Civil & Human Rights

UPDATE: Guatemalan Children Get Six-Month Reprieve on Deportation

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Yesterday, I juxtaposed three immigration stories in my post— the sad news about the murder of 5-10 Honduran refugee children that the US deported recently, the plight of a young Guatemalan mother and her three children who crossed the border alone and are facing deportation, and the callous reaction to the child refugee crisis by … Read more

Guest post: Put Your Muzzle Where Your Mouth Is

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Put Your Muzzle Where Your Mouth Is

By Jeremy M. Helfgot

To America’s staunch supporters of gun rights:

Over the past several years, we’ve engaged in an ongoing dialogue regarding the interpretation and merits of the Second Amendment, and how it is currently applied.

And over and over, you have collectively expressed the same repeated argument: We need to have our firearms to protect ourselves in case the government ever becomes tyrannical and turns on us, creating a police state against which we must defend ourselves and our fellow citizens.

Nonsense.

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Disgraceful: Some Deported Refugee Children Already Dead

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Young Guatamalan children who were reunited with their mother in Cincinnati could face deportation. (Photo: The Enquirer)
Young Guatemalan children, who were reunited with their mother in Cincinnati, could face deportation. How can we sentence them to death? (Photo: The Enquirer)

Thousands of refugee children have been fleeing violence and poverty in Central America for almost a year now. Until all Hell broke loose in Ferguson, Missouri last week, the refugee children had the national limelight. (We are on to the next shiny thing.)

Two heart-wrenching stories about the refugee children were released today. First, Think Progress released a story stating that 5-10 of the recently deported children have already been murdered.

Second, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that group of four young cousins would be facing an immigration judge in Cleveland today and could likely deported– despite having been reunited with family members in the US (pictured above).

Look at the faces of these children. How can we send them back to gang violence and death? Have we become a country of greedy, self-centered bigots? Probably, yes.

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Sorry, Martha McSally, “feminist Republican” IS an oxymoron

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Roll Call‘s Shira T. Center is covering Arizona’s tight CD2 race and sees a formidable candidate in Martha McSally:

Operatives couldn’t make up a better candidate résumé if they tried: retired Air Force Colonel, first in her class at the U.S. Air War College, the first female fighter pilot in combat who flies the very plane — an A-10 Warthog — that’s economically essential to the 2nd District.

At a time when Republicans wrangle with messaging to female voters, this 48-year-old’s spunk and articulate bite is made for television — and unlike anything the House GOP Conference has seen in a while…

…McSally doesn’t talk like the average congressional candidate, instead dropping phrases like “awesome,” “dorked up,” and “bad-ass airplane” before crowds and in conversations. During a live appearance on Fox News Channel in February 2012, she said she wanted to kick former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., “in the jimmy” for his position on women serving in combat…

…“I consider myself a feminist Republican, and that’s not an oxymoron,” McSally tells CQ Roll Call in an interview over a vegetarian burrito slightly smaller than a bowling pin.

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Ferguson, Missouri

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1106-GQ-PF09.01Legendary basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a must-read opinion at TIME magazine that offers a thoughtful perspective on what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri under the provocative headline: The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race:

Will the recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First Century?

The answer can be found in May of 1970.

You probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting, 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

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