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This one’s a few days old, but it’s worth mentioning, particularly in light of recent developments in Arizona.
Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) have written to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano asking her to put deportations of students who would be eligible for legal residency under the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act, now working its way through Congress, would provide a path to citizenship for certain college students who were brought to the United States as children without proper documentation.
As previously noted on this blog, current immigration law puts students who have been American residents since early childhood at risk of deportation. There is no consistent policy for dealing with such students’ cases, and though several have recently won reprieves, they have done so at significant expense and emotional turmoil. Moreover, as senators Durbin and Lugar point out, such deportation proceedings represent “an inefficient use of [the] limited resources” of the DHS.
Police are reporting that a 27-year-old transgender student at CSU Long Beach was slashed in a men’s room on campus earlier this month.
Although the attack took place ten days ago, the university only made it public this Friday.
The student’s assailant addressed him by name before the attack, asking him whether he was that person. The victim of the assault did not recognize his attacker, but was able to provide police with information enabling them to create a sketch.
Police have not said whether they are investigating the incident as a hate crime. The Long Beach Post has, however, reported that a Facebook entry on the incident claimed that the attacker carved the word “IT” into the victim’s chest.
The attacked student was treated for his injuries in a local hospital and released that evening.
Cal State Northridge Economics professor Kenneth Ng has shut down his website Big Baby Kenny in the wake of the site’s outing in the media, but the pages live on in Google’s cache.
The site, which promised to show readers “how to get banged better, cheaper, and more efficiently in the Thailand Girl Scene,” has been known to university administrators for months. Ng was initially defiant when approached by reporters last week, but backpedaled in the face of public outrage. University provost Harry Hellebrand released a statement on Friday thanking Ng “for his reflection and removal of the site.”
Although Ng now says he “never encountered any child prostitution” in Thailand, and denies that his site was a sex tourism guide, his own writings, now deleted, reveal these claims to be lies. In his website, Ng not only made a number of clear references to encountering girls whom he believed to be underage at places of prostitution, he provided his readers directions to, and GPS coordinates of, those locations.
Warning: The excerpts provided below include depictions of child prostitution and the physical abuse of women.
Pages that have been taken down include…
Let us know what you’re doing, what you’re planning, what you’re reading!
Why Smonday? Because Sunday isn’t fabulous enough on its own.
A sweeping new immigration enforcement bill signed into law by the governor of Arizona on Friday has met with immediate opposition from students and others around the nation.
The law, known as SB 1070, has many elements, but its most controversial is a mandate that police officers to detain people they believe to be in the United States illegally.
President Obama on Friday described the law as a threat to “trust between police and our communities” and to “basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” The Archbishop of Los Angeles has compared the law’s provisions to Nazism.
SB 1070 provoked mass student protests even before it was signed — on Thursday morning more than a thousand Phoenix-area high school students walked out of classes and marched on the state capitol to demand that governor Jan Brewer veto the bill.
Dream Activist, a website by and for students organizing for immigration reform, reports that rallies and vigils were planned for Saturday in California, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Washington DC.
Opponents of the law are using the hashtags #SB1070 and #LegalizeAZ on Twitter.
Update | Add Connecticut to the list of states hosting anti-SB1070 protests — Yale students staged a mock ICE raid on campus on Thursday.
studentactivism.net 
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