Bab al-Markaz: Domestic Violence Prevention--New Report

AAAN Updates

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The youth summer camp, which started June 28 at Bridgeview Public Library, has almost completed another successful year. Activities for the kids, who are divided into three age groups, range from reading to improvisational acting to artwork of all kinds. The camp's last day on August 5 will be celebrated by a picnic with the families in the park.

Read more.

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Beyondmedia Education held a workshop with AAAN youth on July 6, 8, and 13 to teach basic video making skills and to talk about how the mainstream media creates its own definitions of concepts like violence. Beyondmedia's project Chain of Change arms Chicago youth with video cameras to document what violence means in their lives and what prevention and solutions can look like.

Watch a music video created by Aaisha Durr, Aris Cervantes, Muhammad Sankari, Arasele Robles, and Beyondmedia's Reggie to Cervantes's spoken word piece, "Pray for My South Side."

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The U.S. has not ratified the International Covenant on the Rights of the Child, nor the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. These are a few of HR Training

the facts that participants learned at the Coalition of African, Arab, Asian, European, and Latino Immigrants of Illinois (CAAAELII)'s July 14 and 15 workshop, "Human Rights See no Borders: New Tools for Immigrant Advocacy." Nine AAAN staff from Family Empowerment and Youth Organizing attended the workshop, which was facilitated by human rights activist and educator Shayna Plaut. One reason the U.S. hasn't ratified, Plaut suggests, is that this country is currently in violation of those very conventions considering the living conditions, for example, of homeless youth or immigrant women.

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The summer session of the youth program is in progress. The four teams are Palestine, Arab Affairs, Racial Profiling, and the Alliance of Young Women Activists (AYWA). Stay tuned for more about the projects in next month's newsletter!

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AAAN's Hatem Abudayyeh and Gihad Ali welcomed Puerto Rican nationalist political prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres home to Humboldt Park July 26, presenting him with gifts of appreciation on behalf of Chicagoland's Arab community. Torres, who was sentenced to 78 years in prison for his community organizing in the Puerto Rican independista movement, served 30 of those years before his release on parole.

After only 24 hours of freedom in Chicago, Torres flew home to another hero's welcome in Puerto Rico. The National Boricua Human Rights Network (NBHRN), which organized tirelessly for his release, raised $10,000 for Torres within the past few weeks, to help with his transition. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who has been in prison for 29 years himself, is the last of the Puerto Rican political prisoners still incarcerated in the U.S.; Torres and NBHRN promised "not to rest until he [Rivera] is released to join his companeros."

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The AAAN hosted an immigration workshop on July 29th. Immigration lawyer Robert Dekelaita arrived late, having been held up by a case he was working on. A Syrian woman, around 70 years old, was applying for citizenship. She could not speak, read, or write English, and a doctor she had seen had mistakenly identified her as a man in her medical papers, using the name of someone else mentioned in her application. She and her family had no idea, and they eventually came to Dekelaita, who found the error and helped them fix it and take the application back to the immigration officers. The first officer they saw again said no, but they asked for his supervisor and eventually got her case accepted.

These kinds of mistakes happen often, Dekelaita says, and immigration officials have started looking more deeply into applications, including investigating aspects that have no real relevance to the person's case. There is a degree of discretion left up to the officers, Dekelaita says, that can be problematic in biased individuals, some of whom are wary, for example, of applicants from certain parts of the world or those that don't speak English. They also possess discretion in evaluating the accuracy of medical information, such as whether someone qualifies for exemption from the test on the basis of depression or a similar condition. "We have a lot of arguments," Dekelaita says, "where they say, 'You're not a doctor--you're a lawyer,' and I say, 'You're not a doctor--you're an officer!'"

Dekelaita described common problems that applicants for citizenship face--especially in the Arab community--like questions resulting from spending several months visiting family back home, and explained how to avoid them.