Opinion | What My 6-Year-Old Son and I Endured in Family Detention - The New York Times

"The author wrote on the condition of anonymity because of the gang-related threats she and her family face in the United States and in El Salvador.



I came to this country from El Salvador in 2014 seeking safety for myself and my son. Instead, I found myself locked in a family immigration detention center. It’s an experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.



When I heard news stories of nearly 3,000 children separated from their parents at the border, my heart broke for them. Now President Trump claims to have ended the separation of families, instead placing parents and their children in family detention — jails like the one my son, who was 6 at the time, and I were in. This is not a solution. It just exchanges one form of trauma for another.



I was forced to flee my country because of violence and threats of violence against me and my family. When I was a teenager, my father and I witnessed a murder by local gang members. In 2005, my father was murdered for having testified. The gangs threatened me as well, but since the murder case got dropped, I was able to continue my life and found a job in law enforcement. However, several years later, they threatened to kill me too. That’s when I decided I had to leave and bring my son and my 16-year-old sister with me. If we had stayed, they could’ve killed us all.



El Salvador has one of the worst murder rates in the world, so I knew the threat was serious. I needed to find a safe place for my sister, my son and myself. Our only option was to flee to a country where we couldn’t be found as easily — the United States. But after we crossed the border, we found no relief. Instead, we were held for two months in a family immigration detention center in Artesia, N.M., run by a for-profit company.



The day-to-day conditions were horrible. The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick.



It was no place for human beings, let alone for families with small children.



When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.



We weren’t allowed to sleep in the same beds as our children, even the youngest ones who wanted to sleep with their mothers to feel safe. Deportations usually happened in the middle of the night, with flashlights pointed in our faces to wake us up.



Most of the officers didn’t speak Spanish, which made it hard to communicate. Things were even worse for the indigenous women among us who spoke only their native languages. Once, officers physically forced an indigenous woman to take a shower while she was menstruating, violating both her privacy and her cultural beliefs. As a woman, witnessing this type of treatment was heartbreaking — and it has stayed with me in the years since.



Until we joined together to demand it, there was no legal assistance available to inform of us our rights or guide us through the asylum process. Many women were deported before seeing a judge because they were pressured by officers to sign deportation papers.



The effect on our children was undeniable.



The younger children were very confused about why they were trapped inside. The stories they acted out when they were playing always recreated the dangerous journey they had just gone through to get here. The characters in their games became coyotes (smugglers who help people cross the border), “la migra” (border patrol agents) and immigration judges. The detention center became their entire world. The ones who were old enough to understand what was happening had trouble coping, and I heard of teenagers who tried to take their own lives.



My son, who is now 10 years old, rarely talks about the experience, so it’s hard to know how deeply it has affected him. But since his father was detained by ICE recently, he is starting to remember — and worry. He constantly asks me whether his father is being treated the way we were treated. I struggle to answer that question, because I remember what we went through.



My teenage sister also suffered in detention. She was already affected by the situation in El Salvador and the death of our father, but being inside the detention center affected her even more. Not being able to feel free and being treated like less than human caused her a deep depression, and to this day, she needs constant psychiatric support.



Other children I know from the detention center are clearly traumatized, afraid of police officers and constantly worried about going back. They remember it for what it was: a prison.



After widespread outrage against the separation of families under his “zero tolerance” policy, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to keep families in immigration detention indefinitely. That’s not a solution, that’s a jail sentence.



Those of us who have been in family detention can’t stay silent knowing that so many more families will have to go through what we went through. The Trump administration should stop prosecuting parents who have only committed a misdemeanor by crossing the border. It should stop putting them and their children behind bars in places that are often run by for-profit prison companies. It doesn’t make sense to cruelly punish migrants seeking asylum for attempting to do what all parents do — protect and keep their children safe. People fleeing dangerous situations should be given an opportunity to find safety in the United States.



My asylum case is still in process and my children and I are just waiting for the final court date. Being granted asylum can’t take away the fear I still have. My mother is still in El Salvador, and I will never be able to go back. At least now, we are in a place where my son is safe and well taken care of. But I’ll never forget those two months in family detention when he was not."



Opinion | What My 6-Year-Old Son and I Endured in Family Detention - The New York Times

Opinion | What My 6-Year-Old Son and I Endured in Family Detention - The New York Times

"The author wrote on the condition of anonymity because of the gang-related threats she and her family face in the United States and in El Salvador.



I came to this country from El Salvador in 2014 seeking safety for myself and my son. Instead, I found myself locked in a family immigration detention center. It’s an experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.



When I heard news stories of nearly 3,000 children separated from their parents at the border, my heart broke for them. Now President Trump claims to have ended the separation of families, instead placing parents and their children in family detention — jails like the one my son, who was 6 at the time, and I were in. This is not a solution. It just exchanges one form of trauma for another.



I was forced to flee my country because of violence and threats of violence against me and my family. When I was a teenager, my father and I witnessed a murder by local gang members. In 2005, my father was murdered for having testified. The gangs threatened me as well, but since the murder case got dropped, I was able to continue my life and found a job in law enforcement. However, several years later, they threatened to kill me too. That’s when I decided I had to leave and bring my son and my 16-year-old sister with me. If we had stayed, they could’ve killed us all.



El Salvador has one of the worst murder rates in the world, so I knew the threat was serious. I needed to find a safe place for my sister, my son and myself. Our only option was to flee to a country where we couldn’t be found as easily — the United States. But after we crossed the border, we found no relief. Instead, we were held for two months in a family immigration detention center in Artesia, N.M., run by a for-profit company.



The day-to-day conditions were horrible. The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick.



It was no place for human beings, let alone for families with small children.



When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.



We weren’t allowed to sleep in the same beds as our children, even the youngest ones who wanted to sleep with their mothers to feel safe. Deportations usually happened in the middle of the night, with flashlights pointed in our faces to wake us up.



Most of the officers didn’t speak Spanish, which made it hard to communicate. Things were even worse for the indigenous women among us who spoke only their native languages. Once, officers physically forced an indigenous woman to take a shower while she was menstruating, violating both her privacy and her cultural beliefs. As a woman, witnessing this type of treatment was heartbreaking — and it has stayed with me in the years since.



Until we joined together to demand it, there was no legal assistance available to inform of us our rights or guide us through the asylum process. Many women were deported before seeing a judge because they were pressured by officers to sign deportation papers.



The effect on our children was undeniable.



The younger children were very confused about why they were trapped inside. The stories they acted out when they were playing always recreated the dangerous journey they had just gone through to get here. The characters in their games became coyotes (smugglers who help people cross the border), “la migra” (border patrol agents) and immigration judges. The detention center became their entire world. The ones who were old enough to understand what was happening had trouble coping, and I heard of teenagers who tried to take their own lives.



My son, who is now 10 years old, rarely talks about the experience, so it’s hard to know how deeply it has affected him. But since his father was detained by ICE recently, he is starting to remember — and worry. He constantly asks me whether his father is being treated the way we were treated. I struggle to answer that question, because I remember what we went through.



My teenage sister also suffered in detention. She was already affected by the situation in El Salvador and the death of our father, but being inside the detention center affected her even more. Not being able to feel free and being treated like less than human caused her a deep depression, and to this day, she needs constant psychiatric support.



Other children I know from the detention center are clearly traumatized, afraid of police officers and constantly worried about going back. They remember it for what it was: a prison.



After widespread outrage against the separation of families under his “zero tolerance” policy, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to keep families in immigration detention indefinitely. That’s not a solution, that’s a jail sentence.



Those of us who have been in family detention can’t stay silent knowing that so many more families will have to go through what we went through. The Trump administration should stop prosecuting parents who have only committed a misdemeanor by crossing the border. It should stop putting them and their children behind bars in places that are often run by for-profit prison companies. It doesn’t make sense to cruelly punish migrants seeking asylum for attempting to do what all parents do — protect and keep their children safe. People fleeing dangerous situations should be given an opportunity to find safety in the United States.



My asylum case is still in process and my children and I are just waiting for the final court date. Being granted asylum can’t take away the fear I still have. My mother is still in El Salvador, and I will never be able to go back. At least now, we are in a place where my son is safe and well taken care of. But I’ll never forget those two months in family detention when he was not."



Opinion | What My 6-Year-Old Son and I Endured in Family Detention - The New York Times

Opinion | We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners - The New York Times

"Last year, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his Virginia gym after another member confronted him and called him a Nazi. This incident did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s O.K. to shun professional racists.



It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States. The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist.



Over the last week, several Trump administration officials and supporters have been publicly shamed. On Friday night, the Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Va. That morning, protesters blasted a recording of sobbing migrant kids outside the home of Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security.



A few days before that, Nielsen left an upscale Mexican restaurant near the White House after protesters confronted her, chanting, “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace!” The Trump adviser Stephen Miller was also yelled at in a Mexican restaurant — someone called him a fascist, though he may not regard that as an insult. The same night that Sanders was denied service, Pam Bondi, Florida’s Trump-supporting attorney general, was heckled outside a movie theater where she’d gone to see a documentary about Mister Rogers. Adding to the furor, Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, urged people to keep jeering at members of Trump’s cabinet when they’re out and about, saying, “You tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”



Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from self-appointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting. “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” it asked.



Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches, firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools. The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion rights by denying them communion. The failure to acknowledge this history is a sign of the reflexive false balance that makes it hard for the mainstream media to grapple with the asymmetric extremism of the Republican Party.



I’m somewhat agnostic on the question of whether publicly rebuking Trump collaborators is tactically smart. It stokes their own sense of victimization, which they feed on. It may alienate some persuadable voters, though this is just a guess. (As we saw in the indignant media reaction to Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner routine, some pundits project their own concern with Beltway decorum onto swing voters, who generally pay less attention to the news than partisans.)



On the other hand, there’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants. I don’t blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse. Particularly when Sanders’s own administration is fighting to let private businesses discriminate against gay people, who, unlike mendacious press secretaries, are a protected class under many civil rights laws.



Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.



All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.



But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.



Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.



Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.



Sometimes, their strategies may be poorly conceived. But there’s an abusive sort of victim-blaming in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill."



Opinion | We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners - The New York Times

Chris Hayes Explains Why It's Important to Yell at Public Officials

Chris Hayes Explains Why It's Important to Yell at Public Officials. Chris Hayes explains what he thinks drove the president to undo his family separation policy and discusses White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being asked to leave a restaurant.

Romesh Ranganathan Got A Taste Of Trump's America

Current Conversations, Dr. George Yancy, Episode #216

Surreptitious video offers peek at impact of Trump border policy

Surreptitious video offers peek at impact of Trump border policy

Trump slams Red Hen as 'filthy,' but Mar-a-Lago had 78 infractions. Red Hen had 0 health code violations.

Trump slams Red Hen as 'filthy,' but Mar-a-Lago had 78 infractions

Even Democrats have foolishly criticised other Democrats for supporting people who refuse to serve Trump cabinet member and protest whenever they appear in public

Many foolish liberals have criticised protests directed at Trump cabinet members. These Democrats and liberal friends have failed to learn the lesson that Martin Luther King sent to liberals in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail".

"...You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue...."

Rep. Maxine Waters responds to Trump

Rep. Maxine Waters responds to Trump

#EvilPresidentTrump Detained migrants say they were promised they would be reunited with their children if they agreed to leave the country | The Texas Tribune

Detained migrants say they were promised they would be reunited with their children if they agreed to leave the country | The Texas Tribune

How to read privacy policies like a lawyer

50 Years after MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign, 2,500+ Arrested over 6 Week...

Opinion | White Extinction Anxiety - The New York Times

This is the fear that White liberals have a tremendous difficulty facing and what makes their strategies for dealing with Trumpism doomed for failure.



"Last week Pat Buchanan was on “The Laura Ingraham Show” to discuss the humanitarian crisis Donald Trump has created at the border by ripping children away from their parents.



He was not particularly sympathetic to these families’ plights, instead choosing to focus on the demographic danger facing whiteness: “This is the great issue of our time. And, the real question is whether Europe has the will and the capacity, and America has the capacity to halt the invasion of the countries until they change the character — political, social, racial, ethnic — character of the country entirely.”



He continued: “You cannot stop these sentiments of people who want to live together with their own and they want their borders protected.” Make no mistake here, Buchanan is talking about protecting white dominance, white culture, white majorities and white power.



A few days earlier on his blog, he expanded on this point: “The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?”



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In describing Western liberals’ aversions to instituting racist, xenophobic immigration policies, he wrote: “We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide.” He ended with this: “Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issue — the Third World invasion of the West — he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future.”



Strip all the other rationales away from this draconian immigration policy. This is at the core: White extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, white minority anxiety. This is the fear and anxiety Trump is playing to. Politico Magazine dubbed Trump “Pat Buchanan With Better Timing.”



White people have been the majority of people considered United States citizens since this country was founded, but that period is rapidly drawing to a close.



As Brookings reported last week:



“First, for the first time since the Census Bureau has released these annual statistics, they show an absolute decline in the nation’s white non-Hispanic population — accelerating a phenomenon that was not projected to occur until the next decade.”



The report continued: “Second, the new numbers show that for the first time there are more children who are minorities than who are white, at every age from zero to nine. This means we are on the cusp of seeing the first minority white generation, born in 2007 and later, which perhaps we can dub Generation ‘Z-Plus.’”



The Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also issued a report last week that pointed out: “In 2016, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in twenty-six states; more than at any time in U.S. history. Some 179 million residents or roughly 56 percent of the U.S. population, lived in these 26 states.”



The report also noted that, “When births fail to keep pace with deaths, a region is said to have a ‘natural decrease’ in population,” and that: “A finding from previous research on natural decrease, which is consistent with our findings, is that once an area begins to experience natural decrease, the trend is likely to continue. Only California, New Mexico, and West Virginia have experienced natural increase after the initial onset of decrease, and in each case it was only for a year.”



This is happening. America will soon be a majority-minority country.



White America is growing older, there are fewer white women of childbearing age, and the white fertility rate is lower than that of Hispanics and blacks.



All manner of current policy grows out of this panic over loss of privilege and power: immigration policy, voter suppression, Trump economic isolationist impulses, his contempt for people from Haiti and Africa, the Muslim ban, his rage over Black Lives Matter and social justice protests. Everything.



Trump is president and is beloved by his base in part because he is unapologetically defending whiteness from anything that threatens it, or at least that’s the image he wants to project. It is no more complicated than that. These immigrant children crying out for their mothers and fathers are collateral damage, pawns in a political battle to wring strict legislation out of Congress — medieval torture displays meant to serve as deterrents.



As Buchanan wrote in his book, “Suicide of a Superpower,” which got him fired from MSNBC because of its racist overtones: “White America is an endangered species.” And he chided any white person who might cheer this nation’s changing demographics:



“Ethnomasochism, the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group, is a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower. It comes out of what James Burnham called an ‘ideology of Western suicide,’ a belief system that provides a morphine drip for people who have come to accept the inevitability of their departure from history.”



These immigration policies are for people who conflated America with whiteness, and therefore a loss of white primacy becomes a loss of American identity."



Opinion | White Extinction Anxiety - The New York Times

Opinion | It’s Time to Integrate New York’s Best Schools - The New York Times

"Across the country, local efforts are at last underway to integrate schools that remain profoundly segregated more than half a century after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Nowhere is that work more important than New York City, where the school system is not only the nation’s largest but also its most segregated.
After largely ignoring this reality for four years, Mayor Bill de Blasio has now taken an important step: He has put forward a plan to integrate eight of the city’s specialized high schools, storied institutions like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. These schools have, for generations, set those lucky enough to attend on paths to success, to middle-class security, to rewarding careers and even to Nobel Prizes.
These schools have a vital mission, to challenge the city’s sharpest young minds. But they are failing in that endeavor, because they all but shut out black and Latino students, leaving untold numbers of New York’s brightest children behind.
Black and Latino students make up nearly two-thirds of the city’s 1.1 million school children. Yet, of the 5,067 offers of admission to specialized schools this year, 51.7 percent went to Asian students and 26.5 percent to white students. Latino and black students received 6.3 and 4.1 percent of the offers, respectively. At Stuyvesant, the most sought-after of the schools, just 10 of the 902 students offered admission were black.
A single, three-hour test known as the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is the sole screen for admission to the eight schools. This system arose from efforts to integrate these schools back in 1971. Opponents of those efforts lobbied for a state law, known as Hecht-Calandra, that requires the three largest schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — to use only the exam. Over the past four decades, the exclusionary process spread as the five smaller specialized schools also adopted the exam as the sole admissions criterion.
New York’s elementary and middle schools do not prepare children for the test, all but ensuring that students seek out extensive test preparation. Many Asian and white students have done so for thousands of dollars apiece. Black and Latino students are likely to walk in with little or no test preparation.
That was the experience of Wyatt Perez, who was valedictorian of his Bronx middle school but didn’t do well enough on the test to attend a specialized school. Mr. Perez, now 17 and headed to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, said he remembered being given a book on the exam and left to study on his own. “I couldn’t find anyone to help me with it,” he said. “I had to look at videos on YouTube.”
Epiphane Lokossou, who emigrated to the United States from West Africa in 2010, said he couldn’t afford test preparation for his 13-year-old son Boris, who attends Lafayette Academy, a middle school in Manhattan.
Brian Zager, Lafayette Academy’s principal, described Boris as a standout student. But when he took the exam last year, he didn’t receive an offer from a specialized high school. Mr. Lokossou said the admissions process had failed to capture his son’s true potential. “It’s just one test,” he said. “It does not define who he is.”
Of all elite public high schools in the country, only New York’s use a single exam for admission. Researchers and others have said this approach is less predictive of success than grades, particularly for black and Latino students.
Mayor de Blasio has vowed to replace the test with a system, to be phased in over three years, that would eventually admit the top 7 percent of students from every middle school, based on a combination of grades and performance on state exams. City officials say that if the plan is implemented, the specialized high schools would be about 45 percent black and Latino.
The plan is far from radical. The University of Texas used a similar approach to maintain diversity when a court struck down its use of affirmative action years ago. New York City education officials estimate that students who would be admitted under the plan would have an average state test score of 3.9 out of 4.5, compared to 4.1 for students currently enrolled in the specialized schools. The average GPA, 94, would be the same.
Opposition has been swift and fierce, much of it from some alumni of the specialized schools, who have said the mayor’s plan would somehow lower the quality of education or “set kids up for failure.” The very intensity of the response underscores how formative an experience it is to attend a specialized high school — an experience that for years has been unfairly denied so many black and Latino New Yorkers.
Some alumni — black alumni — have described in painful detail their isolated experiences in the schools. They include Mr. de Blasio’s son, Dante, who attended Brooklyn Tech. In a Daily News op-ed article earlier this month, he said his experience was marred by racial slurs and slights that included a teacher laughing at a black student who said she wanted to be a doctor.
In recent weeks, some Asian groups have protested outside City Hall and in Brooklyn, saying that Asian students will lose seats. Asian children are about 16 percent of the district’s student body but a majority at schools like Stuyvesant. Many come from families that have scrimped on essentials like food to pay for test prep. Such objections are understandable, but they don’t change the fact that the admissions policy is flawed and unfair to other children.
Some opponents of the plan have also said the city should focus on improving education at schools already attended by black and Latino students. (Of course, the city ought to do that, too.) This argument underscores that the current testing regime is not “race-blind,” since it can’t be separated from the reality of unequal schools and the disadvantages of generations of poverty and racism.
In an interview, the city’s new schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, argued that relying on a single test harmed all New Yorkers, including Asian families who spend scarce resources on test prep. “I’m sorry that the system has forced you to spend your time, your treasure on preparing your kids for that test,” he said. “Help is on the way.”
The city has said that it’s considering adding seats in the schools, to mitigate some concerns. It might also consider increasing outreach to show families other excellent options, including schools like Edward R. Murrow High School and Midwood that draw students from around the city through competitive admissions.
For the plan to succeed, the city will surely need to increase remedial and enrichment programs at the specialized high schools, to serve students who were at the top of their classes but whose middle schools may not have prepared them for the rigor of a Stuyvesant.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to the mayor’s full plan is political, since it will require overturning Hecht-Calandra. That would take forceful lobbying from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has so far signaled only lukewarm support.
In the meantime, there’s nothing to stop the mayor from implementing those parts of his plan that don’t require state action. He could begin with the five specialized high schools not covered by the 1971 state law.
Mr. de Blasio could also consider applying the plan, or something similar, to the city’s other competitive high schools, many of which are also failing to admit significant numbers of black and Latino students.
It is a bitter irony, or just a deeply damning fact, that the spirit of Jim Crow would prove so stubborn in a city whose leaders pride themselves on their enlightened politics. Without aggressive action, New York will continue to fail its black and Latino students, a waste of their potential and its own.
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Note: Detailed data on schools with fewer than six offers, many of which have a higher share of black and Hispanic students, is not made available. The average grade among students offered admission from those schools was 93.9 percent. Source: N.Y.C. Department of Education.
Opinion | It’s Time to Integrate New York’s Best Schools - The New York Times: ""
(Via.)

Supreme Court Says Texas Political Map Is Largely Not A Racial Gerrymander : NPR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said that Texas' legislative and congressional maps are not a racial gerrymander and that all districts are OK, except for one, which it determined is a racial gerrymander — House District 90.

Conservative Samuel Alito has the majority opinion of the court and writes, 'Except with respect to one Texas House district, we hold that the court below erred in effectively enjoining the use of the districting maps adopted by the Legislature in 2013.'

In a one-page concurrence, joined by Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative (in philosophy and use of words) justices, reiterates that his view is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act 'does not apply to redistricting,' per SCOTUSBlog.

The court's liberals dissented, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Sotomayor's 46-page opinion is five pages longer than the majority opinion.)

Sotomayor writes, 'The Court today goes out of its way to permit the State of Texas to use maps that he three-judge District Court unanimously found were adopted for the purpose of preserving the racial discrimination that tainted its previous maps.'"

(Via.) Supreme Court Says Texas Political Map Is Largely Not A Racial Gerrymander : NPR:

A New York election: the battle to prove who's the Trumpiest of them all | US news | The Guardian

Home is where the hatred is. --Gil Scott Heron



"New York spawned Donald Trump, but since his rise to the presidency, the city has come to feel like an independent state, a world away from the obsessions of the man in the Oval Office.



But cross a bridge from hipster Brooklyn or take a free ferry ride from the toe of Manhattan and Trumpland is right there on the doorstep.



Staten Island, the forgotten fifth borough, overlooked by tourists and ignored by most New Yorkers, is a conservative stronghold. Traditionally home to cops and firefighters, Irish and Italians, it voted heavily for Trump in 2016 and will have its say on Tuesday in a Republican primary which can make undisputed claim to be the Trumpiest race of the 2018 midterms.





Michael Grimm and Dan Donovan at an election debate. Photograph: David Taylor for the Guardian

In one corner is Dan Donovan, a sitting congressman who has fallen so perfectly into line with the Trump agenda that he has won the president’s “full endorsement” on Twitter. His campaign signs, popping up on lawns along the 14-mile length of the borough, have been updated with the Trump line, almost as if they are running mates.



In nearby Long Island in May, Donovan joined Trump on Air Force One for a strange presidential fact-finding field trip meant to highlight violence involving the MS-13 gang. He further ingratiated himself by introducing a bill which would order all post offices to display a picture of Trump. Days later, his endorsement arrived.



But Donovan is not sure thing for re-election. His opponent is Michael Grimm, a man formerly known to the US federal prison system as inmate 83479-053.



The former marine and FBI undercover agent has already served as representative for New York’s 11th congressional district, which covers Staten Island and the southern end of Brooklyn. But his last term ended in disgrace after he pleaded guilty in 2015 to aiding and assisting the preparation of a false tax return.



He served seven months in prison, after admitting hiring undocumented migrants and hiding $1m in receipts from a now defunct Manhattan restaurant, Healthalicious.



Grimm also gained notoriety during his time in Washington when he was caught on camera threatening to throw a television reporter off a balcony inside the Capitol building. “I will break you in half, like a boy,” he threatened, after taking exception to being ambushed with a question about his campaign finances.





Now Grimm is back, emboldened by the support of former White House aide Steve Bannon and determined to prove, endorsement or not, that he is the true ally to Trump.



For a man attempting a dramatic political makeover, Grimm has picked a perfect location. His campaign headquarters in a mall on Hylan Boulevard is sandwiched between a Beach Bum Tanning salon and the European Wax Center, where “our experts will have you walking in and strutting out”.



Inside, volunteers are busy in a windowless basement office, with only a few days to go until the vote to decide which Republican will defend the district in November. A campaign T-shirt with the logo “Michael Grimm 2018 All Aboard The Trump Train” is pinned to the wall alongside a glittery red, white and blue God Bless America. At a desk below, four women are hitting the phones.





Volunteers hit the phones for Grimm at his campaign headquarters. Photograph: David Taylor for the Guardian

A volunteer, who gave her name as Maryann, said: “Some people say they like Donovan but covertly, once they are in that election booth, they say they are going to vote for Grimm.”



One poll from the end of May showed Grimm winning by 10 points. After the Trump endorsement, the latest poll gives Donovan a seven-point lead.



Grimm, who had a moderate record as a congressman in the age before Trump, seems to be reinventing himself, taking a hardline position on immigration, condemning the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia and decrying his opponent for voting to support the Affordable Care Act.



Despite his past misdemeanours, there is tremendous loyalty for Grimm in Staten Island. From Tottenville, a waterside neighbourhood where Main Street seems to have as many Italian and Irish flags as stars and stripes, to Midland Beach on its eastern Atlantic coast, locals remember what he did for them after superstorm Sandy hit in 2012, killing 24 people and bringing devastation.



Grimm was there serving food and helping with the clean up. Crucially, for people rebuilding their lives, he authored a bill to keep down the cost of flood insurance.



Veronica Petersen, a retired educator, was one of 12 volunteers making calls on behalf of Grimm on Thursday. She said she first met him after Sandy: “My house was gone. He came to my yard and offered his assistance – food, anything I needed. He’s a hands-on congressman, not an out-of-touch bureaucrat.”



Sitting alongside an image of a beaming Grimm with the slogan “He’s got our back!” she said: “I want a congressman who gets his hands dirty and represents us.”





Retired bus mechanic Joey Brunetti, 69. Photograph: David Taylor for the Guardian

In Tottenville, retired bus mechanic Joey Brunetti, 69, said: “This guy Donovan – first time I heard of him! I talked to Grimm, he’s a down to earth guy, means what he says. What I can say, he’s a stand-up guy.”



What about his record as a felon? “That’s bullshit. He just happened to get caught, most of them do it.”



Outside the LA Fitness gym where Grimm trains, Santo Curatolo, 49, said: “I knew him as someone in the gym. I was hitting the bag and he was next to me, then I saw his ad and said, ‘That guy from the gym is running for Congress’. He’s a regular guy, he’s a gentleman.”



Curatolo said he didn’t vote, but supported Trump: “He’s doing well, right? They say he is the best president ever, he’s making peace with other countries.”



‘I put people like him in prison’

On stage together at a nasty debate this month, Grimm, 48, and Donovan, 61, stood at lecterns inches apart and tore into one another.



Grimm claimed his opponent had offered to help him get a pardon from Trump, but went cold when he discovered he intended to run against him. He called Donovan an “alleged Republican”, condemned him for supporting Obamacare and said “he doesn’t believe in deporting people”.



Donovan, a former district attorney, shot back: “I was a prosecutor for 20 years, I put people like him in prison.”



Both men are falling over themselves to demonstrate their populist credentials and loyalty to Trump – and while many Republicans were critical of the policy of splitting children from their families at the border, both candidates last week staunchly defended Trump as the outcry grew.



Grimm even rejected concern over distressing audio of children in detention crying for their mothers, comparing the sound to any nursery when a child has been left behind. On Thursday, at a low-key press conference, he insisted he had no regrets over what he said, blaming a journalist instead for the framing of the question.



Trump is looming over the candidates, and with good reason: Staten Island’s commitment to the president is largely undimmed. Retired detective Lou Telano, president of the New York Veteran Police Association, said his organisation was the first to endorse Trump, so the president’s endorsement of Donovan was now an important factor.



Telano was also the real-life inspiration for Starsky, one half of television’s most famous cop double act, Starsky & Hutch. He said: “We like Grimm, I like him personally. Donovan was endorsed by Trump, so that puts us in a little predicament. We may stay neutral until the election ends.



“Some of the membership are saying we can’t support him because he’s got a prison record. So that goes back and forth. At this moment, I guess we’ll probably stay neutral. Right now, it looks like we’re gonna do Pontius Pilate.”



A New York election: the battle to prove who's the Trumpiest of them all | US news | The Guardian