Thursday, December 30, 2010

Ever Wonder What Happens to Deportees Once They Are Removed From the U.S.?

Interesting story published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Newspaper about a once vacant hotel in Mexicali that has been turned into a way station for Mexican Deportees arriving in Mexico.

The story is called Deportation Hotel, written by David Bacon who is also the author of Illegal People — How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) and Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006).


Last year, almost 400,000 people were deported from the United States. That's the largest wave of deportations in U.S. history, even larger than the notorious Operation Wetback of the 1950s, or the mass deportations during the Great Depression.

Often the Border Patrol empties buses of deportees at the border gates of cities like Mexicali in the middle of the night, pushing people through at a time when nothing is open and no services are available to provide them with food or shelter. Most deportees are young people. They had no money in their pockets coming to the United States, and have nothing when they return to Mexico.


In Mexicali, a group of deportees and migrant rights activists have taken over an old abandoned hotel, formerly the Hotel Centenario (or Hundred Year Hotel). They've renamed it the Hotel Migrante, or the Migrant Hotel. Just a block from the border crossing, it gives people deported from the United States a place to sleep and food to eat for a few days before they go home or try to cross the border again. The government gives it nothing. Border Angels, the U.S.-based immigrant rights group, provides what little support the hotel gets. A cooperative of deportees cooks the food and works on fixing the building.

During the winter, about 50 or 60 people live in the hotel at any given time, while five or six more knock on its doors every night. Last summer, at the peak of the season when people try to cross the border looking for work, the number of deportees seeking shelter at the hotel rose to more than 300. "A lot of people get hurt trying to walk through the mountains around Mexicali," says Benjamin Campista, a cooperative member. "It's very cold there now, and when they get caught and deported, many are just wearing a T-shirt and tennis shoes. Some get sick — those we take to the hospital. The rest stay here a few days until their family can send them money to get home, or until they decide to try to cross again."

Border Angels and the hotel collective agreed to pay the landlord 11,000 pesos a month in rent (about $900), but they're already six months behind. Every day hotel residents go out to the long lines of people waiting to cross through the garita (the legal border crossing). They ask for money to support the hotel, and each resident gets to keep half of what he or she is given. The other half goes mostly for food for the evening meal. Deportees have plenty of time to explain their situation to people standing in line, since on a recent afternoon the wait to get through the garita was two hours.



Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Two-Year Foreign Residency Requirement on a J Waiver

Our office just took on a case involving an alien from Mali - came to the US on a J visa as a Fulbright Scholar. He married a USC and had his I-612 hardship waiver petition denied by the State Department.

I've been researching the current political situation in Mali and the Al-Qaeda insurrection in the north of the country, in and around Timbuktu. This is a hot spot of violence and both the US and UK have imposed travel bans to that country.

I'm cautiously optimistic that we can help this fellow, in spite of the prohibition imposed by the State Department of granting waivers for someone who has received financial support from the US government. We should have the waiver package ready to file in the next 30-45 days.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Almost Half of all Graduate Students in the Sciences in the U.S. are now Foreigners

I was reading about the eminent decline of the American Empire and found this quote very prescient about our current economic malaise.

Economic Decline: Present Situation







From Alfred W. McCoy: Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

ICE Seizes Domain Names of Alleged Copyright Infringers



The latest moves were disclosed earlier by online publications that include TorrentFreak, which on Thursday reported that ICE agents had raided facilities operated by a file-sharing site called RapGodFathers that is dedicated to rap and hip-hop music. Other music-related sites affected include Torrent-Finder, one of many sites that focuses on files distributed through a technology pioneered by BitTorrent Inc.

See the takedown placeholder image ICE put up on one of the seized domains.