Stephanie J Silverman

U of T expert on why the 'migrant caravan' should not be demonized

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 16:40:35 +0000

U of T expert on why the 'migrant caravan' should not be demonized

noreen.rasbach Tue, 12/11/2018 - 11:40

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A Honduran migrant converses with U.S border agents on the other side of razor wire on Nov. 25 after agents fired tear gas at migrants pressuring to cross into the U.S. from Tijuana, Mexico (photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP)

Stephanie J Silverman

Topic

Global Lens

Global

Mexico

Trinity College

United States

On American Thanksgiving weekend, United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents gassed children with chemical weapons at the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro, America’s busiest border crossing.

Social and traditional media were awash in disturbing images of family members fleeing tear gas canisters, pepper spray and flash bang grenades, some running without shoes and in diapers.

A low-flying CBP helicopter used the down draft from its rotors to spread the tear gas cloud into a Mexican-side canal where many people were gathered.

President Donald Trump had earlier authorized CBP agents to consider rock-throwing as assault with a firearm. He had been anticipating the arrival at the border of a procession of 5,000 to 7,000 asylum-seekers, all on foot and largely fleeing violence, poverty and drought in Honduras and other Central American countries.

The United States has created a backlog at the border by employing a ticketed system of entries and forcing asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico. “We’re not turning people away,” CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters in October. “We’re asking them to wait.”

Humanitarian crisis

It is not surprising that the mayor of Tijuana has declared a humanitarian crisis and is hoping for more financial support to provide the basic necessities of life to migrants.

Trump, meanwhile, has consistently employed hateful, xenophobic, fear-inducing and fascistic rhetoric when discussing the migrants.

In the leadup to November’s midterm elections, the president referred to asylum-seekers as “predators,” “human shields,” an “insurgency” and “the worst scum of the world.”

This language created a false pretence to deploy 5,200 troops, helicopters and heavy equipment to the border, double the number who are stationed in Syria.

The president recently defended the Thanksgiving tear gassing, claiming that three CBP agents had been “very badly hurt” by rocks and stones thrown by migrants whose “violence is very strong.” However, his account contradicts an earlier statement by McAleenan, and the CBP’s internal assessment, that “the likelihood of violence directed against CBP personnel along the border is minimal.”

California ponders legal action

These horrific tear gas attacks have fuelled moral outrage, as well as a probe into the legality of lobbing chemical weapons over the border, with the state of California debating legal action.

We should question how and why the Trump administration is creating a border spectacle that then purports to justify the militarization of the border against this supposed invasion. The administration is repelling the asylum-seekers by any means necessary, forcing them to remain in squalid conditions and denying them access to their rights.

Using military language, as Trump does repeatedly as commander-in-chief, fuels widespread perceptions of migrants as “invaders.” The language creates the false impression of danger. The group becomes seen as a threat that must be contained and pushed out.

It results in a show of power to citizens that their government is in charge of the immigration and asylum systems, and that they should trust and feel protected by these tough officials.

This rhetoric reinforces an “us versus them” mindset, leading to nationalist feelings and displays that then justify violence to repel foreigners, including women and diapered children.

False associations with disease

There is a long history of falsely associating foreigners with disease, and this is no exception. Fox News has been reporting that the migrants have “health issues” as talking heads warn falsely that the newcomers will conjure up the long-eradicated smallpox and bring it into the United States.

Javier Hernanez, of Tijuana, Mexico, wears a Christmas hat as he looks out over the border wall separating Tijuana from San Diego on Dec. 7. Trump says Congress should provide all the money he wants for his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall, calling illegal immigration a threat to the well-being of every American community' (photo by Gregory Bull/AP)

While it’s certainly a fallacy that diseases respect borders, the use of the border as a “cordon sanitaire” to protect the country is a powerful tool to deploy.

The Trump administration insists on putting forward harmful actions to back up its rhetoric of hate. It’s going to build a $5 billion border wall; it will separate tens of thousands of children from their caregivers, confining them to desert tent cities despite signing an executive order purporting to end the practice; and now attacking men, women and children on the Mexican side of the border with tear gas.

Local activists have long been protesting the efforts to scare citizens about this bogus migration crisis.

It’s time to start listening to these voices, and to react with compassion to asylum-seekers not with violence, hate and militarized language.

Stephanie J Silverman is an adjunct professor and the interim associate director of the Ethics, Society, and Law Program at Trinity College, �ؿ�ζSM.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why the U.S. detainment of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a disgrace: U of T expert

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 17:44:52 +0000

Why the U.S. detainment of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a disgrace: U of T expert

noreen.rasbach Mon, 07/16/2018 - 13:44

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Javier Garrido Martinez holds his four-year-old son during a news conference in New York on July 11. The pair were reunited after being separated for almost two months when authorities stopped them at the U.S. southern border (Photo by Robert Bumsted/AP)

Stephanie J Silverman

Topic

The Donald Trump administration is continuing its “zero tolerance” approach to Central Americans seeking asylum at the southern border of the United States.

Despite no evidence that the approach deters asylum-seekers, the administration is prioritizing the use of immigrant prisons or detention centres in their attack.

As a detention expert, I argue that we must not lose sight of how the administration is steadily expanding its detention arsenal under the cover of massive changes to its immigration and asylum architecture.

The mind boggles at the scale and speed of the rollbacks to accessing asylum, humanitarian protection and residence rights, among them:

Withdrawing “temporary protected status” protections against deportation for 200,000 Salvadorans, plus Haitians, Sudanese and Nicaraguans, living in the United States.
Intervening to undermine asylum protections for women and others fleeing persecution at the hands of non-state individuals, including abusive spouses.
Stepping up prosecutions of unlawful entries across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Turning back asylum-seekers at ports of entry.
Hollowing out protections for children not at immediate risk of human trafficking for sexual, forced labour or other forms of exploitation.
Prosecuting parents who pay agents to bring their children to the U.S.
Prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. without preauthorization.

The most shocking of these recent changes is perhaps the Trump administration’s now-revoked order to deliberately remove children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Again, this action was enabled through expanding the uses – and moral and legal thresholds – of immigration detention.

Long-lasting trauma

How did this work? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents arrested the parents and transferred them to detention centres operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.).

Their approximately 3,000 kids became “unaccompanied minors” in the custody of the already under-resourced Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. This ripping apart and subsequent detention of family members in separate facilities has caused long-lasting trauma and anguish, the depths of which we are only beginning to grasp. Psychologists are flagging the lifelong “toxic stress” that has now infected these children's minds and bodies.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly memorably waved off the outcry and moral culpability for this pointless and needless trauma: The parent-less babies, toddlers, children and youth would “be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.”

The HHS has found the “whatever” for these asylum-seeking children: facilities ranging from foster homes to blacked-out floors of corporate buildings, a disused Walmart, a Texan tent city, “icebox” cages and plans to detain children and families on military bases, among them.

Lidia Karine Souza hugs her son Diogo De Olivera Filho at a news conference in Chicago on June 28. A federal judge ordered the immediate release from detention of the nine-year-old Diogo, who was separated from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border in May (photo by Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

The breadth of the Trump administration’s recent expansion of its detention architecture is stunning: The federal government is operating at least 100 detention sites with or without the local co-operation of municipalities.

Detention has flown under the public radar for too long. Warnings and protests from current and former detainees, civil society and researchers have not been widely heeded.

The U.S. is flouting international and domestic rules on detention. It engages in co-mingling of children and adults in detention and prisons, and won’t reunite all of the “tender age” kids – those under five years old – with their parents outside of detention.

The American immigration detention system must be called what it is: abusive, racist, sexist and haphazardly implemented with a dysfunctional but financially profitable bail system. The system is designed not to administer asylum claims, but to punish and even terrorize people attempting to realize their rights.

Pilot projects show that asylum-seekers with proper legal, social, health and other supports will appear for their court hearings; there is no need to detain them or, as we do in Canada too, shackle them with remotely controlled surveillance tools.

Let us not forget that the Trump administration ended the family case management program, an alternative that would have kept families together, and for less money.

The Trump administration is now working to exploit a legal loophole to keep children and their parents in detention together past the 20-day limit set by the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement. They are asking for “consent” for indefinite detention together and offering deportation to parents as the alternative.

Under cover of massive curtailment of protections extended to asylum-seekers and other migrants, the Trump administration is trying to normalize detention for children and adults alike, a truly reprehensible agenda.

Stephanie J Silverman is an adjunct professor at the �ؿ�ζSM.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why try to deport a man in Canada since childhood? U of T expert looks at the case of Abdoul Abdi

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 15:13:30 +0000

Why try to deport a man in Canada since childhood? U of T expert looks at the case of Abdoul Abdi noreen.rasbach Wed, 03/14/2018 - 11:13

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Abdoul Abdi (right) is seen in this Facebook photo as a child (photo via Facebook)

Amy Nethery

Stephanie J Silverman

Topic

Subheadline

The Conversation with U of T's Stephanie J Silverman and Amy Nethery of Deakin University

Abdoul Kadir Abdi is facing deportation from Canada to Somalia.

As migration scholars and detention experts, we will show that while perhaps lawful, this deportation is the accumulation of governmental historical, social and moral failures. Abdi arrived in Canada as a six-year-old child, and is a product of this country. His deportation should be halted.

Abdi was born in Saudi Arabia to a Somali mother, and spent four years in a Djibouti refugee camp. Eighteen years ago, he was only six years old when he claimed asylum in Nova Scotia. With his mother deceased, Abdi arrived in the care of his sister and aunts.

The province intervened to remove Abdi from his aunts’ care. The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services then placed him in foster care until he aged out of the system. Abdi was in 31 different “care” arrangements: permanent and temporary foster homes, halfway houses, hospitals, wards and so on.

Not one addressed his struggles, and some were abusive. The government did not apply for citizenship for Abdi despite pressure from the Abdi family.

When Abdi was about 18 years old, he was convicted on criminal charges. He served four-and-a-half years in prison and was released to a halfway house. It was at the gates of this house that the Canada Border Services Agency arrested him, took him to an immigration detention facility and began deportation proceedings to send him to Somalia.

Abdi has never lived in Somalia, a country under an extreme travel advisory alert.

Abdoul Abdi is seen in this handout photo from the court proceedings in Halifax (Handout photo via The Canadian Press)

Until they apply for and are granted citizenship, asylum-seekers are only granted permanent residence in Canada. Canadian law stipulates that asylum-seekers or permanent residents who receive criminal convictions carrying custodial sentences exceeding six months may be deported. Abdi’s conviction falls under this category.

This deportation order is wrong. With the support of his sister Fatuma Abdi, the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter has begun an anti-deportation campaign called All Out 4 Abdoul. His removal is being legally contested by his lawyer, Benjamin Perryman, with the support of the International Human Rights Program at the �ؿ�ζSM.

Through news conferences, social media and mainstream and prominent media coverage, Abdi and his supporters have called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ahmed Hussen, the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, to use their discretionary powers to stop the deportation. The Federal Court is now hearing the case.

Why has Abdi's plight struck such a visceral chord?

‘Scapegoats’ for poor policy

We argue that Abdi’s case illuminates how Canada is failing asylum-seekers, criminalized people and visible minorities. The federal government’s ongoing and persistent efforts to banish Abdi to Somalia indicate how asylum-seekers have once again become the scapegoats for poor policy.

We find local and federal government failures at various points culminating in this deportation order. On these grounds, we argue it’s the government’s responsibility to stop the deportation.

Firstly, Nova Scotia failed to provide Abdi’s aunts, themselves newcomers, with the full support they needed to raise the child and to keep him safe.

The decision to remove the child from his aunts contradicts the evidence that the best outcomes for children occur when they remain with their families. Nova Scotia is grappling with a disturbing history of abuses at the now-shuttered Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children in Dartmouth, where a provincial inquiry is entering its third phase. The decision to remove Abdi should be situated within a system plagued by institutional racism.

What’s more, as a Crown ward, the state shuttled Abdi among 31 different living arrangements in 12 years – on average, this is a new home every four-and-a-half months. Abdi has alleged that some of these homes were abusive.

Clearly, the state failed to provide him with sufficient care and support to assist him to make good life choices.

Crown wards at greater risk of committing crimes

Governments cannot control an individual’s actions, but we know that people from disadvantaged backgrounds commit crimes at a higher rate than the overall population. As a Crown ward, this child would have been at greater risk of offending. The community is right to expect that the support provided to Abdi should have been commensurate to the risk.

The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services also failed to execute its duty to assist Abdi in becoming a citizen. Given the logistical and other barriers hindering Crown wards from applying, this assistance was its policy-mandated responsibility.

Surely, it’s logical to have more long-term residents as citizens, and fewer people here as asylum-seekers, permanent residents, or other less-than-full statuses. At least 15 cases of former child refugees facing deportation are surfacing; of these, at least three have been deported to a country they have no connection to because of criminal activity after they turned 18.

Fatouma Abdi, second from left, Abdoul Abdi’s sister, heads from Federal Court with supporters after a hearing to determine whether deportation proceedings should be halted. The judge has reserved his decision (photo by Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

Morality aside, this practice breaches international law: Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child state that everyone has the right to nationality and citizenship.

Finally, and most fundamentally, the government of Canada is failing to recognize that Abdi, who arrived in Canada as a six-year-old child, is the product of their state. Indeed it could be argued that, as a Crown ward, Abdi is even more a product of the Canadian system than others who were raised within a nuclear family unit.

By attempting to deport Abdi, the Canadian government has indicated an adherence to biological determinism: The view that Abdi's “nurture” – his social ties, relationships and mutually reinforcing personal and community histories – matters less than his “nature” as a perpetual foreigner.

The Somali Canadian community already faces significant challenges from “systematic, institutional racism on the part of schools, police and intelligence agencies and the media.” It would be a shame if the federal government fed in to false – not to mention racist – perceptions by continuing its efforts to deport Abdi.

Stephanie J Silverman is an adjunct professor of ethics, society and law at the �ؿ�ζSM. Amy Nethery is a senior lecturer in politics and policy studies at Deakin University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.