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I was on the South End staff in 1973. Armond White was our reviewer.
Does anyone have photos from then?
Are there any surviving copies of the South End from then?
Defeat the new Dred Scott decision: in order to overturn the Supreme Court’s Jennings v. Rodriguez, the mass immigrant rights movement must mobilize in the streets.
On February 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that immigrants in America are excluded from the protections of the Constitution and the doctrine of human rights. To the terror of millions of immigrants across the nation, the Jennings v. Rodriguez decision asserts that immigrants—even legal permanent residents—may be detained for any length of time without having the right to appeal for bail. Deprived of the basic protections of the Fourth Amendment, all immigrants in America now face a daunting prospect in the hands of the government: to be imprisoned indefinitely in America’s hellish immigrant concentration camps, or to be deported to their deaths.
This decision must not stand. As Justice Breyer stated in dissent, “No one can claim, nor since the time of slavery has anyone to my knowledge successfully claimed, that persons held within the United States are totally without constitutional protection.” Without the recognition of even the most basic human rights, immigrants in America have been reduced to the legal status of slaves. Under the Jennings v. Rodriguez decision, the nation’s immigrant detention centers are now the legal equivalent of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
Now, only the power of the mass immigrant rights movement can restore the rights of America’s immigrants and force the overturn of Jennings v. Rodriguez. That movement must take to the streets to achieve justice. What the so-called “Justices” of the U.S. Supreme Court would not uphold, the immigrant rights movement must realize through our own actions: that we are all created equal, and endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Make Jennings v. Rodriguez a dead letter: stop deportations and shut down immigrant concentration camps.
If the courts and the politicians will not uphold the rights that they were sworn to protect, then we, like the Abolitionist movement against slavery, must take action to make freedom a reality. With greater urgency than ever, the immigrant rights movement must impose itself to stop the imprisonment and deportation of our fellow Americans. The immigration police must not be permitted to carry out their treachery anywhere. We must escalate and expand the “Don’t Walk On By” campaign to alert people about raids in progress, and to stop the abduction of immigrants by I.C.E. We must redouble the efforts to build and enforce Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Campuses, which will not cooperate with the government’s attacks on immigrants. Churches must provide sanctuary for immigrants, and must refuse entry to any immigration police. And we must shut down the odious concentration camps, rendering them unable to function.
Whenever and wherever the government acts in defiance of human rights, the government has no legitimacy and no right to carry out its tyranny. Whenever and wherever immigrant rights are under attack, the movement must assert itself as the true defenders of democracy and freedom. By making Jennings v. Rodriguez a dead letter in practice, we will be at the doorstep of overturning it in the law.
Trump must resign or be removed.
President Trump’s power is built upon a crazed, neo-fascist movement and a racist campaign of scapegoating immigrants. That power now threatens to demolish the pillars of American democracy, to destroy the lives of millions of immigrants, and even to annihilate human kind in a nuclear holocaust. Every day that Trump remains in office, the entire world remains in peril. Our answer is clear: Trump must go by any means necessary.
But the only way to defeat Trump is to defeat the source of his power—Trump must not be permitted to carry out his attacks on immigrants. We must learn the lessons of history: just as Hitler was able to exploit anti-Jewish fanaticism to build up his authoritarian rule and plunge the world into war, Donald Trump has built his own regime on the foundations of anti-immigrant bigotry. Those foundations must be shattered in order to prevent one of history’s greatest tragedies from repeating itself.
Defend immigrant rights: the movement must mobilize to save DACA and defend the Dreamers.
The Jennings v. Rodriguez decision now places the Dreamers in even greater peril. While the government engages in elaborate maneuvers in order to do nothing for the Dreamers, the clock has kept ticking on the DACA program. Now, these 800,000 young immigrants—who have grown up in America and have been raised as Americans—face the dire threat of having no rights, whatsoever. The entire song and dance by both political parties could turn out to be nothing other than a ruse, a distraction to prevent the Dreamers from making a struggle for their lives. That struggle must take to the streets immediately, and when it does, it will be the first and only step of real progress that has occurred thus far for DACA.
