I am extremely glad to hear that Trump has signed an executive order to end the separation of families, but please do not think that the battle for justice ends here.
I mean, this is literally what Trump was referring to when he said it was ‘democrats’ law’ that was ‘making’ him separate families.
The law is the one says it’s illegal to incarcerate children for crimes their parents committed for any extended length of time. This is the law Trump wants changed.
The law exists because we realized this prolonged internment of innocent children was sometimes happening (in extremely unsafe conditions no less) and we understood that this was a horrible, inhumane, inexcusable thing to do to a child.
The conflict arose when this was paired with the Trump adminstration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, which drastically increased the number of people being prosecuted (far beyond our capacity to handle with reasonable speed and due process), and meant that refugees seeking asylum (much, much more likely to be families fleeing with small children) must go through sometimes months of appeals trying to see if asylum might be permitted.
The former USA stance was that we must not attempt to intern more people than we could handle humanely. The stance Trump’s administration is pushing for is that we must sacrifice humane treatment of these families to protect our own.
This is how the system of white supremacy operates. The media is used 2 create stereotypes like blk on blk crime.They need black men to fill jail cells for the Prison Indstrial complex
You know what? I’m tired of this. I do not know what exactly they are waiting for. I mean our government comes up with “reasons” to invade other countries, such as Syria, like their government is allegedly violating human rights or something like that. but… I mean for other countries, they do not even have to go deep to bomb the fuck out of this place, they can just look at our media. And this has been happening to people of color since the media has existed.
Hey, did you know Border Patrol agents are fond of destroying the food and water caches left in the desert crossing so people don’t die of hunger and thirst?
179 people died crossing between Mexico and Arizona last year, where this happened.
Way to contribute to the deaths of innocent people, sworn officers of the American government!
Regardless of your views on immigration and “illegal” aliens, this is reprehensible. Nothing positive could possibly be gained from such behavior. This is pure cruelty and the result could result in the death of people who, by no stretch of the imagination, could possibly be worthy of a death sentence.
a bunch of people will drive into the desert with guns and shoot holes in water tanks that the green valley samaritans leave out there it’s sickening
Fuck the border agents & every us govt official who knowingly let’s poor people die.
Pittsburgh police shot a black 13 year old running away from them to death on Juneteenth
Pittsburgh police shot a black 13 year old running away from them to death on Juneteenth
Pittsburgh police shot a black 13 year old running away from them to death on Juneteenth.
If it is not clear from the text, they shot him in the back at a distance and was no threat to the officers
I saw a blurb on the news this morning about an individual shot by police and I just assumed the rest of the details. How fucking sad is that. I’m ashamed of my town right now.
I feel like the police violence is escalating here. They beat Jordan Miles (also a teenager at the time
And finally murdered this child. His name was Antwan.
if you are in the pittsburgh area there’s a march at the courthouse downtown tomorrow at 12 pm. here’s a link to the event
to summarize:
-police were following the car antwon was a passenger in because it matched a description (note: antwon was 17 yrs old, not 13 like many of the reports say. There was a 13 yr old on scene, however).
-police eventually stopped the car & ordered the driver out/onto the ground. antwon & another passenger bolted
-police fired 3 rounds into his back. Although 2 guns were found in the car later, Rose was unarmed when he was killed
-the driver was later released without being arrested
-the name of the officer who killed antwon rose has not been released. What we do know is that he has been put on administrative leave, and he was involved in other local departments 7 years prior. However, he was sworn in the same night as he killed Antwon.
-there were no dash/body cams, but a witness took a video. Be warned, it is graphic by nature.
–here is the statement that the family of the victim released
The fact they feel it’s necessary to shoot when we run away instead of chasing us proves there’s a problem. And it’s not the in the training received before being sworn in it’s their character in general. They are literally giving badges to demons out here. Breaks my fucking heart.
He was 17
His 13 year old brother was in the car as well. Initial reports said he was 13. I’m sure you can understand how that could happen in the chaos that transpired right?
Jitneys were the precursor to Uber or Lyft. Imagine you and your brother get a Lyft home and the cops pull the driver over. Then shoot at you as you run away.
He was a poet, an avid skateboarder, and volunteer at local charities. Loved by family and friends.
There have been at least three protests. Currently one is shutting down a major highway. Pictures above are from earlier today
There will be another protest tomorrow. There are also several recordings and live feeds of the protests on FB
So for anyone who thinks the claims of child trafficking with kids separated from their families at the border are melodramatic and baseless, here’s some stuff you should look at.
For an example, let’s take a look at one of the places a number of these children were sent to: Bethany Christian Services, a global nonprofit organization based out of Michigan, who have federal contracts with the government for finding placement for refugee and immigrant children, which is why they were one of the first places these children were sent. Per their own website, they’re a faith-based organization that provides foster care, adoption, resettlement services and other assistance, and their only priority is the well-being of the children they care for.
Sounds good, right? Defenders of this organization have claimed that BCS is against the separation policy and have called for an end to it, but despite searching, I haven’t actually been able to find any such comments from any official spokesperson for the agency.
However, I did find this:
“Right now, we have 99 foster care beds at Bethany across the country, and we’re at capacity,” Dona Abbott, branch director of refugee services at Bethany Christian Services, said. “We’re now recruiting new homes and we’re approaching our government with the offer to provide more beds.”
Now, here’s where some eyebrows should start to be raised.
BCS is not simply a nonprofit charity organization that looks after children in need as best they can in accordance with existing laws. They also are extremely aggressive lobbyists who push for legislation in accordance with their personal religious views….views which most people would consider Christian fundamentalist.
As previously reported by PRA, this past summer Michigan passed a statewide religious exemption law that gives adoption agencies the right to claim a religious exemption from having to serve LGBTQ couples. The DeVos family donated $300,000 in 2013 alone to Bethany Christian Services, Michigan’s leading adoption agency and the main group that lobbied for the religious exemption bill.
So to make sure we’re still on the same page here, let’s be clear about that…..one of the first agencies the government relocated these children to due to existing federal contracts just so happens to be a primary beneficiary of a member of the Trump administration’s charitable givings….and also just so happens to be in the habit of using said funds in the lobbying of religious fundamentalist based laws that have successfully barred potential parents in at least one state from adopting children if they happen to be of a demographic that Bethany Christian Services (and the DeVos family) deem unfit to parent children.
But remember….these people are still clearly, definitely JUST in it to help kids in need.
Now keep going back further. Here’s a book that was written in 2013, called
When Jessie Hawkins’ adopted daughter told her she had another mom back in Ethiopia, Jessie didn’t, at first, know what to think. She’d wanted her adoption to be great story about a child who needed a home and got one, and a family led by God to adopt. Instead, she felt like she’d done something wrong.
Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.
So this book apparently is an investigative look into Evangelical missionary adoption and the links to illegal adoptions and literal human trafficking. Crimes committed by faith-based adoption and foster care agencies and parents who believe its their mission to ‘save’ children from third-world countries by taking them away from parents who they deem unable to properly care for them (and who are unlikely to raise them according to the Christian fundamentalist views these organizations and parents view it as their mission to spread, just like missionaries of past centuries).
I haven’t had a chance to read the book in full myself yet, so I can’t attest to everything in it, just various excerpts I’ve found online. Yes, it is biased – the author takes a clear stance against these groups and their views and actions, but she does not claim to be impartial, nor is she trying to be. The book is her research into proving why her beliefs these people have committed criminal acts are not unfounded. I mention this because this unapologetic bias is what the 20% of reviews on this book that gave it 1-star have focused on to discredit the author and her conclusions here, in the name of defending these various organizations. However, the 48% of reviews that gave it 5-stars frequently express how regardless of any conclusions made within the book, one thing that stood out for most of them is how exhaustively researched and detailed the book was.
And why did I come across this book specifically, and link it here?
Because Bethany Christian Services is one of the organizations the author investigated based on suspicions of child trafficking and illegal adoptions.
Please note….even if you personally do not draw the same conclusions as the author from her research into them, it should at the very least be deemed significant that this organization, one of those that the Trump administration has prioritized sending these children to due to previously established contracts, is
a) Ready and looking to recruit more homes and supply more beds for children the administration sends them, despite already being stretched to the capacity of their ability to care for the children they’re already responsible for.
b) Has an existing relationship with The DeVos family, many of whom (not just Betsy) are part of the administration’s inner circle, and this existing relationship includes lobbying for the advancement of legislation born of their religious fundamentalist views and the prioritization of child care that’s in accordance to what they think a good conservative upbringing should look like
c) has been under scrutiny due to rumors of child trafficking, illegal adoptions and crimes against children in the name of their personal religious convictions stretching back at least five years before these current events
And this is just ONE of the places where we KNOW some of these kids taken from their parents have ended up. It doesn’t even address the hundreds, potentially thousands of kids who’ve already mysteriously ‘slipped through the cracks’ with no official accounting of their whereabouts.
Also something to consider is what happens AFTER these ‘good Christian families’ open up their homes to these poor, disenfranchised refugee children who are just so desperately in need of their enlightened priorities when raising children to be good conservatives.
It shouldn’t shock anyone but people who don’t actually have the well-being of children in mind when they adopt, but rather are just playing into self-serving white savior bullshit and some religious fervor to replicate the missionary work they feel its a Christian mandate to spread……shockingly, many of these people end up ‘regretting’ these adoptions when the children traumatized by being ripped away from families who actually do love them and want them aren’t appropriately grateful. Who have attitude problems or behavioral issues or just aren’t receptive to the ideas and values these people try and drill into them.
That’s a link to a Reuters investigative article that delved into the practice of ‘rehoming’. Or when fucking pieces of shit who adopt children from other countries through legal or illegal means change their minds once the novelty of the living human being they vowed to guard and protect but really just view as a shiny new toy wears off…..literally just….give these kids away to whomever will take them.
Warning, the article can be triggering as hell not just because of what it describes, but how it describes it, frequently referencing these parents in much more generous language than what I just used and acting like there’s something worth empathizing with in their behavior. I think it’s worth the read if you can stomach it, however, because of the facts it does lay down about this downright EVIL practice.
An excerpt from the article:
Part 1: When a Liberian girl proves too much for her parents, they advertise her online and give her to a couple they’ve never met. Days later, she goes missing.
KIEL, Wisconsin – Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they’d adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days – by posting an ad on the Internet.
Also….three guesses what kind of people go looking online for ads about troubled kids people are looking to unload without any kind of paper trail.
Go ahead. Guess what kind of people those kids end up with.
So in conclusion…..fuck Bethany Christian Services, fuck the DeVos family, fuck the Trump administration, and fuck whomever defends any of this vile, despicable shit by harping on about how people are just being melodramatic and exaggerating and that nobody’s actually trafficking immigrant children here.
So y’all need a reminder on what the word “agenda” is?
Putting even more police officers in schools will only feed the school-to-prison pipeline. And needlessly endanger, arrest and criminalize innocent black and brown students, destroy their futures in the process, and in essence, help to maintain a permanent underclass.
“Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal.“ – Michelle Alexander
Make no mistake: The true agenda here is not “school safety.” The real goals are to, 1. Keep the for-profit, prison industrial complex supplied with cheap prison laborers, and, 2. Disenfranchise the next generation of black and non-white voters, who will face additional hurdles to finding employment, rental housing, home loans, student loans, public food assistance, and most importantly, voting — all because they will now have a ~criminal~ record for minor school infractions.
While outraged Americans across the country are calling their elected representatives and taking to the streets to protest the Trump administration’s forcible separation of parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, intelligence and defense contractors are raking in millions thanks to the cruel practice.
According to reporting by the Daily Beast, the intelligence contractor MVM, Inc. won an $8 million five-year contract to “provide assistance” in detention centers for unaccompanied children, and has made $42.9 million in less than a year, transporting minors to centers in Texas.
“It is mind-blowing that those types of industries would be even considered with respect to the care of children.” —Matthew Kolken, immigration attorney
Such facilities have become crowded with children in recent months, especially following the administration’s unveiling of its new “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented immigrants who cross the southern border seeking asylum—under which adults are imprisoned while they await immigration trials and any children traveling with them are sent off to detention centers, sometimes thousands of miles away.
Previously, MVM worked with the CIA in the Iraq War, during which its employees were accused of “procuring and possessing unauthorized weapons and explosives.” The company has also faced accusations of discrimination against employees who were Muslim and African-born.
“I’m guessing that in [MVM’s] mission statement, one of the central components isn’t the care of refugee children,” immigration attorney Matthew Kolken told the Daily Beast. “It is mind-blowing that those types of industries would be even considered with respect to the care of children. They’re not equipped to be able to do it. Would you want your child to be dropped off in their hands? I know I wouldn’t.”
Still, MVM as well as the defense contractor General Dynamics are rapidly hiring new employees to oversee the dozens of detention centers for children who have been taken from their parents or guardians after crossing the border.
Recently-advertised positions include compliance coordinators tasked with overseeing detention centers, youth care workers, and bilingual transport specialists.
Hey everyone? This is not okay. In May, the US government officially adopted a policy separating children from their parents when they crossed the border. It was meant to act as a deterrent to anyone seeking to immigrate to this country. Don’t come with your kids, or we’ll arrest you and take your children away. Children should never be used as political pawns like this. It’s inhuman and cruel.
Parents, after being separated from their children, are being tried as criminals. According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “If you cross the Southwest border unlawful, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple” So not only are families being torn apart, parents are being sent to jail. It’s really hard to be reunited with your child if you are in federal prison.
Please pay attention to what is happening at our southern border. Please care about these people. I know there is a lot gong on in the world, and it’s hard to care about everything all the time, but please don’t forget about the immigrant families. Call you representatives. Vote the people who support this policy out of office in November. Find a local rally/protest. Donate to a charity. Don’t let the people in power get away with this.
Sources are from The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a video interview with Jess Session found on NBC news. Jacob Soboroff is a reporter for NBC news and MSNBC. 13 June 2018
Ben is very upset about private corporations being able to decide what content they allow on their platforms. What’s wrong, Ben? I thought you liked free enterprise!
Thing is Hitler did some good for the german ppl, thus the immense support for him. The orange idiot however doesn’t do anything but playing Golf and approval ratings are decreasing. So, there’s that.
Literally shut the fuck up the only good thing Hitler ever did was put a bullet in his own brain
😂 Look, i hate him, too. But he created jobs. You think Hitler would have had the following he had being an angry men shouting at the clouds? He was a vile being and deserved more than the outcome he got.
Yeah, you’re right hitler created a lot of new jobs
I WONDER HOW HE DID THAT
THIS JUST IN
SLAVERY COUNTS AS JOB CREATION
uh yall do recall that he saved germany from the great depression and regardless of he fact that he was a mad man he did pull of a fairly decent socialist state before the whole “kill the jews” thing came up hell he didnt even want to do that
PUT YOUR FEET IN A WOODCHIPPER
not to be all like “read the thickest book i own six times over like me” but @msdancealot and @shotbythewolf have added some of the wrongest things ive ever read in my life soooooo
1-most of the make work programs of the first few years of nazi germany were created and budgeted for by the weimar government. after this like damn near every job created “by hitler” involved manufacturing weapons of war or extraction of resources to make weapons
2-its important to realize much of the world was leaving the great depression at the exact same time. a global economic recovery ‘saved’ germany, not hitler. theres alot of pretty solid evidence hitler destroyed germany and its economy actually, by running the domestic/consumer economy into the ground to make war
3-“fairly decent socialist state” the nazis were fascists. any sort of nazi social welfare programs didnt come from the same line of thinking as a socialist state. the nazi state was a ramshackle mess, rationing was commonplace, constant financial crisis
4-hell he didnt even want to kill the jews—-this is wrong. hitlers ideaology was so steeped in the idea of a “global jewish conspiracy” he wanted to kill every single jewish person on the planet. he wanted to do that. there wasnt a moment where he said “well shit guys looks like we have to kill the jews now” he wanted to do that for a very long time
Scientific fact, actually. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarbrough found that White people’s neuron system fired less when viewing people of color performing actions, which indicates that they have an emotional disconnect when thinking about people of color; in essence they really don’t connect with us on a basic level of human empathy. (Source) The same people tested scored higher on a subtle racism test, as well.
Jesus
Reason why I don’t trust or fuck with white people proven by science.
There was actually a study done (if better science Tumblr wanna link the source that would be awesome) where they showed a Black person’s hand being tortured and a purple hand being tortured and measured the empathetic response and ppl actually had more empathy and a higher emotional response for a purple ass alien hand being tortured than a Black person’s hand smh
Neuroscience student here. While all of the above statements are true in context, the whole point of the purple hand study is to show that racism based on differences in skin color is not an inherent biological trait in the brain. (There’s hope for humanity!) Quick summary:
When racist white people watch someone who isn’t white experience pain, their brains activate less in areas associated with feeling empathy. The less racist you are (as measured by tests of racial bias), the more these areas activate, while the more racist you are, the less these areas activate. In other words, science confirms the obvious: racism makes you less empathetic to people who aren’t white.
But here’s the super important thing! When the same person watches someone with bright purple skin experience pain, these areas activate as strongly as they do when they’re watching another white person. This shows that the lack of empathy that racist white people feel for people of different skin color is learned, rather than an intrinsic biological trait. If a white person’s ability to feel empathy were intrinsically limited to people with the same skin color, these people wouldn’t feel empathy for a purple hand.
The fact that racist white people still feel empathy for a purple hand shows that this brain activity is the result of cultural learning, rather than differences in skin color blocking our ability to feel empathy. As the authors write, “… Cultural conditioning (e.g., racial stereotyping), rather than biological or structural factors (e.g., somatic similarity), may shape embodied resonance with others.” Again, this is the whole point of the study, and it’s the only reason they included a purple hand.
In summary: humanity isn’t biologically doomed to feel less empathy for people with different skin color. If we can feel empathy for someone whose skin is bright purple, it’s not the difference in skin color itself that’s blocking empathy. What we’re seeing is the product of culture: many white people grow up in a culture that teaches them to see those with more melanin as being “Different”, “Other”, or members of an out-group. Since this in-group/out-group effect is where the lack of empathy comes from, we can prevent these changes in the brain just by teaching little kids to include everyone in their in-group, whether or not their skin color is the same.
Also, as a side note, the concept of race is scientifically controversial. Quote from a paper: “The use of biological concepts of race in human genetic research […] is problematic at best and harmful at worst. … Racial classifications do not make sense in terms of genetics.” Even without getting into details, on average there’s more genetic variation between two random members of the same “race” than between two different “races” as a whole. (Obviously race is real in its consequences, but it’s still a social construct).
In other words, being white does not make you racist. Learning and retaining a chosen lack of empathy from other racists and societal bias makes you racist. Racism is learned, and once learned, becomes a choice. A committed choice.
wupacing 