Pope donated $500,000 to Mexico-based projects to help migrant communities

ABC News Apr 27, 2019

Pope Francis donated $500,000 to Mexico-based projects to help migrant communities as media attention has faded, the Vatican said Saturday. 

 The funds will be distributed between 27 projects associated with 16 Mexican dioceses and congregations, all of which asked for help to continue providing food, lodging, and basic necessities to those fleeing their home countries through Mexico.

“In recent months, thousands of migrants have arrived in Mexico, having travelled more than 4,000 kilometers on foot and with makeshift vehicles from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Men and women, often with young children, flee poverty and violence, hoping for a better future in the United States. However, the U.S. border remains closed to them,” said a press release from Peter's Pence, the organization handling the funds. 

On Saturday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1461which could result in illegal aliens voting.

by William Bigelow12 Oct 2015

Any person who renewed or secured a driver’s license through the DMV may now register to vote, or choose to opt out of doing so. Because illegal immigrants are now eligible for obtaining driver’s licenses, they could be allowed to vote in elections if the Secretary of State’s office fails to verify their eligibility properly.

Brown and the California Democratic party know exactly what they are doing; as a Public Policy Institute survey showed, among unregistered adults, 49% lean toward the Democratic Party and 22% toward the Republican Party. Any bill permitting illegal immigrants to vote would cement the Democratic Party’s hold on California.

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht stated, “This bill is terrible. It makes an already bad situation much, much worse,” adding that California’s registration databases “lack the necessary safeguards to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls.”

Election Integrity Project of California President Linda Paine echoed that AB 1461 “will effectively change the form of governance in California from a Republic whose elected officials are determined by United States citizens and will guarantee that noncitizens will participate in all California elections going forward.” The Election Integrity Project of California had joined True the Vote to demand that brown veto the bill, calling it a path to “‘state sanctioned’ voter fraud.”

Although noncitizens’ driver’s licenses in California feature the phrases “Federal Limits Apply” and “not valid for official federal purposes,” True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell pointed out that state officials “specifically chose not to make noncitizen license holders searchable in their DMV database.”

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla countered that the increase in voters will benefit the state, arguing, “The New Motor Voter Act will make our democracy stronger by removing a key barrier to voting for millions of California citizens. Citizens should not be required to opt in to their fundamental right to vote. We do not have to opt in to other rights, such as free speech or due process.”

California follows Oregon, where Democratic Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill in March allowing the automatic registration of all eligible Oregonians to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license or state identification card.

But Stephen Frank of California Political Review bluntly asserted that the bill will reduce voter turnout because voters will sniff fraud in the polls: “AB 1461 assures corruption of our elections–our elections will look like those of Mexico and other corrupt nations–and honest people will stop voting since illegal aliens will out vote them.”     Beitbart

Pope Francis: The Refugee's Saviour

Sunday 17 April 2016 11.52 EDT Last modified on Sunday 17 April 2016 17.00 ED

The Syrian refugees Pope Francis took in following his visit to the Greek island of Lesbos have hailed the pontiff as a saviour for offering them a new life.

In a hugely symbolic move seen as a lesson in solidarity for Europe, Francis, who is the son of Italian migrants to Argentina, took 12 Syrians from three families – all of them Muslims – home with him to the Vatican on Saturday.

“All refugees are children of God,” the 79-year-old pontiff said on the flight back to Rome, adding that though his gesture was “a drop in the ocean” he hoped “the ocean will never be the same again”.

In an interview with the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, the families, who spent their first night in Rome at a Catholic charity, expressed their gratitude for the pope’s “gesture of hope”.

“We saw friends and relatives die in the rubble, we fled Syria because we no longer had any hope,” said Hasan, an engineer from Damascus, who arrived in Italy with his wife, Nour, and two-year-old son.

After fleeing to Turkey, he and his family set out for Europein a rubber dinghy that sailed from the Turkish coast to Greece. “But it was overloaded,” he said, recalling the pitch black of the sea at night and the waves rocking the vessel.

“In Lesbos, we understood that we were stuck in a place that we could not leave, [we were] in a trap, a prison”, he said. He described the pope as a saviour for taking them off the island, where thousands of migrants risk being sent back to Turkey under a new deportation deal between the EU and Turkey.

Pope Francis spoke emotionally on Sunday of his meeting with migrants and refugees on Lesbos. Addressing worshippers at his weekly Angelus prayer in St Peter’s Square, the pontiff related his visit to a migrant processing centre, where about 3,000 people are being held.

“We greeted around 300 of them, one by one,” said Francis, who was accompanied on his visit by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens.

“There were so many children. Some of these children witnessed their parents and friends dying, drowned at sea. I saw such suffering,” he said.

He went on to tell of one particular case, “that of a young man, who was not even 40”.

“I met him yesterday with his two sons. He was Muslim and told me he had married a Christian, [and that] they loved and respected each other,” he said. “She had her throat slit by terrorists because she would not renounce Christ and abandon her faith.”

Wafa, another of the refugees on the papal flight from Lesbos with her husband Osama, eight-year-old daughter Masa and six-year-old son Omar, told La Stampa of the constant bombardments the experienced around their home.

“Since then [my son] has barely spoken … he is locked in an impenetrable silence,” she said. “Even today, he wakes up every night crying and we cannot get him to play with his sister.”

Wafa said she and her husband, who are from the Damascus suburb of Zamalka, had opted to cut ties with the past. “We know we took the right decision,” she said. After their stay on Lesbos, which seemed interminable “Francis gave us a new life,” she said.

Ramy, a 51-year-old teacher from the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, which is occupied by Islamic State, fled Syria with his wife Suhila and three children – sons Rashid, 18 and Abdelmajid, 16, and daughter Al Quds, seven – after their home was destroyed in the war.

“We discuss a lot and find it hard to imagine what life will be like in the future. We don’t know whether we will start over in Europe or whether, one day, we will be able to return to a Syria free of war and violence,” he told La Stampa.

“We are grateful to the pope, we will prove ourselves worthy of this opportunity and the gift he gave us,” he said.

The three families, who had initially set their sights on reaching Germany or another European country, were expected to seek asylum in Italy.

Their arrival brings to about 20 the number of refugees living in the Vatican, which has fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. A similar intake across Europe would see 6 million people given asylum on the continent of 300 million.

Last year, the pope appealed to every Catholic diocese in Europe to take in a refugee family, an appeal that fell on deaf ears across most parts of the continent.

The number of migrants arriving in Greece has fallen drastically since Turkey agreed to take back all those landing on the Greek islands in return for billions in EU cash and other concessions.

More than 1.1 million people have crossed clandestinely from Turkey to Greece since the start of 2015, and hundreds have drowned en route.     The Guardian

Obama's Immigration Legacy

The centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s immigration legacy heads to the Supreme Court on Monday, where a short-staffed court bench will decide the fate of his controversial programs to grant work permits to millions of immigrants in the United States illegally.

Whichever way the high court ultimately rules, its decision will again inject the volatile issue of immigration into an explosive presidential campaign. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have pledged to push the bounds of executive power and expand Obama’s immigration actions. Meanwhile, the top two GOP hopefuls — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — have promised to rescind the programs immediately and have taken particularly hard-line stances against undocumented immigrants.

But Obama’s immigration legacy is also on the line in United States v. Texas. He was not successful in signing comprehensive immigration reform into law during his two terms, and Obama has come under fire from advocates for deporting more than 2 million immigrants during his tenure. Meanwhile, his sweeping executive actions have been blocked for more than a year, and even if the Supreme Court rules in his favor, the administration will have just seven months to jump-start the programs before Obama leaves the White House.

“I think the president’s legacy is intact” on immigration, said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime proponent of immigration reform who will attend Monday’s oral arguments. “The Supreme Court, I hope, will sustain his good judgment on this issue.”

Other congressional Democrats closely involved in immigration will watch the arguments, including Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Reps. Joaquin Castro of Texas and Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, who said Democrats believe the highly charged immigration case will be a political boon in 2016 regardless of how the court decides. A ruling is expected in June.

Gutiérrez reasons that if the court rules in favor of the administration, Latino voters and others motivated by immigration will come out in droves to protect the programs from a potential GOP president who would move to kill it. And if the administration loses, the same group will vote with similar intensity to punish Republicans, who spearheaded the legal case against Obama at the state level.

“Politically, it’s a win-win,” said Gutiérrez, adding that he is confident the court will allow the immigration programs, called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, to proceed.

As with other high-profile Supreme Court cases, the scene outside 1 First St. NE on Monday morning is sure to be a circus. Immigration advocates from across the country will descend on the court’s front steps with lawmakers, civil rights activists and labor officials for a major rally. Organizers said they are expecting thousands.

Conservative activists will counter those efforts with a protest of their own that touches not just on immigration but on the ongoing contentious battle over the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Groups including the Tea Party Patriots, Judicial Crisis Network, FreedomWorks and Heritage Action will join conservative Reps. Steve King of Iowa, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Ted Yoho of Florida.

“We will be there to protest Barack Obama’s attempt to stack the high court with a liberal crony who will sign off on his unconstitutional power grabs,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and CEO of Tea Party Patriots.

The pro-reform side is making a particularly aggressive public-relations effort in the run-up to the high-stakes court case. On Friday, the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice released results of a poll from Latino Decisions that found 74 percent of Latino voters are less likely to support a Republican presidential candidate who opposes the deferred action program.

Latino Decisions does polling for Clinton, who is a vigorous backer of Obama’s executive actions and announced last week that she would establish a national Office of Immigrant Affairs if she is elected in November. Similarly, Sanders backs the executive actions and, like Clinton, has pledged to expand them to a larger pool of undocumented immigrants, despite the legal challenges Obama has faced doing so.

But Obama’s executive actions have united an otherwise splintered Republican presidential field in opposition to the programs. Trump has vowed to undo the programs on his first day of office if he’s elected president, as has Cruz, who has repeatedly derided the actions as “executive amnesty.”

Republicans have also long emphasized that Obama — who was under pressure from impatient immigration advocates to halt deportations — himself said multiple times that he didn’t have the executive powers to do what he ultimately did in November 2014.

“Let’s remember it was President Obama who said time and again that he did not have the authority to bypass Congress to impose new immigration laws,” said Ruth Guerra, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. “His executive action was contrary to his words, poisoned the well for a legislative effort and blatantly ignored the Constitution.”

Inside the courtroom, lawyers for the House of Representatives will be making their own case against Obama’s executive actions to provide deportation protections and work permits to more than 4 million immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally but are parents of U.S. citizens or green-card holders. Obama’s actions also expanded a 2012 initiative granting those benefits to immigrants who came here illegally as children.

The GOP-controlled chamber was granted 15 minutes before the court to back up arguments made by Texas and the 25 other states that have sued the Obama administration to stop the programs. House lawmakers also voted along near-party lines last month to submit an amicus brief in the case. Senate Republicans also filed a brief defending the conservative coalition opposing the immigration actions.

Obama’s executive actions are “an unprecedented effort, as the President acknowledged, to ‘change’ the immigration laws by executive fiat,” the House brief says. “Whether couched as a statutory power, a constitutional power, or an implicit component of ‘enforcement discretion,’ that is not a power the Executive possesses.”

On the opposing side, lawyers representing three undocumented mothers from South Texas will have 10 minutes to make an emotional appeal on behalf of the immigrant women. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which, along with law firms O’Melveny & Myers and DLA Piper, is aiding the women, said the mothers would qualify for DAPA and plan to apply if the programs get the green light from the court to proceed.          Politico

The Pope's Wall And Immigration

ChristmasIsALie.com

 

Published on Feb 20, 2016

The Pope made news recently when he claimed someone interested in a security wall, could not be a Christian, apparently forgetting that the Pope in the 9th Century did precisely that, and his wall was even expanded and fortified in the 12th century. Catholic "Spin doctors" have hit the internet declaring the comparison invalid (because anyone can "buy tickets" to get in). The comparison was much more valid than anyone on TV would ever dare admit in public, not because of the Vatican's wall, but because of what goes on inside them. Anyone who would like to use the Pope as political leverage to get a vote, should have to be confronted with and face, what goes on inside those Vatican walls.(That is a threat to American sovereignty)

G.O.P. Unveils Immigration Plan: “We Must Make America Somewhere No One Wants to Live”

Credit Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty

November 19, 2014  By Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled his party’s long-awaited plan on immigration on Wednesday, telling reporters, “We must make America somewhere no one wants to live.”

Appearing with House Speaker John Boehner, McConnell said that, in contrast to President Obama’s “Band-Aid fixes,” the Republican plan would address “the root cause of immigration, which is that the United States is, for the most part, habitable.”

“For years, immigrants have looked to America as a place where their standard of living was bound to improve,” McConnell said. “We’re going to change that.”

Boehner said that the Republicans’ plan would reduce or eliminate “immigration magnets,” such as the social safety net, public education, clean air, and drinkable water.

The Speaker added that the plan would also include the repeal of Obamacare, calling healthcare “catnip for immigrants.”

Attempting, perhaps, to tamp down excitement about the plan, McConnell warned that turning America into a dystopian hellhole that repels immigrants “won’t happen overnight.”

“Our crumbling infrastructure and soaring gun violence are a good start, but much work still needs to be done,” he said. “When Americans start leaving the country, we’ll know that we’re on the right track.”

In closing, the two congressional leaders expressed pride in the immigration plan, noting that Republicans had been working to make it possible for the past thirty years.

The New Yorker