Cascadia today: Deportations are cruel + chaos in Vancouver mayor's office + poetry by Roberto Ascalon
The cruelty of mass deportations
Washington State Standard (which by the way, is part of the amazing States Newsroom nonprofit news network covering state-level politics across the US) has a well-written and heartbreaking story of real lives turned upside down by the ICE crackdown in Cascadia. Orozco Forero is a child care worker and mother whose family fled Colombia after being targeted by gang violence. Denied asylum, Forero's family was still able to stay in the US for many years. She is an amazing caregiver for neurodivergent kids, and her son has a life-threatening kidney condition. But caught up in the recent ICE crackdowns (which now mostly involve immigrants with no criminal record) Forero and her family were deported to Colombia, where medical care will be inadequate. As a friend said:
“This family is not a threat. They are an asset.”
In related news, union activist Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, who has long organized farm workers in Washington's Skagit Valley, made the difficult decision to leave the US for Mexico after being detained for four months, KUOW reports. And KING-5 News reports that the Washington state Department of Licensing has been illegally sharing data with ICE.
Washington and Oregon need to do more to stop ICE from operating in Cascadia – either by passing legislation in an emergency session, or taking the first steps toward peacefully gaining autonomy from the U.S.
Andrew Engelson
Vancouver mayor's former advisor to run against him
The Tyee reports on the chaos within Vancouver mayor Ken Sim's administration, including the recent development that Sim's former top advisor, Kareem Allam, who was fired by the mayor – is planning to campaign against him in the next election. Sim is facing plenty of criticism after stepping up a campaign of sweeps against homeless encampments and closing the Vancouver Renters' Office. In other news of embattled mayors, Seattle's Bruce Harrell is under fire for failing to deliver on traffic-calming measures on Lake Washington boulevard, despite approved funding and an increase in crashes on the route, The Urbanist reports.
Heiltsuk Nation builds climate-resilient housing
The Narwhal has a fantastic, in-depth feature about how the Heiltsuk (Haíɫzaqv) Nation of north coast British Columbia is working with the federal and provincial governments, as well as its own initiatives to build small, affordable homes on its lands as well as retrofitting homes with climate-friendly heat pumps. By the way, the Narwhal has started a practice I think every publication in Cascadia should start doing – providing little audio snippets of Indigenous words and phrases used in the article. For instance, the name of the First Nation that's the focus of the piece is known in colonial language as Heiltsuk, but in the Haíɫzaqvḷa language they speak, it's known as Haíɫzaqv. Would be great to see more work done at the state and provincial level to create more publicly available, standardized pronunciation clips.
Poetry by Roberto Ascalon
Seattle-based slam poet Roberto Ascalon, has a beautiful poem about childhood summers at Poetry Northwest, "the day is long and full of names."
we heard people swimming and laughing
but the car door was open and someone
we loved was carrying us to the back seat
That's today's roundup of news & culture from across the bioregion. --Andrew Engelson
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