[-empyre-] last on sanctuary cities

[Alan Sondheim]

Sanctuary Cities (apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious)

This may be of interest only to US residents, for which apologies.
It does give some indication of the brutality of a regime which
pays little attention to protest. The result for refugee and
immigrant communities - even for families legally in the country -
has been devastating.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/27/politics/jeff-sessions-trump-sanctuary-cities/
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/sanctuary-cities-explained/

(Sending it out because we're in a sanctuary city and state; both are 
poor, and, being pessimistic, I'm waiting for the resulting havoc. What's 
so strange, uncanny, for so many of us, is the speed with which the tenor 
of the US has changed; we've gone from more traditional protests (against 
police brutality, military engagement, women's rights, BLM) to protests 
based on a different atmosphere - that of overt racist acts, and potential 
or real federal attacks on the poor, Blacks, Latinos, the environment etc. 
- attacks from the very institutions that are "supposed" to protect us. So 
in a very real sense, many of us feel that this is no longer "our" country 
or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or doubling/doppelganger, 
and that's hard to come to grips with. I'm speaking of course from two 
positions - that of being white, middle-class, and "educated," and that of 
being Jewish and "senior," and witnessing, for the first time in years, 
acts of anti-semitism on the increase, even in Rhode Island (I won't even 
describe the destructive ageism I'm dealing with). So I'm privileged on 
the whole, not having to deal with what a friend here calls micro- 
aggressions against minorities - micro-aggressions that occur constantly, 
that have only increased as well. On a plane of sociality/communality, the 
US is a foreign country for many of us, located nowhere, going nowhere but 
towards a brutal and militarist future, at least for the time-being.)