Earlier this month, Florida passed a law banning the sale of land to Chinese nationals, as well as nationals from six other countries — part of an apparent state-by-state effort to pass similarly restrictive bills in other states including Texas and Louisiana. Many Asian American civil rights groups have criticized the proposed laws as discriminatory and racist.
Now a group of Chinese nationals have filed a lawsuit against the State of Florida saying that the new law — which will take effect July 1 — violates their civil rights under the Fair Housing Act.
A screen-capture from dashcam footage released today by the ACLU of a traffic stop that led to the police beating of Anthony Promvongsa. (Photo credit: ACLU / YouTube)
Shocking dashcam footage released today by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Minnesota shows a police officer brutally attacking a Laotian American man during a traffic stop last summer in Worthington, Minnesota. The ACLU says that the assault was both unconstitutional and excessively violent, and that “[p]eople should not fear that they could be attacked by the police for no reason or while being detained for investigative purposes.”
In the dashcam video (after the jump) which was captured by a second officer at the scene, Anthony Promvongsa (who was 21 at the time of the incident) is seen in the driver’s seat of his parked vehicle when Buffalo Ridge Drug Task Force Agent Joe Joswiak (who was off-duty at the time of the incident) approaches the car door with his gun drawn. Joswiak is heard profanely ordering Promvongsa to exit the vehicle. Immediately upon reaching the car door, Joswiak flings it open and begins forcibly pulling Promvongsa from the vehicle. Joswiak appears to knee and punch Promvongsa several times as he forces him to the pavement and handcuffs him. Midway through the video, another uniformed officer — Sgt. Tim Gaul — is also seen inexplicably turning off the audio of the recording dashcam, leaving no record of the verbal exchange between the police and Promvongsa for the remainder of the arrest.
Now, Promvongsa is facing several criminal charges stemming from the traffic stop while Joswiak does not appear to have any sanction for his obvious use of excessive force. The incident took place on July 28, 2016 — just three weeks after Philando Castile was shot and killed in St. Anthony, Minnesota last year by a police officer during a routine traffic stop.
Earlier this year, I named the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) one of my Giving Tuesday Top 5 organizations for their tireless advocacy around racial justice and women’s rights. NAPAWF has been at the forefront of many key issues relevant to the the AANHPI community, chief among them reproductive rights. For years, NAPAWF has engaged in a state-by-state fight to protect our reprodictive rights (which is of particular importance for the AANHPI community) in part by challenging conservative efforts to rollback abortion access with overtly race-baiting bans on abortions if doctors find that the procedure is sought for reasons such as fetal sex. Despite the lack of any evidence that women are seeking such abortions in any significant numbers, these restrictions are passed on the basis of stereotyping of Black, Asian and immigrant parents as immoral and sexist. Further, these racist laws have received scant commentary or criticism from mainstream media or center-aisle Democrats.
According to Ms. Roark, the right answer was “Lord”, and she requires all her students to answer “correctly” for test credit. She marked the question incorrect and publicly shamed C.C. when he first failed to answer the question, and then when he attempted to answer the question with “Lord Boda [sic]” — a reference to his Buddhist faith — when it appeared on a second exam.
In both incidents, Ms. Roark proclaimed it “stupid” to not fill in a reference to the Christian God, and encouraged her students to also verbally humiliate C.C. for not doing so.
