informational
Des Moines, Iowa - 11 January 2016

Hilary Clinton’s Immigration Reform Proposal / El plan de Hilary Clinton por la reforma inmigratoria

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versión en Español abajo

To win the democratic nomination 2383 delegates are needed. As of this morning, Hilary Clinton has 2184 pledged delegates to Sanders 1804; with superdelegates she has 2755 to Sanders 1852. While Donald trump is campaigning to enforce border security and deport the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, Hillary Clinton’s immigration reform proposal during the 2016 presidential election could be explained as the polar opposite of Trump’s proposal. Clinton ran in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary election for president of the United States campaigning strongly on jobs and raising the minimum wage. During her second campaign in the 2016 presidential election, she finds herself pitted against Donald Trump’s massive deportation plan and Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialist plans to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 nationally.

Arizona

Uncertain future for detained #Dream9: an example of sourcing the story

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(a post discussing sourcing with examples from backgrounding work I did on The New York Times July 23 piece 9 in Deportation Protest Are Held in Bid to Re-enter U.S.)

This week on Tuesday, I got invited to help locate sources and gather background information for a brief follow-up story that Julia Preston was working on. A big part of reporting is reaching sources – and this becomes doubly high pressure when working on a breaking news or developing story. The day before, nine protesters were intentionally apprehended in Nogales on Monday morning. In press releases sent out before the event, protest organizers said that eight young immigrants who’d grown up in the U.S. but then had either voluntarily left or been deported would be protesting family separation (a ninth person joined the initial eight during the protest). They’d try to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at Morley Gate, a pedestrian crossing between Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona and request humanitarian parole.

behind the scenes

Family through a fence

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A bittersweet reunion lets three young immigrants see – and reach for – their deported mothers through a fence. Read more here in the June 11 The New York Times piece: Immigrants Reach Beyond a Legal Barrier for a Reunion

As a young man and two young women approached the border from the Arizona side, a cry rang out through the bars of the border fence. Waiting for their children in matching turquoise t-shirts on the Mexican side were their mothers, separated for years since their deportations for being illegally present in the U.S.

The six came together, reaching through the spaces between the thick metal poles, with sobs and laughter under the watchful (and not always dry) eyes of organizers, reporters, Border Patrol, and Mexican Federales last Tuesday – the culmination of days of travel and two months of planning. All three children are in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program which gives qualified applicants the ability to go to school, work and in some states get drivers licenses while they wait for a more permanent resolution to their legal status limbo. It’s a way for participants to start coming out of the shadows.