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One_liners
_SBCC steering committee member Rosa Sanluis of Fuerza del Valle, an alliance in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas that educates domestic workers about their rights and how to protect themselves, joined Alfonso Cuarón, “Roma” director and screenwriter, at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.
_DHS Secretary Nielsen will face a round of questions related to family separations that happened under her watch and DHS oversight at a hearing in the House Homeland Security Committee, The Way Forward on Border Security,” Wednesday, March 6, starting at 10 a.m. EST, in 310 Cannon.
_This 3-minute Ay Mariposa film short puts to rest any notion that borderlanders will ever give up the fight against the border wall. #StoptheBorderWall
_The Center for Biological Diversity put together a video series of the border region, #BorderViews, to illustrate the effects of new and old border wall and how these destroy our lands, communities, and wildlife.
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Must_reads
_Senate, batter up! In what has become an epic (and dangerous) game that pits an offense of lies about a fake emergency against our border communities, we scored an important first step. The House overwhelmingly passed a resolution, introduced by Rep. Joaquin Castro, to block Trump’s unconstitutional power grab and sham national emergency declaration_which was a misuse of power to get around congressional approval and dip into military and other funds to build his vanity wall. Because the resolution is considered privileged, the Senate is obligated to consider it in committee for 15 days and then put it up for a vote no later than three days after that. If it passes the Senate, then it gets lobbed to the White House for Trump’s signature. Sign it Trump, there’s no crying in politics! In the meantime, Senators Tom Udall of New Mexico and Susan Collins of Maine introduced an identical bipartisan resolution on the Senate side. Congress needs to be on the top of their game to restore their constitutional power of the purse. Take it home!
_Buh, bye…Remember when Trump visited San Diego to inspect his eight prototypes for a wall that represented a mixture of concrete and steel monstrosities 30-feet high? Well, since these were built we’ve learned how the prototypes were riddled with problems, including per a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. And now, the prototypes_which were built at a cost to taxpayers of $3 million _were unceremoniously torn down (unfortunately to make room for secondary fencing). None of the prototypes will ever be used, nor will they stand there to remind us of the bad ideas they represented. We hope one day the rest of the miles of harmful and costly walls that exist in our communities will also be torn down. Good riddance.
_A dream and a promise. We were delighted to hear that House Democrats aim to introduce in mid-March a powerful new version of the Dream Act that will include protections for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) recipients. This bill is long overdue and we hope it flies through an approval on the House side, and that the Senate will respond by passing it in their chamber without mucking it up with heinous and unnecessary riders. It’s time to do what’s right and provided permanent protections with a pathway to citizenship for people who are American in all but paperwork. Oh, and yeah, let’s keep it clean this time around, peeps. Okay? Okay!
_Senate’s Turn. It’s now up to the Senate to react to the House’s passage of the Castro resolution that will end Trump’s national emergency declaration and unconstitutional power grab. And it’s time they felt the pressure. Please reach out to your senators and tell them to vote in favor of restoring the checks and balances that are integral to our democracy. The Senate needs to approve the Castro resolution to stop Trump’s autocratic power grab. We’re expecting the Senate to vote on the resolution the week of March 11th, which isn’t far away, so start making those calls now to call out the #FakeNationalEmergency.
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