NEWSBYLAUREN MARKHAM

Happy news from North Carolina: After a 19 month battle with immigration courts that threatened to deport him unjustly to Guatemala, 31 year old Pedro Guzman is free at last, happily home with his wife and young son.

Though he qualified for NACARA (the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act), incorrect address records, unaccompanied testimony from his aging mother and the labyrinth nature of our country's immigration system left Pedro on the list for deportation.

NACARA was enacted to provide protection and status adjustment to families like Pedro's that fled from conflict in certain Central American countries, but it took the Guzmans thousands of dollars and months of tireless fighting to get Pedro out of inhumane detention and into a lawful U.S. status.

Over the past month, a petition started by CASA de Maryland sent a loud and clear message (actually, hundreds of them!) to the Montgomery County, Maryland Council: keep our communities secure by rethinking the "Secure Communities Program."  Thanks in part to the petition's  supporters, the County Council unanimously voted to ensure that the common mistakes, injustices and illegalities of the Secure Communities program are not replicated in Montgomery County.

Ostensibly designed to deport dangerous criminals, the Secure Communities Program (or S-Comm) is a rapidly-spreading partnership between local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that requires local police to send residents' fingerprints through a federal database for cross-referencing of immigration status. While it may sound innocuous, the program ends up targeting a majority of hard-working immigrant residents for deportation, residents who are neither dangerous nor criminal.

This week, after pressure from immigrant rights activists and hundreds of Change.org members, Apple officially rejected Smuggle Truck, the offensive iPad game, from sale in the iTunes store.

In the proposed game developed by Owlchemy Labs, players load up cartoon trucks with immigrant caricatures and try to make it through the desert with as few immigrant launchings and run-overs  as possible. And all this to the tune of cheery gamer music!

Owlchemy contends that they made the game to satirize the U.S.'s faulty immigration process. Coulda fooled me.  But even assuming good intentions, the game gets it all wrong — dead wrong. I'm all for satire (Jon Stewart for President!) but the thing about satire is that it's smart — while this game is reductive, bigoted, and dumb. Worst of all is that it's dangerous, championing the notion that immigrants lives are disposable and making light of the often fatal hazards involved in crossing the border to safety.

Tomorrow at 5 p.m., hundreds of Bay Area students will be anxiously awaiting a decision that might determine their ability to attend school. No — it's not about school closure or whether their pink-slipped teachers will have jobs next year. Instead of these concerns, students are simply wondering whether they'll be able to afford the bus fare to and from school each day.

On Wednesday, March 23, the Alameda Contra Costa Transit (AC Transit) Board of Directors will vote on a response to Oakland Unified School District's plea to create a discounted fare for Oakland K-12 students — regardless of their age.

Although riders of AC Transit ages 18 and under pay only $15/month for a student bus pass, riders 19 and up must pay $80/month for the same route -- even if they are also still in high school. Seriously? $80/month? Many professional commuters in the Bay Area (including myself) pay equal to or less than that. By the end of this year, this discriminatory fare policy will have adversely impacted 800-900 Oakland students who are just trying to get to school in hopes to graduate and prepare for their futures.

In many "developing" countries with limited infrastructure, it's common that "free" education is in fact loaded with prohibitively costly school-related fees. We'd like to think it's different in the United States, but sometimes, it's not.

In December, I wrote about the transportation-related struggles of high school students in California's Alameda and Contra Costra Counties who have the bum luck of turning 19 before their graduation day. Instead of paying the $15/month youth bus fare to get to school, 19-year-old students are considered adults in the eyes of the local transit administration, AC Transit, and are thus charged an astronomical $80/month just to get to school. In the city of Oakland, alone, over 900 students will be paying the $80 fare this year — and for many, this cost will keep them from attending school at all. We can't allow that to happen.

Fifty-three Rohingya "boat people" have been detained in isolated Thai prisons since 2009. Their crime? Fleeing brutal persecution in their homeland of Burma. In late January, Thailand nabbed another 158 Rohingya who had survived a harrowing journey on ramshackle home-made boats. Thai officials threw them directly into prison.

Despite the known mistreatment of Rohingya in Burma, the Thai government is refusing to recognize the migrants as refugees. Worse, it is blocking the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from visiting the detained Rohingya, thus sequestering them from any legal defense or opportunity for protection.

Announcing the newest anti-immigrant game for your iPhone/iPad coming this March: Smuggle Truck!

As you can watch in the Smuggle Truck teaser, the game challenges you to drive a truck as fast as you can through desert-like terrain while avoiding obstacles like potholes, ravines, and cacti. The goal? Keep as few immigrants as possible from flying off your truck bed and dying in the desert or under the wheels of your truck. Make it across the border with all your immigrants intact and receive a green card as your reward.

Wow. Where to even start?

For starters, this bad-taste game trivializes the traumatic and often fatal experience of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and reduces the human casualties of our immigration system to South Park-style emoticons. As Jorge Mario Cabrera of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of LA (CHIRLA) writes, "Close to 500 people die every year seeking a better life for themselves and their families, and countless others are raped, maimed, robbed, beaten, or kidnapped without anyone ever finding out. Crossing a nation's border, risking your dignity, your well-being, even your life, is no game." I couldn't agree more.

In 1991, the Chinese government forced Mei Fen Wong to get an intrauterine device (IUD) implanted in her uterus as a state-mandated form of population control. Wong found the device "unbearably" painful and, in accordance with what would seem like her individual rights, had it removed by a private doctor. But soon after, in a mandatory state-ordered pelvic exam, the government doctor found that Mei Fen Wong's IUD was missing.

Mei Fen Wong was detained for three days until she gave up her personal rights and allowed the reinsertion of an IUD. Traumatized and scared for her health, she fled to the United States and applied for asylum in 2000. Her claim was rejected by an immigration judge and then again, in 2008, by the Board of Immigration Appeals. But now, with wisdom somehow lacking in the BIA, the 2nd Court of Appeals has found this case compelling enough to have another look.

In their infinite wisdom, the UK wants to deport Brenda Namigadde — an openly gay woman living in the UK — to Uganda where she will be imprisoned for the crime of homosexuality.

Thanks to the tremendous efforts of allout and its petition to keep Brenda in the UK, a British High Court Judge offered Brenda temporary reprieve. Her case is set to be reviewed again on Wednesday, which means that Brenda needs your immediate support voicing her right to protection under international law.

Perhaps the UK's immigration officials don't read the paper and missed the long-running news story outlining Uganda's hostility toward homosexuals. How else could they reject the asylum claim of a woman like Brenda Namigadde after the Ugandan politicians (at the urging of fundamentalist Christian groups from the U.S.) proposed legislation that would make would not only put homosexuals to death or in prison for life, but also stipulated that all Ugandans report any suspected homosexuals to the authorities?

As I write this, Nepal is in the midst of a constitutional renovation which, the government contends, promises to grant more rights to its people. Yet the current draft of the Nepali constitution  contains draconian and dangerous birthright laws that threaten to strip thousands of Nepali children of their citizenship.

As it's currently drafted, Nepali children could only earn citizenship if they were able to prove that both parents are/were Nepali citizens. Because we're talking about a poor country with high birth rates and death rates, this clearly leaves thousands of people vulnerable to statelessness. Orphans? Children of one foreign and one Nepali parent? Children of unknown parentage? Children whose parents have lost their papers? Already, at least 800,000 Nepalis lack citizenship certificates. These new constitutional provisions would only swell this number to crisis-level proportions.

Easy enough for people in the U.S. to say of Nepal's new constitution , "This is ridiculous!" But frankly, it's not so far from home. There seems to be a disturbing trend these days to blacklist children based on their parents status — what with Nepal's sloppy constitutional reform and the U.S.'s proposed plan to mark the passports of children born to undocumented parents with a scarlet "I." Why are we allowing children to be the casualties of our shoddy immigration systems?