RE: Report on denial of right to asylum by border agents
Christine Ho
Dear Joe,
Finally found a few minutes to read your important policy report. It identifies the life and death issues at stake superbly. Have you circulated it among your legal colleagues, such as your friend from ACLU in New Mexico?
I think legal action is required to put an end to these life threatening policies of the Trump administration. CBP (border) agents and ICE are violating both U.S. law and international law by denying asylum seekers their legal right to claim asylum. They should be sued by the ACLU. Can you bring this to the attention of the ACLU?
Christine
From: Heyman, Josiah M [mailto:jmhe...@utep.edu]
Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2018 2:54 PM
To: Neil Hann – SfAA; Ervin, Alexander
Cc: Rosina Hassoun; Donald Stull; Christine Ho; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric; James Loucky; Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu); Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu); Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu)
Subject: Re: Immediate need for anthropologists with language skills
I've absented myself previously from the discussion. I actually was working intensely on a public policy document about why it is wrong to block asylum seekers at the Mexican land border ports of entry:
http://cmsny.org/publications/heyman-slack-asylum-poe/ . Now, it appears that the next administration move is mass family detention (apparently on military bases). It may be blocked in the courts but we cannot assume that, and that may take a while. What I am bringing forward here is the idea of some people working on a policy statement about the harms brought about by mass detention. There may be people in AAA and in other scholarly fields who should be recruited; I can think of some.
Joe
From: Neil Hann – SfAA <ne...@sfaa.net>
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 3:21 PM
To: Ervin, Alexander
Cc: Rosina Hassoun; Donald Stull; Christine Ho; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric; James Loucky; Heyman, Josiah M; Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu); Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu); Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu)
Subject: Re: Immediate need for anthropologists with language skills
Hi All,
I read all three articles and is it not clear to me where I would direct people to volunteer. If someone can provide me with the specific contact information, I would be happy to send a notice to the SfAA membership. — Neil
On Jun 29, 2018, at 3:56 PM, Ervin, Alexander <ame...@mail.usask.ca> wrote:
Neil Hann could send it to the whole membership
From: Rosina Hassoun <rhas...@SVSU.edu>
Sent: June 29, 2018 1:55:28 PM
To: Stull, Don; Ervin, Alexander; Neil Hann – SfAA
Cc: Christine Ho; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric; James Loucky; Heyman, Josiah M (jmhe...@utep.edu); Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu); Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu); Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu)
Subject: Re: Immediate need for anthropologists with language skills
Dear Don and All:
Here are the news articles. Some lawyers are listed by name in the articles but the migrants and asylum seekers are spread out across the US, making this a difficult situation. Perhaps all we can do is cite the need and hope anthropologists will look locally for people they can help.
| The day Vinicio Nicolas found out whether he would be allowed to stay in the United States, and hopefully far from the gang trying to recruit him in Guatemala, |
| As immigration to the U.S. shifts from Mexico to Central America, more Mayan speakers find themselves stuck without translators in the court system. |
| As word spread that the Trump administration was separating migrant families, urgent calls went out across the internet: Interpreters were needed at the U.S.-Mexico border to help immigrants understand their legal cases. |
Rosina
Rosina Hassoun, PhD
Associate Professor
Anthropologist
Department of Sociology
Saginaw Valley State University
N255 Regional Education Center
University Center, MI 48710
Office: (989) 964-2174
Fax: (989) 964-4564
From: Stull, Don <st...@ku.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 3:39 PM
To: Rosina Hassoun; Ervin, Alexander; Neil Hann – SfAA
Cc: Christine Ho; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric; James Loucky; Heyman, Josiah M (jmhe...@utep.edu); Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu); Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu); Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu)
Subject: RE: Immediate need for anthropologists with language skills
Dear Rosina,
If you have specific locales where such assistance is needed, and contact information, then we can probably put out a general call thru the SfAA e-mail list.
Thank you,
don
From: Rosina Hassoun [mailto:rhas...@SVSU.edu]
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 1:56 PM
To: Ervin, Alexander <ame...@mail.usask.ca>; Stull, Don <st...@ku.edu>
Cc: Christine Ho <christi...@gmail.com>; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric <BAI...@ecu.edu>; James Loucky <James....@wwu.edu>; Heyman, Josiah M (jmhe...@utep.edu) <jmhe...@utep.edu>; Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu) <dau...@email.arizona.edu>; Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu) <jfre...@umd.edu>; Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu) <mpao...@umd.edu>
Subject: Immediate need for anthropologists with language skills
Dear All:
It has come to my attention that immigration lawyers are desperately seeking individuals that speak Mayan and other Latino-region indigenous languages. Perhaps our committee and SFAA could put out a general call for anthropologists with these language skills to contact the ACLU and/or other legal groups aiding child and adult detainees/migrants.
Rosina
Rosina Hassoun, PhD
Associate Professor
Anthropologist
Department of Sociology
Saginaw Valley State University
N255 Regional Education Center
University Center, MI 48710
Office: (989) 964-2174
Fax: (989) 964-4564
From: Ervin, Alexander <ame...@mail.usask.ca>
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 11:28 AM
To: Rosina Hassoun; Stull, Don
Cc: Christine Ho; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric; James Loucky; Heyman, Josiah M (jmhe...@utep.edu); Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu); Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu); Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu)
Subject: Re: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
Take a look at this The Guardian article, An amazing example of the heartbreaking stupidity of Trump's prejudice against Islamic and Near Eastern peoples.
Sandy Ervin
From: Rosina Hassoun <rhas...@SVSU.edu>
Sent: June 24, 2018 10:40 AM
To: Stull, Don
Cc: Christine Ho; hrsja...@googlegroups.com; Bailey, Eric; James Loucky; Heyman, Josiah M (jmhe...@utep.edu); Austin, Diane E - (daustin) (dau...@email.arizona.edu); Judith N. Freidenberg (jfre...@umd.edu); Ervin, Alexander; Michael J. Paolisso (mpao...@umd.edu)
Subject: Re: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
Dear Christine and Colleagues:
I was very glad to see Christine’s interview on DemocracyNow.com. Good job!
The nature of Anthropology does not easily lend itself well to sound bites or tweets. Amy Goodman often provides the context that is missing in other reporting, but she is limited in time and often rushEs guests. I agree that we need to engage with the media. Recently, I was asked to comment on the diversity training that Starbucks conducted after the racial discrimination incident in one of its stores for local media. I find it to be a stressful experience.
In the meantime, I have been working on putting together a workshop that would focus primarily on the Muslim and Chaldean deportations and immigration discrimination. I have already reached out to an experienced immigration lawyer to train on being an expert witness and provide commentary on his extensive experience aiding immigrants. But I need to know that I can get money for travel and hotel for him, a community activist, and immigrant/refugee care worker that I would like to bring to the meeting.
Even though I know that the US has allowed in record low numbers of Muslim refugees so far this year, this issue has been overshadowed by the horrendous internment and separation of children from their Latino asylum-seeking parents. The Trump administration is creating one disaster after another so fast that we can hardly keep up. I rarely post publicly on my Facebook, but I have done so on this issue. I am still in shock that the US has internment camps for babies and toddlers, as well as separate camps for teenagers that harken to the days of the Japanese-American internment camps (I refer specifically to the Tornillo camp). I was born and raised in El Paso, a city that has been a majority/minority city (majority Mexican American) since at least 2010. It is particularly egregious to me that El Paso, including Fort Bliss (about 10 blocks from where I used to live), is being targeted to house asylum seekers and other vulnerable people and to send Trump’s horrendous message that Latinos are not wanted in the US. I encourage Joe Heyman to engage with the press, if he feels comfortable doing so.
In the meantime, should I quickly submit a proposal for a workshop or drop those plans altogether for the next SFAA conference? I understand that resources may be limited and I will abide by what our committee would like to do.
Rosina
Rosina Hassoun, PhD
Associate Professor
255N Gilbertson Hall
Saginaw Valley State University
Sent from my iPad
On Jun 23, 2018, at 12:38 PM, Stull, Don <st...@ku.edu> wrote:
Dear Christine,
It sounds like you were a real hit yesterday—and that your performance sparked some good discussion. It reminded me that I have kept wondering why Joe Heyman has not been interviewed on what is going on in El Paso with the new policy on asylum-seekers. A two-way conversation between anthros and journalists is an excellent idea for a Immigration-Initiative-sponsored workshop or panel at the SfAA annual meeting in Portland. And as you will recall, this is a topic we discussed as a possible workshop for the meeting next year.
Would you like to organize such an event, perhaps in concert with some of the other folks in this e-mail string? I think this is just the kind of thing that the SfAA board is looking for, although I cannot speak for them, and they are the ones who will decide what initiatives to fund. That is why I have copied SfAA President Sandy Ervin on this message.
Congratulations on your interview yesterday, and for getting an important converations going.
Warmest wishes,
don
From: Christine Ho [mailto:christi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2018 11:25 AM
To: hrsja...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Stull, Don <st...@ku.edu>; Bailey, Eric <BAI...@ecu.edu>; James Loucky <James....@wwu.edu>
Subject: RE: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
Thanks, Betsy. Your ideas have been captured in Mary’s excellent suggestion for 2-way workshopping.
Wow! Amazing what can be accomplished when great minds intersect!!!
From: hrsja...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hrsja...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Betsy Taylor
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2018 11:58 AM
To: hrsja...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
LInda
I am all for workshops for anthropologists, but we've had many of them over the years. We can always continue doing that. But, I also feel like we already have a lot of people like Christine or you who are adept at conveying complex realities in compelling stories & succinct phrases. We can always use more workshops for people like you all to pass on your wisdom in this.
But, I was envisioning something more participatory that would bring journalists & anthropologists / applied scientists together to solve a common problem. My idea comes from wonderful conversations I just had with three really excellent journalists in which we felt there is a genuine shared problem we have of communicating slow violence (especially bureaucratic violence) in the present media landscape. They were looking for hooks for stories that explained "Appalachia" -- I was trying to discuss the long term problems of the laws & regulations of coal mining that legitimate extraction. We agreed that it is hard to make the underlying root causes accessible. It's a shared problem we felt for both journalists & scholars. And, we agreed that it would be good to get journalists & scholars together to talk about our shared problems of communicating.
On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 11:32 AM Linda R <lra...@verizon.net> wrote:
Christine simply wasn’t given sufficient time to go from the anecdote to a general conclusion. Amy Goodman is very bad at budgeting time for interviews and is always in a tremendous rush at the end of the program. And I wonder if Goodman or a producer discussed the interview sufficiently with Christine beforehand.
In my opinion it’d be a good idea to suggest that Goodman schedule a longer interview with Christine about her work, giving her time to tell multiple stories.
I’ve given many interviews on TV and radio and produced an NPR program. It’s a severe challenge to condense complex material into 2-3 minutes of Q&A.
I doubt that journalists would appreciate being lectured to by anthropologists. A better idea would be for anthropologists to organize a workshop on self-presentation in the media for themselves.
Linda R
From: hrsja...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hrsja...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Betsy Taylor
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2018 11:02 AM
To: hrsja...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
Dear all -- this problem that Christine identifies is important. Even our best journalists (like Amy Goodman) are pushed to focus on individual, more sensationalized cases & events. It's hard for Anthropology to connect with the media often -- because we tend to look at the contextualized, slow violences of injustice. But, journalists want that distilled into dramatic stories. We are actually good at stories -- so seems like we could do more to get ourselves more prominence in the media. But, over the past 2 months I've talked with good journalists about the slow violence of environmental injustice in Appalachia -- and they kept saying that they needed to find "the hook" to make it newsworthy stories.
I wish we could communicate to Amy Goodman that the kind of frontline, long term work that Christine is doing in the detention system is more important to cover than the sudden events of human rights violations that she tends to carry.
I wonder if the HRSJ could grapple with this problem? I know we've tried in the past -- but maybe some workshops for journalists?
On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 10:04 AM Nathan Jessee <nathan...@temple.edu> wrote:
I agree with the others. Fantastic interview and they should have given you more time. I also see what your saying about them focusing on the one case.
Your point that the detainment of adults is “no picnic” and thus warrants as much concern/outrage as that of children is so important.
Inspired by your work! Thank you for sharing.
Nathan
On Jun 22, 2018, at 9:25 PM, Christine Ho <christi...@gmail.com> wrote:Hi Betsy,
Thanks for your support and feedback! I was led to expect more time to talk but did the best I could in the few seconds that I had. The “friend” is my volunteer who speaks Tigrinya and has been visiting the Eritreans loyally in BTC for more than 1 year. I am blessed to have him.
Clearly, DN was more interested in the sensationalism of the suicide than in information about detention. I was very disappointed and not sure there will be future invitations but remain hopeful that more people will now know about the horrors of detention.
Hope all is well with you and yours, best, Christine
From: hrsja...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hrsja...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Betsy Taylor
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2018 7:50 PM
To: hrsja...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: FW: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
terrific interview, Christine! lucid and powerful description of tragic impacts of incarceration. But, they should give you more time in future!
For those who missed it, here is the link to Christine's segment "ICE Detention is “Soul-Destroying”"
On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 6:56 PM Peter Van Arsdale <petervan...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you, Christine, for your extremely important human rights work in this regard. --Peter Van Arsdale
On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 2:45 PM, Christine Ho <christi...@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Christine Ho [mailto:christi...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2018 12:17 PM
To: Christine Ho
Subject: Democracy Now Interview Friday June 22, 8-9 AM EDT
Dear Friends,
Just in case you might be interested, I will be interviewed on the Democracy Now live show tomorrow (Friday) from 8 – 9 AM EDT about the suicide of the asylum seeker from Eritrea who was detained in South Florida.
If you are not available to watch at that time, you can go to the website, click on “daily show” at the top, then select which show of the week you wish and watch it at your own convenience.
Thanks for your support, Christine
Christine G.T. Ho, Ph.D.,
Applied Anthropologist,
Founding Director,
Friends of Broward Detainees, A Detention Visitation Program,
E-mail: christi...@gmail.com
Phone: 305-933-6196
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” --- Albert Einstein, Refugee, Nobel Laureate
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Josef Korbel School of International Studies
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303-995-9333 (Mobile)
Author of Global Human Rights:
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Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is…
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Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is…
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Betsy Taylor
Executive Director
Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN)
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Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is…
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Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN)
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