“Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”

February 15, 2026 by 1 Comment

A self-portrait Kamilla made while her parents spoke to NBC News.

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

NBC News released a report this week, “‘Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this’: A family’s nightmare in ICE detention”. The report opens: “Nikita and his wife, Oksana, fled Russia in desperation two years ago, believing America was their only hope of giving their three children a life free of fear and oppression. Instead, those children are growing up behind the razor-wire fences of a South Texas detention center, among hundreds of other families swept up in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.” What else is there to say, really? Plenty.

The three children are Kirill, 13; Konstantin, 4; Kamilla, 12. The family has been held in Dilley Immigration Processing Center for four months … and counting.

Konstantin was once a social, outgoing child. Now, surrounded by guards, who “are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities,” and constant sharp noises, Konstantin cries a lot and keeps to himself. Actually, the guards at Dilley are tougher than guards at adult facilities, inasmuch as they are “guarding” children. Other than guards, what precisely are the dangers the children face?

Kirill taught himself to play piano and then attended music school. A bright and talented child … who now “spends most days withdrawn, waking at night with anxiety and panic attacks”.

Kamilla is a dancer who loves to perform. She now has partial hearing loss, “thanks” largely to the conditions at Dilley, which include whatever is worse than substandard health and medical care. She now lives in constant pain, with little or no relief. When her mother made a makeshift headband, to cover and protect the ear, the guards removed it, claiming it was “contraband”. Kamilla cried. Again, what are the guards “guarding”?

With Kamilla’s birthday approaching, she was asked if she had any wishes. She replied she had only one, “To get out of here.”

Kamilla’s case is not an isolated one: “When several children fell ill with stomach ailments at Dilley, medical staff refused to treat them unless they had already vomited at least eight times.” A “medical staff” that refused to treat ill children is not a medical staff. Period.

In January of this year, an 18-month-old at Dilley had dangerously low blood-oxygen levels. The parents knew something was terribly wrong. For weeks, they begged for someone to address the child’s illness. No one did. Finally, after week, she was taken to a regional children’s hospital, where she was treated for treated her for pneumonia, Covid-19, RSV and severe respiratory distress. She stayed in the hospital for a ten days. She was prescribed medication. She was then returned to Dilley, where the “medical staff” refused to administer the drugs.

When “medical care” means refusal to care in any way, when the food is poisonous, when the “education” is such that children stop reading, when pianists go silent and the dancers sit all day, there can be only one wish: “To get out of here” Are we sleeping, while others suffer? Are we sleeping now? Tomorrow, when we wake, if we wake or think we do, what shall we say of today?

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: NBC News)

 

COMMENTS:

Mari: wow, this makes me cry. So sad, this is the moment to do something !!

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How are we going to deal with this generation, with all the kids that are supposed to be playing and enjoying their life?

February 11, 2026 by Leave a Comment

This week, yet again, the world abandoned and betrayed children. Not some children. All children. On Monday, ProPublica published two stories: “The Children of Dilley” and “I Have Been Here Too Long: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility”. On Tuesday, The Guardian published a story: “Israeli court blocks life-saving cancer care for boy, 5, due to his Gaza address”. On Tuesday evening, PBS New Hour aired a story: “Mother recounts weeks in immigration custody with her U.S. citizen children.” That you need not read or watch any of these to know what they are saying and how these accounts of torturing children, all in the name of “national security” and even “democracy”, will make you feel, says it all, doesn’t it?

The ProPublica reporters spoke to more than two dozen current and former detainees, more than half of them children. They also collected letters from “more than three dozen kids”. I’ll share one of those letters, written by Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, a nine-year-old child from Colombia. Antonia was detained for 113 days. The letter is in Spanish, translated into English by ProPublica:

““Name Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya

Country I am colombian

Age 9 years

Locked in custody how long 113 Days

I am Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya and I have been 113 days in detention I miss my friends and I feel they are going to forget me. I am bored here. I already miss my country and my house, I came on vacation for 10 Days and they took me into an ice office an officer interrogated me 2 hours without my mom, I was traveling with flight attendant because my mom lives in new york, they only wanted to arrest my mom, because my mom didn’t have documents to live in U.S.A., I always traveled with my tourist visa but ice used me to catch my mom and now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside. When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.

They don’t give me my diet I am vegetarian, I don’t eat well, there is no good education and I miss my best friend julieta and my grandmother and my school I already want to get to my house.

Me in dilei [Dilley] am not happy please get me out of here to colombia.

Antonia”

Meanwhile, in “another part of the world”, “an Israeli court has rejected an appeal to allow a five-year-old Palestinian boy with an aggressive form of cancer to enter Israel for life-saving treatment, citing a government policy that bars residents registered in Gaza from crossing the border, even when they no longer live there.” The child is five years old. Since 2022, he has lived in the West Bank, where he has been receiving medical care he could not get in Gaza, but now he needs a bone marrow transplant or he will die. The court rejected his family’s petition, arguing that the petition was “an indirect challenge to the security establishment’s post-7 October restrictions, which have prevented Gaza residents from entering Israel for medical treatment.” Imagine the security threat a dying five-year-old child presents to the nation-State. As one local human rights organization explained, “The significance of this ruling is that the court is providing backing for an unlawful policy that effectively condemns children to death, even when life-saving treatment is in reach.”

PBS focused on Jackie Merlos, a Honduran woman who was returning from Canada to her home in Washington State. Ms. Merlos was accompanied by her four children, all of whom are U.S. citizens. The five were detained and sent to an ICE processing center in Tacoma, Washington, Ms Merlos and her four children were kept for four weeks in a windowless room. After four weeks, the children were released. Ms. Merlos spent another 100 days in custody. As PBS noted, Ms. Merlos has “a temporary legal status while her full visa is pending. She has no criminal history.” Here is part of what she said:

“They treat us not as human beings. They treat us more than animals. The detention center wasn’t good for — to have a family there. My kids started having so much hunger of all the stress and trauma that they were going through …. We live in fear. My kids live in fear. Those 14 days and four months that I spent in detention were really, really bad for them, because there’s been so much trauma ….They are not the happy kids that they were before our detention … My kids are living in fear. It’s, what we’re going to do with all this generation that are living in fear, even knowing that they are citizen of United States? They don’t have rights anymore …. How are we going to deal with this generation, with all the kids that are supposed to be playing and enjoying their life?”

How are we doing to deal with this generation? How are they going to deal with our question to them, “How would you like your execution, swift or slow?”

 

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Illustrations: ProPublica)

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A Winter of Anguish for Minneapolis Children

February 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are.

                                    Walt Whitman, “Long, too long America”

“A Winter of Anguish for Minneapolis Children”. That’s the headline of an article in today’s New York Times, and really … what else is there to say? As the United States approached its nineteenth-century civil war, Walt Whitman asked if we were capable of show the world what our children en-masse really are. Are we? By something like a popular vote, “citizens” of the United States elected a government hell bent on imposing suffering on our children, en-masse.

Whitman ended his brief, five-line poem: “(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?)” Who indeed.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image: Henri Matisse, “.L’Angoisse qui s’amasse en frappant sous ta gorge…”  – “The Gathering Anguish That Strikes in Your Throat”/ Museum of Modern Art)

 

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On Martin Luther King Day

January 19, 2026 by Leave a Comment

 

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If elected, Amanda Burrows would be Vancouver’s first renter and woman mayor

December 18, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Amanda Burrows

Who sets housing policy where you live? Renters? Homeowners? Or both? Does anyone in charge of housing policy in your area really know anything about the experience of facing eviction or, more drastically, of being evicted? Recently, Amanda Burrows announced her candidacy for the mayoral nomination of Vancouver. Burrows is “a prominent social justice advocate in Vancouver” as well as Executive Director of FIRST UNITED, a faith-based community services provider. Vancouver is Canada’s least affordable city. Burrows knows that. As she explained in a recent interview, “I have been evicted before, which is so many people’s stories in this city: being severed from the community and not finding a place to live because there’s barely any vacancy and it’s so expensive. I couldn’t even find a place if I wanted to.”

Burrows explicitly raises the question of renter representation in her campaign. In a world in which global, national and local economies have equated “wealth” and “development” with greater and growing inequality, increasing numbers of people are facing the varied and yet not so varied landscapes of “affordable housing crisis”. Part of that means more and more folks are renting. For example, according to a recent report, in the United States “the share of first-time home buyers dropped to a record low of 21%, while the typical age of first-time buyers climbed to an all-time high of 40 years”. That means many are putting off buying a home, and leaving the rental markets, for over a decade.

In 2022, researchers from Boston University and the University of Georgia published a report, “Who Represents the Renters?” The researchers pored over the data concerning 10,000 local, state and federal officials. Guess what they concluded? “We find that renters are starkly underrepresented by a margin of over 30 percentage points—a gap that persists across a variety of institutional and demographic contexts. Public officials are substantially more likely to own single-family homes that are more valuable than other homes in their neighborhoods. Collectively, these findings suggest deep representation inequalities that disadvantage renters at all levels of government.” 89% of city councilors were homeowners in sample cities where homeownership hovered around 51%. 83% of mayors and 76% of city councilors were homeowners. Finally, the average homeowning officeholder’s property was worth 50% more than the median value in their ZIP code.

The report concludes, “The underrepresentation of renters among elected officials is troubling and affects the kinds of policies discussed on the local and national stages.” Troubling, indeed. The troubling is not about this councilmember or that mayor, but about the composition of the body that decides, and in many instances creates, housing policy, and therefore housing itself. You may or may not live in Canada or the United States, but wherever you live, the question of renters and homeowners pertains. Amanda Burrows may or may not be elected, although I for one wish her well. The question here is the question asked by researchers a few years ago, as by researchers in mid-nineteenth century England: Who sets housing policy where you live? Renters? Homeowners? Or both? Does anyone in charge of housing policy in your area really know anything about the experience of facing eviction or, more drastically, of being evicted? Who speaks, whose voices and experiences are excluded?

Homeownership rates by office category

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: Kate Hyslop / The Tyee) (Infographic: Katherine Levine Einstein, Joseph T. Ornstein & Maxwell Palmer, Who Represents the Renters)

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If we are serious about housing affordability for wage earners

October 29, 2025 by Leave a Comment

“If we are serious about housing affordability for wage earners, we must understand that the market alone will not deliver it.” Patrick Condon

On October 27, England (but not Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) officially enacted the long-awaited Renters’ Rights Act: “Central to the Act is its provision to abolish Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions, under which private landlords have been able to remove tenants even if they have done nothing wrong.” Between July 2024 and June 2025, 11,400 households suffered Section 21 no fault evictions. There is no count of how many people found themselves homeless as a result. As happens so often, the term “households” conceals as much as it reveals, but suffice it so say, tens of thousands of people were given two months to find a place, people who had done nothing wrong and now faced homelessness. Again, “homelessness” covers as much as it conceals. Numbers exist for those in shelters or seeking assistance. No one knows how many moved in with family or friends … “temporarily”.

While the Renters’ Rights Act is a welcome change, and not only because of the abolition of Section 21, some must wonder why it took so much to eliminate no-fault eviction, and why it takes so much to do so in other countries, such as the United States? No fault eviction was always wrong, always a violation of people’s human dignity and human and civil rights, but in a climate in which living on the streets has itself become criminalized, it’s even worse.

The Renters’ Rights Act does more than abolish Section 21. It also bans landlords from refusing tenants that receive benefits or that have children and establishes a new Private Rented Sector Landlord Ombudsman, where renters will be able to register complaints about landlords. Furthermore, landlords will not be able to raise the rent above the “market rate”. Landlords will not be allowed to allegedly respond to “bidding wars” by demanding a rent greater than the advertised one. Finally, landlords will be prohibited from asking for more than one month’s rent upfront from tenants.

This welcome news should have happened long ago. The housing crisis didn’t happen overnight. Renters, housing advocates, homeless service providers and others have long campaigned for these measures and more. Building more, rezoning, controlling landlord behavior, raising wages for low-income workers, regulating the market, controlling land prices and values have to happen together. This has been public knowledge for decades.

Vienna has been investing in and supporting social, aka public, housing for decades, and it’s paid off. While the city’s not paradise, it’s a practical response to unaffordable housing. Or take Melbourne. Until 2021, Melbourne was the second most expensive city in Australia. That’s when the city decided that that was an unacceptable situation. Melbourne built more, and it controlled real estate investing, by taxing real estate investors, taxing platforms like Airbnb, taxing vacant properties and land. Will Melbourne’s success continue? Who knows, the point is that the city recognized the patterns.

At midnight tonight, Vancouver will close public comment on the Vancouver Official Development Plan, a plan described as ambitious, thoughtful and well-crafted in vision and intent, on one hand, and faltering in diagnosis and prescription. In the next week or so, voters in the Netherlands and New York City will make their decisions largely based on candidates’ and parties’ promises, proposal, and plans for affordable housing. Let’s make sure the focus is on the residents, the people, living the crisis, rather than the buildings.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Blandford Fletcher, “Evicted” (1887) / Queensland National Art Gallery)

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What has South Africa’s G20 presidency brought to the people?

August 7, 2025 by 1 Comment

In October of 2024, the Afrikan Liberation Hub (ALH) was invited to the G20 South Africa: Kickoff workshop for civil society. The event was hosted in a hotel in inner Joburg that has gained notoriety as a gathering space for civil society organisations and movements; ANEW Hotel eParktonian. We were excited to receive the invitation, hopeful that it came from an understanding of our work of amplifying grassroots movements that are doing the ‘leg work’ of economic systems change. The same groupings that are building wellbeing economies at a local level, attempting with little resources and no real policy backing, to offset negative and violating effects of the skewed global financial architecture. Equipped only with a strong sense of justice and solidarity amongst forgotten people.

Indulge us, we don’t have pictures of our reactions but you can imagine our glee at seizing the opportunity to bring the perspectives and experiences of ALH members to such highbrow discussions. The workshop was a capacity building exercise to ensure that SAs civil society have an understanding of the G20 and subgroup C20, through which much of our advocacy work would take place. We had colleagues from Brazil, specifically the C20 sherpa do a procedural handover; comrades from India shared their disillusionment with the state co-opting of the C20 and how it inspired their formation of WE20:The people’s summit on G20; South African government Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) declared that the country’s presidency is dubbed THE PEOPLE’S G20 to serve as a constant reminder of the intention to put ordinary South Africans’ interests at the heart of all G20 processes, negotiations and decisions; Oxfam SA, Afrodad and Environmental Justice Network promised to champion the peoples’ needs in their participation in C20 processes and policy making, leading the rest of CSOs in attendance through identifying shared demands, the modes of engagement within the C20 and carving out working groups that would capture the diversity of sectors/concerns represented in the room.

We left with even higher enthusiasm, signing up to two Working Groups 1-Gender Equity & Feminist Just Economies and 5-Environmental Justice & Sustainable & Resilient Communities. Little did we know that we wouldn’t participate in any of them because those organisations that invited us to the Kickoff workshop were no longer in the C20 leadership. A development that was never really formally communicated, at least not from the initial facilitating organisations. In February, we reached out to Oxfam, reiterating our readiness to fully participate in the working groups and asking why we have yet to move past the planning stages and into policy building. For months until May 2025, we were only privy to rumours of a leadership battle in the C20 that has caused its total collapse. At the same time, we fielded questions from ALH members on outcomes of our participation in the C20, requests to consider joining other working groups so as to influence their area of concern. And for months, we couldn’t give them concrete answers for C20s’ seeming fall from the face of G20 processes. In this vacuum, more established working groups continued working, climate finance for instance have had several virtual meetings to design policy recommendations, they have written open letters to the SA G20 sherpa and are continuing to engage with researchers in the field. Climate finance is an issue that is inaccessible to many of the communities we work with, the language and framing alone is enough to send even the most well read amongst us to do mini desktop studies. We mention it here because the organisations leading the working group have long been working on fair climate financing solutions, they have climate economists and co-creation funds that made it so that their work was not dependent on C20s stability.

The working groups we were a part of however, were not held in the same way. It is 3 months away from the G20 Summit where the C20 is expected to put forth condensed civil society needs, demands, and recommendations for G20 leaders to consider. Yet, which civil society actually crafted these manifestos? How many grassroots organisations can confidently show up to G20 civil society activations knowing that their causes will be tabled? In one of our most recent ALH members’ meeting, several organisations expressed how G20 processes including the C20 are not worth their time or energy. How will the participation of these organisations feed the food insecure? Will attending all the meetings in fancy Joburg North hotels/conference venues create dignified work for unemployed youth? The climate finance policy recommendations won’t save mamas who are losing their crops every summer due flash floods. As for the Afrikan Liberation Hub, what moral and otherwise obligations do we have to continue dancing with these processes in the name of getting marginalised voices in the room when the very voices aren’t convinced of the change-making potential of this participation?

(By Inolofatseng Lekaba, Afrikan Liberation Hub)

(Image Credit: G20 South Africa: Kick-off Workshop Report)

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To starve, to die, or cause to die

July 31, 2025 by Leave a Comment

“Starving / Help Now / Millions Are Starving in Bible Lands! …”

Today’s headline reads: “Anger Over Starvation in Gaza Leaves Israel Increasingly Isolated”. There’s, finally, been much, or some, discussion among “the powers that be” of Israel’s politics of starvation in Gaza. There’s some anger, some dismay, not enough but some. There’s some disgust, some revulsion, not enough but some. As so often, much of this timidity and “modesty” results in an articulation that is actually a blurring of meaning. Starvation is not hunger. Hunger is ”the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also: the exhausted condition caused by want of food.” Hunger is bad, destructive, and a politics and public policy based on hunger is evil. But hunger is not starvation. Starvation, and these definitions all come from the Oxford English Dictionary, or better to starve, means “To die, or cause to die”. When starve is a transitive verb, it means “to cause to die”, that is, to kill, to murder, by refusing access to food. That’s what’s going on in Gaza. Nothing else. Starvation.

Does it matter that children are being starved? Yes. Yes, it does. Does it matter that adults are being starved, adults of all genders? Yes. Yes, it does. Is the world acting as if these deaths and this mass murder actually matters? No. Palestinians are not starving to death. They are being starved. That is a death sentence, for the individuals, families, communities, people and nation. What would you call such a public policy?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief Artist(s), 1914 – 1918 / Smithsonian Museum)

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and what do you do tomorrow

July 18, 2025 by Leave a Comment

enquire of the fellow
he doing good
on International Mandela Day

I on the outside
library bench
reading and lapping up
the sunlight peeking out

he has brought sandwiches
doing his bit ticking off
a box on a checklist
for today

his finger points
to up above
as he asks someone
are there children there

as is my wont
I look skywards
and I think to myself

manna is falling
yet one more time
from the upstairs

for Africa the begging bowl
for Africa with its riches
in the ground below
look above and beyond

and what do you do tomorrow
I enquire of the fellow
he practising an act
of kindness
on International Mandela Day

he chuckles good-naturedly
and I am at the receiving end
of a packet of sandwiches
(a free lunch)

and what do you do tomorrow

The afternoon of International Mandela Day brings a free lunch my way (Friday 18 July 2025).

 

(By David Kapp)

(Image Credit: Denis Farrell/AP/ The Guardian)

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The `agony’ of Lisa Murkowski

July 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment

On July 1, by a vote of 51 – 50, the U.S. Senate passed the mammoth budget and policy bill that now sits in the House of Representatives. Here’s how the story’s told: “The Senate voted 51 to 50 to pass the Republicans’ major tax and domestic policy bill, which President Trump wants on his desk by Friday, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote.” While officially JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote, the real story, as you already know, the real “tiebreaker”, who broke so very many ties with her vote, was Senator Lisa Murkowski, so-called moderate Republican Senator from Alaska. When asked to describe the process by which she arrived at this momentous, if not cataclysmic, decision, Senator Murkowski answered with one word, “Agonizing”.

Agonizing. The good Senator was “in agony”. Here’s how else she described her thinking on the subject: “Do I like this bill? No …. I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.” Americans are “not going be advantaged”? Here’s just a little of what “not being advantaged” looks like: “a proposed Medicaid work requirement, which would cut off coverage for millions of enrollees who do not meet new employment or reporting standards”. According to nonpartisan estimates and experts, at least 17 million Americans will lose their health coverage. This slow-moving death sentence is what passes for “not being advantaged.”

Finally, Senator Murkowski explained, “I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country when you look to the Medicaid and the SNAP provisions.”

Agonizing. What is agony, exactly? Agony has many roots, all of which gesture towards its importance and extremity: “mental struggle or anguish of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (Vetus Latina, Vulgate), anguish, distress (4th cent.), death-agony.” The list, from the O.E.D., goes on, but you get the picture. Being divided is not agony; being conflicted is not agony. Frankly, it’s not even struggling mightily, but that’s another story. The earliest widely used version of agony was the Agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus enters the Garden and realizes and ultimately embraces the betrayal and subsequent torture he will be made to endure. “Not being advantaged”

Knowing what was to occur, Jesus prayed: “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” This is what agony looks like, the transformation of sweat into something like blood. Senator Murkowski voted to send millions of people into various forms of excruciating suffering. They will be in agony. They will struggle mightily, as many have done for all of their lives. What the Senator did was vote for the bill. As Jesus concluded, in the night of the Agony of the Garden of Gethsemane, “Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

Agonizing.

 

(by Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: William Blake, “The Agony in the Garden” / Tate)

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