods and conflicts displaced more people within their own country in 2020 – in spite of the global pandemic – than in any other year covered by the IDMC’s reporting. Shockingly, the report found that internally displaced people outnumbered refugees, those who flee to another country, by a ratio of two to one. 

    The research center, which is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), also cautioned that their figures were likely a “significant underestimate” as global pandemic travel restrictions frustrated efforts to more accurately collect data. 

    The post War And Climate Disasters Displaced A Record Of 55 Million People In 2020 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Gaza damage and Glasgow raids: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Peru

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UN Relief Agency Condemns Israeli Bombing of Gaza Refugee Camp

    UNRWA Condemns Israeli Bombing of Gaza Refugee Camp, Killing Family of 10

    Matthias Schmale, director of UNRWA operations in Gaza, says civilians in the besieged territory are facing “terror from the skies” amid Israel’s bombardment, which has already killed nearly 200 people. “The price the civilian population is paying for this is unacceptable. This has to stop. This is terror on a civilian population.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. You can sign up for our daily news digest email by texting “democracynow” — one word, no space — to 66866. We’ll send you our news headlines and stories every day, as well as news alerts.

    At least 10 Palestinians from the same extended family died Saturday when Israel bombed the Gaza refugee camp al-Shati. Eight of the victims were children. One 5-month-old baby named Omar was pulled from the rubble alive. His mother and four of his siblings were killed. This is Omar’s father, Mohammad Al-Hadidi.

    MOHAMMAD AL-HADIDI: [translated] They targeted the house they were in. There were no rockets there, just women and children; no rockets, just peaceful children celebrating Eid. What have they done to deserve this? A rocket hit their house, over their heads, without warning or communication. Three whole floors fell over them, and we had to recover their body parts. … I call on the international community, those who support human rights and children’s rights and democracy, those who penalize anyone who harms a child, to look to our children here who are being bombed with strikes that drop entire floors onto people who we have to recover their body parts.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now in Gaza by Matthias Schmale, the director of operations for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees.

    Can you talk about what happened, not only there, but what’s happening to children, to the Palestinians in Gaza?

    MATTHIAS SCHMALE: Good afternoon, Amy. And thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk to you.

    Look, the way I describe this is we’ve had seven days of war. This is war. We are not close to war. We are in a military confrontation. This is war. And I think, as you just heard from Refaat, the citizens of Gaza are experiencing this in a terrified manner. It’s terror from the skies, what’s going on here. And you mentioned the house that was leveled in Beach camp, our refugee camp. Six of those children were children that went to UNRWA schools. So it hits home very directly. Some of my staff knew the family. And these six children are among 18 children that we now have confirmed that went to UNRWA schools. So, what I am trying to get to with all of this is the price the civilian population is paying for this is unacceptable. This has to stop. This is terror on a civilian population.

    We also have to then think about the people who have fled their homes out of fear. A few nights ago, there was heavy fighting in the north. There were rumors of a tank — of a ground invasion by the Israelis, and thousands of people left their homes in fear, not necessarily because they were destroyed, as I understand it — I will come back to that — but in fear of what will fall from the sky next. And we now have, today, three days later or so, 41,000 and more people in 50 of our schools. Unfortunately — well, fortunately, the population, remembering also 2014, sees the blue of the United Nations and buildings that have a blue U.N. flag on it as still a relatively safe place, safer than their own home. So, that is what is happening. As UNRWA, we are trying our best to stand up our teams that will manage these centers properly and provide the necessary assistance. There are some immediate needs, like protection, including protection from COVID — of course, COVID is far from over — as well as safe water, the basic needs you need to have covered if you are in a shelter away from home.

    Then you’ve also talked about people who have actually lost their home. The last I heard is that at least 600 families are not able to go back. So, many of the people who are at the moment in our shelters could go back if there is a ceasefire, but there is a group of at least 600 families and households that couldn’t because either their house is totally destroyed or it’s too damaged to go back. And, you know, allow me to make a point there. The Israelis claim — and correctly on this point — that they often warn. They don’t always, like the Beach camp hit was without warning, as far as I know. But they have warned, on other high-rise buildings, civilians to get out. So, in those terms, they protect their lives. But they have lost their homes. They are now without a home. And it’s completely senseless and mind-boggling.

    So, that is the situation on the ground. I cannot as eloquently, of course, as Refaat describe the impact on the civilian population. He is directly affected. I can only say to you I hear a lot about traumas. One of my colleagues texted me, very movingly, saying, as a family, they now sleep on the same mattress in the central part of their home, just because they want to die together, if that happens.

    AMY GOODMAN: Matthias, you talked about people responding to a rumor that Israel is invading, but this was not just a rumor. Israel, the military, directly put that out. The headlines of The New York Times, “A Press Corps Deceived, and the Gaza Invasion That Wasn’t”; The Washington Post, “Israel told the media it had ground forces in Gaza. Then it changed the story”; AP, “Israeli military accused of using media to trick Hamas.” You’re talking about the human toll of that trick. Can you explain further the significance of them putting this out and tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing?

    MATTHIAS SCHMALE: Yeah, I mean, I can only say, if they indeed — “they” being the military on the Israeli side — put this out deliberately without really having the intention, that is just atrocious, you know, and unacceptable, because, as you have said, it led to then thousands of people fleeing. And by the way, we only know about the 41,000 that are seeking refuge, a safe place to be, in our schools. There are many thousands more that went to family and relatives. So, there’s another disaster in the making here, because a lot of poor families are having to host people, you know, being themselves squeezed. So we’re looking into how we can assist them. It’s reckless, this. It’s shameless and reckless how the military is operating in terms of the civilian population.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us some specific stories of children killed? I ask that because when the Israeli military was asked about this yesterday, they said, “Consider the source of the information you’re getting about the number of Palestinian children who are dead.” They said, “It is the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, which is run by Hamas.” So, they said, consider the source. So, Matthias Schmale, you are with the United Nations. Talk about the number of Palestinians, Palestinian children, who have died.

    MATTHIAS SCHMALE: So, Amy, if I may say two things on this. We have our independent source. We run 278 schools, which are populated by 285,000 children. We have very precise information about this school population, the 285,000 children. This is independent information from the Ministry of Health and the authorities here, when I tell you my health teams have reported to me that they know at least 18 of the more than 50 children killed were UNRWA schoolchildren. So there is no doubt in my mind this is correct, independently verified information. And I would not be surprised if, sadly, that number of 18 were to rise quite significantly. So that’s one bit.

    The other bit is, I was told, very movingly, by one of our so-called area education officers about a 13-year-old child, one of the 18, by the name of Hamza. His mother is severely disabled, and his father has died. Hamza is the person who looks after the family. And he was out shopping to get the basic needs covered for the family. And on his way back, he happened to be in the wrong place when a missile hit. So, a young child leaves the home to bring food for his family and returns dead. These are not made-up stories. This is not Hamas stories or anyone spinning a story. This is a real-life story. The human cost of this is unbearable and unacceptable.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re only talking about the Israeli assault on Gaza, but we are talking about the pandemic. Israel has been hailed as being the gold standard of ensuring its population is vaccinated, has not been the case for what has happened in the Occupied Territories, which they are responsible for. During the pandemic, UNRWA has been working to ensure access to PPE and water. Can you talk about clean water? Can you talk now about this report we shared at the beginning, the number of doctors who have been killed in the Israeli airstrikes, including Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf — maybe you know him — who headed the coronavirus response at Shifa Hospital, the main hospital in Gaza; another prominent doctor from Shifa, the neurologist Mooein Ahmad al-Aloul, also killed in an airstrike; and what this means for Gaza?

    MATTHIAS SCHMALE: Yeah, I did not know those two individuals you named personally. I know of them. And again, you know, all the information I have had about them — I’ve been here now three-and-a-half years, so I think I have a pretty good sense of who is linked to the authorities and in reality a militant, and who is not, who is just simply doing their job. And to the best of my knowledge, these two doctors who were killed were professionals trying to provide healthcare and address immediate and urgent health needs of the population here. So, indeed, one of the issues, when there is a war, is to protect health institutions and healthcare workers, including doctors. And the toll in those terms is also rising.

    You mentioned, I think, at the beginning the MSF clinic that was destroyed. I also know from my colleagues in the Palestinian Red Crescent that their central ambulance unit was severely affected. One of our 22 primary healthcare centers, in fact, was not targeted but had some damage as a result of a strike that was too close. So, when we are still fighting the COVID-19 crisis — we were just seeing the beginning of the end of the second wave — we should also remember that we — just before corona started a year-plus ago, we were coming out of two years of Great Marches of Return, which had a devastating human impact. There were more than 35,000 people injured at the fence, as they call it here, more than 200 killed, again including 13 women or schoolchildren, due to disproportionate reaction from the Israeli side. And I’m mentioning this because the health system was already struggling and basically on its knees. We were very worried that COVID would be the cause of the health system falling apart. It barely coped. And now this on top of it. So, this war, if it continues any longer, has the risk of having a very decimating, devastating impact on healthcare on its people, in terms of the doctors and nurses, and on the healthcare infrastructure.

    AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Matthias Schmale, you grew up in South Africa. I’m wondering your thoughts on the comparison of occupied Palestine to apartheid. Our next group, B’Tselem, uses that term. Human Rights Watch uses that term. Of course, many Palestinians talk about that. Do you think that is a fair comparison?

    MATTHIAS SCHMALE: Speaking here as an individual who grew up in apartheid South Africa, I have to tell you, what I’m experiencing here reminds me a lot of what I saw in my childhood. The issue is people being treated — an entire people being treated differently from the rest of us. And whether that fits some academic definition of apartheid or not, it is wrong. And these are an occupied people, and this should stop. You know, not just the war has to stop. There has to be the beginning of a meaningful process — as we did see in South Africa, that ended the system there — that has as its aim a just solution for what happened 70 or so years ago during what the Palestinians call the Nakba, and that provides the opportunity for everyone — and that, of course, includes Israelis — to live a dignified and peaceful existence next to each other or together.

    AMY GOODMAN: Matthias Schmale, we want to thank you for being with us, director of UNRWA operations in Gaza. That’s the U.N. agency that works with Palestinians.

    This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll speak to a reporter who works with Al Jazeera and AP. The media building that housed AP and Al Jazeera has just been bombed by the Israeli military this weekend. We’ll talk about what this means for getting access to information out of Gaza. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Indefinite detention of refugees is unlawful under international law, but Australia has quietly made it legal

    To counter the court’s ruling against unlawful detention, the government simply wrote a new law allowing it to do whatever it wants

    In 2012, a person placed in immigration detention in Australia was held, on average, for less than 100 days.

    In 2021, that figure is 627 days – 20 months – the highest it has ever been.

    Related: New law allows Australian government to indefinitely detain refugees

    Troubling for Australia’s democracy is the practice of governments legislating their way around court decisions

    Related: I saw first-hand the terrible toll detention is taking on the Biloela family | Kristina Keneally

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Iranian asylum seeker cleared of Channel smuggling charges

    Man who took turn steering boat ‘because he didn’t want to die’ freed, with case opening way for others to appeal their sentences

    An asylum seeker jailed on smuggling charges for helping to steer a boat filled with migrants from France to England has had his conviction overturned at a retrial after spending 17 months in jail.

    Lawyers and campaigners say the verdict could lead to other migrants currently in jail on smuggling charges being freed, allowing the Home Office policy of prosecuting asylum seekers who play a role in piloting boats across the Channel to be challenged more widely.

    Related: UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • New law allows Australian government to indefinitely detain refugees with criminal convictions

    Human rights groups warn the law gives the immigration minister a new power to overturn refugee status

    Human rights groups – and parliament’s own human rights committee – say a new law pushed through parliament gives the government the power to indefinitely detain refugees, potentially for the rest of their lives.

    The Migration Amendment (Clarifying International Obligations for Removal) Bill 2021 was tabled on the last sitting day of the March session of parliament, and voted into law on Thursday, after debate was cut short on the floor of the Senate.

    Related: Morrison government plan to make more migrants wait for benefits labelled ‘unusual’ and ‘harsh’

    Related: Budget immigration costs: Australia will spend almost $3.4m for each person in offshore detention

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Refugees and the Armenian genocide: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • US-Made Border Crisis Persists Despite Biden’s About-Face on Refugee Cap

    Migrants and asylum seekers are seen after spending the night in one of the car lanes off the San Ysidro Crossing Port on the Mexican side of the U.S./Mexico border in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico on April 24, 2021.

    This week’s news of the Biden-Harris administration’s about-face on U.S. refugee policy was a win for all the progressive forces that have been pressuring Biden to discontinue Trump’s egregiously low cap on the number of refugees accepted each year. But the victory did nothing to change the other massive structural ways in which the Biden-Harris administration is continuing to perpetuate the humanitarian crisis at the border through its embrace of Trump’s other asylum policies.

    For example, even as the Biden-Harris administration now says it will increase the refugee cap to 62,500, rather than adopting Trump’s annual cap of 15,000 refugees as it had earlier announced it would do, the Biden-Harris administration is still continuing the Title 42 program that Trump imposed a year before, effectively closing the border to most refugees with no due process, court date or record of an asylum application.

    Since Trump implemented the Title 42 program on March 20, 2020, more than 630,000 people have been expelled from the United States, 240,00 of them on Biden’s watch.

    Republicans and Democrats alike are preoccupied with the so-called border crisis.“There is no crisis at the border caused by migrants,” Nicole Phillips, legal director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told Truthout. “There is a humanitarian and human rights crisis because the U.S. government has effectively closed the border to asylum seekers and has not allowed them to file for asylum since March of 2020.”

    More Haitians were returned to Haiti in the first two months of the Biden-Harris administration than in all of fiscal year 2020, according to a report titled, “The Invisible Wall,” that was released on March 25, 2021, by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the UndocuBlack Network and the Quixote Center. Haitians, who make the long, treacherous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border are fleeing instability, violence and persecution in Haiti, “only to be abused by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] officers,” the report notes.

    The Biden-Harris administration’s continuation of Title 42 to expel asylum seekers is causing family separations, as documented in an April 2021 report published by Human Rights First, Haitian Bridge Alliance and Al Otro Lado. The policy propels desperate families to send their children over the border to protect them from kidnapping, sexual assault, and other forms of violence. Moreover, CBP is still separating children from aunts, uncles and grandparents with whom they traveled to the border and expelling those relatives to Mexico.

    In addition, the administration has continued Trump’s policy of expelling mothers who have just given birth in the U.S. with their newborn U.S. citizen children to Mexico with no proof of citizenship for their babies.

    The Title 42 Policy Is Based on a False Assumption

    The “Biden-Harris [administration] is hiding behind Title 42 in order to justify keeping the border closed because they’re afraid of the backlash from Republican and right-wing media,” Phillips said. “Harris should know better,” as she opposed Title 42 when she was a senator. Harris, along with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, signed a letter calling for an end to Title 42. In March, Biden made Harris his point person on immigration.

    The Title 42 expulsion policy is based on the misapplication of an obscure public health law. The Public Health Service Act of 1944 was designed to grant quarantine authority to health officials which would apply to all persons, including U.S citizens, arriving from a foreign country. It was never intended to be used to distinguish between noncitizens who could or could not be removed or expelled from the U.S., according to Human Rights Watch.

    Section 265 of U.S. Code Title 42 allows the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to “prohibit … the introduction” into the U.S. of individuals if the director believes that “there is serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States.”

    Like Trump, the Biden-Harris administration is disingenuously using the excuse of health hazards from the COVID virus to justify continuing the Title 42 closure, in spite of the consensus by experts that there is no correlation between the entry of migrants and increased risk of COVID infection. It is really a political decision.

    Using Title 42 to keep migrants out of the United States was the brainchild of Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration adviser. Although the CDC opposed the program because it was not supported by a public health rationale, the director succumbed to pressure by Vice President Mike Pence and other administration officials. “It has become clear that the Trump Administration used the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for its larger racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant plan to close the U.S.-Mexico border to migrants seeking humanitarian protection,” according to “The Invisible Wall” report.

    Expelled Migrants Face Dangers in Mexico

    Migrants whom the U.S. government turns back at the border — including mothers with young children — are “sitting ducks” for kidnappers and others when they are returned to Mexico. Human Rights First identified at least 492 reports of violent attacks since January 21, 2021, including kidnapping, rape and assault against people who were stranded at the border and/or expelled to Mexico. Eighty-one percent of LGBTQ asylum seekers have reported attacks, including rape, kidnapping, trafficking, and other violent assaults.

    About 1,500 people are living in a tent encampment in Tijuana near the port of entry at San Ysidro. Many of them have been stranded there for more than a year because they can’t apply for asylum due to the Title 42 expulsion policy.

    The people who are not sent to Mexico are kept in ICE or CBP detention and sent back to their home countries with no chance to apply for asylum. CBP officers and Border Patrol agents abuse the migrants in their custody, denying them emergency medical care, stealing their belongings and conducting expulsions at night to dangerous border towns, according to Human Rights First.

    In 2016, the Obama administration initiated a policy called “metering,” in which migrants take a number “as if they were at an ice cream store, in order to be able to file an asylum case,” Phillips said. Metering “prevented asylum seekers from meaningfully accessing their right to seek asylum because it forced them to remain in Mexico.” As of February 2021, more than 16,000 asylum seekers remained on metering waitlists. There may be 10,000 to 15,000 Black migrants who are stranded at the southern border, Haitian Bridge Alliance estimates.

    Meanwhile, the migrants wait at the border, compelled to stay in Mexico — some for as long as two to four years just to be able to file for asylum. CBP used Trump’s March 2020 Title 42 order, which continued the metering program, to turn away almost 13,000 unaccompanied children. Biden has promised to end the metering program.

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now receiving and processing unaccompanied children. On November 18, 2020, a federal judge ruled that expelling them violates the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Although a federal court stayed that order in January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration amended the CDC’s Title 42 order to exempt unaccompanied children arriving at the border. As a result, they haven’t been expelled since November 2020.

    “That shows that DHS has the capacity to process the backlog of asylum seekers at the border who haven’t been able to enter ports of entry because of Title 42 since March of 2020,” Phillips said.

    The Title 42 Policy Is Illegal

    Title 42, which has never been applied in the immigration context, violates the Immigration and Nationality Act as well as the Refugee Convention, which grant noncitizens the right to asylum if they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, if they are sent back to their home countries.

    The Refugee Convention forbids refoulement, sending an individual to a country where it is more likely than not that the individual would face persecution on one of the protected grounds. The Title 42 procedure also violates the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which contains a non-refoulement provision. It forbids sending an individual to a country where there is a substantial likelihood he or she would be subjected to torture.

    The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has confirmed repeatedly during the pandemic that expelling asylum seekers and refugees at the border with no individualized determination of their needs to be protected violates the non-refoulement provisions of international law. The UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection declared, “The right to seek asylum is a fundamental right. The COVID-19 pandemic provides no exception.”

    The Title 42 Policy Is Racist

    Using Title 42 to keep migrants out the United States under the guise of protecting health is a cynical and racist policy. “President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security must be reminded that their inaction to protect vulnerable immigrant communities seeking refuge in the U.S. is not only putting lives on the line; it upholds a white nationalist immigration system that seeks to expel and keep Black and brown immigrants out at any cost,” Cynthia Garcia, national campaigns manager for community protection of United We Dream, said in a statement.“Biden could instruct the CDC to lift the [Title 42] policy,” Phillips suggested.

    Many Black migrants and asylum seekers from Africa and the Caribbean are disproportionately harmed by the expulsion policy. Sixty-one percent of Haitian asylum seekers who were denied U.S. asylum protections were crime victims while languishing in Mexico. Many are targets of anti-Black violence.

    To its credit, the Biden-Harris administration suspended the repressive Trump administration policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program. Those migrants could file for asylum in the United States but then had to leave the U.S., return for court hearings, and then leave again. It left approximately 25,000 asylum seekers in Mexico living in dangerous conditions as their cases progressed through the U.S. legal system. Six thousand of them are now being processed and they no longer have to stay in Mexico.

    “This is a big victory for them and their families,” Phillips said. But it only applies to migrants from South and Central America and the Caribbean. This doesn’t help the thousands of Haitians languishing at the border, who don’t come under the MPP. “The border isn’t open to Haitians and Africans,” Phillips added.

    The administration’s quick reversal on refugee caps demonstrates the power of political pressure in holding their feet to the fire. The importance of continued opposition to their inhumane asylum policies and demands for humane ones cannot be underestimated.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • My father works for the company that sells weapons used in my partner’s homeland | Izzy Brown

    I had never imagined how horribly the company my father works for was entangled with the story of my West Papuan partner

    ​They make great trucks. That’s what my father says whenever I ask him: “What do they make? Who do they sell them to?” “Only to the good guys,”​​​​ is his standard answer, and the topic changes quickly. But what he calls “trucks”, most people call “tanks”. And ​I am always led to wonder, “What kind of ‘good guy’ drives a tank?”

    My father works for Thales, one of the richest weapons corporations in the world. Before heading up security for Thales he worked for Asio, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

    Related: Global protests throw spotlight on alleged police abuses in West Papua

    If it’s true that change begins at home, I hope my father will be ready

    Related: The West Papuan independence movement – a history

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Biden’s U-Turn on Refugees Aligns With Voter Support for Pro-Immigrant Policies

    President Joseph Robinette Biden walks away from a podium

    Earlier this week, President Biden, under pressure from his own voter base, executed what might end up being the most consequential political U-turn of his presidency.

    Having disappointed refugee rights advocates and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party a few weeks ago by adhering to Trump’s limit of 15,000 refugee admissions this fiscal year, on Monday Biden announced he was raising that cap to 62,500. It was the right decision to make, even if it took him nearly three weeks to get there.

    Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how many refugees will actually be admitted in practice. Even as he raised the cap, Biden warned, “The sad truth is that we will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year,” due to how badly the system for processing refugees was dismantled and drained of staff under Trump.

    Nevertheless, successfully pressuring Biden to ditch Trump’s restrictive policy is still a hugely important win for progressives. After Biden opportunistically decided to keep the low cap that he had inherited, an array of luminaries on the left of the political spectrum, as well as decided moderates such as Sen. Dick Durbin, called Biden out for betraying a campaign promise and, more importantly, squandering the trust of refugees who, after years of waiting in camps for the required visas and entry documents, were finally preparing for their journeys to the U.S.

    This one ought to have been a no-brainer. There never was a morally cogent reason to eviscerate the refugee resettlement program in the way that Trump and his team did. It was always about nativism, and, more particularly, about raw Islamophobia. It was against Muslim-majority countries such as Syria and Yemen, Somalia and Iran, that Trump turned most of his animus, blocking refugees — many of whom are fleeing particularly brutal and long-lasting civil conflicts — from those locales, not only via low caps on the total numbers admitted, but also via executive orders specifically denying entry to people from those individual countries.

    Trump used Congress member Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child refugee, as a foil in speech after speech, attacking her in the most incendiary of language, urging his people to turn against refugee-welcoming cities such as Minneapolis, and encouraging his audiences to chant “send her back” after he had riled them up against her.

    Biden has consistently opposed Trump’s policies on refugees and on the Muslim travel ban. In fact, when candidate Trump first unveiled, in a short speech to his doting followers in late 2015, his desire to ban Muslims from entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” and followed up early in the new year with a TV ad touting this vile plan, Biden said Trump’s language was “dangerous.” Meanwhile the White House, at which Biden was at the time the vice president, released a statement asserting that Trump’s proposal “disqualified” him from holding high office.

    On the campaign trail, Biden consistently called the Trump administration out for its evisceration of the U.S.’s refugee resettlement program — between January 2017 and the fall of 2019, the Trump administration admitted fewer refugees than the Obama White House did just in its last year in office. And during the pandemic, refugee admissions all but ground to a halt. Biden promised, as I wrote back in April, to reverse this trend: to rapidly raise the refugee cap to 62,500 this year, and shortly thereafter to 125,000.

    All of this made his decision last month to uphold Trump’s 15,000 cap on refugee admissions this fiscal year particularly perplexing. It was a decision seemingly made in fear about the political blowback his administration was facing from the right over the high numbers of people seeking to claim asylum on the country’s southern border.

    While much of the country’s immigration policies can only be legislated by Congress, refugee admissions is one area where the president has extraordinary unilateral power. The president can raise or lower the number of admissions each year simply by issuing a new presidential finding. Thus, when the White House waffled on increasing refugee admissions numbers in mid-April and then suddenly announced that Trump’s cap would be maintained, it left immigrants’ rights advocates scratching their heads in confusion.

    If Biden’s initial decision to maintain Trump’s camp was a cold political calculation designed to prove the Biden administration’s immigration “toughness” in the face of would-be asylees along the southern border, as appears to have been the case, it made precious little sense even in relation to that cynical goal. For while a large majority of Americans do critique Biden’s handling of the surge of would-be migrants along the border with Mexico, many of their criticisms are about the specific ways in which unaccompanied minors are being treated and about how large numbers of children have been stuck in holding centers for days and weeks on end. It’s important to note that the Pew Research Center survey that showed that two out of three Americans thought the border surge was being handled poorly also showed nearly seven in ten Americans saying undocumented residents should be offered a viable path to legal residency.

    That nuance holds true for the public’s understanding of refugee admissions as well. One in three Americans tell pollsters that refugee admissions should be a high priority for the new administration, and another 45-55 percent say it should be a moderate priority. And while refugee admissions are remarkably unpopular amongst the GOP base, raising the refugee admissions cap is broadly accepted as being the right thing to do among Democrats given the messy realities of the world at the moment.

    All of this should have provided ample political cover for Biden to raise the refugee cap last month. Instead, inexplicably, he dropped the ball.

    Sometimes, it seems, politicians need to be rescued from their own worst impulses. Such was certainly the case with Biden and refugees. Had his decision to adhere to Trump’s nativist cap held, he would have squandered an opportunity to set the U.S. on a better course. Now, however, under fierce pressure from the grassroots, he has pressed the reset button. After four years in which Trump went out of his way to beat up on refugees, to humiliate the vulnerable, and to seek political hay by exploiting their misfortunes, Biden has now — albeit belatedly and only under huge pressure from his own grassroots and from many Democratic members of Congress — taken the first and most basic step toward salvaging the country’s refugee resettlement program.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Revealed: 2,000 refugee deaths linked to illegal EU pushbacks

    A Guardian analysis finds EU countries used brutal tactics to stop nearly 40,000 asylum seekers crossing borders

    EU member states have used illegal operations to push back at least 40,000 asylum seekers from Europe’s borders during the pandemic, linked to the death of more than 2,000 people, the Guardian can reveal.

    In one of the biggest mass expulsions in decades, European countries, supported by EU’s border agency Frontex, systematically pushed back refugees, including children fleeing from wars, in their thousands, using illegal tactics ranging from assault to brutality during detention or transportation.

    Related: UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • The refugees torn from loved ones by Australia’s ‘cruel’ family separations

    Many lost years in detention; others have given up hope of ever holding their wife or children again. A new report argues Australia is engaging in a ‘strategic, deliberate and coercive campaign’ to separate refugee families

    Nayser Ahmed, his wife and two children, fled together.

    As members of the violently persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority, their homeland, Myanmar, would never be safe.

    Related: ‘Somewhere to call home’: helping stateless children realise their right to Australian citizenship

    Related: ‘Suffered more than many’: how Canada and Europe are resettling Australia’s refugees

    I am here, my body is here, but my mind and heart are not here. They are always with my family

    Related: ‘I never felt alone’: refugee Mostafa Azimitabar on justice, Jimmy Barnes and freedom after eight years

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Cruel’ trafficker accused of torturing refugees found guilty in Ethiopia

    Tewelde Goitom reportedly ran a brutal and lucrative trade extorting migrants desperate to reach Europe from Libya

    One of north Africa’s most notorious human traffickers, accused of extorting and torturing thousands of refugees and migrants in Libya, has been found guilty on five counts of smuggling and trafficking in Ethiopia.

    Tewelde Goitom, known as “Welid”, operated in Libya between roughly 2014 and 2018 and is thought to have been at the heart of a highly lucrative and brutal trade trafficking desperate migrants trying to reach Europe.

    Related: A mayday call, a dash across the Mediterranean … and 130 souls lost at sea

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

    Exclusive: Torture survivors and lone children stuck in Greece and Italy after Home Office ‘deliberately’ ends cooperation on family reunions

    The Home Office has been accused of failing to reunite vulnerable refugees who have the right to join family in the UK under EU law, leaving lone children and torture survivors stranded.

    The government faced widespread criticism when it announced that family reunion law would no longer apply after the UK left the EU, and it promised that cases under way on that date would be allowed to proceed.

    Related: Outrage at U-turn on promise to reunite child refugees with UK family

    Related: ‘I was alone, I had nothing’: from child refugee to student nurse in Athens

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Greece accused of ‘shocking’ illegal pushback against refugees at sea

    Lawsuit filed at European court of human rights says group were abandoned in life rafts after some were beaten

    A lawsuit filed against the Greek state at the European court of human rights accuses Athens of a shocking level of violence in sophisticated inter-agency operations that form part of an illegal pushback to stop the arrival of refugees and migrants.

    The suit, filed by the NGO Legal Centre Lesvos, centres on an alleged incident in October last year in which a fishing boat set off from Marmaris in Turkey for Italy carrying about 200 people, including 40 children and a pregnant woman. The boat ran into difficulty in a storm off the south coast of Crete, leading the captain to radio for assistance.

    Related: ‘We were left in the sea’: asylum seekers forced off Lesbos

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • A mayday call, a dash across the ocean … and 130 souls lost at sea

    Last week, a dinghy full of migrants sank near Libya. Those who were part of the rescue mission tell of a needless tragedy

    The weather was already turning when the distress call went out. A rubber dinghy with 130 people on board was adrift in the choppy Mediterranean waters.

    On the bridge of the Ocean Viking, one of the only remaining NGO rescue boats operational in the Mediterranean, 121 nautical miles west, stood Luisa Albera, staring anxiously at her computer screen and then out at the rising storm and falling light at sea.

    Related: Senior Libyan coastguard commander arrested for alleged human trafficking

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Yemen, Myanmar and George Floyd: human rights this fortnight in pictures

    A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Peru

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Locke invested with NZ Order of Merit for his human rights advocacy

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    The Governor-General, Dame Patsy Reddy, this week invested social justice advocate and former Green Party MP Keith Locke as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit “for services to human rights advocacy”.

    Locke described the the award in the New Year Honours list as recognition of the great work of human rights advocates in the many organisations he had worked in, such as those mentioned in the tribute read out at the ceremony.

    “Mr Keith Locke has been a long-term human rights activist at both national and international levels,” said the citation.

    “Mr Locke became the National Co-ordinator of the Philippines Solidarity Network from 1986 to 1991 and created exchange programmes between social justice groups in New Zealand and their counterparts in the Philippines.

    “Around this time he opened the progressive One World Books store, which provided a hub for activists in Auckland.

    “He was Secretary of the Wellington Latin America Committee from 1980 to 1985.

    In the 1990s he was a Foreign Affairs spokesperson for the NewLabour, Alliance and Green parties and was a Green Member of Parliament between 1999 and 2011.

    “During this time, he advocated on politically unpopular international human rights issues and drew attention to human rights abuses in Tibet, China, East Timor, Fiji, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East.

    “He was recognised by Amnesty International with the Human Rights Defender Award in 2012 and the Harmony Award from the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand in 2013.

    “Since retiring from Parliament, Mr Locke has served on the Boards of the Auckland Refugee Council from 2012 to 2017 and the New Zealand Peace and Conflict Studies Centre Trust until 2019.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Locke invested with NZ Order of Merit for his human rights advocacy

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    The Governor-General, Dame Patsy Reddy, this week invested social justice advocate and former Green Party MP Keith Locke as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit “for services to human rights advocacy”.

    Locke described the the award in the New Year Honours list as recognition of the great work of human rights advocates in the many organisations he had worked in, such as those mentioned in the tribute read out at the ceremony.

    “Mr Keith Locke has been a long-term human rights activist at both national and international levels,” said the citation.

    “Mr Locke became the National Co-ordinator of the Philippines Solidarity Network from 1986 to 1991 and created exchange programmes between social justice groups in New Zealand and their counterparts in the Philippines.

    “Around this time he opened the progressive One World Books store, which provided a hub for activists in Auckland.

    “He was Secretary of the Wellington Latin America Committee from 1980 to 1985.

    In the 1990s he was a Foreign Affairs spokesperson for the NewLabour, Alliance and Green parties and was a Green Member of Parliament between 1999 and 2011.

    “During this time, he advocated on politically unpopular international human rights issues and drew attention to human rights abuses in Tibet, China, East Timor, Fiji, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East.

    “He was recognised by Amnesty International with the Human Rights Defender Award in 2012 and the Harmony Award from the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand in 2013.

    “Since retiring from Parliament, Mr Locke has served on the Boards of the Auckland Refugee Council from 2012 to 2017 and the New Zealand Peace and Conflict Studies Centre Trust until 2019.”

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • I saw first-hand the terrible toll detention is taking on the Biloela family | Kristina Keneally

    After nearly four years and $50m, it is time to let these two lovely little girls and their parents to go home to Biloela

    The two little girls in the Christmas Island Recreation Centre crèche are like many other children I have met in visits to childcare centres – keen to show me their drawings of rainbows, tell me they can spell their own names and that their birthdays are coming up. Kopika, age 5, is serious and ponders my questions thoughtfully. Tharunicaa, age 3, twinkles with a cheeky smile. Like many little girls, they want to check out my rings, bracelet and necklace and show me their sparkly earrings. Then they want to run off and play with their friends.

    Related: Kristina Keneally to make own way to Christmas Island after Peter Dutton blocks use of RAAF jet

    Related: Biloela Tamil family to remain on Christmas Island after federal court upholds ruling on daughter’s visa

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Hundreds to be moved into Napier Barracks despite previous virus outbreak

    Hundreds more people are to be moved into Napier Barracks despite serious concerns over conditions, the PA news agency has revealed.

    Health risk

    The expected increase comes after nearly 200 cases of coronavirus (Covid-19) were detected and dozens of residents had to be moved out to deal with the crisis earlier this year. An announcement on 19 April, seen by PA, informed local organisations that plans are in place to increase numbers at the controversial barracks to 337 over the coming weeks.

    Around 50 people have been moved into the barracks in recent weeks, and the Home Office has declined to comment on how many more would be moved in.

    People seeking asylum – Napier Barracks
    A view of Napier Barracks in Folkestone, Kent (Gareth Fuller/PA)

    Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais, told the PA news agency:

    At the end of the day it’s still dormitory accommodation – how can that be Covid safe?

    What are they going to do if there’s another Covid outbreak? How is it going to be very different?

    Government response

    A Home Office spokesperson said:

    While pressure on the asylum system remains we will continue to make use of Napier Barracks.

    Asylum seekers are staying in safe, suitable, Covid-compliant conditions, where they receive three nutritious meals a day.

    We have also made a significant number of improvements to the site following feedback from residents and inspectors.

    The department has faced repeated criticism for its use of the military site in Folkestone, Kent, with a group of MPs condemning the conditions as “utterly unacceptable”. Moseley argued that the continued use of the barracks to house asylum seekers was “political”. She said:

    We need leadership that treats refugees with dignity and respect, and we know that people in this country want that

    One Napier Barracks resident, speaking anonymously, said:

    The living conditions are really bad here to the point that there’s 20 people living in one room.

    We are also very worried about getting ill and catching the virus.

    Another said:

    I can no longer bear this situation. I want to get out as soon as possible.

    Featured image via YouTube – RT

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Biden’s Waffling on Refugees May Leave Desperate Thousands in Limbo

    Migrants, mostly from Central America, are dropped off by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a bus station near the Gateway International Bridge, between the cities of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, on March 15, 2021.

    The Biden administration’s moral missteps and waffling on U.S. refugee policy last Friday revealed a worrisome willingness to treat refugees as political footballs, putting many lives in limbo and only partially reversing course after intense blowback from centrist Democrats like Sen. Dick Durbin.

    On April 16, after experiencing a few hours of outcry from congressional Democrats and grassroots organizations in response to Biden’s decision to keep Trump’s 15,000 cap on refugee admissions for the fiscal year ending this September, Biden made an unexpected about-face: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that the limit on refugee admissions would be increased, but by a yet-to-be-determined amount, with the new number to be announced by May 15.

    The Biden administration’s initial decision to reimpose Trump’s cap on refugee admissions — a cap that progressive lawmakers have decried as “unacceptably draconian and discriminatory” — came as somewhat of a surprise after Biden’s efforts to otherwise unravel Trump’s xenophobic policies and regulations, reverse the stance the government was taking in arguing key immigration cases before the Supreme Court, and attempt to create a more humanitarian process for unaccompanied minors crossing the border without paperwork. Immigration activists who had recently cheered the administration’s decision to reverse signature Trump initiatives, such as the new “public charge” rules that all but barred immigrants from emergency food, housing and medical assistance, expressed dismay over the Biden administration’s initial attempt to impose Trump’s refugee policy for the rest of the fiscal year.

    The ostensible reason for Biden’s order on refugee admissions was that the resettlement system is currently overwhelmed with the huge influx of asylum seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border, and that adding tens of thousands of refugees into the mix would overstrain the system. In reality, as Biden and his team know all too well, the two systems are apples and oranges. There are different laws regulating asylum admissions and refugee admissions, different government agencies and nonprofit systems are involved in the actual resettlement process, and, by and large, different pots of money are available to resettle refugees as opposed to processing asylum seekers through the courts.

    More to the point, as administration officials told the media on Friday, Biden’s team is worried about the political optics of increasing refugee admissions at the same time as so many people are claiming asylum. They worry about public opinion and congressional blowback, and fear it could end up eclipsing all the other big-picture reforms and investments that they are seeking to achieve over the coming months. After all, while solid majorities of U.S. voters approve of Biden’s approach to COVID-19, to the economy, and to infrastructure investments and tax law changes, that majority vanishes when it comes to Biden’s approach to immigration and his handling of the surge of migrants on the southern border.

    Now, the refugee admissions process has long been a political football — a way, for example, for Cold War warriors to show their fealty to Florida’s anti-communists by making it easier for Cubans, during the Cold War and decades immediately following its end, to claim refugee status; or for religious groups to advocate for their members in the countries of the former Soviet Union to be considered as refugees. In the Trump era, bashing refugees became an easy way for the demagogue-in-chief to whip up his mob. He repeatedly traveled to Minnesota, for example, where many Somali refugees have been resettled, and made racially inflammatory speeches about them, as well as about Rep. Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child refugee. Given this history, perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that POTUS 46 has caved on refugee admissions at the first sign of fragile public support on the issue.

    But Biden and his team have, repeatedly, linked U.S. admission of refugees to a broader sense of the country’s place in the world. They have, from the get-go, set up refugee admissions as a litmus test for our moral values. And last week, they spectacularly failed that test.

    What made Biden’s initial announcement on Friday particularly hard to bear was that during his campaign, Biden pledged to raise the annual refugee admissions level to 125,000 — and, mere weeks after his inauguration, he promised to get halfway to that goal, 62,500, just this year.

    Biden’s team sweetened the announcement about adhering to the 15,000 cap and walking back his commitment to rapidly expand admissions with promises that, because Trump’s Muslim travel ban no longer held sway, the refugees would be admitted from places of greatest need, including those fleeing the ghastly civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

    That’s true. But, to be honest, it’s also largely window dressing. If refugee admissions continue at this historically low level, thousands of individuals and families, who have undergone years of vetting and are now just waiting for the final word that they can set off for the U.S., will remain in limbo, in often overcrowded and unsanitary refugee camps overseas, for months (and quite likely years) to come. That’s a huge stain on the U.S.’s moral reputation.

    Moreover, the refugee resettlement infrastructure — which took decades to build after World War II, and which was largely shredded during Trump’s presidency in an act of epic institutional vandalism — won’t be easily jump-started again so long as the refugee cap is kept low. That’s because, with only 15,000 refugees admitted in 2021, the federal funds (based on the numbers being resettled) won’t flow in adequate measure to groups like the International Rescue Committee and World Relief. As a result, these organizations will likely be unable to reopen shuttered offices in cities around the country, or to rehire skilled staffers who have been let go during the past four years, making it even harder down the road to quickly get up to speed should refugee admissions increase in 2022.

    The about-face that the Biden administration made after facing blowback from congressional Democrats and activist groups is better than nothing, but, in its vagueness, it’s still a far cry from the earlier pledge to increase admissions up to 62,500 this year.

    Around the affluent world — as wars, climate change, population stresses, water shortages, the pandemic, and other crises rage, and as tens of millions of people flee these conditions — governments are battening down their hatches against refugees and asylum seekers. In Denmark, a supposedly liberal government has begun deporting hundreds of Syrian refugees, who have lived in the country for years, back to Syria. They claim, disingenuously, that Syria is now no longer dangerous. In the U.K., the government is instituting quick-deportation policies against asylum seekers that look shockingly close to those adopted in the U.S. under Trump. In Australia, would-be asylees and refugees, many of them children, are held in prison-like conditions, for years on end, in an island fortress hundreds of miles from the mainland.

    Biden promised something different, something better. He’s delivered on many of his promises in these past three months. But now he’s dropped the ball on refugees. Hopefully, the political pushback he has received will help set him on a more ethical course. For whatever the short-term political optics, it’s simply wrong to turn desperate refugees into political footballs.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Vows to Raise Refugee Cap After Backlash But Leaves the Number Uncertain

    President Joe Biden meets with members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Executive Committee in the Oval Office at the White House on April 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    After President Joe Biden on Friday came under fire from human rights advocates and progressive lawmakers for signing a directive to retain the historically low 15,000-person refugee cap imposed by former President Donald Trump, the White House issued a statement that appeared to walk back Biden’s widely criticized move.

    “The president’s directive today has been the subject of some confusion,” said a statement from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki late Friday. “Last week, he sent to Congress his budget for the fiscal year starting in October 2021, which honors his commitment.”

    “For the past few weeks, he has been consulting with his advisers to determine what number of refugees could realistically be admitted to the United States between now and October 1,” Psaki said. “Given the decimated refugee admissions program we inherited, and burdens on the Office of Refugee Resettlement, his initial goal of 62,500 seems unlikely.”

    “While finalizing that determination, the president was urged to take immediate action to reverse the Trump policy that banned refugees from many key regions, to enable flights from those regions to begin within days; today’s order did that,” she added. “With that done, we expect the president to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15.”

    As Common Dreams reported earlier Friday, sources within the administration claimed the decision to keep the cap in place related to concerns about the recent rise in crossings at the southern border. Reporters and advocates framed Psaki’s statement as a shift prompted by widespread criticism from rights groups and lawmakers.

    “This is unacceptable,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), had tweeted of the directive Friday ahead of the press secretary’s clarification.

    “You made a promise and thousands of refugees are depending on you,” Pocan reminded the president. “We can and must do better than Donald Trump.”

    Manar Waheed, ACLU senior legislative and advocacy counsel, initially said that “today’s news is a devastating blow to Black and Brown immigrants who are fleeing persecution and seeking refuge—and have been for years — only to see their hopes destroyed by an administration that promised to do better.”

    In response to Psaki’s remarks, Waheed added that “as a candidate, Biden promised humanity and relief for refugees fleeing persecution. We will be watching to see if President Biden fulfills his promises.”

    “My heart and thoughts go to all refugees around the world who are forced to wait another month for the administration to act,” said Jacqueline Kifuko, refugee organizer at Community Refugee & Immigration Services (CRIS). “As a former refugee, I truly understand how… this kind of news can affect the mental state of individuals already in the process of resettlement, particularly those coming to the U.S. I urge the Biden administration to honor its promise to the refugee community as soon as possible.”

    Anahita Panahi, the Opportunity for All campaign co-chair at CRIS, said that “we are devastated that Biden continues to delay his promise to all the refugees fearing for their lives. The U.S. has a duty to provide refuge for those fleeing religious or political persecution and war-torn countries. This is unacceptable.”

    Kayo Beshir of the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Coalition similarly said that “I am devastated by Biden’s delay in fulfilling his promise.”

    “As a former refugee and a refugee organizer that turned out many former refugees to go out and vote this past election, I am extremely disappointed by this administration’s decision to delay the presidential determination,” Beshir added. “This is truly a blow to my community that envisioned this would be an administration to reverse the policies of the previous administration that pushed to limit immigration.”

    Psaki’s statement came as RAICES, the largest immigration legal services nonprofit in Texas, was drafting a Twitter thread blasting Biden’s failure to keep his promise and calling on the president to “rebuild refugee resettlement infrastructure as soon as possible, so that the U.S. can increase these admissions numbers immediately.”

    Acknowledging the update from the administration, the group declared that “our demand still stands.”

    “Such political cowardice. Full stop,” Kelsey P. Norman, an author on migration and fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, had tweeted about the directive.

    “And now they’re backtracking,” Norman added Friday evening. “Thank you to all the groups and individuals who pushed back on this!”

    While maintaining pressure on the administration to go further, some advocates also acknowledged the positive impacts of the new directive.

    “Time and again, President Biden has shared his commitment to reversing the bigoted, anti-Muslim policies of the Trump administration. Specifically, he made a commitment during the campaign to restore refugee admissions, but today he fell short,” said Muslim Advocates special counsel for anti-Muslim bigotry Madihha Ahussain.

    “The Trump administration weaponized immigration policies to drive anti-Muslim sentiment across the country,” Ahussain said. “Trump enacted a Muslim ban and dropped refugee admissions to their lowest levels in history. We cannot allow these discriminatory policies that have left a stain on our country to stay in place.”

    “While today’s announcement will lift restrictions on resettlement for some Muslims, such as those from Syria, who were vilified by the last administration, that is simply not enough,” she added. “We applaud the promises made by this administration for a more humane and pluralist immigration policy. We urge him to stay true to those promises.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.