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Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
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11 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
#TantonPapers case update:

After 4 years, I'm finally taking @UMich to trial.

Yesterday we propounded initial discovery. Item #1:
"PRODUCE: The Donor/Gift Agreement between Dr. Tanton and The University of Michigan/Bentley Historical Library."
Besides the papers themselves, this secret gift agreement is the most important piece of this puzzle. Why did Tanton want to keep his papers secret through 2035? How did they agree to only keep half of them closed, and why? Were there any other parties involved in the decision?
I had tried to request this secret agreement through FOIA in 2017, but UM denied it, saying we were parties to litigation. OK, fair enough. One of my colleagues tried to ask for it, and they denied her too, saying she was my agent and therefore a party to the litigation as well!
I didn't think it would take 4 more years to get to it, but here we are, and now the University has to show what it's been hiding.

#TantonPapers

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More from @HMAesq

Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
27 Apr
It's good to see the @JoeBiden administration taking the threat of white supremacist-fueled extremism seriously.

But how to define it? Where is the line between extremism and free speech?

nytimes.com/live/2021/04/2…
Terrorism and extremism are not the same. It would be shortsighted to focus only on one while ignoring the role the other plays on it.

9/11 vastly expanded the categories and scope of terrorism and extremism, and we saw it reflected in not only law & policy, but discourse.
Surveillance, prolonged civil detention, and deportation were but a few of the reactions. In a recent call with our Virginia Senator, we called for a 20-year post mortem of the Patriot Act.

What lessons from post-9/11 will we use to address domestic extremism? Are we safer?
Read 17 tweets
Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
23 Apr
What if I told you we could have a path to citizenship for COVID-19 essential workers without having to convince 10 Republicans in the Senate? It's possible: through budget reconciliation.

Yesterday our @GovernorVA Northam became the first Governor to tell @JoeBiden to do it.
If a pathway to citizenship for essential workers is passed as part of the 2nd reconciliation economic package, then we only need a simple majority in the Senate, and *checks* yep, we have it.

We can make this happen! The power Dems have gained means nothing if we squander it.
VA is the *only* state in the country whose senators both sit on the Senate Budget Committee. We've been calling on Sen @timkaine and Sen @MarkWarner to be bold and push a pathway to citizenship for essential workers.
Read 9 tweets
Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
21 Apr
Earlier today, before news about the verdict dropped, I read this piece about an amazing archeological find: the childhood cabin of Harriet Tubman. I thought about the Underground Railroad, how Tubman was by all accounts a hated lawbreaker in her day.
washingtonpost.com/history/2021/0…
Tubman never waivered in her commitment to standing up against the evil of human slavery.

She had little, but she knew how to read the wilderness, how to read the sky, the wind, the sun and the stars.
She used what was given to her to speak truth to power, fighting white supremacy without writing a single op-ed, filing a case, or firing off a tweet.

One hundred fifty years and some hours later, another group of people spoke truth to power, fighting white supremacy as well.
Read 16 tweets
Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
12 Apr
Got a pair of U visa approvals today!

U visas provide status for victims of certain crimes. The qualifying rules can be quite technical. My clients waited nearly 6 years, for crimes that occurred 10-15 years ago.

All that uncertainty over status is now over.
There's a massive backlog of U visas: note how long these cases were pending. And one of the requirements is the police signing off on a certification form that qualifies the crime, and attests to the help the victim gave in prosecuting it.
U visas are a great way to engender trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement.

Sadly, not all jurisdictions like to participate in such easy community policing. When police refuse to sign, the U visa is not available.

Signing U visas should be official policy!
Read 6 tweets
Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
11 Apr
This is the white nationalist #TantonNetwork at work.

Notice the frame the border is chaos, the only way to fix it is by militarizing it, and use tropes of criminal brown people lumped together in one boogeyman shouting in Spanish and Arabic.
Convenient they leave out the fact that our mismanaged border is a direct result of the enforcement-only policies they've pushed for decades. They've cost taxpayers billions with the bloated deportation machine they built, and now offer as a solution to the problem they caused.
Who's in the #TantonNetwork?

@FAIRImmigration
@CIS_org
@numbersusa
@IRLILaw
@PFIRorg

And a few others. I'd say check out @colcomfdn list of donees, but Colcom (chief funder of the Tanton Network) scrubbed their website of their list. Hmmm....

nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/…
Read 4 tweets
Hassan Ahmad Profile picture
11 Apr
SUCCESS!!

I'm 2 days late posting this because I got hacked an hour after I posted a thread on @stephenm and white nationalist law group.

On 4/9, the Mich. Supreme Court ruled in my favor: my lawsuit v. @UMich to unseal the #TantonPapers will proceed!

hma-legal.com/mich-supreme-c…
If you're new here: 4 years ago I filed a FOIA to unseal the secret papers of John Tanton, the racist mastermind behind the anti-immigrant movement.

His organizations, known as the Tanton Network, are responsible for stalling immigration reform for the past 30 years.
They run for cover when confronted with evidence of their eugenics-fueled origins.

Sadly, they're rarely confronted. That's why I want to break the seal on their founders' papers.

motherjones.com/politics/2021/…
Read 11 tweets

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