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On his first day in office President Joe Biden gave Christian Martinez, and 650,000 others like him living in the U.S., a little space to breathe.

Through an executive order, the newly inaugurated president directed the Department of Homeland Security to preserve and fortify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The order solidified the reversal of a much challenged decision by the Trump administration to attempt to end the program in 2017.

Biden has since announced plans for more sweeping immigration reform policies that could see a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million people living without legal status in the U.S.

WASHINGTON>> It's taken only days for Democrats gauging how far President Joe Biden's bold immigration proposal can go in Congress to ac

Its a new ray of hope for the 20-year-old Martinez, who is among 5,250 other young people in Michigan shielded from deportation and allowed to legally work under the DACA program, according to the American Immigration Council. He and his parents, who moved from Mexico when he was three, live in Waterford with his two younger siblings, who were born in the U.S.

Throughout the Trump administration we had so many worries. I was constantly thinking about what I could do to take care of my siblings if my parents had been taken away, Martinez said. In the neighborhood where I live, week after week, we would see heads of families taken away and I always gave God thanks that my dad wasnt one of them.

Martinez was in his last year of high school in the Waterford School District when Trump first tried to overturn the program. He was just months away from going through his first renewal process to keep his status active. At the time, he worried it would be his last.

Christian Martinez was just three-years-old when he came to the United States.

While the federal government did continue to accept renewals for the DACA program, new applications were halted. The first new applications to be approved in several years were announced in early January, according to the Associated Press. A total of 171 new applications were approved from Nov. 14 to the end of 2020. More than 2,700 people applied.

NEW YORK>> The Trump administration must accept new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects so

Yumana Dubaisi, an immigration attorney and director of the Immigration Legal Department at the International Institute of Metropolitan Detroit, said her organization has seen a wave of new potential DACA applicants in recent weeks. The institute offers low cost and free immigration services to the southeast Michigan region.

People who didnt have the chance to apply before can apply now and thats a big win, Dubaisi said. People in these communities have lived in fear of the unknown and changed the way they lived their lives because of it. Theres constant fear of family separation, from being caught up in anything, like a misdemeanor.

The Trump administrations attempt to close down DACA was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal judges over the course of three years. Ultimately, the nations highest court ruled that the program wasnt ended properly followed by a federal judges ruling to completely restore the program in December 2020. That same month however, new legal challenges to DACA appeared in a federal court in Texas as nine states asked to end the program claiming it was unconstitutional. There was no immediate ruling for the case.

PHOENIX (AP) The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the program that protects immigrants who were brought to the country as children and allows t

Were hoping that this immigration reform will pass, and if its approved by Congress, the chances of these lawsuits and the potential of more lawsuits will be minimized to nonexistent, Dubaisi said. Were hoping that congress will take care of these 11 million people. I cannot begin to express the fear many of these kids have had, of being deported, of being separated from their families.

Dubaisi calls the potential new immigration reforms aimed at providing citizenship as long overdue. For Martinez, that sentiment can be felt in the apprehension underneath the new hope of DACAs comeback.

Were excited about DACA, but were anxious too. When I see my friends that are natural citizens can come and go wherever they want, I feel like theres a barrier between us, Martinez said. My mom really wants to be able to go to the grocery store or appointments by herself, instead of me having to leave work to drive her.

Christian Martinez, 20 of Waterford, poses for a photo in Clarkston after working his construction job.

More than anything else, he said, Martinez just wants the opportunity to actually visit the country hes been afraid he and his family could be deported to. Hes lost family in Mexico to the coronavirus pandemic, as have his other DACA recipient friends. His siblings have never crossed the border. They have an older brother, 24, who theyve never met and who Martinez hasnt seen in 16 years.

All of my DACA friends are excited, and happy. Were all really hoping well be able to travel soon, to at least see our family members tombstones, Martinez said.

The cities of Farmington Hills and Troy are opening warming centers to assist the public as temperatures will hover around 0 degrees, with the

Less than two months into the mass COVID-19 vaccination program, there are positive signs of getting more shots into more arms in Oakland Coun

The M1 Concourse motorsports club and raceway in Pontiac is preparing to bring on a new chief executive officer this spring.

Federal authorities are warning of scam artists using a ploy that claims to involve U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officers.

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With hope and apprehension, DACAs Dreamers look to new era of immigration policy - The Oakland Press

Last updated on February 9, 2021, at 02:40 pm

Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks introduced three immigration bills in the 117th Congress: the No Social Security for Illegal Aliens Act of 2021, the Arrest Statistics Reporting Act and the American Jobs First Act of 2021.

The No Social Security for Illegal Aliens Act would prohibit the distribution of Social Security benefits to undocumented immigrants who perform unauthorized work in the United States. Brookss office, in a press release, said that demonstrating their contempt for American law, undocumented immigrants often use fraudulent Social Security numbers to flout law that forbids undocumented immigrants from receiving Social Security payments.

About the No Social Security for Illegal Aliens Act, Brooks said:

The prospect of free government services and benefits is a giant magnet for illegal aliens. Congress should do absolutely everything in our power to eliminate that giant magnet. Thats why Ive reintroduced the No Social Security for Illegal Aliens Act. It would prohibit the distribution of Social Security benefits to illegal aliens who perform unauthorized work in the United States. The bottom line is, NO illegal alien should be rewarded with government benefits for breaking Americas laws.

The Arrest Statistics Reporting Act does two things. It would require that arrest reports already sent to the FBI by state and local governments include the best-known immigration status of the arrestee. Second, it would require the federal government to publish crime data related to undocumented immigrants in the FBIs annual crime reports. Brookss office said that this data will better inform the public and lawmakers about illegal alien crime and help lawmakers make better decisions needed to protect American lives.

About the Arrest Statistics Reporting Act, Brooks said:

Americas policymakers face an information gap that undermines our ability to make immigration policy decisions that protect American lives from the threat posed by illegal alien crime. Policymakers know that, in FY 2020, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted 103,603 administrative arrests. Those arrested had criminal histories including more than 1,800 homicide-related offenses, 1,600 kidnappings, 3,800 robberies, 37,000 assaults, and 10,000 sex crimes. But, federal crime data alone is insufficient. Many of the most heinous crimes, such as murder, rape, violent assaults, and the like, are prosecuted at the city, county and state level. Currently, Congress does not have access to city, county and state-level data on crimes committed by lawful immigrants or illegal aliens.

The American Jobs First Act overhauls the H-1B visa program that, according to Brooks, too often harms American workers. The American Jobs First Act is aimed directly at combatting American worker replacement like the Tennessee Valley Authority attempted last summer. As was widely reported, TVA planned to layoff at least 120 of its American technology workers with the intention of replacing them with lower-cost foreign H-1B guest workers.

The American Jobs First Act:

About the American Jobs First Act, Brooks said:

My American Jobs First Act will bring much needed reform and oversight to the H-1B visa program to ensure that U.S. workers are no longer disadvantaged in their own country. To end the allure of cheap foreign labor, the bill will require employers to pay any H-1B workers a minimum amount of $110,000. And to stop American worker replacement, my bill will require companies seeking H-1B labor to not have fired any American workers for at least two years without just cause and commit to not firing any workers without just cause for two years after. Commonsense H-1B reform measures like these, alongside ending the unfair Optional Practical Training (OPT) and diversity visa lottery programs, all serve to promote American interests when it comes to immigration.

Brooks was praised by groups seeking legislation to crack down on illegal immigration.

Congressman Brooks has established himself as a leader in Congress in fighting to end illegal immigration and to create a legal immigration system that better serves the interest of American workers, said Chris Chmielenski, the deputy director of NumbersUSA. With these bills, its clear that Congressman Brooks plans to take this fight to the 117th Congress.

RJ Hauman, the government relations director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said: Congressman Mo Brooks is once again leading the charge on protecting American workers and families at a critical time. These three pieces of legislation check a few of the most important boxes on immigration policy proper illegal alien crime data, no taxpayer benefits for illegal aliens, and finally reforming a deeply flawed guest worker program. We applaud him and urge every one of his colleagues to cosponsor.

With Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress as well as the presidency, it will be very difficult for any of these bills to pass. Brooks represents Alabamas 5th Congressional District.

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Brooks introduces three immigration bills - alreporter.com

In his first weeks in office, President Joe Biden has made his administrations approach on immigration policy clear: reviewing or replacing four years of his predecessors hardline approaches.

In less than three weeks in office, Biden has sent to Congress a massive immigration reform bill that would provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, issued executive orders to refortify the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and ordered a review of interior enforcement policies and the controversial Migrant Protection Protocols.

Advocacy groups and immigration attorneys have cheered those early steps, but warn that Bidens overall success could be limited if hes unable to tackle another problem that has been growing for years: the ever-growing case backlog in federal immigration courts. Without addressing the backlog, they say, Biden's mission of achieving a fair and equitable immigration system won't be complete.

The immigration courts and the backlog are not a physical border wall, but it is a paper border wall, said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to track immigration court cases. Its one of the ways to keep people from participating in society in a full and complete way.

As of Jan. 1, there were 1.3 million cases pending before the countrys immigration courts, including about 360,000 asylum cases, according to TRAC data. Thats more than double the 542,411 cases pending when Donald Trump took office in 2017. Texas courts have about 162,000 pending cases, the second-largest total behind Californias 187,000. The backlog includes people from more than 200 countries.

The backlog means that asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants often have to wait years between hearings. In El Paso courts, there was an average wait time of 715 days or just under two years between when a person was given a notice to appear before a judge and the next hearing. And that's a relatively quick turnaround: The average was nearly four and a half years in Dallas courts and 4.8 years in Houston courts, according to the TRAC data.

The backlog grew under Trump despite the former president adding hundreds of immigration judges. But that wasnt enough to contain the tsunami of new cases filed in court under the Trump administration's enforcement-heavy approach, a TRAC report states.

Leaders from both parties, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have supported appointing even more immigration judges. But simply adding more judges misses the point, said Gregory Chen, director of government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Instead, he said judges need more freedom to use their discretion to remove or dismiss cases from their dockets that involve people the federal government doesnt deem a security or flight risk, including thousands of cases that have been pending for years.

There are also 460,000 cases in the current backlog involving immigrants who could qualify for legal status, Chen said.

Just adding more judges doesnt make the system more fair or independent, he said. "[The Department of Justice] is not a judicial body, and so what weve seen happen is the law enforcement and immigration enforcement priorities have interfered with the courts independent operation and ability to be impartial."

There is also growing pressure on Biden to address the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have been placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which sends most asylum seekers back to Mexico as they wait for their asylum hearings in American courts. As of last month, more than 70,400 people had been enrolled in the program.

Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order requiring Department of Homeland Security officials to promptly review and determine whether to terminate or modify the program." Advocates are calling for the outright end to the program, which they say Biden promised on the campaign trail.

Theres nothing to review about a policy that leads to people getting beaten, tortured and kidnapped regularly, as they wait like sitting ducks on the southern border, said Erika Andiola, the chief advocacy officer for Texas-based Refugee and Immigrant Center or Education and Legal Services, or RAICES. Everyone impacted by it over the past two years should be welcomed into our country with open arms.

Because none of Biden's early executive orders mentions the court backlog, Kocher said he hopes Bidens proposed immigration bill addresses it.

Biden has been in office for less than a month, so it is too early to draw conclusions about where the court backlog fits within his priorities, he said. The only thing we know for certain is, these 1.3 million people must be taken into account or the integrity and legitimacy of our immigration system will continue to be undermined and mired in dysfunction.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/04/joe-biden-immigraton-court-backlog/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Read more from the original source:
Biden's Early Immigration Overhaul Has Overlooked One Growing Problem: A Massive Court Backlog - GovExec.com

Russell T Davies could not have known when he made Its A Sin that it would come out during another pandemic one that has elicited an entirely different response. How bittersweet it must be for the survivors of the Aids pandemic to see the care and attention that has been given to cracking Covid.

There are a million reasons Its A Sin is so powerful, and I do not have the word count to go into them all here. It is powerful because it is full of love and it is full of joy, but to me it is powerful because it shows us the true nature of shame, and how deadly it can be. Shame, mostly born out of other peoples ignorance, is what kills. Shame is what essentially leads to the death of one character, a heartbreakingly beautiful boy who is ultimately too scared to find out if he is HIV positive, meaning the disease progresses to Aids.

During his last days, he tells his shocked mother that he is sure he has killed other men, simply by loving them. Later, his friend Jill tells her that so many of the men dying alone in Aids wards believe that, in some small way, they deserve it. That in some small way, this disease is their punishment for not being the child their parents wanted them to be.

Its tempting to see Its A Sin as a very modern period drama, to compartmentalise what happened and tell ourselves that the world has long since moved on. But the shame of Its A Sin is not that far away. While advances in science mean HIV is now an entirely manageable condition, campaigners have faced uphill battles to get preventative drugs, known as PrEP, made available on the NHS. In 2019, almost 700,000 people across the world died from Aids-related illnesses, while 38 million people were living with HIV. And a report published last year by the UN found that the Covidpandemic risks setting back the goal to end the Aids pandemic by at least 10 years. The report estimated that even a six-month disruption in HIV treatment could result in an extra 500,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

We must be careful, too, in believing that the kind of shameful ostracisation gay men faced in the 1980s is a thing of the past. If anything, shame has become mainstream thanks to the advent of social media, and Covid has only cemented its position as a powerful global currency. Shame is the religion that drives the culture wars. Shame is now state-sanctioned, with full-page adverts in national newspapers shaming us into not leaving the house. For many LGBTQ+ people, shame did not magically die with the repeal of Section 28 (a mere 20 years ago). And the trans rights conversation, which now dominates the media, seems powered by shame.

Its A Sin reminds us that shame is a dead end for everyone involved. It gets us nowhere. Its interesting that this show about shame has in itself been shamed, for not telling the story of all the women who died of Aids. But for me, the most powerful character was Jill (interviewed in The Telegraph last month), who shows us how powerful it is to be set free from shame. As Russell T Davies knows, the only way you kill shame is by exposing it to the light. Let this extraordinary drama be a prompt for us all to do just that.

Read more:
Shame drives the culture wars and its powerful legacy still lives on - Telegraph.co.uk

It seems so obvious why Captain (later Major) Sir Thomas Moore mattered. Why should we even ask? He was so decent, raised so much money for charity, served in the war defending India and what was then Burma. And he was so modest. It is really no wonder that he became a national hero.

But there is something more. He stood for a kind of Britishness that resonated with Middle England. First, he linked the war and the coronavirus crisis. Each year on Armistice Day we realise how few survivors there are from those two extraordinary generations who gave their lives for their country. Those wars dominated the lives of British families for more than a century. Nearly 900,000 military dead in World War One. Nearly 400,000 in World War Two, not counting 70,000 civilian dead. In Blake Baileys new biography of Philip Roth, he describes VJ Day. As he celebrated with the other youngsters, writes Bailey, Roths jubilation tempered somewhat by the sight of older people sobbing on benches probably the parents of boys who had been killed, he thought. The war was over and it was a wonderful thing, but not for them. They would have this grief forever.

Hence the shock when young demonstrators desecrated the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill last year. For so many British people, these were disgusting, unforgivable acts. This brings us to the second reason why Tom Moore was regarded as a national hero. Without ever wishing it, he had become part of the culture wars, the growing divide about what kind of country Britain is or should be.

I cant remember any moment in my lifetime when Britishness has been so bitterly contested. Which statues of the past should be torn down? Is Britains past something to be celebrated a story of freedom, tolerance and democracy or is it something to be ashamed of, a dark story of slavery, racism, colonialism? The older you are, the more likely you will see it as the former. The younger you are, the more inclined you will be to see it as the latter. Of course, its not just a generational conflict. If youre black or brown you will wonder why generations of British historians and politicians have been so silent about the legacy of slavery and Empire.

What does any of this have to do with Tom Moore? On Twitter I saw this by @JarelRB just after Moore died: The cult of Captain Tom is a cult of White British Nationalism. I was appalled. No, it isnt, I replied. People wanted to pay their respects to a fine man. Its as simple as that. @JarelRB turns out to be the Reverend Jarel Robinson-Brown, a young black clergyman still in his 20s. He has now deleted his tweet and apologised; the Church is investigating. But what fuelled his anger?

Many want to build a statue in Tom Moores memory. Who would bet against that statue being desecrated in no time? Why? Because some (many?) would share Robinson-Browns anger and see respect for an old army veteran who raised so much money for charity as a cult of White British Nationalism. Too white, too male, too old, too patriotic. This is what we have come to. We shouldnt pretend otherwise.

Is it a coincidence that this response to the death of Sir Thomas Moore took place at the same time as a debate about patriotism in the Labour Party? It is clear that one reason Labour lost so resoundingly in 2019 was not just because Jeremy Corbyn associated with Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites and terrorists, but because there was a sense among many ordinary British people that he preferred the Palestinian flag to the Union Jack, the IRA to British veterans.He didnt know (or care) when the Queen gave her speech on Christmas Day. Sir Keir Starmer knows this cost Labour hugely in the last election and has started to speak about patriotism and the British flag. But then a video from 2005 appeared of Starmer boasting of supporting the abolition of the monarchy. Guido Fawkes commented: It wont go down so well in Bishop Auckland or Ashfield.

This isnt just about one quote. YouGov published a poll about patriotism. It asked people, How patriotic would you say you are? A 61 per cent majority of British people polled said Patriotic. 88 per cent of Conservative voters but only 44 per cent of Labour voters called themselves Patriotic. There was a similar divide between Leavers (81 per cent) and Remainers (54 per cent).

Middle England took Captain Tom to its heart. Rightly so. There is so much to admire and respect. But another England would, I fear, disagree. Much of the political debate over years to come will be over these issues.

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Why Tom Moore mattered: a culture war over the Captain - TheArticle