- Home
- About Us
- Issues
- Countries
- Rapid Response Network
- Young Adults
- Get Involved
- Calendar
- Donate
- Blog
You are here
Anti-Militarism: News & Updates
Event
March 3, 2020
Friends of Immigrants supports migrants and refugees locally in NE Ohio as well as at the US/Mexico Border. Join us to learn about various initiatives in defense and support of our immigrant sisters and brothers. Meetings are held on the first Tuesday evening of each month in rotation at St. Dominic, Forest Hill, and St. Paschal Baylon.
RRN Letter
February 26, 2020
Brayan Stiven Gonzáles Blanco is a conscientious objector experiencing harsh treatment by the Colombian military. Legal procedures were not followed in the way that Brayan Stiven Gonzáles Blanco was recruited in September 2019. After consulting with the Collective Action of Conscientious Objectors (ACOOC), Brayan began the formal process to define himself as a conscientious objector at the beginning of February 2020, exercising his right granted by the Colombian Constitution, which recognizes the Recruitment Act 1861/17. On February 5 he was threatened and constrained by military commanders of the Battalion No. 13: Major Moreno, Captain Vanegas, and Sergeant Tarazona. Captain Vanegas threatened him: “We are going to initiate a court martial because what you are doing is a crime.”
We are urging the government of Colombia to 1-ensure that all forms of pressure on Brayan Stiven Gonzáles Blanco cease; 2-protect the physical and psychological integrity of Brayan Stiven Gonzáles Blanco, in strict accordance with his wishes; and 3-release Brayan Stiven Gonzáles Blanco from military service so that he can continue the process to define his conscientious objector status, according to the law of Colombia
News Article
February 26, 2020
In 2010 Mesa, an on-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent who was at the border in El Paso, Texas, shot Hernández at least twice — once in the face. At the time, the boy, a Mexican national, was on the southern side of the border in Ciudad Juarez. What is in question, and at the core of a legal dispute the U.S. Supreme Court has been trying to resolve for nearly three years, is whether Hernández's parents, who are also Mexican nationals, have a legal standing to sue Mesa for damages in the killing that occurred outside of U.S. territory. On Tuesday the court delivered its decision: The Hernández family cannot sue.
News Article
February 24, 2020
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — A man from Mexico in government custody and awaiting deportation died by apparent suicide in an Ohio prison, U.S. immigration authorities said Friday. David Hernandez Colula, 34, was being held at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown during pending deportation proceedings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. Colula died at a hospital early Thursday after prison staff found him unresponsive in his cell. Colula apparently died by suicide but the case is under investigation, authorities said. Colula was transferred to the Ohio prison following his arrest in Michigan in December for an outstanding warrant.
News Article
February 24, 2020
Professor García Hernández spoke in Houston yesterday at Brazos bookstore, and in his presentation echoed the core demand of his book: End the incarceration of immigrants. García Hernández makes the case that the incarceration of immigrants is not justified by claims for security and protection. That, in fact, the evolution of immigrant prisons over the last 40 years have been driven by the strategic use of nationalist, race-baiting politics coupled with the profit generating subcontracting of enforcement operations. The two features – ideology and resources – intersect in a social structuring of incarceration. The practices that have evolved fly in the face of due process, and contradict existing legal protection. Another person has died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. David Hernandez Colula was from Mexico, and had been in the United States for at least 5 years. The apparent cause of death is self-inflicted strangulation. He died on Thursday, February 20. He was being held at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown.
News Article
February 21, 2020
Good news... WE JUST PAID ELIAS'S BOND!
Friends, family, and fellow members of the movement,
We did it! Elias will be free from immigration detention after 6 months of incarceration. We are proud of our work but even more, we are proud of Elias and his perseverance in the face of vast injustice.
News Article
February 21, 2020
Honduras has been suffered since many year by the effects of corruption. So are getting $300 million robbed every year from the Honduran healthcare system. Also, Honduras is one of the world’s most dangerous places to be an environmental activist or human rights defender. Frontline Defenders rated Honduras third in the world in murders of human rights activists in 2019 and Global Witness named Honduras the deadliest country in the world for environmental activism in 2017. More than 100 small farmers have been killed since 2009 in land disputes in Bajo Aguán, where large-scale palm plantations encroach on land farmed by poor farmers and cooperatives. Activists protesting environmentally damaging projects, like Guapinol community members organizing against a mine polluting their water, are in jail. International financing backs many of the controversial projects. The November 2017 elections in which President Hernández was declared reelected were seen as fraudulent by much of the Honduran public, yet the OAS’s call for new elections was ignored. In the massive protests that followed, at least 23 people were killed, the vast majority allegedly by security forces. Over 60 people were wounded. Two years later, not a single security force member has been convicted for these crimes.
Event
February 20, 2020
Residents of the Cleveland area had their first encounters with Dr. Moya in the fall of 2019 when Temple Israel Ner Tamid synagogue sent a 54’ semi trailer filled with much needed items for children on both sides of the border wall. Putting the concept of “Tikkun Olum” to work, Dr. Moya truly uses her expertise to better the world. Dr. Moya is a on the faculty of Social Work at U of TX-El Paso and is nationally recognized for her research on tuberculosis, stigma, women, HIV AIDS, homelessness and intimate partner violence, and for creating an off campus macro course of practice to serve the homeless. We are honored to welcome her to northeast Ohio. Please join us!
News Article
February 20, 2020
Fr. Donal Godfrey, SJ, associate director for faculty and staff spirituality at USF, explained that the Jesuits had spoken against the kidnapping, torture and murder of civilians, many of them poor, at the hands of El Salvador’s military regime during the country’s civil war. Because the Jesuits spoke up, they were targeted as enemies. “With this memorial, we honor the martyrs in El Salvador, and we reaffirm our Jesuit mission to struggle against injustice and seek the truth,” said Fr. Godfrey.
News Article
February 15, 2020
In February 2020, still waiting as he now passed 950 days in detention, Kevin began thinking that he might just give up and self-deport, even if it meant going back to a place he’d been followed out of by text messages saying if he ever returned he would be killed. This is a story about the ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport a Honduran teenager named Kevin Euceda, who had already been in detention for more than two years. The U.S. government’s anti-trafficking program took the extraordinary step of certifying Kevin as a victim of “severe human trafficking,” finding that he had been “subjected to involuntary servitude by being forced to work for a gang.” The designation gave Kevin the right to all the benefits of a legal refugee, and meant he would be a prime candidate for asylum. [In September 2019, Kevin watched his court proceedings] from a remote detention center. On one side of the judge, he could see his lawyers, ready to argue that he should be freed immediately. Across from them was a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there to argue that Kevin should be deported. And in front of them all, inside a thick folder, was an old report from a shelter for immigrant children that was the reason the long-running matter of Kevin Euceda existed at all: “Youth reports history of physical abuse, neglect, and gang affiliation in country of origin. Unaccompanied child self-disclosed selling drugs. Unaccompanied child reports being part of witnessing torturing and killing, including dismemberment of body parts,” the report said. The person who had signed it: A therapist at a government shelter for immigrant children who had assured Kevin that their sessions would be confidential. Instead, the words Kevin spoke had traveled from the shelter to one federal agency and then another, followed him through three detention centers, been cited in multiple ICE filings arguing for his detention and deportation, and now, in the fall of 2019, were about to be used against him once more.