{"id":4119,"date":"2018-10-19T23:30:34","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T23:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/?p=4119"},"modified":"2018-10-19T23:30:34","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T23:30:34","slug":"children-as-political-weapons-assembly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/2018\/10\/children-as-political-weapons-assembly\/","title":{"rendered":"Children As Political Weapons Assembly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On October 4, students packed into the auditorium to watch the assembly on immigration and using children as political weapons, led by the student organization La Causa (formerly known as the Hispanic-Latinx Alliance). <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The assembly included extremely powerful videos, including one from John Oliver\u2019s show. In the clip, Oliver put together mock trials of children in immigration courts, giving the viewers a visual of what some cases could look like. Children are not entitled to a lawyer in immigration court so in the majority of cases, they enter the court alone, even if they are only a toddler. Some of the children did not know what a lawyer even was when asked by the judge, demonstrating that they are unfit to defend themselves given their extremely young age. Of course a young child who doesn\u2019t speak English does not understand what occurs in immigration court and cannot stand up for their rights. Therefore, 90 percent of children who go into immigration court without a lawyer are deported.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another powerful element of the assembly was the recordings of babies crying in detention centers, separated from their families. Hearing these noises made it clear how tragic their situation is. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The assembly also taught the student body that the United States was a large factor in causing the need for Central Americans (particularly people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) to migrate. In the past, the U.S. supported dictators that were \u201canti-communist\u201d and corrupt national governments who were \u201cfighting drug-trafficking.\u201d These dictators and corrupt governments ended up causing extreme violence and unsafe environments due to gangs and organized crime embedded in the police and army. Even though the United States was a large factor in causing these unsafe living environments, we only accepted 3 percent of asylum seekers from northern Central America and deemed the rest \u201ceconomical asylum seekers\u201d rather than \u201cpolitical asylum seekers\u201d \u2013\u2013 sending them back to certain death. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Overall, this assembly opened the student body\u2019s eyes in many ways, one being the specific flaws within our government in terms of immigration and how specifically child immigrants are mistreated in the citizenship process. Hopefully the inspiring speakers influenced students to dive deeply into conversations around immigration and will lead to concrete action to combat the injustices surrounding immigrants\u2019 rights. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On October 4, students packed into the auditorium to watch the assembly on immigration and using children as political weapons, led by the student organization La Causa (formerly known as the Hispanic-Latinx Alliance). The assembly included extremely powerful videos, including one from John Oliver\u2019s show. In the clip, Oliver put together mock trials of children in immigration courts, giving the viewers a visual of what some cases could look like. Children are not entitled to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[],"coauthors":[334,333],"class_list":["post-4119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4120,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4119\/revisions\/4120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4119"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}