Crossing the Line Launching June 18 In Celebration of World Refugee Week 2024
Plus an Invitation! Read on for more...
It’s here!
Launching tomorrow in San Francisco, Crossing the Line is rolling off the presses—published by
of She Writes Press for World Refugee Week 2024. Please join me and my host, National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area, to celebrate the human rights to dignity, safety, and freedom of movement at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery in The Mission, 6-9 pm.
We invite you to join the growing chorus!
Let us sing in glorious harmony so loud and so long that it reaches the ears of the Biden White House. Tell him and Vice President Harris, too, that we can welcome newcomers with the dignity all humans deserve. All we need is the political well.
Urge him to read Crossing the Line to meet the people showing us, every day, that there is a better way—that hope knows no borders and our systemic cruelty is not okay.
Make Biden and Harris understand that this is not who we want to be and that out-Trumping Trump is no way to win an election.
Remind Biden of his own words, stated on World Refugee Day 2023…
“…we join nations around the world in honoring the bravery and resilience of millions of refugees forced to flee violence and oppression. Together, as we celebrate their diverse contributions to the fabric of our communities, we renew our support to citizens and organizations who step up to provide them with critical care, services, and assistance.”
…because he hasn’t provided critical care, services, and assistance.
Candidate Biden convinced us, in 2020, that the soul of the US nation could be restored, in part through compassionate, human-centered immigration reform. In some respects that has happened, and I’m happy to give credit where credit is due:
Under his administration, the US is set to resettle more refugees in any year since 1995.
Work-based H1A and H1B visas are back on track with solid bipartisan support for welcoming skilled workers.
He is poised to announce relief for families of US citizen children of law-abiding parents who were swept up in Trump’s ICE dragnet and deported (one of eight ways our immigration policies separate families, as documented in my book—a good policy that is long, long overdue.
His Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) creates a legal resettlement pipeline for another 360,000 people a year, enabling folks from these four countries to circumvent both human traffickers and the perilous Darién Gap. If they can pay.
But Biden’s latest Trumpy move—his Proclamation on “Securing” the Border of June 4, 2024—continues to equate “security” with yet more cruelty at the US-Mexico border. With it, the Biden administration has once again caved to the nativist forces that insist on tearing our nation asunder.
Borders are violent.
They are tools of in-group/out-group exclusion. They exist to divide. So while Biden has succeeded in repairing some of the damage inflicted by “the former guy,” aka “convicted felon,” he remains married to the baseline strategy informing White House policymaking. It’s called “prevention through deterrence,” and cruelty for cruelty’s sake is the stake plunged into the heart of the policy’s core.
Because here’s the thing: deterrence doesn’t work. Never has, never will.
Why? Because people move. Always have, always will.
Indeed, more than one in every 100 people on the planet are displaced from their homelands and on the run. That’s more refugees in the world today than at any other time in human history.
We should be asking, Why are so many people on the run? Then seek to take responsibility for the part we’ve played, as members of the Global North, in creating the conditions that result in human displacement.
Instead, for the last forty years, at least, the only question world leaders can think to ask, including our own—from Reagan to Bush 41 to Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama to the “the convicted felon” to Biden (as senator, vice president, and president)—is: How do we stop them?
We can do better. We must do better.
Biden’s greatest immigration fail…
…according to a Homeland Security insider, who agreed to be interviewed for Crossing the Line on condition of anonymity, was in not lifting Trump & Co’s abuse of Title 42 of the US Public Health Code on inauguration day 2021, as promised. In this way, he states, Biden let the most damaging legacy of the convicted felon’s administration live on, giving Border Patrol cowboys and Border Protection cops permission to kick everybody out as quickly as possible, with impunity and without legal due process.
“Both Title 42 and MPP moved the Overton Window as to what could be possible at the border,” my Homeland Security source states.
Biden’s June 4th Proclamation on “Securing” the Border offered no quid to balance the law-and-order quo, nudging the Overton Window ever further rightward.
Want to find out more? Order your copy of Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands today. Then join the growing chorus and sing with us from the rooftops:
Their hope knows no borders. Our cruelty is not okay. We are better than this.