Joey here.

Carefully washing my paws.

Here to inform you that the Tenth Annual Ride for Human Rights is being postponed.

Until the Ides of March, Jeffrey and I were preparing for our Ride from Seattle to Provo.  We looked forward to learning from new friends . . . seeing another slice of America with our own eyes . . . biking the open roads.

Then came the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  It causes COVID-19.

That changed everything.

Jeffrey canceled our 1-way mid-April ticket from NYC to Seattle.

If we flew west, we’d face quarantine.  Then there’d be limited food and shelter along our sparsely populated 1200 mile (1900 km) route.

We wouldn’t be able to engage people concerning refugees, asylum, and Human Rights First.  When they realized we’d come from NYC via Seattle—two COVID-19 hot spots—they’d flee, or bar our passage.

The mob would be right to fear us.  People who look healthy can spread deadly COVID-19.

Postponing this year’s Ride is the only choice for a Kangaroo Court Puppet who has empathy and common sense.

Our Kangaroo Courts lack both.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”)—the immigration courts, prosecutors, and immigration police, judge/jury/executioner if you will, all controlled by the U.S. attorney general (“AG”)—are the president’s tools for “detaining” (jailing) non-criminal non-citizens, adults and children, in Petri dishes of COVID-19 infection.  The AG won’t release these innocent prisoners, nor will he postpone their civil immigration court proceedings.

To paraphrase the words of the late Nobelist, Elie Wiesel, written in another context, the AG’s deportation machinery works night and day, on feast days and holidays.  It puts at risk the life and health of thousands of human beings.  It endangers immigration judges, government prosecutors, court interpreters, ICE agents, rent-a-cops, and public and private jailers, who pursue and process foreign-born “respondents” who may have broken arbitrary immigration rules but are innocent of any moral or legal crime.  It threatens the lawyers and others who help these “respondents” to exercise their legal rights.  It threatens the life and health of the respondents themselves, whom the law requires the AG to protect.

Lawyers and officials protest from both sides of the immigration divide.  Yet the AG’s machinery grinds on.

Releasing non-criminals who are jailed in close quarters, and delaying the AG’s version of “justice” until the courts can operate safely, is the right thing to do.  Justice indeed.

Don’t count on this AG to do it.

Despite the pandemic, Human Rights First’s staff are working hard from their homes. They speak up for those whom our government is spending billions to jail and abuse in our names, while we are distracted by COVID-19.

Human Rights First needs our help to stop the lawless and immoral attacks on the vulnerable.  Anticipating our Tenth Annual Ride, some of you already have donated to Human Rights First.  Your souvenir postcards are in the mail to you.  We hope more of our friends will give too, if not now, then when it’s safe for us to reschedule the Ride.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey—a Registered Professional Nurse and “activated” member of the New York City Medical Reserve Corps . . .

. . . who as a man of a certain age, is at high risk from COVID-19—will look for reasonably safe ways to be useful.  For starters, in protective garb . . .

. . . and using his unique Social Distancing Stick (a dowel, a hose clamp, and a binder clip) . . .

. . . Jeffrey has distributed cash to incapacitated persons’ homes on behalf of a nonprofit guardianship agency.

To live means to take chances.

But don’t be stupid.

Stay home.  Wash your paws . . . or your hands if you got ’em.  Keep your distance from fellow mammals.  Support Human Rights First.

And please join us when the pandemic ends and we proceed with the Tenth Annual Ride for Human Rights.

Our Ride delayed will be a ride indeed!