Leid Stories—Emptying Detroit: Trump’s Anti-Mexican Forced-Repatriation Policy; 36,000 New Foreclosure Notices Set to Rid the City of ‘Undesirables’—01.23.18

Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced a nationwide mobilization to back up a demand for real justice and equality for all, a revived “Poor People’s Campaign” today issues the battle cry again, the Trump administration specifically in its crosshairs.

As Leid Stories reports, the Poor People’s Campaign may have lost momentum and wide grassroots support over the years, but pitched battles across the country nevertheless continued, even if erratically.

Leid Stories updates two significant, and ongoing, grassroots battles in the City of Detroit.

Elena Herrada, an elected member of Detroit’s “old” school board whose authority over local education unconstitutionally was overridden by the state during the state-imposed bankruptcy of the city, reports on a pushback by the Mexican community against the Trump administration’s racist, anti-immigrant policies, especially as they relate to forced repatriation.

The City of Detroit has stepped up its aggressive plan to “reclaim” property and vast tracts of land that would then be offered—mostly to speculators and the politically connected—at bargain-basement prices to help “resurrect” the beleaguered city.

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan-African News Wire and a Detroit organizer for the Workers World Party and Moratorium Now, reveals that the city has sent about 36,000 new notices to homeowners informing them of imminent foreclosure on their properties.