Civics 3/26

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Share

New to URL Media? Subscribe below to receive our weekly newsletters.

News and information about politics, government, civic participation and engagement from the URL Media network.

Marta Gaspar, a farmworker, covers guava fruits from pests with plastic bags at a farm on Nov. 2, 2023, in Homestead, Florida. (Photo by Eva Marie Uzcategui for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Fla. blocks heat standards from being passed across the state: Prism reports that starting July 1, it will be illegal for local governments to pass health and safety measures for outdoor workers in extreme heat. “In just a few months, as Florida temperatures soar to triple digits, outdoor workers will face increasingly dangerous conditions,” said Esteban Wood, the policy director at WeCount!, a nonprofit that helps immigrant workers in South Florida. She adds that some of these conditions will result in heat strokes for workers, as well as billions of dollars in lost productivity for companies and an overwhelming number of heat-related hospitalizations in emergency rooms. Read more here.

Court orders investigation into abusive and wrongful deportations of Cameroonians: A New York judge has ordered a deeper investigation into abusive deportations of Cameroonians by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2020-2021. According to an NBC News report from 2020, ICE officials used pepper spray and solitary confinement to coerce Cameroonians to agree to deportation. Those deportations, or "death flights," as advocates call them, highlight the racist treatment Black migrants face in the U.S. from immigration authorities. 

“Cameroonian asylum-seekers came to the U.S. seeking protection but were instead met with confinement in immigration jails, discriminatory abuse, and unlawful deportations,” said Samah Sisay, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The government must stop avoiding accountability and provide the records requested to ensure these abuses never happen again.” Prism has more here.

Don’t liberals want to fix the immigration perception problem?: In a Harlem laundromat, conversations about politics and immigration reveal complex feelings about NYC's so-called migrant crisis, writes Felipe De La Hoz for Epicenter-NYC. He overheard one woman share concerns about migrant arrivals since the spring of 2022, highlighting controversies over migrant-related spending, taxpayer money, and city services and shelters. "They are getting all this taxpayer money, and we pay all these taxes and we get nothing!" said the woman. His goal in highlighting their rhetoric is not to extrapolate the general public's sentiment on this issue, but rather to highlight a sentiment that speaks to some of the Democratic Party's messaging failures around immigration skepticism this election year. Read more here.

Six harmful tactics that tried to stop Latinos from voting: From English literacy tests during the 1920s, to "white primaries" in the South, Pulso lists historic tactics used to suppress Latino and Black U.S. citizens from voting. One well-documented campaign against voters of color was Operation Eagle Eye, which went into effect in Arizona in 1964. The campaign included purging voter lists, sending deceptive mailers to voters, and sending poll watchers to the polls to challenge voter eligibility. Read more here.

💡 Discover the stories that make a difference in our world. Visit our newly revamped website and be part of the change. Check us out here!