CPD IN THE NEWS

Vanguardia – July 19, 2013 - Nueva York planea pagar abogados de oficio a los migrantes que se encuentren en una corte de migración y enfrenten la deportación.

Algunos migrantes con o sin papeles en la ciudad que enfrenten la expulsión de EU podrán a partir de finales de este año o 2014 presentarse frente al juez de migración con un abogado de oficio pagado con fondos municipales, reduciendo así sus posibilidades de ser deportados porque ya no estarán solos en la corte.

Activistas, un Magistrado federal y funcionarios locales planean anunciar el viernes que la ciudad ha destinado 500 mil dólares a financiar un programa piloto que ofrecerá representación legal a migrantes.

Brittny Saunders, de la organización Center for Popular Democracy, dijo que esta es la primera vez que un programa así se implementa en una municipalidad de EU.

“La intención que tenemos a través de este programa piloto es lograr información sobre los beneficios que la representación legal supone tanto para un individuo en detención y enfrentando la deportación como para su familia, su comunidad y la ciudad entera’’, dijo Saunders.

“Esperamos que este programa sea un modelo para otras comunidades alrededor del país’’.

Migrantes que acaban en las cortes de migración y que enfrentaban la deportación no tienen derecho a ser defendidos por un abogado de oficio. Pueden contratar a un abogado privado pero muchos migrantes no tienen el dinero para pagar por ese servicio. Es por ese motivo que la ciudad, varios activistas y un juez federal interesado en el tema llamado Robert Kaztmann han unido esfuerzos para ofrecer ayuda a migrantes en esta situación.

Saunders dijo que en el Estado de Nueva York una media de 2 mil 800 migrantes se encuentra anualmente en proceso de deportación sin acceso a asistencia legal.

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In a major speech on voting rights Thursday, Hillary Clinton laid out a far-reaching vision for expanding access to the ballot box, and denounced Republican efforts to make voting harder.

Speaking at Texas Southern University in Houston, Clinton called for every American to be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 unless they choose not to be. She backed a nationwide standard of at least 20 days of early voting. She urged Congress to pass legislation strengthening the Voting Rights Act, which was gravely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling. And she slammed restrictive voting laws imposed by the GOP in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, which she said affect minorities and students in particular.

“We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country,” Clinton said, “because what is happening is a sweeping effort to dis-empower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”

“We should be clearing the way for more people to vote, not putting up every road-block anyone can imagine,” Clinton added.

From a political perspective, forthrightly calling out Republican voting restrictions and advocating greater access to voting will likely help Clinton shore up key sections of her base – minorities and students in particular. And it could put the GOP on notice that further efforts to make voting harder may backfire by giving Democrats a tool to motivate their supporters.

Clinton, the prohibitive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called out by name several of her potential 2016 rivals – Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie – for supporting restrictive voting policies. She said Republicans should stop “fearmongering about a phantom epidemic of voter fraud.”

“Finally, a presidential candidate is acknowledging the rampant voting discrimination that has surged since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013,” Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told msnbc. “Voting is a cornerstone of our nation’s commitment to democracy, and Clinton’s acknowledgment of its importance is noteworthy.”

Clinton said relatively little about the most hot-button voting issue, voter ID – an approach that also appears politically savvy. Despite evidence that as many as 10% of eligible voters, disproportionately minorities, don’t have the ID required by strict versions of the law, polls show voter ID is generally popular.

Instead, Clinton sought to move the voting rights debate for 2016 toward more advantageous terrain for Democrats and voting rights supporters: expanding access to voting and voter registration, to make it easier to cast a ballot and bring more Americans into the process.

Noting that between one quarter and one third of all Americans aren’t registered to vote, Clinton called for an across-the-board modernization of the registration process. The centerpiece: universal automatic voter registration, in which every citizen is automatically registered when they turn 18 unless they affirmatively choose not to be, effectively changing the system’s default status from non-registered to registered. Oregon passed such a law earlier this year, and several other states, including California, are considering the idea.

“I think this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy,” Clinton said.

Clinton also said registration should be updated automatically when a voter moves, and called for making voter rolls more accurate secure. And she said Republican efforts to restrict voter registration, seen in Texas, Florida, and other states, disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and students.

Around 50 million eligible voters aren’t registered, according to a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, based on Census Bureau data. That’s three times as many as the number who are registered but stay home.

Clinton said the nationwide early voting standard of at least 20 days should also include evening and weekend voting, to accommodate those with work or family commitments.

“If families coming out of church on Sunday are inspired to go vote, they should be free to do just that,” Clinton said, in a reference to the Souls to the Polls drives that are popular in Africa-American communities, in which people vote en masse after church. 

Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina — all Republican-controlled states — have cut their early voting periods in recent years, with the latter two states also eliminating same-day voter registration. And a third of all states offer no early voting at all. Democratic efforts to create or expand early voting have been killed, or allowed to languish in committee, by Republicans in at least 15 states, eight of them in the south, according to a tally compiled by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. 

In addition, Clinton called for Congress to fully implement the recommendations of a bipartisan presidential panel on voting released last year, which included online voter registration and establishing the principle that voters shouldn’t wait more than 30 minutes. And she suggested that laws barring ex-felons from voting should be liberalized, adding her voice to a growing push against felon disenfranchisement laws. 

And Clinton lamented the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act.

“We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person to vote than the right of a corporation to buy an election,” she said. 

Asked by msnbc on a call with reporters whether it was realistic to propose legislation, given the record of the Republican-controlled Congress, a senior official with the Clinton campaign pointed to ”encouraging signs” in the states, arguing that such changes could be implemented at the state level with federal support.

On voter ID, Clinton’s criticism of Texas’s law was centered on a provision that allows concealed gun permits but not student IDs, suggesting partisan bias. She didn’t offer the kind of broader condemnation of ID laws per se often voiced by voting and civil rights groups. And in criticizing Wisconsin and North Carolina’s slew of voting restrictions, she focused on cuts to early voting rather than those states’ ID laws.

Hours before Clinton spoke, a de facto arm of her campaign that provides pro-Clinton information to the media sent out an email documenting the GOP 2016 hopefuls’ records of supporting restrictive voting policies, which it contrasted with Clinton’s expansive approach.

Clinton’s speech comes less than a week after her campaign’s top lawyer, Marc Elias, filed suit to challenge Wisconsin’s voting restrictions. Last month, Elias filed a similar lawsuit challenging Ohio’s early voting cuts.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a statement to msnbc and said Elias is wasting Ohioans’ tax dollars. “Hillary Clinton is calling for a national standard for early voting that is less than what Ohio currently offers,” Husted said. “Given this fact, I call on her to tell her attorneys to drop her elections lawsuit against Ohio.”

The Clinton campaign has said it’s not officially involved in the lawsuits but supports them.

In choosing to give the speech in Texas, Clinton was going into the belly of the beast. In addition to the ID law, which has been struck down as racially discriminatory and is currently being appealed, Texas also has the strictest voter registration rules in the country. And last week, a voting group alleged that the state is systematically failing to process registration applications, msnbc reported.

Clinton has long had a strong record on voting issues. As a volunteer for the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, Clinton worked to register Latino voters in Texas. And in 2005 as a senator, she introduced an expansive voting bill that would have made Election Day a national holiday and set standards for early voting.

At Texas Southern, Clinton received the Barbara Jordan Leadership Award, named for the crusading civil rights leader who was the first southern black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Source: MSNBC

WASHINGTON — They kept a grueling pace. 

More than 250 marchers completed a 118-mile journey from Charlottesville, Virginia, to the nation’s capital on Wednesday. A core group of faithful marchers walked a third of the length of Virginia, a former Confederate slave-holding state, to speak out against racial hatred.

Read the full article here.

The Dallas Morning News - March 4, 2015, by Sheryl Jean - A coalition of community and labor groups in Texas is calling for the Federal Reserve to focus on full employment and higher wages for blacks and others in poor neighborhoods who have been left behind in the economic recovery.

The group also wants the board of the Fed’s regional bank in Dallas to keep that in mind as it searches for a replacement for Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher, who will retire March 19.

Liberal activists across the country on Thursday plan to protest outside seven Fed regional banks, including New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, to highlight high unemployment among minority groups and to urge officials not to raise interest rates yet and instead focus on full employment and higher wages. A demonstration also was planned at the Dallas Fed’s office on the edge of downtown, but was canceled due to a forecast for bad weather.

Still, activists in Dallas plan to call attention to a new report showing that the nation’s economic recovery hasn’t reached many minority communities. Falling jobless rates maskhigh black and long-term unemployment and racial inequality in wages in Texas and across the country.

The 84-page report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute shows that Texas’ average jobless rate was 5 percent in 2014, but it was 9.5 percent for blacks. In the Dallas metro area, the average rate was 5.1 percent last year, but it was 9.6 percent for blacks. Nationally, the black jobless rate was 10.3 percent, compared with a national average of 6.2 percent.

Wages also lagged. Texas’ median wage grew 3.9 percent from 2000 to 2014, but it rose 8 percent for whites and declined 0.8 percent for blacks, according to the report. Nationally, wages have been stagnant for most workers since 2000.

“If the Fed raises [interest] rates to banks, then our rates go up, but wages aren’t going up,” said Danny Cendejas, senior organizer in Dallas for the Texas Organizing Project, one of the groups in the coalition. “It’s something that is very concerning for most of our community. In the black and brown communities, where we know the unemployment rates are higher, how do we expect those people to pay their loans back?”

The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since 2008 to help spur business lending to create jobs and boost the economy.

Coalition members in Texas want a more open search process for Fisher’s replacement with more involvement by the community. Fisher, who was in El Paso on Wednesday, has been one of the most vocal advocates of raising interest rates sooner than later.

“Look around at all the construction cranes in Dallas,” said Becky Moeller, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “I think the lower interest rates are spurring businesses to do work and then they’re hiring people. We just don’t want an interest rate policy that isn’t good for workers in the state.”

Moeller was among a group of 10 community leaders who met with three Fed representatives — general counsel John Buchanan; Alfreda Norman, head of community development and public affairs; and spokesman James Hoard — for about 90 minutes in January to discuss the search process for a new president, the timeline and the qualifications sought.

“We had a good conversation and thought we answered their questions,” Hoard said. The Dallas Fed put the name of the search firm and its email address on its website for anyone interested in nominating a candidate, he added.

Moeller has a different view of the meeting.

“We don’t have a candidate, but we felt like we had some input we wanted to share,” she said. “We don’t want it to be someone who wouldn’t be good for jobs in the future. We wanted to make sure they were looking at the economic factors that relate to real people in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico. We have low-wage workers who can’t get their head above water. We have folks who are long-term unemployed.”

In addition to the Texas AFL-CIO, the groups that met with the Dallas Fed were the American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, Dallas Central Labor Council, Fort Worth Building Trades and Ironworkers, Harris County Central Labor Council, Jobs With Justice, Texas Organizing Project and Workers Defense Project.

Coalition members last summer protested the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., forum and met with Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen in November.

Yellen and three other Fed officials met with about 30 workers and activists, including some from Texas, for an hour to hear their plights of being long-term unemployed and struggling to make a living. As a result, the Fed created the Community Advisory Council in January to provide different perspectives on the economy, especially the needs of low- to moderate-income families.

“She listened very carefully and was very engaged and was grateful to us for requesting the meeting,” said Ady Barkan, staff lawyer for the Center for Popular Democracy, who was at the meeting. “It’s the kind of response we would like to see from others.”

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