Shiu-Ming Cheer: Government Shutdown Ends Without Legalizing 'Dreamers'

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

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Government Shutdown Ends Without Legalizing 'Dreamers'

Posted Jan. 24, 2018

Interview with Shiu-Ming Cheer, senior staff attorney and field coordinator with the National Immigration Law Center, conducted by Scott Harris

The federal government was shut down for three days, after Senate Democrats’ withheld their approval of a short-term spending bill in order to pressure the Republican majority to schedule a vote legalizing nearly 800,000 “Dreamers,” recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents without documentation. But Democrats, facing a possible backlash and vicious GOP attacks, voted to reopen the government on Jan. 22 after Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a vague commitment to bring up DACA legislation for a vote by Feb. 8, the date the current funding bill will expire, and when the government will again face a possible second shutdown.

Immigrant rights activists and DACA recipients, many of whom have engaged in civil disobedience protests on Capitol Hill, were angered in what many viewed as a Democratic party surrender to President Trump and the hardline anti-immigrant Republican agenda. The rage stems from doubts that the Republicans will follow through on their commitment to hold a vote on DACA, which was necessitated when Trump rescinded Barack Obama’s executive order establishing DACA protections on Sept. 5.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Shiu-Ming Cheer, senior staff attorney & field coordinator with the National Immigration Law Center. Here, she assesses the winners and losers in the recently ended government shutdown, and the future of the DACA program.

SHIU-MING CHEER: I just want to make the point that it is Trump who created this problem where we're seeing close to 800,000 young immigrants who are protected in the DACA program face the expiration of the program and the loss of work permits and potential deportation from this country. That was a crisis created by this administration and Congress has been trying to find a solution that would provide a way for these young people to be able to gain their legal status and eventually become citizens. And so, I think we felt fairly optimistic over the weekend as we saw Senate Democrats and even a few Senate Republicans say that this issue of legalization of young people was important enough that they were not going for continued budget resolutions.

And this morning (Monday, Jan. 22), unfortunately, in a disappointing way, we saw that the Senate did in fact end up voting for a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for another three weeks until Feb. 8. And as part of that agreement, there's a vague commitment from the Senate leadership that there would be a vote on the DACA issue in the near future, but we're not clear what that means.

There's been many different proposals introduced. Some of them contain very negative provisions, such as additional funding for the border wall; changing family immigration. So we're not sure exactly what it's going to look like if this issue is brought to a vote. And it's very disappointing when the shutdown was really because of the Republicans. And yet, we see the Democrats fail to really stand up to them and push forward the agenda that they had told us they would push forward – a very progressive agenda.

BETWEEN THE LINES: As our listeners know, the Democrats are in the minority in both the House and Senate. And Republicans, of course, hold the White House with Donald Trump. What options did the Democrats have in terms of pushing the DACA vote that they didn't get with this deal to extend funding for the government for another few weeks. What were their options?

SHIU-MING CHEER: Some of their options would have been to refuse to vote for the funding unless a bill to legalize young immigrants was attached. There's been a lot of negotiations about what this would look like and there's been a bipartisan deal reached in Congress in terms of who would be legalized, how long it would take, etc. and so, I think a lot of what Democrats just had to do was to stay strong and hold the line and say that this issue is important enough that they would not vote to keep funding the government unless this issue was part of that agreement.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So what's the response of your organization, the National Immigration Law Center and other grassroots groups of immigrants' rights activists and the Dreamers themselves, who have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience on Capitol Hill very often, since this issue has come to a head in recent months?

SHIU-MING CHEER: Right, and you know, for us and for other immigrant rights groups, the protests, the actions will continue. We saw a lot of people – hundreds of thousands – turn out for the Women's March this past weekend and many people connected the issue of immigration as to why they were present at the march. So, the work will still continue, the advocacy will still continue. We know that it takes awhile to create change and so, we're not going to back down. We're going to continue really pushing our Congress members and other elected officials until can get the solution that we want.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And maybe you could describe the legal strategy because I know at least one federal court judge held up any implementations of the Trump administration's directive to end DACA altogether in March, coming up real quick. What can you tell us about the court strategy?

SHIU-MING CHEER: Right, there are several cases proceeding in courts across the country that - cases were filed saying that Trump's actions in ending the DACA program were unconstitutional. And one of the main goals is to really keep the DACA program around as long as possible so that people can still renew their DACA and get their work permits for another two years and still have that protection from deportation. Because of an injunction, or a block on the administration's decision to end DACA, there is a window right now where people can still renew their DACA, and that was one of the goals, to make sure that people would have that continuity with their DACA and not face all the imminent risks and problems that people face when they become undocumented.

For more information, visit the National Immigration Law Center at nilc.org.