At the Presidential Debates, Community and Faith
Groups Demonstrate
Declaring
Migration is a Human Right, Profiting from Pain is Inhumane
Contact:
Judith
Marquez, 720-690-5172
October 3, 2012 Denver, CO – Pressed against the fence
surrounding the debate festival observers asked “What are the puppets for?” Faith leaders, immigrants and community
leaders singing and chanting along University and Evans, but the image that
drew attention was that of dozens of people dressed in Monarch butterfly wings
and the family of 14 foot tall puppets they surrounded.
The Monarch butterfly migrates
hundreds of miles every year, crossing Mexico, the US and Canada. The
demonstrators insist that the pattern and timelessness of human migration is equally
beautiful, natural and significant. “Migration is a human right, people have
migrated for centuries. The militarization and policing of borders is out of
step with not only our history, but with our familial and economic realities.
These policies result in death, as we saw in Chula Vista this week with the
shooting death of US citizen mother, wife, sister and daughter Valeria
Munique Tachiquin. We are here today to envision communities without this
type of violence,” stated Jordan Garcia,
Organizing Director at the American Friends Service Committee.
Clergy surrounding the puppet
family with their entourage of butterflies, offered silent witness, blessings
and prayer as the grandmother, mother and baby were separated from each other
by current immigration policy. Rev. Nancy Rosas explains the moral imperative
for change this way “This separation of families, not only detention but also
deportation, is morally reprehensible. Families experience unnecessary pain and
suffering, we want that to end.”
The group demonstrated the monetary and human costs of
deportation and for-profit detention centers like GEO, Inc, both of which have
doubled under President Obama’s Administration. They called on both candidates and the public
to oppose inhumane and unwarranted detention and deportation and to recognize
the human rights of migrants chanting “Profit from Pain is Inhumane!” as each
of the puppets were scattered to the edges of the demonstration. Immigrant
detention costs $5.4 million in taxpayer money per day. While detaining a
person costs $164 per day per person[1], several studies have
shown that alternatives to detention are just as effective at a cost of
anywhere from $4 to $12 per day.
Judith Marquez explained her
motivation for participating as she passed out fact sheets on the costs of
detention and flyers to protest the Aurora for-profit immigrant detention
center, GEO. “It has become more and more
obvious that the main reason people are detained is because corporations stand
to make money based on tearing apart families. This profiting from pain is
suspect.”
The
three corporations with which ICE contracts, including
CCA and GEO, spent at least $45 million in the past decade on campaign
donations and lobbyists at the state and federal levels. [2]
People in butterfly wings surrounded each of the puppets,
bringing the family back together through community, transforming profit from
pain into a soaring love of family and justice. They left the presidential
debates singing “Gonna keep on walking forward, Keep on walking forward, Gonna
keep on loving boldly, Gonna reach across our borders, Never turning back”
WHO:
American Friends Service Committee, Clergy and members from the Unitarian
Universalist Association, the United Church of Christ, and the Mountain View
Friends Meeting, plus Coloradans for Immigrant Rights, Rights for All
People and Padres y Jovenes Unidos.
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