Obama, Don't Send Central Americans Back to Their Deaths! - Stop the Deportation Raids!
- by: Susan V
- recipient: President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson
Central America now has the highest homicide rate in the world. Although the US is providing aid to strengthen law enforcement, the situation is getting worse. In addition to widespread domestic violence against women and girls, the area is plagued by "extreme levels of organized crime, gang violence and poverty."
These conditions have led to an influx of refugees to the US seeking asylum, mostly women and girls. However the Obama Administration’s Department of Homeland Security is deporting these refugees with "raids that terrorize the community and separate families," one advocacy group told the Boston Globe.
And several leading Democrats are criticizing a policy they say has “terrorized immigrant communities nationwide.”
In a petition asking Obama not to send her family back to their "deaths," one El Salvador mother tells how she had to flee to the US with her children after her husband was killed and their lives threatened.
Many of these refugees are simply asking for protections similar to those offered Syrians and other refugee groups - a policy known as Temporary Protected Status. Sign this petition to urge the president to stop these deportation raids and grant TPS to Central American refugees in the US.
To President Obama and Jeh Johnson, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
Dear Mr. President and Secretary Jeh Johnson:
Hours after 77 immigrants, several from Central America, were rounded up and deported, advocates speaking in a Boston church insisted that your administration could legally grant Central American refugees protections similar to those offered to Syrians and other refugees.
Others have accused your administration of heartlessly sending destitute families back to the unstable and dangerous world they fled,” and Luis V. Gutierrez from Illinois reportedly insists that this situation is not about immigration - it’s a “refugee crisis.”
Still others are criticizing what appears to be a double standard in the way this administration is treating the Syrian crisis vs the crisis in Central America.
Immigration impact says that in El Salvador, "conditions are getting worse by the day," and The Guardian reports that “El Salvador saw a 70% spike in violent deaths in 2015, making last year the bloodiest since the country’s civil war…..Roughly “6,657 people were violently killed in 2015, amid a rise in mass killings and escalating violence between alleged gang members and police.”
Immigration Impact includes a personal account found in a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees of one Salvadoran woman named Norma to document the kind of dangers women face there now. It reads:
“In late 2014, four gang members abducted her and took her to a nearby cemetery. Three of the four proceeded to rape her; she believes they targeted her because she was married to a police officer. ‘They took their turns…they tied me by the hands. They stuffed my mouth so I would not scream.’ When it was over, she said, ‘They threw me in the trash.’ She contracted a sexually transmitted disease as a result of the rape.”
Thus II concludes that "deporting someone back to that kind of danger is inhumane and indefensible."
According to Washington Times, Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders agrees that the deportation policies are inhumane and has urged your administration to "immediately end these raids and not deport families back to countries where a death sentence awaits. " Sanders, among others, is urging this administration to "declare Central America so unsafe that people from that region are allowed to stay and work in the U.S. — a policy known as temporary protected status.“
I, the undersigned, join Sanders and others in this plea to end the deportation raids at once and grant protective status to Central American refugees.
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