I believe I speak for a lot of my colleagues when I say this:
The last 4 yrs have radicalized me. I don't know now how I so blithely accepted borders & cages & administrative violence of all kinds as a regular part of my life and practice, but I never will again.
I'm only sorry that it took the cruelest and worst-run Presidential administration in at least the past century for me to see what this thing was the whole time I've been practicing, and a deep dive in the immigration history & policy I now teach to see what it's always been.
I still have a lot to learn & am feeling out my own understanding after so many years of basically accepting that things like prisons and detention centers and family visas which take 15-20 yrs "need" to exist, but I'm going to try to put the work in & encourage you to try it too
Anyone else thinking about #immigrationcourt dates scheduled for for clients in 3 yrs and wondering if there will be a federal government to hear them by then, or is that just me
Fun times for someone who grew up believing as a matter of fact that the world would end in his lifetime!
I opened today's class on asylum/refugee policy by reminding everyone that there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the phrase "American refugees" is not something that we will come to know in our lifetimes. Any given country is just a couple of bad leaders/yrs away from it
DMs are open for anyone who wants to go in on* one of these and join me for some recreational arson
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*read: give me several million dollars for
Or maybe we buy one, upgrade the cell blocks into humanly habitable dorms, and team up with the Unitarians to make the thing a year-round "church camp" which does nothing but provide communal sanctuary for people whose appeals have run out
One of the only fun things about the last few months has been watching the bubble which contains the parallel cartoon universe of Soros plots & deep state conspiracies which tens of millions live in among us pop every time it touches the actual one we're all stuck in together
I mean, the pandemic has absolutely proven that the concept of shared objective knowable truth based on sources and methods we can all agree on is dead and that it will almost certainly take us all with it soon enough but you gotta take the laughs where you find them
No doubt most of the people responsible for this fact-free garbage about "illegal votes" and a vast conspiracy which somehow includes Republican governors and secretaries of state are doing it all in the worst possible faith, & that is so weird to me. I just can't even imagine
Just got around to reading the House #cannabis bill and actually stopped breathing for a few seconds when I saw this subtitle. This one sentence could change millions of lives by reuniting families separated by deportation and arbitrary inadmissibility.
The retroactivity here means not just expungement (also in here for federal cases), but fully removing cannabis offenses from any possibility of immigration consequences. This likely would have been inevitable with descheduling it, but it's genuinely thrilling to see it in print