There are about 2.3 million immigrants in New Jersey. An estimated 400,000 to 500,000 lack legal status and, because of this, they have been excluded from much of the assistance offered by the federal and governments meant to help workers survive as the coronavirus pandemic rages across the country.

Activists want to change that. They are pushing a bill in the state Legislature that would grant to undocumented taxpayers a one-time coronavirus relief payment — $1,000 for those with children, $700 for those married without children, and $500 for others — designed to provide short-term relief and to recognize the contributions they make to the state.

The bill sets aside $35 million in the state budget to cover the payments and could help, which could help up to 35,000 residents — a number that falls short of the kind of action needed, but one that might be politically palatable at a time when the state faces a budgetary crisis. It was introduced in May, but has not moved forward. It awaits hearings in both the Senate and Assembly appropriations committees.

Bill S2480/A4171 was introduced in the state Senate by Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), and Nellie Pou (D-Passaic), along with 16 Democratic co-sponsors. The Assembly version was sponsored by Annette Quijano (D-Union), Raj Mukherji (D-Hudson), and Yvonne Lopez (D-Middlesex), with 22 co-sponsors.

The legislation is long overdue. New Jersey was hit hard by the virus early on, and once again we are witnessing an upward spike in cases — we are back at the numbers we were seeing in April but, thankfully, without the deaths. We need to re-impose limits on the economy, minimize large gatherings, and do what we can to limit exposure. For many, this is not possible, because they have no choice but to work, often more than one job, to survive.

The Ruiz/Scutari/Pou bill is designed to offer some relief. During an online press conference on Monday, advocates for the immigrant community argued that the state must pass the bill and that Gov. Phil Murphy must sign it into law. They said many in the the undocumented community have lost their jobs and are struggling to survive. This not only affects workers, they added, but businesses serving those communities.

The Rev. Dr. Prince A.Z.K Adekoya II, president of African Diaspora For Justice, said the undocumented do the jobs “that other people will not do” and patronize businesses owned by other immigrants or that keep immigrant communities afloat.

“I think it is imperative that we look into this and ask our legislature to look into this and make sure they pass this bill to save a life,” he said. “Some of these undocumented families, (they are) a family of four, family of five, six and so on. How do they expect them to survive this situation?”

Abril Barrales, owner of Ay Chihuahua restaurant in Passaic, said it was many in her community were suffering. “We have left millions of people or almost a million people behind because we exclude immigrants from relief,” she said. “That means that they have been many months suffering, and they pay taxes. They’re contributing to our economy to our country. And it’s really unfair that we are not including everyone in aid.”

The undocumented community, she said, “contribute nearly $600 million in state and local taxes, in addition to their federal tax contributions, but still they are not receiving any help right now.”

Ruiz, in a May 11 press release, described it as necessary because undocumented immigrants were “intentionally carved out of the federal stimulus package and cannot access unemployment insurance, despite paying into it.”

According to the coalition supporting the bill, which includes Make the Road NJ, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Latino Clergy association and the National Action Network, immigrant communities have been hit hardest because they comprise a disproportionate number of so-called “frontline workers,” or those in health care and retail. They are the ones, the groups say, who “have allowed millions of New Jerseyans to shelter in place during the worst months of the pandemic.” They do not qualify for unemployment insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. and most other safety net programs. Emergency federal aid, like the one-time stimulus issued early this year and expanded unemployment, also were off limits.

The coronavirus has caused significant economic and human damage in New Jersey and across the country. Rather than finding ways to protect workers and make it easier for them to survive away from their workplaces, we have left all low-wage workers, but especially those without legal status, with a Hobson’s Choice: Go to work and potentially contract and spread a deadly virus, or stay home without a paycheck, which only creates a different kind of vulnerability for themselves, their families and their communities. So they work. They put up with the risk, put up with employers who often take advantage of them during the best of times, but now hold even greater economic power over their lives.

This is what the workers I’ve talked with tell me, the story the advocates offer. The work. They get sick and miss time. They lose their paychecks and have to turn to soup kitchens and pantries for help. Or, they lose their jobs when their employers close shop. Lacking access to aid, they turn to soup kitchens and pantries.

They shouldn’t have to beg for assistance. None of us should. That’s what government is for, to help. This bill is a modest step toward addressing this.

Patrons of my Patreon page can head over there for an advance copy of my next column for the Progressive Populist. It’s called “Circular Firing Squads” and offers my take on the Democrats’ internecine squabbles.

My current column, “Election Day Diary: Dark Mood for a Dark Moment,” is available at Progressive Populist.

I posted this to a now dormant tumblr several years ago after I happened upon Rachel Sherwood’s poems on Poets.org. I’ve since reached out to her friend and literary executor David Trinidad, who kindly passed along a pdf of Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening, her lone book. This is a short essay, a first impression. A longer essay is brewing.

*

Discovering Rachel Sherwood

She was barely 25 when she died, author of stray poems published in small journals, and like too many great poets, her Work faded to memory. Reading Rachel Sherwood today on the Poetry Foundation website (her lone book is out of print and difficult to find), I marvel at her control of language and grasp of detail. Marvel at the power of her fragmentary poems. At a voice surprisingly mature for such a young writer.

There is pain. A poem like “The Usual” reeks of it, opening with a conversational declaration  — “This is what it’s like” — before shifting into second person and, without narrative, dropping the emotional hammer.

you sit in the white room

singular, knees together

arms over your head

Helpless. Prone. Arms in a protective position. Three lines. Nothing wasted. The speaker, in her vulnerability, is disconnected from truth. Trust has been erased. She guards herself against “the noise from the radio,” calling it “false as a drunk’s promise / to loan you his car next week.” It’s a nod to a seamier, unreliable world — and she refuses to flinch. “Of course,” she says, echoing the first line’s straightforward declaration, making it clear she’s seen all of this before, “next week never comes / lies continue, nobody disbelieves them / but some are ready for the real story.” The exclusion of punctuation forces it all to run together, while also slowing the pace.

The real story is that “the young man involved breaks her tired heart.” Tired. Resigned: “it’s the usual: spilt liquor, / broken dishes, wrecked cars.”

The title poem of her lone collection, “Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening,” relies on some of the same techniques: opening declaration, an accumulation of small details. And like all of her work (There are a dozen poems by Sherwood at the Poetry Foundation website), the word choices are made with purpose. A “fitful” wind, so ominous, does its damage: “soot piles in the corners / of new buildings. It is “soot,” the burned residue of energy, and not just “dirt”; and it is “new buildings,” indicating that even the gleaming edifices of progress are to be sullied. Even the gulls — an ocean bird — are victimized. They “stumble out of place” — not walk — and are joined children who “watch, breathless” and “feel an emanation / from this shuddering place.”

There is a sense of magic within all of this. A winter sky that “cracks with cardinal color,” a “wonder”that causes the speaker and her companion to coo “like dwarves at the Venetian court / must have done — / amazed at Tiepolo’s sunshot ceilings.”

This is where the poem resides, in “fickle” wonder, in an acknowledged “smaller inconstancy.” Change. Uncertainty. “But,” she says, “the dazzle above, enclosing / seems fit or made for this / fragment of belief.”

Sherwood was writing 40 years ago, but her work feels contemporary, a comment on the current moment. Perhaps, we have not advanced as much as we seem to think, despite out cell phones and gadgets. We still witness the cruelties man imposes on man. We still suffer the greed and vanities of fools who think they are — we are — somehow exempt from the wind’s fitful power.

At our best, we acknowledge, we sit amazed, by the mysteries. At our worst, we allow the meanness to overtake us. Both are present, always.

*

I came across Rachel Sherwood’s Work for the first time earlier this week as I was catching up on some podcasts. I was immediately struck by her poem, “The Usual,” and looked her up on the Poetry Foundation website. I’d wondered how her Work escaped me — the poems were as real as anything I’ve come across.

The story, at least what there is of it, is sad and can seem typical of the arts. A great talent begins her emergence, but tragedy strikes and the talent is lost. Sherwood died in a car crash in 1979 at the age of 25.

She had

attended St. David’s University College in Wales and California State University Northridge, where she cofounded the literary journal Angel’s Flight and where her poem ‘Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening’ won the Academy of American Poets prize. She also worked on the editorial staffs of 1822 and The Wallace Stevens Journal.

She had published poems in Angel’s Flight, Beyond Baroque, and Foreign Exchange, and had given several poetry readings in the Los Angeles area. To preserve Sherwood’s memory, her friends established the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize at Northridge; the award is given annually to a student poet. David Trinidad also created Sherwood Press in her honor and published (in collaboration with Greg Boyd’s Yarmouth Press) a book of Rachel Sherwood’s poems, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening (1981).

This is from the Poetry Foundation website and leaves out her cause of death (found on Wikipedia, not the most reliable of sources). It’s unclear why, but poetry.org can’t be faulted. They host a dozen of her poems on their site, which amounts to a necessary act of preservation. Her book, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening,  was published in 1981 by Sherwood Press and Yarmouth Press, but is out of print. But for the Poetry Foundation — and her friend David Trinidad — she’d be completely lost to us.

Originally posted to my Patreon page.

Nearly 100 New Jersey inmates were released into federal immigration custody during a release that was supposed to be part a humanitarian prison amnesty program designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 in state prisons.

The release, reported by NJ.com and also relayed to me by advocates for the state’s immigrant communities, has further damaged the relationship between the immigrant community and government officials, with many immigrants fearing they could be picked up by immigration enforcement or be turned over to federal authorities just for shopping at the local Walmart or getting a COVID test.

The Rev. Bolivar Flores, vice president of the New Jersey Coalition of Latino Pastors and Ministers, was closed to tears as he recounted a call from a member of his church, Ministerio El Sol Sale Para Todas Internacional in Jersey City.

“I received a call from a mother who have two children, 4 and 3 years old, say that she doesn’t have no more milk, and she’s scared to go to the Walmart, to get for a child who is hungry milk, because she see where she lives and that her husband may be arrested,” Flores said.

Flores said most undocumented residents pay taxes to the state and federal government through a tax identification number, and that they do so happily and willingly because they want to be part of the community. 

“But now people don’t want to go to do COVID testing, because they don’t trust our state,” he said. “They see this and say, ‘I don’t want to go to have COVID testing. I don’t have green card. When he asks me (for it), he can do what happened with my brother who just got out from jail.”

His story reminded me of the fears expressed by immigrants I interviewed in New Brunswick in 2016, during the final year of the Obama administration when immigration agencies engaged in a surge of enforcement and detention. What’s different this time is that the enforcement action took advantage of a humanitarian effort by the state, which released more than 2,000 inmates from state prison Nov. 5. The program, created by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy, was meant “to reduce the spread of the coronavirus in corrections facilities.” The program, as NJ Spotlight reports, was coordinated with local and county officials.

According to NJ.com, 95 immigrant inmates were “released ahead of schedule Wednesday” and “were picked up by federal immigration officers.” Advocates for immigrants said the inmates were green card holders, which means they were authorized to be in the United States, but that their status was contingent on their not committing criminal offenses.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office of Enforcement and Removal Operations said in an email that 88 inmates (yes, there is a discrepancy) were detained by ICE on ICE detainers. (The same email was sent to NJ.com, apparently.) They were “violent offenders or have convictions for serious crimes such as homicide, Aggravated Assault, drug trafficking and child sexual exploitation. Some were placed in removal proceedings and housed in ICE facilities outside of NJ, while others were detained locally pending execution of their final orders of removal.”

ICE said that 53 were sent to Texas, one to upstate New York, and 32 were detained in ICE custody in New Jersey at one of four facilities that hold immigrant detainees. Two “were released under an Order of Supervision in NJ based on case specific circumstances,” the email said.

Advocates dispute ICE’s characterization of the those detained, pointing to the law’s language. The legislation signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy in October (S2519) specifically prohibits early release of inmates serving sentences for murder, aggravated assault, or “conduct … characterized by a pattern of repetitive, compulsive behavior.”

And they found the actions heartless. Activists tell me families were waiting outside state prisons for their family members, when ICE swooped in and whisked them away.

“To watch children waiting for their parents, and can you just imagine that their parents had just walked out, and now to see them be imprisoned,” Flores tells me, “this is a perverse and diabolical act.”

The federal effort is consistent with a decades-long punitive approach to immigration that has forced too many in the immigrant community to remain in the shadows rather than come forward and participate fully in the communities in which they live. This creates a dangerous atmosphere. Many fear contacting police to report crimes, fear getting medical help, fear even the smallest of interactions with government agencies. The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these fears, which predate Donald Trump and likely will continue after Trump has left office.

What is different is not the deportations — Obama set a record for that — but the broader narrative around immigrants and the aggressive way in which Trump’s immigration agencies have been deployed as shock troops has heightened the danger for immigrant communities. Trump and his Homeland Security secretaries have used hardline anti-immigration rhetoric at every turn, including portraying all immigrant detainees as dangerous criminals.

There also is a retributive component, say many activists, with the Trump administration through ICE and the Border Patrol ramping up enforcement in Democratic communities and states as revenge for those areas not supporting the administration’s punitive policies.

“I see, in the middle of the campaign, that our state is a Democratic state, that we want to take this guy from the White House, and this is the reparation that we have, the reaction from the White House,” Flores said. I think so our elected official of the federal level.

What happened in New Jersey is consistent with the separation of children from their families at the border, with the criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border, with the expanded use of ICE and the BPS far from the border, with the rounding up of immigrants when they appear at local and regional courts, and the efforts to defund sanctuary cities and invade sanctuary churches to root out refugees and unauthorized immigrants.

The immigration system is broken and has been for decades. It needs a complete makeover that recognizes the damage American foreign interference has done in Central and South America, the creation of failed states tied to our aggressive anti-communist efforts dating back the 1950s, and the ravaging of the environment by rich countries. The uncertainty and chaos, especially in the Northern Triangle in Central America, are on our hands. We can’t pretend otherwise. Any reformation of our immigration system has to recognize this.

Chris Stapleton’s new record, Starting Over, is flawless, a master class in songwriting. He is deft with the rhyme and is expert at turning a phrase and making the cliched tropes of country songs feel both fresh and like your favorite sneakers.

His band is tight, the production crisp (strings on “Cold” set a mood that the guitar solo slices into — brilliant). It all lends muscle to one of the best and most muscular voices in contemporary music.

He is on par with Willie Nelson and  Merle Haggard.