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Councilor says it's time to rally around Boston's Haitian community
By adamg on Wed, 11/20/2024 - 12:58pm
City Councilor Benjamin Weber (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury) today recited Martin Niemöller's poem before introducing Haitian-American pastor Keke Fleurissaint to open the council's meeting with an invocation.
Weber, the council's only Jewish member, first said he objects to people trivializing the Holocaust, such as a Republican congressman who last year compared Direct TV's elimination of Newsmax to the murder of 6 million Jews, but continued:
With talk of mass deportations, construction of detention centers, stripping of funding for affordable housing and public schools and threats issued to anyone who may try to stand in the way, I will keep the lessons Martin Niemöller learned at the front of my mind. That is one of the reasons why I am glad we have Pastor Keke with us today. Pastor Keke represents a Haitian community that is vital to the city of Boston. and if the Trump administration comes for them, I hope we have the strength to speak out and act.
Mayor Wu recently re-asserted Boston's role as a sanctuary city and, like Gov. Healy, has vowed to fight the incoming Trump administration's plans for concentration camps to hold immigrants - possibly including people who were actually born in the US - before sending them out of the country.
Trump's proposed "border czar" called Wu "not very smart."
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Comments
Question-
Are they here illegally? Have they been convicted of crimes? If the answer to those questions are no then yes they are an have been welcomed here. I would also assume that all legal, law abiding Haitian residents would also want those types of people removed as it gives them a bad name. Everyone was ready to burn down the ships to defund the police over a few bad apples but this approach seems to be to keep the ships just throw the apples back to the farm they came from. How is this wrong?
Yeah, but that's not what they're limiting themselves to
They want all immigrants out, including children of immigrants who were born here, because, as you might recall, they don't believe in that Constitutional nonsense about how such people are Americans. They're also talking about "denaturalization" or stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship.
lets be real here
Not all. Just brown and black ones. If it was all, everyone would be deported and our country would be run by the indigenous people, who were here before the white man arrived.
I also just read an article about this plan to end birth right. It would only apply to new, not existing. Because if this was existing, Barron Trump would be deported also. (which this article debunked also).
I dislike USAT as a source but this seems to track
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/11/19/barron-trump-bi...
...and the President-elect &
...and the President-elect & his surrogates have made many statements with assorted false & racist elements that have led to threats of violence, disrupted communities, created costs, demonized people, etc...
Do some reading, anon. All that BS about stealing & cooking pets, depressing communities, ****hole countries, calling people illegals who actually have legal status? They peddled those falsehoods - even when told by all parties on the ground local to the situation that these were falsehoods - and the results was bomb threats, swatting, business closures, school closures, disruptions to local economy.
...and these aren't the only people he'll do this to.
Answer
Questions posed in bad faith do not deserve serious answers.
Well, for one thing
The comparison is misguided since only police officers are equipped with the power of qualified immunity.
Pretty much everyone who works for the government.....
has qualified immunity. FYI
are any of those people
haitian migrants?
Lots of Haitian Immigrants work for the City of Boston
And many of them are not US Citizens. And they have qualified immunity.
And there are probably 100+ Boston Police officers of Haitian decent who earned their citizenship through their parents as well. If you know the Haitian immigrant community in MA you know that most of them are documented and are here legally.
feels like we're getting off track
i understood this conversation to be about Haitian migrants. the commenter i replied to compared the "bad apples" in the police force to those in the migrant community.
This is why I go to UH,
This is why I go to UH, because of not knowing things like Boston was a officially a sanctuary city. I remember a Judge letting someone slip away from the Feds through her chambers and I must have heard the term before, but it didn’t impress itself into my awareness. Yes, we must keep that poem in mind, but we must also remember both Parties are playing with the fire of demagoguery and both Parties are capable of and at times are practicing leading us down the path of ignorance and intolerance.
Today you learned?
Not for nothing but Adam's linked source on that specific tidbit for this story is from WBUR, which you can also read and listen to for free.
You can find articles in the Globe dating back at least to 2017 under Marty Walsh reporting on his affirmation of the city's status as a sanctuary city.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/02/24/muslim/ruYlriH8qt7wKxPrn2XE...
I'm not trying to sound critical of you but rather point out that we have a decent number of decent sources of news and information in this area. It certainly could and should be a greater number of sources but we aren't in a news desert here like some other places are.
Hi, Thanks for your reply.
I had to have had heard those local news items before, but it must have gone in one ear and out the other. The term must have seemed such an abstraction.
When I hear the term sanctuary city in the news it’s usually depicting Seattle, New York, Chicago…,
Now that you mention it I remember back to Florida sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and if DeSantis said “sanctuary city” it seemed to me an abstraction, an epithet based on general deep blue Massachusetts stereotype. And, as I write I remember the displacement of after school programs from DCR facilities, and a recent UH story about a violent incident outside a hotel being used for migrants.
Massachusetts is not a new desert, but it strikes me as incredibly anemic. Maybe I’m expecting too much from popular news. I want the popular press to give me the “Inside Baseball,” dossiers, histories and agendas of the movers and shakers all the time and not just occasionally.
My point was I’m glad I check UH, because the information sinks in better and I trust it.
Very good people...
...on both sides.
Not a good look.
We all have to look past
We all have to look past dehumanizing stereotypes.
I loathe the saying “you have to put your own face-mask on first, because it’s often an indulgent, trite blather, but Democrats can’t so good when so many are not doing well.
My point is for my Party to have any moral authority we must learn from our mistakes.
...what?
Speaking of non sequiturs, can you explain the relevance?
There’s a difference between
There’s a difference between bothsiderism and pointing out the pathologies of amoral electioneering from both sides.
I don’t care so much about how I look, or such loaded phrases as “not a good look.” I prefer persuasive writing to coercive writing.
Sigh
Quick, without resorting to google, define "electioneering". Of any sort, "amoral" or not.
"Both Parties"
Do take your shilling for the GOP right the f*ck out of here. This article was about a city councilor standing with Haitians that have been "demogauged" by republicans relentlessly during the recent campaign and threatened with all manner of racist threats and deportation camps.
This isn't a game. Whatever "demagoguery" the democratic party has been responsible for in recent decades, it has no relation to the current ongoing threats that faces Haitians from the republican autocrat that will soon run ICE.
And, whose fault is that?
And, whose fault is that? We lost the election out of negligence, arrogance. The Party chose to represent some, not all.
We?
Who is this we? I have no idea what team you are playing for. Do you?
He's a Right Wing Shill
he knows the game he's playing.
I’m a life-long Democrat, but
I’m a life-long Democrat, but I’m not a Socialist and my party’s pandering to the effites and elites and pandering to dangerous, coercive, un-American, anti-liberal, anti-Zionist (which at root is antisemitic) fringe to maintain electoral margins instead of being the party for the people delivered the victory for Trump.
… anti-liberal, anti-Zionist (whic
P.s., Senator Sanders is entitled to his position that it is not a just war as the ICC is entitled to he bought off.
lol
If this "fringe" is being "pandered to", explain to me why they ain't got shit out of the deal yet.
That's not the point, shill
The point is, Haitians and other groups in Boston are in great danger from the fascist that your party nominated. It's not a "both sides" thing. It's a "right wingers are calling for mass deportations of Haitians" thing.
Yeah, and now it’s going to
Yeah, and now it’s going to be a challenge protecting them since we lost the House, Senate, Executive Branch by pandering, patronizing and appeasing groups coercive to American, Western and especially big “D” Democratic values.
Losing balance in the Supreme Court should have been a wake up call to get the Party in order and realigned, but instead everybody chose the short-term profit from the spectacle of victimhood.
(Maybe RBG knew what she was doing.)
If we want to help migrants Democratic leaders need to stop doubling-down on a losing strategy and articulate and demonstrate they get it.
Name names
Name names and bring receipts. Go on, do it.
You're the one who admits that he can't be arsed to learn what a "sanctuary city" is. Why would anyone believe that you would know "pandering, patronizing and appeasing" if you fell over it in broad daylight?
Remind me again
Did we stand with the Haitians when Wu and others complained about them using the Melnea Cass Rec Center? There were protests outside the building and not from the group you would expect to be protesting migrants.
Haitians wouldn't be foreigners
If Haiti were a U.S. territory. All the lines on the map are fabrications.
Then again, real bit of good that does for Puerto Ricans.
Haiti never ASKED...
... to become part of the United States. However, the Dominican Republic did -- but Congress rejected President Grant's effort to bring this about: https://aaregistry.org/story/dominican-republic-santo-domingo-annexation...
I still want to hear the Satanic Temple …
…. present an invocation. And then see invocations ended forever.
Yes, we should rally round our Haitian neighbors otherwise.