Unfairly Detained by ICE

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“When Will We Know?”—an ongoing series

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José Coyote Pérez, an immigrant laborer and labor activist in upstate New York, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on February 24. He is prisoner number A#099757267 in the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, New York.

He ought not be there. He should not be detained.

Pérez has been in America for fifteen years, he has a permit to work in the U.S., he has a social security number, and he was about to earn his driver’s license. Further, his ICE case was administratively closed in September 2016. In other words, he was a part of the New York State economy, he was a law-abiding resident on his way to citizenship. ICE had closed its file on him.
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The New DOJ: Protect the Violent from Their Victims

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“When Will We Know?”—an ongoing series

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No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.—Title IX

The new U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) thinks that the larger problem in society is not the scourge of rape and sexual assault but the reporting of it. The authors of a new, leaked, memo from the Department of Justice appear the think that the quickest way to reduce sexual violence is to report it less.

A Justice Department draft memorandum that proposes “recommendations on the interpretation and enforcement of Title IX” was leaked on February 20 by one of the many online accounts of government employees who have “gone rogue” and are hard at work sharing with the world all the changes that have been introduced since the new presidential administration took the reins of power. Three days later, the document was confirmed to me as legitimate by a source.

The Twitter account that published the document, @ALT_USCIS, is operated by insiders who claim to be employed at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, and it has been a reliable source for information about the “ICE Raids” that took place the last three weeks and quite a few other things.

The thrust of the leaked draft memo is to change operational procedures in our nation’s schools and law enforcement from what has been a history of protecting victims of sexual assault to a new standard in which those accused of sexual assault are to be protected.
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Shawkan Is Spared a New Sentence

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Mahmoud Abu Zeid, an Egyptian photojournalist who goes by the name “Shawkan,” learned today that his next hearing will be on Tuesday, March 21. And then chaos broke out in the courtroom.

The hearings in the trial of the more than 700 individuals detained in the aftermath of the government’s violent break-up of the Rabaa sit-in protest have unfolded in a logistically trying fashion. After the court’s judges announced the latest postponement, most of the defendants started to chant in unison that the court was unfair, that the session was invalid.

The panel of judges immediately found 700 of the defendants (almost the entire group) guilty of “insulting the judicial system,” and it sentenced each defendant to one year in jail with forced labor added. Shawkan was one of a mere twenty defendants who was not given the new, additional one-year sentence.
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