Undocumented youth and allies take a freedom bus ride

Source: http://mexmigration.blogspot.com/2012/08/no-papers-no-fear.html

GROWING MOVEMENT TRAVELS TO CORE OF ANTI-IMMIGRANT REGIONS

(LOS ANGELES, CA.)  In a previous blog posting, I reported on the growing movement of undocumented youth seeking to assert their rightful place in U.S. society. I was reporting on the advent of an entirely new political subject involving the expression of “undocumented fearlessness” among youth without papers who deliberately had themselves arrested protesting SB1070 against the backdrop of the struggle to end the reign of Sheriff Arpaio and his constant dragnets in the Latina/o community, which are designed to fill the shoddy tents in his desert gulag with the fresh money-making bodies of detainees who are eventually swallowed up by the hidden holds of the private corporate prison and detention industry; these are the same forces that, with the Koch Brothers, are funding the attack on American democracy. This amazing and energetic movement includes many youth who were first brought to the United States as infants and older minors; they are the constituency targeted by President  Obama’s  recent Executive Order temporarily suspending deportation proceedings against these innocent undocumented children and younger adults.

The Undocubus. Credit: Ruckus Society

Now individual acts of protest through the public expression of undocumented fearlessness have become a bona fide collective action social movement. The protesters have upped the ante and created a “No Papers, No Fear” organization. Their principle protest vehicle is the launching of the Undocubus Ride for Justice, which is currently traveling through the core regions of the states that have promulgated the attack on Mexican-origin peoples (from Arizona through the Deep South) This is an especially significant and poignant development because for most of the past 100 years, undocumented immigrants have been forced into the shadows by the constant threats posed by apprehension, detention, and deportation. Instead of accepting their status as Homo sacers – i.e., as bodies without a political existence – the new generation of undocumented youth are instead putting everything on the line in order to assert their political nature as human agents by engaging in direct action protests and thereby enacting their social if not legal citizenship. This activism by the most marginal and vulnerable among us challenges and undermines the state of exception and disrupts the normal operation of biopower at its core.

The movement also brings attention to the fact that, despite the too little too late Executive Order on deferred action, the Obama administration has been unrelenting in its pursuit of the deportation agenda and every year the Department of Homeland Security has an average removed some 400,000 people from the United States. Over the past four years, as has been widely discussed and criticized, President Obama has actually deported over 1 million people, an amount far greater than what was realized under the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Lest we forget, Obama’s meteoric deportation program is a direct result of his continued promotion of systematic collaboration between local police and immigration agents through the so-called Secure Communities, which was authorized under the 2001 U.S. Patriot Act and has been implemented in more than 90 percent of counties. I have previously reported on this dangerous development, which operates under the rubric of the so-called 287g provisions of the Patriot Act, and constitutes a violation of human and civil rights.

The 287g program is part and parcel of a set of very serious threats to our Bill of Rights that includes the power of the President to authorize the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens under the recently signed National Defense Authorizatioin Act (NDAA). This legislation basically declares that the U.S. homeland is a war zone, in the indefinite so-called global war on terrorism, which is of course an open-ended invitation to suspend the Bill of Rights and impose a permanent state of siege (or exception) on the population.

Nevertheless, the undocumented youth are resolute and righteous in their defiance of this sort of repression. It is the grassroots power of our own communities mobilized in a growing social movement that is propelling the process of transformation of the discourse and biopolitics of immigration.  The “No Papers, No Fear” Ride for Justice campaign is a very good example of a leading-edge and transformational movement led by undocumented youth. The Ride for Justice campaign has a website and I invite my readers and followers to visit it often as it documents one of the greatest new social movements of our time. The activists with this campaign explain their raison d’être in eloquent and courageous words:

…we have also witnessed how actions led by our own communities have the power to change policies and to create alternatives to defend the rights of immigrants. In Arizona, Barrio Defense Committees have organized to share information about how to fight against deportations, and against those who seek to criminalize immigrant communities. Actions by undocumented students, such as coming out of the shadows, civil disobedience, and occupations of electoral offices have shown what happens when our community acts for itself, it changes everything.  We can’t wait for anyone else any longer. We’ve come too far to allow this country to be turned back...This summer a culmination of this work will be manifested during a Bus ride, through key states in the southern part of the United States, that will continue to confront power with the stories, voices, and actions of those directly affected by these immigration policies. Riders are undocumented people from all over the country, including students, mothers and fathers, children, people in deportation proceedings, day laborers, and others who continue to face deportation, harassment, and death while simply looking for a better life. [Bold emphasis is in the original]

We are presenting a short video clip of the Undocubus Ride for Justice and call on our readers and followers to educate and inform the public about the just cause of undocumented youth who have already earned their place in U.S. society and represent an invaluable asset to the future of our country. Anyone that has weathered the dangers and deprivations of life as an undocumented minor will not be rankled by the sorts of threats and challenges they are likely to face as bona fide adult citizens of this changing nation that yearns for their determination, knowledge, skill, and genuine compassion, all qualities that are often missing among more privileged segments of our citizenry.

It is not a cliché to note that the youth in this video are speaking truth to power. They have an important message for all of us: They argue that the crisis of human rights in Arizona did not start with SB1070, but the new faces of resistance were forged in the aftermath of that unconstitutional travesty; these are their faces; and voices. These are the faces of undocumented youth who without fear declare that they will defy the courts and the state that criminalizes them for simply wanting to live and work and have families and be members of a historically and rightfully established community that by far predates the arrival of the Anglo snowbirds that have surreptitiously and violently weaseled their way into political and economic power in Arizona and other border region states.

These youth expect and demand nothing less than just immigration reform and insist that they will be recognized as human beings with full political rights; they will refuse to allow their families to be split apart or the hate to drive their cultures and histories out of the school classrooms. These youth challenge all of us who care about our country to take a stand, and perhaps a bus ride, with them on the road toward a truly democratic future; a future we will only be able to take back by sheer political force through the exercise of our agency against the Arpaios, Brewers, Huppenthals, and Kobeks of the world who are destroying the American Dream based on their irrational fear and hatred of our emerging bronze majority and rainbow nation.

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