Activists Mining Monero For Detained Migrants Bail Fund

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Under the Trump administration, there has been a marked
increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
actions, with the agency reporting a 42 percent rise in 2017
for arrests nationwide and a 650 percent increase in
workplace arrests for the 2018 fiscal year over 2017. Not to
mention a mind-boggling 1,200 percent rise in courthouse
arrests in New York .

This increase in arrests has been controversial, with many
accusing the administration of violating the civil rights of
the arrested for political gain. After the widespread media
coverage around the Trump administration's "zero-
tolerance" immigration policy (widely referred to as the
"family separation policy"), there was a groundswell of
community-based efforts to reunite families. One
fundraising effort, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for
Education and Legal Services (Raices), made headlines after
raising more than $20 million to provide legal
representation to detained individuals separated from their
families.

Since that time, the administration has ended the practice
of actively separating families, and public attention appears
to have significantly dissipated.
However, while the policy of forced family separations has
ended, migrants continue to be detained at significant rates.
Bail Bloc attempts to offer a way for those still paying
attention to contribute. Users can download the Bail Bloc
software, which would transfer 10 to 50 percent of their
computer's processing power to mine Monero (XMR). The
Monero is then sent to Bail Bloc, converted to , and
transferred to the Immigrant Bail Fund monthly.

While Bail Bloc seeks to provide aid specifically to detained
migrants, the organization is motivated as much by the
perceived need for bail reform as by President Trump's
immigration stance. In fact, Bail Bloc came into being in
response to a New York Times Magazine piece, "The Bail
Trap," which highlights how the bail system in the United
States tends to push poorer individuals into accepting plea
bargains that are typically to their detriment. "This is
basically what poor people are offered as an alternative to
justice," Grayson Earle, the co-creator of Bail Bloc told The
Observer. "With the rise of , we wanted to
take some of that speculative energy and make it do
something actually useful."

In recent years, some notable efforts have been made
toward bail reform. On August 28, Governor Jerry Brown
signed a bill abolishing cash bail in the state of California.
This came after a California appellate court declared the
state's cash bail system unconstitutional. New Jersey has
made similar efforts , eliminating cash bail for most criminal
defendants beginning in January 2017.
As of press, over 45 XMR, worth upwards of $7,000, had
been mined. According to Bail Bloc, this is "enough to bail
out 12 people."

Source: https://www.ethnews.com/