With a handful of legislators finally beginning to tackle the broken U.S. immigration system, immigration reform is back on the front page in the United States for the first time this decade. But it has never been off the radar for immigrant groups, who have witnessed first-hand the toll that indiscriminate deportation, indefinite detention, and ongoing discrimination have taken on our communities.
As I looked onto the tens of thousands of people proudly waving American flags at April’s immigration rally in Washington, D.C., I couldn’t help but think of my immigrant parents. Driven by a lack of economic opportunity and a desire for a brighter future, they escaped to the United States in their late teens. They were able to become citizens through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which included Ronald Reagan’s so-called “amnesty.”
The State Department’s official rationale is to encouraging “further political reforms.”
Army hard-liners in Burma are resisting President Thein Sein’s opening to the West.
The mainstream American news media has shifted its attention from the criminal act itself to the ethnicity and the religion of the suspects.
Set amidst the cityscape of Kampala and the rolling hills of Ugandan countryside, the film God Loves Uganda, produced by Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, takes an extraordinary look at the influence of conservative American evangelicals on Ugandan society.
The Germans used the word instandbesetzen — a combination of renovating and occupying — for squatting.
On day 20 of testimony in the genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt last Thursday, Ríos Montt’s defense team walked out of the courtroom, proclaiming it will not be party to an illegal trial. Hours later, a judge declared the genocide trail annulled.
This once religiously conservative country has set an example for progressive social reform and the struggle for human equality.
In a week of remarkable events and reversals in Guatemala, the genocide trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt came to an abrupt halt on April 18 as a judge ruled all proceedings to date invalid. The witnesses who testified for the prosecution—dozens of survivors of mass rape and massacres—would have to testify again if the trial were to proceed. Meanwhile, death squads are again operating in Guatemala, eliminating indigenous leaders, union leaders, women’s rights activists, and others challenging the status quo and asserting their rights.