What grassroots groups learned from fighting Trumpcare — and how they’ll apply it to the DACA fight

Through early August, grassroots groups helped face down four versions of health care bills supported by the White House and Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress. Though deeply unpopular with Americans, one of those proposals cleared the House and another came just one vote short of advancing in the Senate. Now, those same groups have six months to pressure Congress to pass legislation aimed at protecting the estimated 800,000 undocumented immigrants whose statuses have been thrown into limbo by the Trump administration’s recent decision to end the program designed to protect them. Read more. 

DACA activists erect, then tear down, confederate statue of Jeff Sessions

On Wednesday, activists with the Latinx-rights group Mijente marched to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., where they first erected, and then tore down a statue of Attorney General Jeff Sessions in confederate garb.“Jeff Sessions is a living monument to the Confederacy,” Mijente director Marisa Franco said in a statement announcing the action.The protest took place in response to the administration’s decision to endthe Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program which protected hundreds of thousands of young undocumented people who arrived in the U.S. as children. The president had Sessions make the official announcement on behalf of the Department of Justice. Read more.

Will adding more women to Border Patrol help the agency shed its reputation for violence?

• In April, Carla Provost — who’d been sworn in as deputy chief of U.S. Border Patrol just five months earlier — became the agency’s acting chief, making her the first woman ever to hold the position.
  
• At an event Tuesday honoring the 42nd anniversary of women joining the agency, Provost had a message for the women in attendance: There is no better time to be a woman on the force, but there are still far too few of them.
  
• “We have to do a better job,” she said, according to the New York Times.
  
• The Times reported that women only hold 939 of Border Patrol’s 18,276 agent positions, accounting for just 5% of the agency. But for those who worry about Border Patrol’s lengthy history of allegations of excessive force and sexual violence, diversity in the agency isn’t exactly a top concern.
  
• “Integrating women into this organization doesn’t change the fact that its policies negatively impact the lives of women across the world. It simply means women will participate in that process,” Kim Tran, the executive publisher at Third Woman Press: Queer and Feminist of Color Publishing, told Mic via email Friday. “That’s the limit of reforming a body with this specific goal.” Read more. (7/29/17, 11:38 AM)
  

Without immigrants, the ice cream cone would not exist

• This summer, as your ice cream (likely vanilla if you’re like the rest of America) drips down the sides of your preferred cone, take a moment and thank the brilliant innovators who brought you this incredible edible creation more than a century ago.
  
• Peggy Armstrong, vice president of communications for the International Dairy Foods Association, explained in an interview that there are two distinct men of honor in the annals of American ice cream cone history. The first is an Italian immigrant named Italo Marchiony.
  
• “Marchiony came to America in the late 1800s,” Armstrong said. “He invented the ice cream cone in New York City and was granted the first patent in December of 1903. So he gets credit for the first.”
  
• His cone, Armstrong said, is more or less the flat cake cone served at ice cream shops today. However, there was another man, Syrian immigrant Ernest A. Hamwi, who accidentally introduced his waffle cone creation at around the same time. Read more (7/12/17)
  

Officials announce immigration “amnesty” for Grenfell fire survivors

• On Wednesday, the U.K. government announced it will waive immigration rules for all foreign nationals directly impacted by the Grenfell Tower fire in London for the next 12 months, NPR reported.
  
• The 12-month suspension means the Home Office will not conduct checks on residents of Grenfell Tower and Grenfell Walk, the Guardian explained. It will also not check the status of anyone coming forward to provide information to authorities.
  
• Immigration minister Brandon Lewis reportedly told MPs the suspension of immigration rules was put in place to protect those who were too afraid to speak with authorities due to their unresolved immigration status, the Guardian noted. Read more (7/6/17)
  

Anti-immigration Kate’s Law, which just passed in the House, is based in myth

• On Thursday, the House passed two new anti-immigrant bills: Kate’s Law and the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act.
• Both bills are ostensibly aimed at curbing violent crimes committed by undocumented people living in the United States. 
• The former bill is named for Kate Steinle, a San Francisco woman who was allegedly murdered in 2015 by an undocumented immigrant with multiple felony convictions.
  
• But immigration and civil liberties advocates say the bills are nothing more than an attempt to crack down on all 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.
  
• Here are three major reasons why the two bills are based on specious claims about the undocumented community and aren’t likely to do much about preventing violent crime.
  
• Immigrants don’t commit more crimes than the general population
• The bills aren’t targeted at people with violent criminal convictions 
  
• ICE already prioritizes violent criminals, and has for some time 
• Read more (6/29/17 5:45 PM)

Trump gets standing ovation for promising to pass a law already on the books

• President Donald Trump promised supporters at a campaign rally in Iowa Wednesday night that he would “very shortly” pass a law that would ban immigrants from receiving welfare benefits for “at least five years.”
  
• The problem? That’s already the law.
  
• “Most qualified aliens entering the country on or after enactment are banned from receiving Federal means-tested public benefits for a period of five years beginning on the date of the alien’s entry with a qualified alien status,” according to rules for receiving benefits such as Medicaid, coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — better known as food stamps.
  
• That law has been on the books for more than 20 years, applying to immigrants who entered the United States after Aug. 22, 1996. Read more. (6/22/17, 9:21 AM)
  

Immigrant labor is more important now than ever

• On Monday, tens of thousands were expected to walk out of their jobs and take to the streets for a national Day Without Immigrants strike. 
• The strike was predicted by organizers to be the largest single-day labor strike in over a decade.
  
• The message of Monday’s protest was simple: Immigrants power the U.S. economy, and America needs them now more than ever. Experts couldn’t agree more.
  
• “All net job growth is coming from new businesses, and native-born Americans are becoming less entrepreneurial while new immigrants are picking up the slack,” Jeremy Robbins, executive director for New American Economy, a bipartisan organization devoted to highlighting the economic benefits of immigration reform, said in an interview. 
• “Last year, even though immigrants were 13% of the population, they started 20% of new businesses, and that’s a huge thing.”
  
• According to Robbins, new businesses created by immigrants are key to net job growth in America, which ends up benefiting native-born Americans economic prospects. Read more (5/1/17)

Thousands of immigrants who joined the military are struggling to get US citizenship

• New screening measures for immigrants who wish to gain U.S. citizenship have delayed thousands of enlisted soldiers, the New York Times reported Saturday, with at least 4,300 Army enlistees alone finding themselves ensnared in lengthy waits for background checks which leave them unable to enter basic training or deploy overseas.
  
• The stricter vetting procedures are not the invention of President Donald Trump, but began in the “waning months” of former President Barack Obama’s administration. 
  
• According to the Times report, the affected personnel must remain on U.S. military bases until the reviews are completed — and about 1,500 Army personnel had been waiting so long that their legal status had expired by November. Read more. (4/30/2017 1:25 PM)
  

Undocumented activists announce plans for the biggest workers strike in over a decade

• A coalition of immigrants’ rights groups, workers organizations and labor unions just announced their plans for the biggest single day strike in over ten years. The strike, planned for May 1 — a historically significant day for labor organizing — is an attempt to highlight the importance of labor from immigrants and working class people of color in the United States economy.Organizers from Movimiento Cosecha, an immigrant rights activist group told Mic more than 400,000 workers have committed to the strike and they’re expecting heavy turnout in states like California, where tens of thousands of workers from the SEIU United Service Workers West have pledged to join the strike. 
  

• They’re also encouraging allies across the country to strike in solidarity with immigrant workers. Read more. (4/3/2017 4:30 PM)

Sessions blames sanctuary cities for assaults, rapes and “countless” murders, threatens to pull funding

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a surprise visit to the White House on Monday to threaten to pull billions of dollars of grant funding from so-called “sanctuary cities” who refuse to turn over undocumented immigrants to federal immigration officials for deportation.
  
• Sessions rattled off a list of heinous crimes he said were committed by undocumented immigrants, and said if it weren’t for sanctuary cities — that choose not to detain undocumented immigrants based solely on their undocumented status — these crimes wouldn’t have taken place. Read more (3/27/17 2:48 PM)

Chamroeun Phan grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, by all measures, isn’t a menacing guy. At 34, he’s slight of build, a brown-skinned Cambodian-American who wears a long black ponytail, rocks Milwaukee Brewers baseball caps, and has an affinity for flyfishing in the summer. 

The one big blemish on Phan’s record is the night in 2009, when he broke three windows at a bar that he often went to play poker with his then-fiancé and six older brothers and sisters. Even the bar’s owner said that he was a “great person” but had “a little too much to drink.” Still, Phan was charged with felony first-degree damage. He spent 40 days in jail, and then moved on.

But, seven years later on Aug. 28, 2016, Phan was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Read more. (3/19/2017 12:30 PM)

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny took a stand for immigrants while speaking at the White House for St. Patrick’s Day — right in front of Trump.

Detained immigrants were served rancid meat in one of California’s wealthiest counties

• This week in disgustingly inhumane happenings across the country:  A detention facility in Orange County, California, has been serving expired deli meat to hundreds of immigrants, the Los Angeles Times reported.
  
• An internal report published on Wednesday revealed the details of the horrific conditions. During a surprise inspection last October, inspectors found that immigrants were being served “slimy” lunch meat that they had to wash off before eating, the Times said. 
  
• The report also revealed the detention center had moldy showers, another significant health risk.
  
• This all went down at the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange and the James A. Musick facility in Irvine. Read more (3/10/17 11:56 AM)

In light of Donald Trump’s revised executive order on immigration Monday, it’s more important than ever that we remember this.