A is for America

In the latest episode of our podcast "A is for America", we spoke with Natalia Alonso and her mom, Monica, two local heroes who leapt into action after the devastating June 5 workplace raids on Corso's Flower and Garden stores in Sandusky and Castalia, Ohio. After the raid took away more than 100 parents, Natalia began collecting donations and supplies for the children, teenagers, and families left behind.  Our interview with Natalia begins at 14:30, and you can donate to her Facebook page here.

On this special Fourth of July edition, Joe and Van recap the immigration news of the week, including Jeff Sessions' changes to the asylum process, abolish ICE, a California ruling in favor of SB 54, and the ongoing story about the separation of families.

The latest episode of our podcast, "A is for America", is set in Brownsville, Texas, where advocates led by the ACLU held a mass rally this week outside of a courthouse where migrants are being prosecuted. (Interviews start at 7:00.)

This week, we spoke with Ur Jaddou, former counsel with the Department of Homeland Security and the director of DHS Watch, a new project that works to hold the Trump Administration accountable for its anti-immigrant policies. We spoke about Trump's policy of separation children from their families, how this week's executive order won't do anything to help that, and how House Republicans have taken no action.

The latest episode of our podcast, “A is for America”, features an interview with Ghada Mukdad, a Syrian peace activist who fled her home country and currently lives in Texas. (Interview starts at 16:05.)

The latest episode of our podcast, “A is for America”, features an interview with Jon Rodney and Layla Razavi of the California Immigrant Policy Center, who spoke to us about the California Values Act and what hate groups have done to try and bring down the law in the Golden State. (Interview starts at 16:00.)

One conduit for this extremist strategy will be anti-immigrant laws at the state and local level. In Nevada, anti-immigrant opponents have been trying to get a discriminatory initiative onto the state ballot this November, which would change the state constitution to force local officials to cooperate with ICE on immigration enforcement. The initiative was barred from being put on this year's ballot due to language that the state supreme court ruled was "deceptive and misleading", though supporters of the initiative may try again in 2020. (Our interview with Amy Rose starts at 10:30.)

Frank Sharry spoke with our co-host, Joe Sudbay, about the last year in immigration politics and how Republican candidates have tried to ape the Trump anti-immigrant strategy — and failed to win every time. Americans have shown that they want to be brought together and that they want the country to move past divisiveness, yet all Trump and Congressional Republicans can do is offer increasingly ugly attacks. Democratic candidates running this fall should learn to lean into, rather than run from, immigration — especially since polls have shown that xenophobic attacks turn off voters of all stripes. (Interview begins at 6:10.)

Our Political Director, Matt Hildreth, traveled to Pennsylvania earlier this month to speak with Mustafa Kour, a Somalian-born immigrant who took refuge in Kenya before coming to the United States. Mustafa is now an entrepreneur, and one of the winner's of Lancaster, Pennsylvania's "2017 Great Social Enterprise Pitch", for a startup which brings diverse communities together. Mustafa has choice word for anti-immigrant candidates running this fall, and wants to remind them that refugees like him are human beings and Americans, too. (Interview starts at 10:25.)

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Postville, Iowa raid, which is still one of the biggest workplace immigration raids in history. Our Political Director, Matt Hildreth, traveled to Postville, as well as to Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, site of an immigration raid that happened just this week. Matt's interview with Rev. Hegar begins at 14:20, and the interview with Tar Macias begins at 25:05. Listeners who want to learn more about the Postville, Iowa raid should watch Abused, a documentary which is streaming for free this week.