Tag: trump

Standing in Solidarity with Our Neighbors

People in our community, our Newberg neighbors, are being picked up by immigration enforcement without warrants, detained without charges, and often sent out of state, leaving families and friends in the dark about their whereabouts.

Some call these immigration actions what they are: kidnappings. Many of our city officials seem to shrug, saying little to nothing about the people they’ve been voted to represent. An entire community is living with fear, their lives on hold because of ICE, and Newberg city officials don’t want to address the trauma being perpetuated by rogue immigration enforcement.

This is unacceptable. 

On October 5 and in conjunction with UNIDOS, we are hosting a Pack Newberg City Council event, hoping to call attention to our neighbors’ pain and to our city government’s inaction. We want to stand in solidarity with immigrants who have made Newberg home, and who are being dehumanized by ICE actions–and our local government’s inaction.

If you can participate, please gather in front of city hall before the city council meeting on Monday, October 5, at 5:40 p.m. Each participant in our event will receive a picture of an immigrant who has been harmed by ICE, including the images of 15 Yamhill County residents who have been detained, and 55 people (nationwide) who have died because of ICE activity.

We plan to hold the signs during the city council meeting to humanize a dehumanizing process, putting names and faces to the immigrants impacted by ICE kidnappings. After making statements during public comments at the council meeting, we will march from city hall to the flag pole, where we will hold a vigil for local and national victims of ICE.

Standing in Solidarity with our neighbors will convey to our elected officials that they cannot be silent about the harmful effects of unfettered immigration enforcement. Standing in solidarity with our neighbors will hopefully convey that we are mourning with those immigrants who are themselves grieving the loss of family members to ICE raids, as well as the loss of safety and security.

We hope you will join us in supporting folks who are our neighbors and friends, and who deserve to know that Newberg is a place they can call home.

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Let us know if you are willing to hold a sign! We need 60+ people, and it would help us a lot if you would let us know you are planning to be there and participate. We can even assign you the person’s sign you will carry ahead of the event. Please use this link to indicate your interest: https://forms.gle/C3GFNrujHXrg3yHi6

Databases, Unmarked Vans, and Courthouses: Where This Advocacy Group Says Undocumented Immigrants are Disappearing

“They have masks on their faces. You can’t tell who they are,” said Innovation Law Lab’s (ILL) Communications Manager Victor Romero Hernandez of ICE agents in recent months. “ICE has become a lot more violent and aggressive, and a lot less transparent,” he told me.

Romero Hernandez says detentions used to be much more reliably tracked than they are currently. On the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, a search engine called “The Online Detainee Locator” (ODLS) is displayed. An individual believed to be in ICE custody can be searched on the system using the individual’s Alien Registration Number or alternately, using first name, last name, and country of birth.

On the website, ICE notes that “[f]or security reasons, ODLS does not provide information about transfers that are planned or in progress.” However, “Once a person is transferred and booked into another ICE detention facility, ODLS will be updated with that information.“

According to Romero Hernandez, the information about detainee location that ICE says it provides is not consistently made available. “It used to be that they [ICE] would detain somebody and then they would appear on the ICE identifier,” he said. “Now, not as often.”

Innovation Law Lab is a Portland based immigrant advocacy organization, with “team members in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, Washington, and Mexico,” its website states.

The organization was founded in response to the detention of Central American migrants at covert facilities near Artesia, New Mexico over a decade ago. These were “secret detention facilities in very remote areas,” said Romero Hernandez.

Cell and wifi service were limited or nonexistent in these areas, so Innovation Law Lab “built a software system to support immigration attorneys” where they had previously been hindered in their work for lack of access.

Now, the work of Innovation Law Lab is three-pronged. “[W]e use the law, technology, and organizing to advance the immigration movement,” Romero Hernandez said.

Lately, he says, everyone’s workload at ILL has “gotten a lot heavier.” With an increase in detentions, he says their attorneys have had to respond very quickly to a lot of cases. Meanwhile, those working in advocacy for the organization have been focused on lobbying to maintain free and low-cost immigration services in Oregon through the Equity Corps of Oregon.

“As a formerly undocumented person, I can speak to how hard it is to stay on top of rent and food on top of trying to pay attorneys and legal experts,” Romero Hernandez said.

In recent months, immigration proceedings at courthouses have attracted ICE agents and resulted in detentions, he told me. When ICE teams detain individuals they often “don’t have identification,” he stated.

“We think about these as kidnappings,” Romero Hernandez continued. “It’s […] like kidnapping, where people are snatched off the streets in unmarked vans.”

*Shared with permission from a Yamhill county Substack writer

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