Articles

7/4/19, Vox: Reminder: Trump doesn’t need to keep migrants in detention camps

7/3/19, The Atlantic: What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse

“At Ursula, traumatized children with untreated illnesses sat before her. She probed, pressed, and listened. She took notes; she entered their data into a spreadsheet; she compartmentalized. She thought about a social event she’d promised to attend at 6 o’clock.

At 5:53, the guard with the surgical mask brought in the 3-year-old Sevier had requested to see, holding her by the armpits, like a puppy. Thin and subdued, the girl was crying but didn’t turn away. “Underweight, fearful child in no acute distress,” Sevier wrote. “Only concern is severe trauma being suffered from being removed from primary caregiver.”
After the exam, the child lingered, and Sevier offered to hold her. She climbed into the doctor’s lap and fell asleep in less than a minute. The squalor, the lighting, the agents, and the event that evening fell away from Sevier’s consciousness. As if in rebellion against her careful training, her mind shut down, she told me. And for what seemed like an eternity, she sat in vacant silence with the child.”

7/3/19, The Nation: The US Is Making a Mockery of Its Asylum Obligations

7/3/19, Vox: After removing a citizenship question on the 2020 census, the DOJ is trying to put it back on — at Trump’s request

7/2/19, NPR: Trump Administration Hits Some Immigrants In U.S. Illegally With Fines Up To $500,000

7/2/19, ABC News: Lawmakers demand change after scrutinizing conditions at immigrant detention centers

7/2/19, The Atlantic: ‘Nothing Prepares You for the Inhumanity of It’

7/2/19, New York Times: Squalid Conditions at Border Detention Centers, Government Report Finds

7/1/19, The Nation: Trump Is Dumping Asylum Seekers on American Streets—but Solidarity Activists Are Fighting Back

“Within days of the surge in DHS drop-offs, and to the fury of an array of local right-wing militias and self-proclaimed Patriot groups, a huge range of community organizations—many of them faith-based—swung into action to rescue the destitute asylum seekers. Churches were opened up to provide orientation sessions, health checkups, meals, and transportation to the immigrants’ sponsor families around the country. Local residents offered spare bedrooms to provide a night or two of accommodation before the migrants continued on their way. Volunteer doctors and nurses tended to the sick. Grandmothers heeded the call to cook hot meals for people who often had eaten no more than bologna sandwiches and ramen noodles for days on end while in detention.”

7/1/19, CBS News: “David vs. Goliath”: Lawyers struggle to help asylum seekers sent back to Mexico

7/1/19, Immigration Impact: More Women and U.S. Citizens Impacted by Immigration Enforcement Actions

6/30/19, NPR: Under Siege And Largely Secret: Businesses That Serve Immigration Detention

6/30/19, CBS Baltimore: CASA Trains Bystanders How To Help Undocumented Immigrants After President Trump Says ICE Will Start ‘Big Deportations’

6/29/19, The Wichita Eagle: ‘It’s a dream come true.’ Wichita families move into new Habitat for Humanity homes

6/28/19, The New Yorker: What Would an Effective, Humane Border Policy Look Like? (19:27 podcast)

6/28/19, The Guardian: Britain’s disappeared: how refugees get stuck in indefinite detention

“So, I asked him, why did he want me, or anyone else, to tell his story? Wouldn’t it be more powerful coming directly from him? His response was that he needed someone else to hear, a person outside the immediate experience, to acknowledge and record what happened to him and to those whose sufferings he saw and shared. He wanted me to be his witness, not because his narrative required verification, but because of the fact of hearing itself; because it signifies that in a world that so often seeks to deny and disbelieve such accounts, his story has been absorbed by a listening heart.

We talked together for hours and, as I noted down what he told me, fearful of making mistakes, I became a partner in testament to the ongoing reality of cruelty and suffering. This is an obligation to which I am deeply committed – my own parents were both refugees from Nazism at the age of 16.”

6/27/19, ENS: Political tensions in Washington over immigration policy fuel Episcopal advocacy, outreach

6/27/19, Buzzfeed: Kids Describe In Their Own Words The Dire Conditions Inside A Border Detention Center

6/26/19, Sojourners: Prisons Weren’t Built for Children. Here’s What We Can Do.

6/26/19, Bloomberg: Amsterdam’s Hire-a-Refugee Program Takes On Tight Labor Market

Opinion

7/1/19, The Guardian: I fled Nazi Germany. I hope the US doesn’t turn its back on refugees

6/30/19, The Hill: As a nation we must honor the humanity and basic needs of migrants

Publications

June 2019, Forced Migration Review: The Ethics Issue

We each live according to our own personal code of ethics but what moral principles guide our work? The 19 feature theme articles in this issue debate many of the ethical questions that confront us in programming, research, safeguarding and volunteering, and in our use of data, new technologies, messaging and images. Prepare to be enlightened, unsettled and challenged.