Racial Issues in Utah

With so much tension these days between nativists and immigrant advocates, some of us tend to forget there are other issues that still haunt us.

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Different State Of Race Relations

With Few Blacks, Utah Feels Its Way

By Karl Vick

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 31, 2008; Page A01

SALT LAKE CITY -- Earlier this year, a state senator stood on the statehouse floor here and spoke disparagingly of a pending bill. "This baby is black," said Sen. Chris Buttars, a Republican, adding, "It's a dark, ugly thing."

Weary of talking about race? Come to [Utah] the Beehive State, where race relations is a topic of bracing freshness.

Here, basic issues of sensitivity -- what is spoken of aloud and what is best left unsaid, assumptions good and bad, all the delicate matters that in so many parts of the country have been burnished to exquisite subtleties by worry and constant attention -- are still very basic indeed...

for complete WP article click here

Letter to Chertoff on rights of detainees

Below is part of a letter written to Michael Chertoff, Director of Homeland Security. The letter is from 17 nationally recognized human rights organization (the list is abbreviated for this post). For a link to the complete letter click here

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May 15, 2008
Secretary Michael Chertoff
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
3801 Nebraska Ave. NW
Washington, D.C. 20528
Dear Secretary Chertoff:

We, the undersigned organizations, are writing to express our continued and serious concerns regarding the provision of medical care to immigration detainees. Based on conversations with detainees, service providers across the country and personnel in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we have identified several areas where we believe the provision of medical services must be dramatically improved.

First, we are deeply concerned that the Division of Immigration Health Services’ (DIHS) stated mission does not comport with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention Standard on Medical Care and established principles of constitutional and international law. The ICE Detention Standard appropriately requires that detainees “have access to medical services that promote detainee health and general well-being.” Yet by its own terms, the DIHS Covered Services Package primarily provides health care services for emergency care, defined as “a condition that is threatening to life, limb, hearing, or sight.” The services package treats pre-existing conditions differently from those that develop during detention, and ties treatment decisions regarding conditions that cause deterioration in health or uncontrolled suffering to ICE’s ability to effectuate deportation. In addition, documents released by the Washington Post reveal that at least one DIHS medical director identifies DIHS’s mission as that of “keeping the detainee medically ready for deportation.” This view was recently reinforced by Gary Mead, Acting Director of Detention and Removal Operations, on National Public Radio, when he questioned whether additional medical care must be provided once DIHS has ensured that a detainee is “medically capable of being removed.” The position of the DIHS medical director and Gary Mead demonstrate how inconsistent DIHS’s mission is with proper standards of care and ICE’s own standards....

Signed by the following organizations:

American Civil Liberties Union
American Immigration Lawyers Association
Amnesty International USA
Asian American Justice Center
Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.
Human Rights Watch
National Immigration Law Center
Physicians for Human Rights
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

cc: Julie Myers, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Daniel Sutherland, Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Richard Skinner, Inspector General

What Color is Your Hat?

for link to photo click here

The De Moines Register wrote a great editorial on the DREAM act. However the responses are so hateful, I don't want to post them here. You can be sure they would make you wince.

That leaves me with a question. Should we post the negative comments as long as they are not vulgar? How "fair" do we need to be to the other side. The whole thing has become something of a Western in reverse - with the media (with the help of Lou Dobbs) labeling pro-immigrants and DREAMERS as the bad guys and nativists as the good guys.

Regardless, it is good to have the support. Many U.S. newspapers have done the same. The editorial asks why can't the government support the DREAM act? Perhaps it is because as long as there are people who are very loud about how they hate immigrants - the politicians will follow the nativist lead.

It will be an interesting election this November.

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Give undocumented grads a chance

The Register's editorial
De Moines Register
May 30, 2008

No one knows how many illegal immigrants are graduating from Iowa high schools this spring, but it's a sure thing Santiago Cordero, Wendy Razam and Gaby Campos are not the only ones.

The Register's Ken Fuson wrote about the frightening futures faced by the undocumented teenagers who received their diplomas at Postville's high school on Sunday afternoon. In the wake of the May 12 immigration raid in the small northeast Iowa town, they worry about what will happen to parents, brothers and sisters and what to do with their own lives now.

But even if federal agents had not stormed the Agricprocessors Inc. meat-processing plant, these youngsters would be up against a much harsher reality than most of their classmates.

Because their families brought them here illegally, they don't qualify for most financial aid for college, and they lack the valid Social Security numbers necessary to get a job on the up and up.

Across the United States, it's estimated that 65,000 undocumented children who have lived in the country for five years or more finish high school each year. They are legally entitled to a public education through 12grade because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision.

But then they are cast into the shadows. This not only is a cruel contradiction in public policy, but also limits the potential of young people who could contribute a great deal to the U.S. economy if allowed to pursue a path to citizenship.

Congress could fix this by passing the Dream Act, legislation first introduced in 2001. The Senate voted down the most recent version in October, 52 to 44. Sponsored by Richard Durbin of Illinois, the bill would have granted provisional legal status to undocumented students who finish high school if they go to college or serve in the military for two years. To qualify, they must have been brought to the United States as children, lived here at least five years and be of good moral character. After meeting the requirement to attend college or the military, they could apply for permanent legal status.

Opponents don't want to reward any sort of illegal immigration, even though it's not the fault of young people - mostly Hispanic - who had no choice in coming to the United States.

Or perhaps they don't want to reopen the divisive debate over America's broken immigration system, despite the clear need for reform, evidenced by the presence of an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

The Dream Act is just one part of a broad package of desperately needed reforms - including higher, realistic immigration quotas - but it is an important place to begin.

It would help offset an anticipated labor shortage and keep the country globally competitive. Instead, the United States invests in educating undocumented students in elementary and secondary schools, but gets too little in return.

It also would demonstrate compassion for young people who feel as if they are Americans. It's not much of an option for them to return to a home country that they don't know and whose language they may barely speak.

Imagine knowing that the door to a better life will slam shut when you are only 18. No wonder many illegal immigrants drop out of school long before high school graduation.

But others are hopeful, despite the anti-immigrant backlash. They go on to earn high school diplomas, like the three undocumented teenagers in Postville, who have said they hope to continue their education.

As Postville Superintendent David Strudthoff told the Register, they made the correct choice.

Why is it so hard for the nation's political leaders to do the same?

for DMR editorial click here

Koreans protest import of American Beef

Just about the entire European Union has been affected by Mad Cow disease.

click here for image

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Democracy Now

May 30, 2008

10,000 South Koreans Protest US Beef Imports

In South Korea, more than 10,000 people took to the streets of Seoul Thursday in the latest of daily protests against an agreement on importing US beef. The South Korean government’s decision to ease restrictions has sparked a national crisis.

Protester: “I came here because I got so angry after the minister announced the implementation. I’ve been participating in these rallies, but I think the government pushed it unilaterally without listening to our voices. I can’t
stand it.”

South Korea banned American beef five years ago after an outbreak of mad cow disease. But the ban was lifted earlier this month after US lawmakers threatened to withhold a pending trade deal unless South Korea accepted US beef.

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Holy cow! The mandarin strikes back ... Francis Beckett reads around The Politics of BSE, by Richard Packer From The Guardian, June 30, 2006

Here is information on how Mad Cow Disease affected the United Kingdom:

BSE - mad cow disease - emerged in cattle in 1986, but the government insisted for 10 years that it could not be transmitted to humans and it was safe to eat beef. One agriculture minister, John Selwyn Gummer, invited the press to photograph him feeding beefburgers to his daughter. Then, on March 20 1996, Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell told Parliament that 10 young people had contracted variant CJD, which is always fatal, probably from BSE. By September 2000 there were 80 victims of CJD. Most of them were young. No other country suffered to anything like the same extent.

It wrecked the British beef industry, not least because the European Union banned British beef. The ban, which in 1997 Tony Blair vowed to have removed within months, was only lifted last month. But Sir Richard's story is not that of the illness, nor even its effect on the industry, but, as his title implies, the politics.

By the start of the 1990s, the European Commission was saying that British slaughterhouse standards were not high enough. Yet as late as 1992, Prime Minister John Major was writing to Gummer: "The regulatory burden we are imposing on business frustrates enterprise, innovation and growth . . . We . . . need to look at the new (EU) rules on meat hygiene which have caused alarm to local business . . . "

When Dorrell made his sensational announcement, the Major government panicked. Groups of ministers gathered in meetings whose decisions were reported, mostly accurately, in the same day's Evening Standard, and then changed by a slightly different group. Major decided on a policy of non-cooperation with the EU until it lifted its ban, a policy that Packer and others warned could not succeed, and it did not succeed.

for complete Guardian article click here

Timing of the Telling - McClellan on Bush

Cartoon "The McClellan Book," by John Cole
link to cartoon



McClellan is being attacked on all sides. From the Bush administration: that he is lying, from the media: why he took too long to tell us about the dark side of the White House.

You could say that it is a character flaw, that he was too easily led by his superiors. This could be possible. But considering the history of Bush, Cheney and associates - you could wonder how dangerous it would have been for him to speak out while he still worked for them. You can define the word dangerous many ways. Or how dangerous it is for him now that the book is released.

The presidential administration with no clothes

As story after story comes up about the disastrous tenure of the Bush administration, you would think that McClellan's book criticizing Bush and his cronies would be welcomed. Many people would rather criticize Mc Clellan than admit that their emperor has no clothes.

funny how lies can make you hallucinate.



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'Disillusioned' McClellan Defends Memoir
By Dan Eggen and Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 29, 2008; 11:55 AM

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan today strongly defended his critical new book on the Bush administration, saying he became "disillusioned" as he realized he was a pawn in a larger political game.

McClellan, who has been harshly condemned as a turncoat by some of his closest friends and former colleagues, said in an interview on NBC's "Today" show that the book was intended to illustrate how a presidential candidate who vowed to change the culture of Washington failed to do so once he was elected.

Instead, McClellan says, President Bush stayed in a "permanent campaign culture" and allowed his staff to use misleading and incomplete information to "sell" the Iraq war to the American people. While the president focused his public arguments on the possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, McClellan said, his true goal in toppling Saddam Hussein was to boost democracy in the Middle East.

McClellan told "Today" he hoped his message would resonate during the current presidential campaign season, when the major candidates are again emphasizing their desire to change the way Washington operates.

"The White House would prefer I not speak out openly and honestly about my experiences, but I believe there is a larger purpose," McClellan said in his first interview since the book's contents were reported earlier this week. "I had all this great hope that we were going to come to Washington and change it. Then we got to Washington, and I think we got caught up in playing the Washington game the way it is being played today."

McClellan, 40, was the ultimate Bush loyalist. He first went to work for George W. Bush when he was Texas governor in 1999, helped Bush gain the White House in 2000, and then came to Washington to defend the president for the next six years on such issues as the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.

But the explosive book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," alleges that the Bush administration waged a "political propaganda campaign" in favor of the Iraq war and bungled the response to the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast...

for complete WP article click here

The Apocalypse: Nigerian Riots

When Donajih and I were in New Mexico about a month ago we stayed in a lady's house for a couple of nights. She was like super nice and really understood the struggle that immigrants across the globe are going through. She is one of the few people that have looked me in the eye and that i feel i have connected with. Donajih and I woke up in our last morning there and had coffee with her before we took off... she started talking to us about the the end of the world, wars, hunger, and all these things that almost made us cry (Ok, im exageerating). She basically told us that we were at the doorstep of the apocalypse... ok, so maybe she was overreacting too, but she did get to my head a little bit, just a little bit.

Yes, things in the United States are pretty bad regarding immigration. In toher parts of the world though things are much, much worse. I am not sure that people realize that we are killing each other everyday. People are being displaced from their familes and homes at the cost of xenophobia. That is really what it is.

When i came across this article today, the lady from New Mexico was the first image that came to my head. Maybe the apocalypse is closer than we think.

Complete article

Tens of thousands of mainly Zimbabwean and Mozambican immigrants have been forced out of their homes since the onset of the xenophobic attacks in the middle of the month have left 56 people dead.

While many of the victims of the riots have simply decided to leave the country for good after their shacks were torched or razed to the ground, others have been sleeping either out in the open or head-to-toe in community centres.

National police spokeswoman, Sally de Beer said no major incident had been reported in the last 24 hours, bolstering hopes that the violence had been finally brought under control with the help of troop deployments.

The xenophobic violence has been a major embarrassment for the continent's economic powerhouse which has portrayed itself as a beacon of racial tolerance since the demise of the whites-only apartheid regime in 1994.

South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is due to host his Nigerian counterpart Umaru Yar'Adua next week, has come under fire for his response to the crisis.

Image

About Immigration: from the words of the Wall Street Journal

It is surprising that Sen. Elizabeth Dole has started an anti-immigration campaign as part of her re-election plan after the appearance of the following review on a book by Jason L. Riley, a member of the WSJ's editorial board, in the Wall Street Journal explains many aspects of the immigration debate. Here are a few excerpts:

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A Welcome, Not a Wall
16 May 2008
The Wall Street Journal
A11

In "Let Them In," Jason L. Riley, a member of The Wall Street
Journal's editorial board, argues the case for open borders, reminding us of the immigrant contribution to America's economy and culture, correcting various myths about legal and illegal immigration, and chiding Republicans for their restrictionist tendencies., .,

...Most immigrants fall into one of two categories: low-skilled laborers or high-skilled professionals. One-third of all immigrants have less than a high school education, and one-quarter hold a bachelor's or advanced degree. Most native workers, by contrast, are concentrated betwixt those two extremes. Hence, immigrant workers tend to act as complements to the native U.S. workforce...

...Immigration policies that limit industry's access to that talent become ever more risky as the marketplace becomes ever more global....

...-- better to let Apple and Google and eBay make their own personnel decisions
without interference from Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs."...

...hostility to immigrants is not a political winner...Unfortunately, it's not a lesson that some conservatives are in danger of learning anytime soon."...

.. illegals who collect a paycheck also pay payroll and Social Security taxes but are denied the attendant benefits, Uncle Sam tends to come out ahead."

..."Mexican immigration was such a nonissue in American politics that it never even came up in the 2004 presidential debates. But by November 2006, Republicans and their conservative allies in talk radio and cable news would turn it into a raucous
national theme... The GOP spent tens of millions of dollars on television ads that portrayed Latino immigrants as dangerous criminals...

...Historically, the best results have come from providing more legal ways for immigrants to enter the country. Most of these people are not predisposed to crime or terrorists in waiting. They are economic migrants who would gladly use the front
door if it were open to them...

to obtain this WSJ article click here

Immigrant Bashing Does Not Win Elections

detail of image from CNN.com

Elizabeth Dole should take the advice from the Boston Globe journalist who wrote The anti-immigration rabble-rousers haven't disappeared - but none of them will be the next president of the United States.*

As I watched a new campaign ad approved by Elizabeth Dole, I thought about how she is reminding her constituents that North Carolina's most significant concern is to "identify, apprehend and deport these [undocumented immigrant] repeat criminals."

The Sheriffs in the ad have either not read the numerous studies that show the very low incidence of crime among the undocumented immigrant population* or have chosen to misrepresent the information (in other words lie). If you take the comments seriously, you could wonder about "these repeat criminals." You would think they were talking about axe murderers instead of people who have only committed a misdemeanor for entering this country without a proper visa. How many misdemeanors have you (or your kids) committed that no one knows about?

A few examples (I swear on my grandmother's memory I am telling the truth):

a young man who ended up at Harvard decided one day to smash up the car of his high school principal. He did this in the school parking lot. He positioned his car some yards behind the principal's car and rammed it from the back. Did anyone report this? no was the young man charged with anything? no. We know how much auto body repairs are these days, so he not only committed a misdemeanor, you could say that was a felony because it was well over the $50 limits on such crimes.

another young man takes computers from his school and other computer related material from where he works part time. Everyone knew about it, even the school. Nothing happened, which could possibly be related to one of his parent's being the CFO of a major health corporation.

Having had two offspring that were once teenagers, I heard these kinds of stories for years.

These kinds of things happen frequently, everyone that has raised a child to adulthood has probably experienced some of the agony of getting that phone call.

Everyday life is full of things that can go wrong, that are done with or without malice. Yet the Sheriff's of North Carolina have decided to cleanse their state of the most vulnerable. Their uniforms and southern drawls make them sound like the strong men of the South - Final question: when does a bully look like a strong man?



click here for link to Dole's anti-immigrant campaign ad

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May 28, 2008
Categories: Campaigns
Politico.com

Dole focuses on illegal immigration in first campaign ad

Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) launched the first advertisement for her reelection bid, which features statewide sheriffs praising her work securing federal assistance for law enforcement officials to crack down on illegal immigration.

The federal program Dole touts in the ad trains local law enforcement officials to act as immigration enforcement deputies.

“Most of us didn’t have the tools to identify and apprehend illegal immigrants who were repeatedly committing crimes. ...So Sen. Dole works out a solution, a statewide partnership between federal officials and North Carolina sheriffs to give us access to the federal tools to identify and apprehend and deport these repeat criminals,” several statewide sheriffs say in the ad.

“She’s one tough lady with major league clout,” two other sheriffs go on to say. “I’m sure glad she’s from North Carolina...”

link to complete Politco article

*See dreamacttexas post "US natives are 10 times more like to be in prison or jail than immigrants."



thanks to A.N. for passing this info along

Underground Undergrads coming out on May 28th from 4-6 PM in UCLA

Undocumented Immigrant Students Speak out


Featuring Stories by: Mario Escobar – A former child soldier from El Salvador who recently attained asylum in this country Tam Tran – A UCLA graduate who testified before the U.S. Congress on the status of undocumented students Grace – A Korean student who gave up her student visa to qualify for AB 540 so she could attend UCLA Antonio – A Mexican immigrant who arrived in this country at the age of four and who struggled to finance and complete his college education


UNDERGROUND UNDERGRADS highlights the growing student movement around access to higher education for undocumented students. This student publication includes the moving stories of eight UCLA undocumented undergrads who write about their emotional pain, financial hardships, and ultimate triumphs upon graduation. It also serves as an educational and research tool by providing a summary of the history of legislation impacting undocumented students in higher education as well as a resource guide of organizations that support student rights.

Wednesday, May 28, 4:00-6:00 pm UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library Haines Hall 144 Co-sponsored by the CSRC, UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, and IDEAS at UCLA

Directions to UCLA available at: http://www.ucla.edu/map/ Campus parking can be purchased for $8 at the Westholme Dr./Hilgard Ave. or Wyton Ave./Hilgard Ave. kiosks. The closest available Lots are #2 and #3. For more information: (310) 206-9185 b

To learn more about the CSRC, visit our website or email us . To subscribe to our newsletter, e-mail CSRC Newsletter and include in the body of your message the line (and nothing but the line) SUBSCRIBE CHICANO [first name, last name] (don't enter the brackets, just your name).

Crossing over to the dark side

link to image





In the 1960s, long before the big immigration rush, a young relative of mine, who was about 13 at the time used to tell the rest of the family that he wanted to be a Border Patrol Agent. He lived on the border with Mexico - and like most kids then, saw the Border Patrol as a representative of "good authority" - the family had no experience (at least in a couple of hundred years) with immigrating, so there were no "bad stories" about these men in uniform. Our experience was crossing back and forth over the international bridge, going to "el otro lado" to go to a Bull Fight,* buy cabritos, spices, or gifts for relatives who lived further from Mexico. When our car would approach the officer he just asked "American citizens?" and my mother (who usually took us over) would say yes, while the kids would watch.

By the time he was 18, he no longer talked about the Border Patrol. Maybe it was a good thing. He went on to college and has a successful career a few hundred miles form the border.

Four decades have passed and so much has changed. It is no longer so easy to cross the border, immigrant or not. No one I know wants to be a Border Patrol Agent. Now our experience is like the one I encountered a couple of years ago in Pharr, Texas when an agent "mistakenly" kept my friend's Mexican ID Card - the Matricula. I guess when he took the card he didn't imagine someone would be writing his story in a widely read blog.

In the 50s and 60s there were probably a number of "good guys" (not many women then) in the Border Patrol. But who knows nowadays. In the following article the NYT talks about the agents that have gone over to the dark side. My contention is that with the current anti-immigration climate and the notorious reputation gained by ICE agents - just joining DHS is like crossing over the DARK SIDE. I never did like it when they changed from INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) to DHS. Considering how many charges of inappropriate behavior are being leveled against DHS officers - maybe the agency should really be called Darth Vader Homeland Security.


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May 27, 2008

Border Agents, Lured by the Other Side

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and ANDREW BECKER

SAN DIEGO — The smuggler in the public service announcement sat handcuffed in prison garb, full of bravado and shrugging off the danger of bringing illegal immigrants across the border.

“Sometimes they die in the desert, or the cars crash, or they drown,” he said. “But it’s not my fault.”

The smuggler in the commercial, produced by the Mexican government several years ago, was played by an American named Raul Villarreal, who at the time was a United States Border Patrol agent and a spokesman for the agency here.

Now, federal investigators are asking: Was he really acting?

Mr. Villarreal and a brother, Fidel, also a former Border Patrol agent, are suspected of helping to smuggle an untold number of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Brazil across the border. The brothers quit the Border Patrol two years ago and are believed to have fled to Mexico.

The Villarreal investigation is among scores of corruption cases in recent years that have alarmed officials in the Homeland Security Department just as it is hiring thousands of border agents to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

The pattern has become familiar: Customs officers wave in vehicles filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband. A Border Patrol agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall prey to temptation and begin taking bribes.

Increased corruption is linked, in part, to tougher enforcement, driving smugglers to recruit federal employees as accomplices. It has grown so worrisome that job applicants will soon be subject to lie detector tests to ensure that they are not already working for smuggling organizations. In addition, homeland security officials have reconstituted an internal affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection, one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, overseeing both border agents and customs officers.

When the Homeland Security Department was created in 2003, the internal affairs unit was dissolved and its functions spread among other agencies. Since the unit was reborn last year, it has grown from five investigators to a projected 200 by the end of the year.

Altogether, there are about 200 open cases pending against law enforcement employees who work the border. In the latest arrests, four employees in Arizona, Texas and California were charged this month with helping to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country.

While the corruption investigations involve a small fraction of the overall security workforce on the border, the numbers are growing. In the 2007 fiscal year, the Homeland Security Department’s main anticorruption arm, the inspector general’s office, had 79 investigations under way in the four states bordering Mexico, compared with 31 in 2003. Officials at other federal law enforcement agencies investigating border corruption also said their caseloads had risen.

Some of the recent cases involve border guards who had worked for their agencies for a short time, including the arrest this month of a recruit at the Border Patrol academy in New Mexico on gun smuggling charges.

The federal government says it carefully screens applicants, but some internal affairs investigators say they have been unable to keep up with the increased workload.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said James Wong, an internal affairs agent with Customs and Border Protection. “It’s very difficult for us to get out and vet each and every one of the applicants as well as we should.”

The Border Patrol alone is expected to grow to more than 20,000 agents by the end of 2009, more than double from 2001, when the agency began to expand in response to concerns about national security. There has also been a large increase in the number of customs officers.

James Tomsheck, the assistant commissioner for internal affairs at Customs and Border Protection, said the agency was “deeply concerned” that smugglers were sending operatives to take jobs with the Border Patrol and at ports.

Mr. Tomsheck said the agency intended to administer random lie-detector tests to 10 percent of new hires this year, with the goal of eventually testing all applicants. His office has contracts with 155 retired criminal investigators, adding 36 since last fall, to do background checks.

In one of the new corruption cases this month, at a border crossing east of San Diego, a customs officer allowed numerous cars with dozens of illegal immigrants and hundreds of pounds of drugs to pass through his inspection lane, investigators said.

The officer, Luis Alarid, 31, had worked at the crossing less than a year, and the loads included a vehicle driven by Mr. Alarid’s uncle, the authorities said. Mr. Alarid has pleaded not guilty to a charge of conspiracy to smuggle. Investigators found about $175,000 in cash in his house, according to court records.

In another recent case, Margarita Crispin, a customs inspector in El Paso, Tex., began helping drug smugglers just a few months after she was hired in 2003, according to prosecutors. She helped the smugglers for four years before she was arrested last year and sentenced in April to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit up to $5 million.

Although bad apples turn up in almost every law enforcement agency, the corruption cases expose a worrisome vulnerability for national and border security. The concern, several officials said, is that corrupt agents let people into the country whose intentions may be less innocent than finding work.

“If you can get a corrupt inspector, you have the keys to the kingdom,” said Andrew P. Black, an F.B.I. agent who supervises a multiagency task force focused on corruption on the San Diego border.

Comparing corruption among police agencies is difficult because of the varying standards and procedures for handling internal investigations, said Lawrence W. Sherman, the director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and an authority on corruption.

But he described policing the border as “potentially one of the most corruptible tasks in law enforcement” because of the solitary nature of much of the work and the desperation of people seeking to cross.

Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, declined an interview. But in response to questions at a recent news conference, he suggested that the breadth and depth of border security improvements would inevitably produce problem officers.

“There is an old expression among prosecutors,” he said. “Big cases, big problems. Little cases, little problems. No cases, no problems. Some people take the view we ought to make no cases and then we would have no problems. I think that is a head-in-the-sand view, which I do not endorse...”

for complete NYT article, click here



*sorry about that, but I was six years old, and people didn't talk about animal rights in the late 1950s.

DREAMERS be careful in Galveston

photo: commercialappeal.com

In today's Houston Chronicle there is an article on how suburban jails may get overloaded because of ICE"s criminal alien program (funny I kept typing "progrom") - inside the article is an important piece of information:

Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo, spokesman for the Galveston County Sheriff's Office, said Galveston deputies already report illegal immigrants whenever they are encountered during the course of a normal arrest

As thousands of students visit Galveston beaches every year - a good number of these students get arrested - for violations such as public intoxication or assault (if they got into a fight). DREAMERS go to the beach too.... and you know how sometimes you can get caught in a mess by just standing nearby.

Since Galveston now has a policy of checking immigration status - be careful if you are a DREAMER- and stay out of, if you see a problem erupting nearby - get away from the action. If you are no longer a DREAMER, be sure to carry your documents with you...

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May 25, 2008, 11:02PM
Effort by ICE could be strain on suburban counties' jails

By HARVEY RICE and ERIC HANSON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

As Harris County meshes into a Homeland Security Department program to accelerate the deportation of illegal immigrants locked up in U.S. jails, suburban counties fear it could overburden their smaller staffs.

The department's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already enlisted Harris County and the six adjacent suburban counties in its Criminal Alien Program, allowing jails to report each inmate's immigration status.

The more ambitious parts of the ICE effort are to train local law enforcement in immigration duties and equip county jails with sophisticated technology that would give them access to the ICE fingerprint database.

Harris County is waiting its turn to send deputies for immigration duty training in the 287(g) program, but suburban counties worry about the strain caused by having members of a smaller department absent for the training.

Houston-area counties are among 52 counties under the ICE Houston office, which reports that about 200 illegal immigrants with criminal records are taken into custody every week.

The number of illegal immigrants in suburban county jails varies, from 317 over the course of a year in populous Fort Bend County to less than 10 on any given day in smaller Chambers and Liberty counties.

ICE does not keep numbers for individual counties, but deportations from the 52-county area have risen steadily over the past three years, rising from 4,880 criminal deportations in fiscal 2005 — about 58 percent of all deportations — to 7,100 in fiscal 2007, about 53 percent.

Nationally, deportations of all types have risen from 178,177 in fiscal 2005 to 280,523 in fiscal 2007.

None has applied

Although most area counties are interested in the training, so far none of the suburban counties — Montgomery, Fort Bend, Liberty, Chambers, Brazoria or Galveston — has applied for the program.

"Taking people out of pocket for an extended period of time would be a problem," said Cpl. Hugh Bishop, spokesman for the Liberty County Sheriff's Office.

The ICE training takes officers away from their departments for at least a month, ICE spokesman Greg Palmore said. Jailers receive four weeks of training and field officers five weeks, Palmore said.

Bishop said cost is another hurdle to participation. Although ICE pays for the training and provides housing, departments must continue to pay salaries for the absent officers.

Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo, spokesman for the Galveston County Sheriff's Office, said Galveston deputies already report illegal immigrants whenever they are encountered during the course of a normal arrest, and the department is leery of doing more...

for complete article click here

Hope is the Last Thing that Dies

The other day i met with a fellow DREAMER and found out that she had just resolved her legal situation. She said to me: "You know, ever since i came to the United States i was always conscious that if it came down to it I would have to marry a citizen in order to fix this jam..." Well, she did alright.

The other day a good friend of mine offer to help me from this jam... but stories like the marchers in Nevada reminded me that there are better things coming up.





Dozens of college students, many in graduation gowns and caps, marched from Valley High School to University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Friday afternoon in support of legislation that would give undocumented young people a path toward legality.

"I've heard the stories about people who couldn't go to college because of their status," said 19-year-old Irina Barrera, a UNLV sophomore majoring in women's studies. "They were brought here (to the United States) by their parents. They had no choice."

Participants hoped the "March for the DREAM" would drum up interest and support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act for short.

The DREAM Act would allow undocumented immigrants who came to the United States with their families at age 15 or younger, and who plan to attend college or join the military, to move toward legality.



Supporters say it will help children who have grown up in the United States, have assimilated into American culture and may have few memories of their countries of origin.

Many of Friday's marchers said they had family members or friends who would benefit from such legislation.

The DREAM Act failed last year when the Senate voted 52-44 in favor of it. Sixty votes were needed to advance the proposal.

Opponents argued the bill would put people on a path to citizenship even if they were living in the country illegally, amounting to a type of amnesty.

But supporters hope the act will soon be resurrected.

"It's an election year, so we're trying to push it to the forefront," said Dawrin Mota, 22.

Mota, a UNLV junior studying hotel management, said he knows "a couple of young people who have no options" because they are in the country illegally.

Even if they were able to get college degrees, he said, they would have few options afterward because they can't legally work in the United States.

The march was organized by the United Coalition for Immigrant Rights, which helped put together 2006's large-scale marches in support of comprehensive immigration reform.

Sharon Moore, a UNLV assistant professor of English who teaches African-American and American literature courses, showed her support Friday by donning a black graduation gown and marching with some of her students.

"I see a similarity between these (marches) and those I teach about at UNLV," Moore said. "There's so much about the struggle for immigrant rights that smacks of the kinds of concerns slaves had and the rights of African-Americans to have access to higher education. The plight of the disenfranchised is universal."

The marchers traveled about 3.5 miles, chanting slogans such as "Books not borders!" and "Si se puede!" -- "Yes we can!" -- and carrying signs that read "Education not deportation" and "Fight for the Dream."

They then held a rally at UNLV's outdoor amphitheater.

Juanito Espinoza, 23, carried his framed associate's degree from College of Southern Nevada.

"It's important to show the community that Latinos are productive," Espinoza explained. "I feel my undocumented friends should have the same access to education. I know a lot of people who are undocumented, and their stories are heartbreaking."

Contact reporter Lynnette Curtis at lcurtis@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0285.

Agency cites mistake in raid at UCSD complex

Agency cites mistake in raid at UCSD complex

May 23, 2008
LA JOLLA – Local officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement say agents made a mistake last week when they entered UCSD student housing to search an apartment without first notifying the university.


Last Thursday morning, ICE agents entered the off-campus graduate housing unit of student Jorge Narvaez, 21, a legal U.S. resident. Earlier that morning, agents had carried out a criminal search warrant at the French Gourmet, a Pacific Beach bakery and bistro, and were proceeding on to suspected illegal workers' homes.

While Narvaez works at the bakery, the worker that ICE agents sought didn't live at Narvaez's address.The agency's policy when entering a university campus, or off-campus university housing, is to alert campus police. However, in this case, agents didn't realize they were in student housing until later, ICE spokeswoman Lauren Mack said.

"Had they been aware that morning, we would have provided a courtesy notification by contacting the campus police," Mack said. "We are conducting an internal review of the situation to clear up any confusion as to how that happened, and to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Narvaez, a pre-law student born in Mexico who has lived in the United States most of his life, lives in the Mesa Graduate Housing complex near the University of California San Diego. While he is an undergraduate, students with families also live there; Narvaez has a wife and young child.

He said he was home alone last Thursday about 10 a.m. when half a dozen armed agents arrived at his door. After asking if the other person lived there, they began asking him questions, Narvaez said.

"They asked me what's my legal status," he said. "I had nothing to hide, so I let them in my home. I went outside and they went through all my stuff."

While Narvaez said he has no complaints as to how the search was carried out, he said agents should have been aware of where they were.

"There are signs in front that say this is university housing," he said.

UCSD officials learned of the incident as news spread from student to student and eventually to faculty, said Grecia Lima, a senior who helped organize a forum on campus yesterday to discuss stepped-up immigration enforcement. Earlier this week, UCSD campus police spoke with ICE officials about the incident and to "revisit the importance of advising campus police when agents become involved in contacting students on campus," Stacie Spector, associate vice chancellor for university communications, said in a written statement.

Campus police at San Diego State University cooperated with federal drug-enforcement agents during a five-month undercover operation on campus that resulted in 96 arrests earlier this month. Afterward, university President Stephen Weber said he had not been made aware of the agents' presence until shortly before the operation ended.

Immigrant Detainees Beaten, Lawsuit Claims

(CBS) CBS News Investigative Producer Laura Strickler wrote this for cbsnews.com.

Immigrant Detainees Beaten, Lawsuit Claims
Private Contractor Cited for Safety Problems in the Past

A new lawsuit filed against a private contractor who runs an immigrant child detention center claims nine teenagers were beaten and abused by employees who work for Cornell Companies. The company has been cited by immigration officials for safety problems in the past.

The Hector Garza facility in San Antonio handles young immigrant “males with serious behavioral and psychological impairments”. “I think the general American has no idea these kids even exist,” said Susan Watson, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid attorney for the nine plaintiffs, “When our own government treats them this way, they deserve their day in court,” she said. The plaintiffs claim they notified authorities of multiple beatings but no action was taken.

One of the plaintiffs is described in court documents as a 16-year-old Honduran male identified as C.C. Arriving at the border alone, C.C. was put into custody for a week by Border Patrol agents.

He was later transferred to the Hector Garza Center, where court filings claim a teacher “severely battered C.C. punching and kicking him, then beating him with a chair as he lay on the floor.”

Lawsuit filings claim C.C. conveyed this to the authorities but nothing was done. A week later, court documents indicate C.C. came to the defense of another child who was being beaten. C.C. was hit again, this time losing consciousness and ended up in the hospital, according to the civil complaint.

Click the title of the post to view the entire article.

Another Student in the news!

It is good that the media is paying more attention to cases like these, it is sad that cases like these happen. Before, students who Could Not continue their studies further because of their status- were not even taken into account. But reality has to set into the politicians and truly pay attention to what the people in this country are facing. How difficult is to understand the necessity of ‘allowing’ for students to keep up with their goals in schools and careers. The careers that others may not fill, but the needs and wants are there.

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Aspiring artist, 18, who grew up in U.S. fighting deportation to Mexico

By Tal Abbady | South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Garcia adjusted to his new life and became fluent in English. He attended Silver Lakes Middle School and Coconut Creek High School, where he discovered his artistic talent. In 10th grade, he won first place in an art competition for ESOL students for his drawing of a Mayan man standing next to a jaguar. That prize spurred more drawings. Garcia took art classes at school and began to see his future as an artist.

But a random checkpoint at the Port of Miami in August put Garcia on the radar of immigration officials. Garcia and a 21-year-old friend, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant who was driving the pair, were stopped by officials when they accidentally drove into the Port of Miami. They tried to leave, but both were asked for their ID. Neither had any. Officials took Garcia's friend into custody. He was deported soon after. Garcia was held in Miami for two days before authorities sent him to a detention center in New York. He was there three weeks, before he was given a hearing date and released. Garcia, who has little understanding of the immigration system, said he'd heard of the deportation of adults. But he said he doubted that school children such as himself could be ensnared by the law.

Roughly 700,000 children enrolled in K-12 schools throughout the country are undocumented, according to Josh Bernstein, director of federal policy for the National Immigration Law Center. A proposed bill, the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for students like Garcia, has languished in Congress for years. Bernstein referred to Garcia as part of the "1.5 generation" -- wedged between the first generation of immigrant adults and the second generation of U.S.-born children. "It is a very promising generation, but our laws are written in such a way that we treat them like criminals," he said. But proponents of tougher immigration enforcement say that is the easy side of the argument.

"When parents break the law, they're taking the risk that there will be consequences for their children," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "Immigration policy forces people to make tough ethical decisions," said Stein, "but the laws matter."

After his hearing, Garcia was hopeful for his future. Bolstered by the judge's decision, he said he will focus the next months on his case. "I came here to be someone," he said of his entry into the United States. "I have a good shot.""

Bad News in Massachusetts

It's not just that Senator Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer. It is also that the state of MA has decided (again) not to allow instate college tuition for DREAMERS.

These two events do not bode well for DREAMERS. Kennedy has always been one of the DREAMERS greatest champions. The latest denial of instate tuition will keep hundreds of graduating high school seniors from attending college.

Tuition aid to illegal immigrants falters

Patrick declines to act on behalf of graduates

By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | May 22, 2008

Governor Deval Patrick has decided against taking action to allow illegal immigrants to pay resident tuition and fees at state colleges and universities this fall, an administration official said yesterday, crushing advocates who were counting on the governor to deliver on a pledge to support the students.

Earlier this year, Patrick said he was considering ways to offer illegal immigrants in-state rates, such as issuing a regulation, adding that it would be "the right thing to do."

The governor declined to comment yesterday, but an administration source who spoke on condition of anonymity said Patrick decided that there were "significant legal impediments" to that approach. The governor will still support legislation on the matter, but on Beacon Hill the issue is widely viewed as dead this session.

The decision is a blow to church pastors, school counselors, and advocates from Lawrence to Springfield, who had pressured Patrick to act before high school graduations in the next few weeks. Now several hundred seniors are again facing college tuition and fees that are more than double the resident rates, as high as $21,900 a year.

"This would be slamming the door on hundreds of students who are graduating this year," said Loren McArthur, staff director of the Merrimack Valley Project, a group of churches, labor unions, and others who sent Patrick 300 letters this month urging him to act now. "If this is his decision, it's unfortunate. But we will be urging him to reconsider."

Advocates had hoped that Patrick, who often touts his own background as a civil rights advocate whose life was transformed by education, would build support for a relatively small group of students. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation estimated that if students could pay in-state rates, as many as 600 illegal immigrants would enroll in college a year, out of 160,000 in the public system, bringing in about $2.5 million in tuition and fees. The group estimated that only about 100 such students were enrolled in 2006.

"We had hoped that the governor would honor his commitments and his promises to make education access fair for all Massachusetts students," said Shuya Ohno, spokesman for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. "He understood that it was a question of fairness. What he couldn't articulate is that it actually makes money for the state."

In recent weeks, hundreds of supporters were intensifying pressure on Patrick, peppering him with calls and letters on behalf of the students. Some wanted Patrick to sign an executive order allowing students to pay in-state rates. Others urged the Board of Higher Education to change its regulations to allow it. Patrick considered that option, but the board said it did not have that authority, said Eileen O'Connor, a board spokeswoman....

for complete Boston Globe article click here

thanks to citizenorange.com for alerting us to this article

Congressional Hearing on Immigration Enforcement & Reform

House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime, and Global Counterterrorism

Hearing on "The Border Security Challenge: Recent Developments and Legislative Proposals."

Thursday, May 22, 2008, 10 a.m. Eastern Time

For live webcast of this hearing click here

Thursday, May 22, 2008 @ 10am Eastern Time

311 Cannon House Office Building

“The Border Security Challenge: Recent Developments and Legislative Proposals”

· Subcommittee on Border, Maritime, and Global Counterterrorism and Subcommittee

Witnesses (invited, partial):

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), Member of Congress

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), Member of Congress

Rep. Health Shuler (D-NC), Member of Congress

Chief David V. Aguilar, Office of Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security

Michael C. Kostelnik, Maj. Gen., USAF (Ret.), Assistant Commissioner, Office of Air and Marine, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security

Thomas S. Winkowski, Assistant Commissioner, Office of Field Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security

There will be a live webcast of this hearing.

Press Release from Immigration Policy Center

On Thursday, May 22, the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime, and Global Counterterrorism will hold a hearing on "The Border Security Challenge: Recent Developments and Legislative Proposals." As lawmakers evaluate the border-enforcement initiatives that have already been implemented by the Bush administration, and the various enforcement proposals now on the table in Congress, they would do well to keep in mind that an enforcement-only approach to border security has been tried - and failed - for more than two decades.

In two new fact sheets, Money for Nothing: Immigration Enforcement Without Immigration Reform Doesn't Work and The Politics of Contradiction: Immigration Enforcement vs. Economic Integration, the IPC analyzes the escalating costs and fatal flaws of the enforcement-without-reform approach to border security. The reports point out that the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically at the very same time the federal government has poured billions upon billions of dollars into border enforcement. Many U.S. taxpayers question the use of their tax dollars on failed deportation-only efforts, and are calling for fair and practical immigration reform.

No Racial Profiling?

NPR does a report on the death of a high school student involving an undocumented youngster. Shawl's family is now fighting to pass a law in order to question SUSPECTS on their legal status in the United States.

Listen HERE

In March, 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw Jr. was gunned down outside his home in South Central Los Angeles. The man accused in the fatal shooting is alleged gang member Pedro Espinoza, who prosecutors say entered the United States illegally.

Now, Shaw's family is fighting to pass a measure called "Jamiel's Law." The proposed legislation would allow the Los Angeles police to ask crime suspects about their immigration status.

For more, Farai Chideya speaks with Jamiel's mother and father, Jamiel Shaw Sr. and Anita Shaw.

Then, we hear from Fermin Vasquez, a student at California State University, who entered the United States illegally and is now an immigrants' rights activist. Vasquez is president of Students United to Reach Goals in Education.

Talented student artist could be deported

IMMIGRATION

Talented student artist could be deported
Meynardo Garcia's artwork has won awards, but the Coconut Creek student may be deported.
Posted on Sun, May. 18, 2008

BY ANI MARTINEZ
armartinez@MiamiHerald.com

Meynardo Garcia, 18, stands with his Holocaust Documentation and Education Center award-winning artwork. Garcia is a senior at Coconut Creek High School and is in danger of being deported.

J. ALBERT DIAZ / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

» More Photos
Meynardo Garcia's ambitious dreams of becoming an artist are on hold, while he fights the U.S. government over his mother's decision years ago to break the law.
His mother slipped Meynardo, then age 10, into the United States illegally from Mexico. He's now 18 years old, a senior at Broward's Coconut Creek High School.
Meynardo's saga as an undocumented immigrant would have largely gone unnoticed but for his art teacher, his fellow classmates and his prize-winning artwork.
Nearly 1,000 classmates have signed a petition to allow Meynardo to stay in the country and his art teacher has gotten him an attorney to represent him in his legal battle.
Last month, he won first place in the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center's student art competition, beating out 500 other nationwide contestants.
He produced intricate artwork on a poster board with an airbrush, a technique Meynardo taught himself. It depicts a somber group of Latino boys surrounded by barbed wires and includes words written in Hebrew.
''When I studied about the Holocaust, it reminded me of kids in my neighborhood,'' Meynardo said. ``Those kids didn't have freedom and the kids in Mexico don't either.''
He wasn't able to claim the $250 prize because he doesn't have a social security number.
''He has an innate sense of what a composition needs,'' said his art teacher, Jacqueline Sacs. ``In 2007, he didn't know what the Holocaust was but wanted to participate in the contest. His piece awakened a passion for him about children.''
She hopes his artistic ability will somehow help persuade an immigration judge to allow him to stay.
Click the title of the post to view the complete article.

Who is Afraid?

Not to scare anybody, but the Daily Kos published a post today that tells us there might be up to 8 million people put in detention - "in case of national emergency" -

When I first saw the link and didn't know the source I thought to myself, they have got to be kidding - the source must be some nut.

Apparently the London Times also published an article on a similar plan in the UK.

I clicked the link and to my surprise it came from the Daily Kos - click here for the post


thanks to GL for alerting us to this information

"Juan Crow" In Georgia

TRUTH IN IMMIGRATION

"Juan Crow" In Georgia

May 09, 2008 - Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow.

Click the title of the post for the full article. (MALDEF : Truth in Immigration Website)

La NETA...about Latinos and English

The vast majority (88%) of second generation Latinos speak English very well, a figure that rises to 94% by the third generation. In fact, maintaining fluency in Spanish is often a challenge for second and third generation Hispanics. Just 11% of second generation Latino adults and 6% of third-generation Latinos speak only Spanish in the home. To learn more, click here.

Responding to Julie Myers and ICE

Julie Myers, assistant director of DHS published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. in which she defended the agency while describing what she believes as competent care for those in detention. She is saying that ICE needs to be represented with "balanced" views. Of course it is fair to present different sides of the problem. But the Washington Post and the NY Times are not debating the quality of care in DHS detention centers. These newspapers are exposing inhumane treatment of detained immigrants. This is not a debate, it is a exposé of something very detrimental to our society.

My response to Myers' statements:

Myers: ICE did not create the detention or detainee health-care systems but, in fact, inherited the procedures of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS).

Response: Myers appears to be implying that her agency is less responsible for bad medical treatment in detention centers because DHS "inherited the procedures' and detention heath-care systems.

Myers: Psychologists and social workers have managed a daily population of more than 1,350 seriously mentally ill detainees without a single suicide being committed in the past 15 months.

Response: Perhaps none in the past 15 months (that have been reported), but suicide is still a very serious threat to the well-being of detainees. See WP article on suicides in detention.

Myers: [DHS has] national detention standards that are comparable to or surpass industry standards in their commitment to detainee health and comfort.

Response: The WP has a document that highlights actual DHS dollar savings when medical care is denied. This document shows DHS imitating the policies of HMOs, generally known for paying doctors not to treat (the care they don't give), versus the care they do give. Click here for details.

Myers: ICE detention facilities are open to those outside the agency. We routinely conduct tours for members of Congress, representatives from nongovernmental organizations and the media.

Response: from the ACLU: In March, 2008 U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, Jorge Bustamante was denied entrance to New Jersey's Monmouth County Correctional Institution and Texas's Hutto immigration detention center, a converted prison According to ACLU the "U.S. has a history of blocking international experts from access to controversial detention facilities." For the complete ACLU report click here.

Myers: Readers should know that ICE does not tolerate malfeasance or malpractice. Instances of improper behavior will be immediately and vigorously investigated; if necessary, appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.

Response: If this is true, then why are there repeated incidents of ICE misrepresenting themselves as police, why are they entering homes without warrants, and verbally abuse people being interrogated (among many other inappropriate behaviors)? See ACLU statement requesting the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the DHS.

The Big White Buses

Photo by Spencer Hsu for the Washington Post



Last year I spent many hours talking to DREAMERS - they often mentioned the ominous big white buses from Homeland Security. This image contains buses used to transport detainees from the Postville raid.

Introduction to Congressional Hearing on ICE Raids

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey introduces a hearing by the Congressional Committee on Education and Labor.

She talks of raids in her district in San Rafael and Novato, in Marin County, California. It appears that the Postville ICE raid provoked today's meeting.

She tells of 4.7 million children in the U.S.that have one parent who is undocumented. Two thirds of these children are U.S. citizens. That over 200 children had parents arrested in Postville Raid, that many of these children are sleeping in St. Bridget Church.

This video is over 8 minutes long, but well worth watching in its entirety.

Congressional Hearing on ICE RAIDS

Elementary school principal Kathryn Gibney testifies about the impact of ICE raids on her students. She tells of parents being arrested while they walk their children to school, ICE agents banging on apartment doors at night saying they are police.



Congressional Hearing by Committee on Education and Labor, May 20, 2008, regarding the impact of ICE raids on communities, families, and children.

400 protest Postville Raid

From Democracynow.org

Hundreds Protest Iowa Immigration Raid

In Waterloo, Iowa, hundreds of people marched on Sunday to protest last week’s immigration raid at the Agriprocessers kosher meatpacking plant. Immigration agents detained nearly 400 immigrant workers in what has been described as the largest single immigration raid in US history. The raid resulted in more than ten percent of the town of Postville, Iowa being locked up. On the day after the raid, half of the school system’s 600 students were absent, including 90 percent of Latino children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding. Many of the workers have been held at a fairgrounds usually used for exhibiting cattle. No charges have been filed against the owners of the meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors.

What U.S. would lose if we sent everyone away

BENEFITS AND COSTS

The impact of illegal immigration on the U.S. economy.

• 8.1 million: illegal immigrants

• $1.8 trillion: annual spending, U.S.

• $220.7 billion: annual spending, Texas

• $652 billion : annual contribution to U.S. GDP

• $27 billion or more: * the costs of education, health care and incarceration in six states, including Texas

Sources: The Perryman Group;

The Greater Houston Partnership, Houston's pre-eminent coalition of businesses and corporations commissioned a study that confirms that undocumented immigrants bring huge benefits to the U.S. and Texas economies. The study is showing the liability of undocumented people is in the billions, however their contribution is in the trillions.

Just so you will know the importance of the GHP, here is a little information.

The Great Houston Partnership statement on it's web page:

"If the Greater Houston Partnership were a Fortune 500 company, the $1.92 Trillion in combined annual sales and other receipts of its board of director firms would exceed the Gross Domestic Products of all but the top six nations of the world"

GHP's members and supporters include:

AT&T

British Petroleum

Center Point Energy

Chevron

Chase

Conoco/Phillips

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May 19, 2008, 10:40PM
Price put at $1.8 trillion
Study: That's what U.S. would lose if undocumented immigrants vanished

Houston Chronicle

By JENALIA MORENO

If the 8.1 million undocumented immigrants who cut lawns, bus tables and perform other jobs disappeared overnight, the nation's economy would lose nearly $1.8 trillion in annual spending.

Texas, the second-hardest-hit state after California, would lose 1.2 million undocumented workers and $220.7 billion in expenditures.

These are just some of the findings from a study done by the Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic analysis firm, whose work was commissioned by Americans for Immigration Reform, a group spearheaded by the Greater Houston Partnership.

Houston's business community is trying to revive the politically charged immigration reform debate that has stalled in Congress. It plans to raise $12 million by December to fund a campaign for reform and thus far it says it has raised about 10 percent of that goal in pledges.

The government has recently increased enforcement, with raids at work sites and plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But getting rid of all undocumented immigrants would hurt, not help the economy, Charles Foster, an immigration attorney and chairman of Americans for Immigration Reform, said Monday.

"If you do that, you would have serious economic upset," Foster said.

He said immigration reform needs to give employers a method of hiring immigrants legally.

"We need comprehensive reform that looks at our needs and addresses those needs," said Ray Perryman, president of the Perryman Group, which examined data for 500 sectors of the economy, Census Bureau surveys and other data to arrive at its conclusions...

for complete Houston Chronicle article click here

The Postville ICE Raid - Why weren't the Postville employers arrested?

The largest immigration raid in U.S. History did not include the arrests of any employers - Is ICE thinking that the only ones guilty are the immigrants? ICE is well aware that the companies generally know the immigration status of their employees - If an employer willingly hires someone with a false social security number, isn't that punishable by law? Why is the rule so stringently enforced for undocumented immigrants but not for their employers who are colluding with this so-called illegal job system?



Those wanting to send donations for Postville families, can send checks to

St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry
St. Bridget's Church
P.O. Box 369
Postville, IA 52162


for information on donations call St. Bridget's Church at (563) 864-3138.

Video of Sister Mary McCauley at St. Bridget's discussing the Postville ICE raid



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Postville relief workers report families' greatest need is cash
Decorah, Iowa
May 20, 2008

from the Decorah Newspaper


Many Postville families torn apart by last Monday's federal government raid on a Agriprocessors meat packing plant are in dire need of money for rent, utilities, food, and medical bills.

That is the latest report from leaders of volunteer support groups who have rallied to the aid of families now sheltered at St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville. As of Friday afternoon, about 300 people, mostly women and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens, remained at the church.

Approximately 390 allegedly undocumented workers at Agriprocessors were arrested during the May 12 raid by agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency -- the largest single-site operation in the country.

Workers were transported to a makeshift detention center at the Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, and many family members are still without word of the arrested workers. Nearly 40 women have been released with GPS monitoring devices, attached to their ankles. And several minors have also been released with monitoring devices.

"Families are anxious to find their loved ones, and when fear does not keep them away from their own homes, they are accepting collect calls that cost $4.25 for the first minute and $1 for each consecutive minute. Children whose parents were detained are traumatized and dealing with issues of anxiety, grief and separation," explained Sister Mary McCauley of St. Bridget's.

Leaders of the relief effort reported the workers' paychecks have stopped, and their families' greatest need now is cash to pay basic household expenses and medical costs.

Donations may be sent to: St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry, St. Bridget's Church, P.O. Box 369, Postville, IA 52162. Checks should be made out to St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry.

Donations of non-perishable food items to the local food pantry are also greatly needed. For information about the types of foods most needed and how to make a donation, call St. Bridget's Church at (563) 864-3138.

"The church and area volunteers plan to continue arranging medical services and legal advice for the families while also trying to provide security and support. The goal is to help family members feel secure enough to begin to think about what lies ahead," McCauley said.

Wealth and Education

for link to image click here

A study from the American Association of University Women says that boys are not in crisis - that a student's success is tied to family income -

and that Black, Latino, and low-income students are at risk. Now why is that?

First I would like to know how the specifics of family income are connected to school success. Is it that the family can afford tutoring? Is it that the more family income, the better the neighborhood they live in and the more community funds invested in their local school?

Does more money mean that smarter students get to go to camp every summer? What about the very affluent students get to go for a whole six weeks? (isn't the price of this in the thousands)

Just ask around at any elite college - how many of the students have traveled to Europe? How many took music lessons, how many went to the Smithsonian before they were 10? How many have a quiet, comfortable space to do their homework? How many of their elementary, middle and high schools had their own libraries? or gyms? What is the teacher turnover at their schools?

Yes, it relates to money. Next time someone says that Latino, Black and poor students are at risk, be sure to take the time to explain why they are at risk. Be clear that it is not their supposed limited abilities - make sure everyone knows that it is our society that rewards those with money - which easily transfers into having a large number of high performing students...

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No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says

Academic Success Linked to Income

By Valerie Strauss

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 20, 2008; Page A01

A new study to be released today on gender equity in education concludes that a "boys crisis" in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.

The report by the nonprofit American Association of University Women, which promotes education and equity for women, reviewed nearly 40 years of data on achievement from fourth grade to college and for the first time analyzed gender differences within economic and ethnic categories.

The most important conclusion of "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education" is that academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said.

"A lot of people think it is the boys that need the help," co-author Christianne Corbett said. "The point of the report is to highlight the fact that that is not exclusively true. There is no crisis with boys. If there is a crisis, it is with African American and Hispanic students and low-income students, girls and boys..."

for complete WP article click here

Violence against immigrants in South Africa

video from BBC

Thousands seek sanctuary as South Africans turn on refugees

• Chris McGreal in Johannesburg
• The Guardian - London
• Tuesday May 20 2008

• No one in Cleveland squatter camp seemed to know the names of the five burned or bludgeoned bodies. They were referred to simply as Zimbabweans, though no one could even be sure they were that.

  It was enough that they were foreigners accused of taking jobs, houses and women - or of leading a crime wave - by the mobs that killed them and drove hundreds of others from their homes. About 50 people were taken to hospital with gunshot and stab wounds as the gangs smashed their way in to the dozen or so foreign-owned shops in Cleveland, in the south of Johannesburg.

  "It is unfortunate that people got killed," said one of a group of young men lounging on a main street who gave his name only as PK. "But they had to go. They do not belong here taking jobs. Let them go back to Zimbabwe and solve their own problems instead of bringing them here. We have enough problems of our own."

  The surviving foreign residents of Cleveland have joined at least 10,000 other immigrants seeking refuge in police stations and churches as xenophobic murders, rapes and other violence spread across the city and its satellite townships on Monday.

  At least 22 people have been killed, including two men who it was reported had their throats cut in Tembisa township yesterday and others who have been burned alive, beaten to death or shot, in the worst violence to hit Johannesburg since the politically-driven killings of the final years of apartheid.

  In the city centre at the weekend, marauding gangs of men stopped people in the street or in minibus taxis to interrogate them about their origins. Those who did not speak an indigenous language were beaten up.

  Some South Africans in the afflicted areas have taken to painting their names on their doors so they are not mistaken for foreigners although some of the mobs have also targeted South Africans speaking minority languages such as Shangaans and Venda.

  Much of the violence is driven by resentment of three million Zimbabweans who have fled the crisis in their own country in search of work. But the government's critics say the attacks are also a result of its failure to deliver jobs and significantly better conditions for the mass of urban poor while a ruling elite has got rich - leaving black South Africans to compete with the flood of immigrants from across the continent for jobs and housing...

for complete Guardian article click here

The Business of Detention Centers.

The work of Renee Feltz, a friend from Houston, TX.

After the Postville Raid

-----
Immigration Raid Jars a Small Town
Critics Say Employers Should Be Targeted

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2008; A01

POSTVILLE, Iowa -- Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest.

"I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa," said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. "Are they mad because I'm working?"

Monday's raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration's largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself "Hometown to the World." Half of the school system's 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.

Current and former officials of the Department of Homeland Security say its raid on the largest employer in northeast Iowa reflects the administration's decision to put pressure on companies with large numbers of illegal immigrant workers, particularly in the meat industry. But its disruptive impact on the nation's largest supplier of kosher beef and on the surrounding community has provoked renewed criticism that the administration is disproportionately targeting workers instead of employers, and that the resulting turmoil is worse than the underlying crimes.

"They don't go after employers. They don't put CEOs in jail," complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff, 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town's population of 2,300 "is like a natural disaster -- only this one is manmade."

He added, "In the end, it is the greater population that will suffer and the workforce that will be held accountable."

Congressman Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) said enforcement efforts against corporations that commit immigration violations have "plummeted" under the Bush administration. "Until we enforce our immigration laws equally against both employers and employees who break the law, we will continue to have a problem," he said.

Julie L. Myers, assistant homeland security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said that to the contrary, the agency has seldom been so aggressive, including opening criminal investigations of company officials. While cases have netted only a handful of sentences for low-level managers so far, Myers said, such white-collar crime investigations typically take years to develop.

"Can we really execute a search warrant without taking any action against [illegal employment] that we know is taking place?" she asked. "Or will just taking business records through a search warrant cause illegal aliens to leave, and then we're not fulfilling that part of the mission, as well?"

Lobbyists and former officials say that in unleashing ICE, the administration is trying to "turn up the pain" to motivate businesses and Congress to support the comprehensive immigration changes sought by President Bush, such as a temporary-worker program and earned legalization. If the existing legal tools are too blunt, they said, Congress should create a fairer system.

But the pressure on employers -- whose wages and hiring practices have lured illegal workers to both large cities and small towns -- has mostly been indirect and economic: While workplace arrests have risen tenfold since 2002, from 510 to 4,940, only 90 criminal arrests have involved company personnel officials.

So far, no officials at Agriprocessors have been charged. The company, founded by Aaron Rubashkin, has a storybook history whose recent chapters have turned murky. After some of Rubashkin's Lubavitch Hasidic family moved here from Brooklyn in 1987, the firm became the nation's largest processor of glatt kosher beef, the strictest kosher standard. It produces kosher and non-kosher beef, veal, lamb, turkey and chicken products under brands such as Iowa Best Beef, Aaron's Best and Rubashkin's.

According to an affidavit filed by an ICE agent in conjunction with this week's arrests, 76 percent of the 968 employees on the company's payroll over the last three months of 2007 used false or suspect Social Security numbers. The affidavit cited unnamed sources who alleged that some company supervisors employed 15-year-olds, helped cash checks for workers with fake documents, and pressured workers without documents to purchase vehicles and register them in other names.

In addition, the affidavit alleged that company supervisors ignored a report of a methamphetamine drug lab operating in the plant. It also cited a case in which a supervisor blindfolded a Guatemalan worker and allegedly struck him with a meat hook, without serious injury.

Agriprocessors has faced other troubles, as well. In 2006, it paid a $600,000 settlement to the Environmental Protection Agency to resolve wastewater pollution problems, and this March it was assessed $182,000 in fines for 39 state health, safety and labor violations. In 2004, the U.S. Agriculture Department's inspector general accused the company of "acts of inhumane slaughter" after animal rights advocates publicized an unauthorized video of a stumbling, dying cow, and some Jewish groups attacked its worker practices.

And last month, the company lost a federal appellate court battle over whether it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize, on grounds that those in favor were illegal immigrants and not entitled to federal labor protections.

"This employer has a long history of violating every law that's out there -- labor laws, environmental laws, now immigration laws," said Mark Lauritsen, international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has waged a bitter battle to organize the Postville plant. The union charged that the immigration raid disrupted a separate U.S. Labor Department investigation into alleged child labor law violations and other infractions.

ICE may be "deporting 390 witnesses" to the labor investigation, Lauritsen said, adding, "This administration seems to place a larger value on big, splashy shows in this immigration raid than in vigorously enforcing other labor laws."

In November, Sholom Rubashkin, company vice president and the founder's son, wrote a letter to customers decrying "a slanderous and patently false campaign" by the union, and defending the company's record and its products as "safe and wholesome." After this week's raid, the family released brief statements expressing its sympathies to workers, commitment to customers and cooperation with authorities.

Chaim Abrahams, a company representative, said Agriprocessors is working to "bolster our compliance efforts to employ only properly documented employees" and has launched an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to the raid.

The blitz, which occurred after a 16-month investigation, began with helicopters, buses and vans encircling the western edge of town at 10 a.m. Witnesses said hundreds of agents surrounded the plant in 10 minutes, began interviewing workers and seized company records.

By early afternoon, illegal immigrants began arriving by bus at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa, about 75 miles from Postville. ICE held 313 male suspects at an exhibit hall and 76 female suspects in local jails for administrative violations of immigration law.

Those arrested include 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 2 Israelis and 4 Ukrainians, according to the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Iowa.

Eighteen were juveniles who have been released or turned over for refugee resettlement, and the prosecutor's office would not say if there were underage workers at the plant. Of the adults, 306 face criminal charges for aggravated identity theft and other crimes related to the use of false documents. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the workers on Thursday, meanwhile, accused the government of violating their constitutional rights through arbitrary and indefinite detention.

For now, Postville residents -- immigrants and native-born -- are holding their breath. On Greene Street, where the Hall Roberts' Son Inc. feed store, Kosher Community Grocery and Restaurante Rinconcito Guatemalteco sit side by side, workers fear a chain of empty apartments, falling home prices and business downturns. The main street, punctuated by a single blinking traffic signal, has been quiet; a Guatemalan restaurant temporarily closed; and the storekeeper next door reported a steady trickle of families quietly booking flights to Central America via Chicago.

"Postville will be a ghost town," said Lili, a Ukrainian store clerk who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld.

But Cesar Jochol, 48, a native of Patzun, Guatemala, and owner of a market called Tonita's Express, questioned whether the raid will be a deterrent. People who can afford to eat meat only once or twice a week in Guatemala, while earning $4 a day, can earn $60 a day in Iowa, enough to eat beef or chicken three times a day, he said. "You take away a hundred people. A couple hundred more will come tomorrow; they'll just go to L.A., New York, New Jersey and Miami," said Jochol, a 21-year U.S. resident.

At St. Bridget's Catholic Church, Eduardo Santos, 27, who came from Guatemala and lost two of his fingers working at the factory, said the raid was "fair . . . but it's bad for everybody. There's no work." He plans to go home.

"The problem is, who is going to do the work?" said Stephen G. Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor who wrote a 2000 book on the clash of cultures in Postville as Agriprocessors' Lubavitch Jewish leaders gained influence in the mostly Lutheran town. "This is a no-win situation."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

McCain, Top Dems Back Immigration Despite Wary Public

McCain, Top Dems Back Immigration Despite Wary Public

BY SEAN HIGGINS

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 5/16/2008

John McCain made his stance on immigration pretty clear last year.

"I think the (border) fence is least effective," the Arizona senator told Vanity Fair. "But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."

In one gasp, McCain managed to sum up his own contradictory record on immigration and the frustration it inspires among many Republicans.

So the issue will likely dog McCain's presidential bid.

Democrats aren't crowing much, though. It's a hot potato for them too.

"I don't think there is going to be much debate about immigration in the presidential campaign," said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a pro-reform business coalition group.

"When they can avoid it, they will. And when they cannot, they'll straddle," Jacoby said. "Any tilting to one side will just get you in trouble with the other side."
(More)

Public Lies; Private Secrets

While the political history of this country is full of politicians fudging just a bit..... the current administration wins the prize for honest dishonesty. They aren't embarrassed when they are caught with their pants down-- they just smile and say "we didn't say that."

What is really unfortunate is that the nation's president is often seen as a model for honesty and integrity - not this time -- except for those who are lying to themselves.

-----

A Ludicrous Denial

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, May 16, 2008; 1:29 PM

What do you call it when White House officials say one thing in public and almost the exact opposite in private?

You might call it lying.

President Bush yesterday took the highly provocative rhetorical step of likening those who support negotiating with our enemies to Nazi appeasers. For most people following the presidential campaign, it was an obvious attack on Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama, who has been particularly critical of Bush's refusal to talk with leaders who disagree with him.

On the record, White House officials issued disingenuous denials that Bush was talking about Obama. But on background, they admitted as much.

CNN's Ed Henry reported that "White House aides privately acknowledged the remarks were aimed at the presidential candidate and others in his party."

Sasha Issenberg writes for the Boston Globe: "White House officials indicated that the criticism applied to Obama."

Brian Williams reported on the NBC Nightly News that "it was clear to those listening that it was in part to make a point about Barack Obama back home." NBC correspondent John Yang then added: "Privately, White House officials said the shoe fits the Democratic frontrunner."

When asked at yesterday's gaggle if Bush's remark was "in any way directed at Senator Obama," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino replied: "It is not." And not only that: She tried to blame Obama for such an interpretation. "I understand when you're running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you," she said. "That is not always true and it is not true in this case."

for complete WP article click here

ICE in Italy

Returning Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi begins his term as the tough guy - imitating Bush by having his immigration police arrest 400.

--

Italy arrests 400 in illegal immigrants swoop

By Stephen Brown
Washington Post
Reuters
Thursday, May 15, 2008; 8:11 AM

ROME (Reuters) - Italian police announced on Thursday the arrest of hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in a sign of the new right-wing government's determination to clamp down.

Police arrested 383 people including 268 foreigners, with 53 immediately taken to the border for expulsion, in a week-long operation stretching from northern Italy to the Naples area.

Silvio Berlusconi swept back to power for a third term as prime minister last week promising to get tough on illegal immigrants, blamed by many for crime. He is readying new laws to screen immigrants and jail or expel those breaking the law.

Those arrested came from Eastern Europe, Albania, Greece, North Africa and China and face charges ranging from illegal entry into Italy to prostitution, drug trafficking and robbery.

In Libya, police have arrested 240 would-be illegal migrants from several African countries over the past four days as they prepared to sail to Italy, the Interior Ministry said.

Libya is a springboard for hundreds of thousands of Africans trying to reach Europe via Italy on board unseaworthy boats.

The policeman in charge of the Italian operation, Francesco Gratteri, told a news conference the sweep "wasn't aimed at any specific category or ethnic group. The sole objective were criminals who have caused a sensation of rising alarm in society."

The focus of Italian concern about immigrant crime are the Roma, known here as "nomads," who come mainly from Romania and other Eastern European countries. In Rome, police raided the biggest Roma camp and took away about 50 men for questioning.

The arrests coincided with a visit by Romanian Interior Minister Cristian David. Romania has Europe's biggest Roma population and its prime minister warned this week that Italy's crackdown could cause "xenophobia" against other Romanians...

for complete article click here

Who is having the delusion?

Congratulations to Israel for reaching its 60th year. I am sure the country is proud to have the U.S. President make an official visit and to say in a speech that it is "a delusion to attempt to negotiate with America's enemies in the Middle East."

The question is who is delusional? Those who attempt to negotiate? Or those who declare war on false grounds?

Bush appeasement slur angers Democrats

Obama outraged by president's claim that talking to US foes in Middle East is like negotiating with Hitler

• Ewen MacAskill and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
• The Guardian,
• Friday May 16 2008

President George Bush used a visit to Israel yesterday to denounce Democratic party offers to negotiate with America's enemies in the Middle East as comparable to appeasement of Hitler. Although Bush did not name any Democratic politician, the party's presidential contender Barack Obama has offered to open negotiations with the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

Obama and other Democratic leaders expressed outrage at being compared to the Nazis, especially on a visit to Israel. They also condemned Bush for breaking a long-time convention against using foreign visits to score domestic points.

Obama described it as a "false political attack", saying he had never advocated talking to terrorists, while Joe Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said: "This is bullshit." The Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, described Bush's comments as "beneath the dignity of his office".

Speaking during a visit to the Knesset, where he was attending celebrations to mark Israel's 60th anniversary, Bush said it was a foolish delusion to think it was possible to negotiate with extremists and terrorists. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided,'" Bush said...

for complete Guardian article click here

Exploring goverment's detention centers for undocumented immigrants by Washignton Post

Article 05/11/2008
System of Neglect: As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies,...
Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein, A01 (Post)

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.
During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. Please click on the title of the post to view the complete article.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CBS's 60 Minutes is also scheduledto carry the results of the investigation this weekend. Checkout the story at:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/08/wapo-to-run-explosive-ser_n_100813.html

Will Postville, Iowa become a ghost town?

desmoinesregister.com

May 14, 2008

Town of 2,273 wonders: What happens to us now?
By GRANT SCHULTE, JENNIFER JACOBS and JARED STRONG
gschulte@dmreg.com

Postville, Iowa - The future of 390 workers, the meat-processing plant that employed them, and this northeast Iowa town's economy remained in limbo Tuesday, one day after federal agents conducted what they're now calling the largest raid of its kind in the nation's history.Twenty-nine Agriprocessors Inc. workers have been arrested on charges that include aggravated identity theft and the false use of Social Security numbers, federal officials said Tuesday.

Developing: A list of people detained in the raidTen of those detainees appeared before a judge for the first time Tuesday afternoon. Shackled at the waist and ankles, they shuffled single-file into a retro ballroom on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo. The men were given special earphones so they could hear the court proceedings being translated into Spanish.

The detainees were transported to Waterloo after Monday's raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville.Federal officials said the number of people detained now totals 390, nearly four times as many as the raid on the Swift plant in Marshalltown 18 months ago.

Those arrested Monday include 314 men and 76 women. Fifty-six detainees - mostly women with young children - have been released under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Most were required to wear an electronic monitoring device around one ankle.Officials with ICE and the U.S. attorney's office in Cedar Rapids would not say whether others could face criminal charges.Those not charged are being held under "administrative arrest" as alleged illegal immigrants. More initial appearances before a magistrate judge are scheduled for today.

View the rest of the article by cliking on the title of the post.

This article includes contributions from Ken Fuson in Des Moines, Tony Leys and Nigel Duara in Postville, and Jerry Perkins in Waterloo.
Copyright ©2008
The Des Moines Register.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080514/NEWS/805140371/-1/SPORTS09

If undocumented immigrants could vote....Who would they vote for?

Los 'sin papeles' mexicanos votan al presidente de EE UU
En Votemos.es, proyecto de Ricardo Miranda, los latinos indocumentados siguen el proceso electoral

R. BOSCO / S. CALDANA
15/05/2008

"¿Quién sería el presidente de los Estados Unidos si los inmigrantes indocumentados mexicanos, y latinos en general, pudieran votar?". La pregunta no es baladí si se considera que el 42% de todos los inmigrantes que llegaron a la nueva tierra prometida, a lo largo del siglo XX, fueron mexicanos y que éstos constituyen la mayoría de los cerca de 14 millones de sin papeles que viven en Estados Unidos.

Según datos del censo Current Population Survey, en 2006 los inmigrantes ocupados superaban los 22 millones, es decir el 16% de la población activa. De éstos, el 5% de la fuerza laboral del país y el 31% de la inmigrante son mexicanos: 6,8 millones.

Además de ser la comunidad más grande, también es la peor retribuida, con un promedio de 23.000 dólares al año, una suma inferior a las percibidas por los centroamericanos y dominicanos (25.000) y la población nativa (38.000).

Estos datos y muchos más se encuentran en la página de Votemos.us, un proyecto lanzado por el artista Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, nacido en San Francisco de padres nicaragüenses, con el objetivo de conocer opiniones y deseos de los que no pueden expresarlos públicamente y mucho menos a través del voto.

Además de expresar su preferencia, a través de Votemos.us es posible conocer la biografía de los candidatos y su programa, comparar los resultados de las votaciones celebradas en cada Estado para escoger al representante de los dos grandes partidos y seguir el proceso electoral, a la vez que se lleva a cabo la votación paralela. También hay sendas secciones dedicadas al punto de vista de los votantes y a la sátira política, y nuevas entregas semanales de videoentrevistas realizadas a inmigrantes.

"Entre México y Estados Unidos existe una circulación constante de gente, productos y dinero. En 2006, los inmigrantes mexicanos enviaron a su país 24.500 millones de dólares y, según datos de Hacienda, entre 1996 y 2003, los indocumentados pagaron casi 50.000 millones en impuestos federales, de modo que tienen todo el derecho a hacer oír su voz", afirma Miranda, quien se dio a conocer con Fallout, un proyecto que analiza los motivos de la crisis político-econó mica de Nicaragua y la fractura social, generada por los años de guerra y la política intervencionista de EE UU en Latinoamérica.


Por el momento Hillary Clinton es la preferida de los visitantes de Votemos.us, con el 44% de los votos, mientras que Barack Obama, del que muchos inmigrantes desconfían, suma el 30%. Les siguen de muy lejos, Rudolph Giuliani y John McCain con un 5% cada uno. Por lo que se refiere a los partidos, ganan los demócratas con el 72% frente al 14% de los republicanos y los indecisos, respectivamente.

"Muy probablemente el resultado de las elecciones presidenciales sería distinto si todos los indocumentados que viven aquí pudieran votar. Este proyecto trata de dibujar un escenario más real", asegura Miranda recordando que muchos de estos inmigrantes residen en Estados Unidos desde hace décadas, como uno de los protagonistas de los vídeos, el mexicano Raymundo, que vive y trabaja en Brooklyn (Nueva York) desde hace 25 años sin tener los papeles en regla.

"A través de las entrevistas, que iremos colgando en la web semanalmente, los estadounidenses pueden intentar comprender lo que piensan los latinos, tanto sus vecinos del barrio como los que viven del otro lado de la frontera", añade el artista. Entre estos últimos, José Antonio Lazzari, un argentino afincado en Ciudad de México, se pregunta quiénes son los candidatos de izquierda y afirma que no votaría ni a Clinton ni a Obama, y menos a McCain. "En Estados Unidos quienes mandan de verdad son las compañías multinacionales, que se están forrando en Irak".

VOTEMOS.US:
http://votemos. us FALLOUT: http://transition. turbulence. org/Works/ fallout/

RICARDO MIRANDA ZUÑIGA:
http://www.ambriente.com/
http://www.elpais.%20com/articulo/%20red/papeles/%20mexicanos/%20votan/presidente%20/EE/UU/elpeputec%20cib/20080515elpc%20ibenr_6/Tes

View the website by clicking the title of the post.

Dying in detention: Death in custody

Roxanna Brown

died on May 14, 2008 at the age of 62

while in federal custody in Seattle, Washington


Ms. Brown was detained on May 9, 2008 while getting ready to have dinner with faculty from the University of Washingon, where she was scheduled to give a talk the following day. Brown was considered "one of the foremost authorities on the ancient-ceramics trade in Southeast Asia." She was the current "director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University in Thailand."

When you scratch does it help your itch?

Have you ever been around anyone who tells you he found fleas on his dog at the same time that the dog is about to sit on your lap? There is often an interesting reaction to being told this -- you start feeling something crawling on you. Then you feel stupid when your friend finishes his sentence telling you the dog has already been to the vet and no longer has fleas.

While I absolutely do not compare fleas to people, I compare this experience of itching with things that happen in our country that make us uncomfortable. Lots and lots (millions and millions) of new neighbors would make anyone uncomfortable. People who are reacting strongly to this are imagining immigration will ruin the neighborhood, the local public school will go down the tubes, or God forbid, their own kid would marry an undocumented immigrant (for love no less).

For one, how much of this disaster is in our imagination? Secondly - why have we let our hysteria interfere with logical reasoning in finding a solution? This is what the NYT is discussing today in it's main editorial.


The NYT ends the editorial below:

The itch to do something about illegal immigration is being scratched. Note to country: Scratching never cured anything.

It's a great analogy - every ICE raid is a tough reaction to the itch, its when you dig the nail into the skin - which is really painful. Main question is, does a deep scratch help the itch? Of course not, it makes it worse, in fact sometimes you start thinking (or imagining) you are itching all over.

Of course immigration has grown painful to the U.S. -- any type of demographic shift of this magnitude would be uncomfortable. But trying to pick out the problem with your fingers makes it look like you

1. are too angry to look for a solution
2. that you must be very afraid of what is happening to this country
3. would rather hurt yourself to get rid of the itch - than go to the doctor.

---

May 15, 2008
New York Times

Editorial

No Rebates for You

Immigrant restrictionism is stiffing hundreds of thousands of American citizens and legal residents out of their tax-rebate checks.

Hard-liners were so intent on keeping the cash out of the hands of undocumented workers that they restricted the rebate to people with Social Security numbers. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, issued by the Internal Revenue Service to people who pay taxes but do not qualify for Social Security numbers, will not do. If a married couple files jointly, and one spouse is not eligible for the rebate, neither gets the money.

This hurts all manner of people who are working and paying taxes: American soldiers stationed abroad who happen to have married foreigners; high-tech immigrants in Silicon Valley and other places whose spouses are not authorized to work or have not yet had their paperwork processed. These are people who are perfectly legal, economically vital and politically inconvenient.

The government should fix the law so spouses get their money. It is a technical repair that even this Congress should manage. But why shouldn’t undocumented immigrants with taxpayer numbers get the cash too? The checks are not rewards for good behavior; they are taxes returned as a means to an end. Illegal immigrants constitute about 5 percent of the work force and earn much less than the native-born. They are just the sort of group the stimulus should be aimed at, if the purpose is to get the most economic bang for every rebate dollar.

Arguments like that do not fly in the polluted atmosphere of immigration politics, which has produced toxic byproducts so extreme that they make the rebate glitch seem like a mere annoyance.

Industries across the country are suffering and crops are rotting for lack of workers. Congress is debating a national right-to-work system that could mistakenly ensnare countless Americans and seriously overburden the Social Security bureaucracy. Federal agents and local police officers around the nation are rounding up the usual immigrants.

Such crackdowns have forced thousands of harmless people into a fast-growing, secretive detention system that is shockingly deficient in basic rights and decent health care. In a disturbing article, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the United States government had injected hundreds of undocumented foreigners with mind-altering drugs to render them docile while they were being deported. This practice violates every imaginable standard of decency, not to mention a few international laws and treaties.

Smart efforts to minimize the ill effects of illegal immigration die political deaths, meanwhile, like putting the undocumented into New York State’s motor-vehicle database, registered and insured instead of anonymous and unaccounted for. That was also the fate of the Dream Act, a modest bill to ease the way to college for the guiltless children of illegal immigrants so they would not be condemned to dead-end jobs. A model identity-card program in New Haven, hailed for lowering crime, is under legal attack from nativist groups.

Efforts at deliberate, proportionate and responsible immigration reform provoke paralysis, but restrictionist tactics are greeted with exuberance. The itch to do something about illegal immigration is being scratched. Note to country: Scratching never cured anything.

Asking DREAMERS for their status when they enroll in college

It has been reported that one local community college admissions officer told a DREAMER he/she could not enroll in college - justifying this with the following: “I’ll be breaking the law if I let you into this college.” DREAMERS are allowed to enroll in college and are not supposed to be questioned on their immigration status.


Attorney Josh Bernstein, who is the Director of Federal Policy at the National Immigration Law Center in Washington distributed a commentary today regarding the legality of undocumented students attending public colleges. Bernstein stated:

"DHS has now clarified in unambiguous terms that colleges and universities are not required to ask about the immigration status of their students, and they also are not required to report undocumented students to the government."

The official letter from the Department of Homeland Security can be accessed if you click here



The North Carolina Attorney General responded to the release of the DHS letter in an AP article published today:

"Although federal immigration officials last week released a statement saying there is no law prohibiting the state from educating illegal immigrants at public colleges and universities, Cooper's office said that statement is not the same as a legal opinion from the Department of Homeland Security."

North Carolina Says No to College for DREAMERS

Of the 300,000 students in the North Carolina Community College System, there are only 100 DREAMERS. The state's Attorney General's attack on these hundred students is wildly out of proportion for the small number affected by the ruling. Is this truly a legal issue or is it an example of pure maliciousness?.

--

NC community colleges halt illegal immigrant policy

By ESTES THOMPSON

The Associated Press
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; 6:54 PM
Washington Post

RALEIGH, N.C. -- North Carolina's community college system reversed itself Tuesday and said it will no longer admit illegal immigrants until federal officials formally weigh in on whether it is legal...

The change was supported by Gov. Mike Easley, but it provoked heavy criticism _ especially from the leading candidates running to replace the outgoing governor. That led the nation's third-largest community college system to seek an opinion from the state attorney general's office on whether the admissions policy was legal under federal law.

Attorney General Roy Cooper's office recommended the community colleges drop the lenient admissions policy, and suggested that following stricter guidelines approved in 2001 _ under which illegal immigrants were not eligible for a public post-secondary education _ was more likely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

...Although federal immigration officials last week released a statement saying there is no law prohibiting the state from educating illegal immigrants at public colleges and universities, Cooper's office said that statement is not the same as a legal opinion from the Department of Homeland Security.

"At the community college system's request, we are seeking guidance from the Department of Homeland Security on this admissions policy as it relates to federal law," said spokeswoman Noelle Talley.

...In Arizona, for instance, voters approved a ballot measure that prohibits undocumented immigrants from paying in-state tuition rates, a move that has driven many out of the public education system. A federal bill called "The DREAM Act" that would have given some illegal immigrants legal status to serve in the armed forces or attend college stalled last year in Congress.

Only about 100 of the nearly 300,000 degree-seeking community college students are illegal immigrants in North Carolina. They pay full, out-of-state tuition rates. Those enrolled in degree courses during the 2006-2007 school year may continue their studies, system president R. Scott Ralls said...

____

AP Education Writer Justin Pope in Raleigh contributed to this report.

for link to complete AP/WP article click here

Dying in Detention: Deaths in ICE Custody

Manuel Perez-Ayala

died in 2004 at the age of 59

in Florence, Colorado

Truth, Lies, and Politics

Photo by Ina Fassbender, Reuters

This photo was taken in Germany, yet it looks so American. If I could give it a title, I would call it "Lying in the name of democracy" --

How is it so easy to lie when you are a politician. In the story below, Borough Mayor of Tunkhannock had the nerve to write a letter to the editor of his local paper in which he says that Obama has close Muslim ties.

For one, it shouldn't matter if he did, but the truth is that Obama is nowhere close to being a Muslim.

Is this new or has the "lie thing" been around as long as there have been politicians? Didn't John Adams say a bunch of bad things about Thomas Jefferson?

There may be some slipping, as when Hillary says she was in the line of fire in Bosnia - or Richardson saying he played pro-ball. But considering that Muslims (unfortunately) are easily arrested on airplanes and other places - I am sure that Mayor Norm Ball considered his description of Barack Obama a defamation of character -that Ball is proud of.

The following is from an article on racism and the Obama campaign. I thought it deserved its own dreamacttexas post.

It's not clear if the Bush Administration started this political trend of public officials lying while they are looking their constituents in the eye. Worse still is that we believe them.

-----
from the Washington Post, May 13, 2008

Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause

In a letter to the editor published in a local paper, Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball explained his support of Hillary Clinton this way: "Barack Hussein Obama and all of his talk will do nothing for our country. There is so much that people don't know about his upbringing in the Muslim world. His stepfather was a radical Muslim and the ranting of his minister against the white America, you can't convince me that some of that didn't rub off on him.

"No, I want a president that will salute our flag, and put their hand on the Bible when they take the oath of office."

Obama's campaign workers have grown wearily accustomed to the lies about the candidate's supposed radical Muslim ties and lack of patriotism. But they are sometimes astonished when public officials such as Ball or others representing the campaign of their opponent traffic in these falsehoods.

for complete WP article click here

The plate with red apples

Photo by M.T. Hernandez*





Yesterday my daughter and I were talking about a small collection of plates that I have on my kitchen wall. There is one from a flea market, two from Tuesday Morning - one of which has a big artichoke on the front. I also have one that has a checkered pattern with red apples. When I first saw the plate, at a convenience store on the freeway somewhere in Virginia, I thought it would be good to buy it - as a souvenir of the trip I took with a group of DREAMERS to D.C.

There were eight DREAMERS and myself in the store. They made money from us that day. We also ate at their adjoining cafe and bought gas.

As I was paying for the plate (over-priced at $10.00) the clerk said that they should get the riff raff out of the store. A woman standing next to him said to me, "Don't pay him any mind mam."

After I told my daughter the story she asked me a couple of questions, why did I still buy the plate? and why did I have it in my kitchen - she said that I should get it out of my house, it brings bad energy.

I bought the plate because I was sort of in shock - I wasn't thinking. This kind of thing hasn't happened to me since the 60's in southeast Texas. Of course I know that there are lots of people (especially these days) that don't like Latinos, especially Spanish speaking Latinos. The kids, all having been born in a Latin American country are fluently bilingual but prefer Spanish. Most of them are also brown-skinned making ethnic identification easy.


Today the plate is no longer have it in my kitchen. I have to admit, every time I looked at it I remembered the man at the convenience store so it was a good thing I took it down.

----

Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause

By Kevin Merida

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; Page A01

Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.

Here's the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive.

The campaign released this statement in response to questions about encounters with racism: "After campaigning for 15 months in nearly all 50 states, Barack Obama and our entire campaign have been nothing but impressed and encouraged by the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life. The last year has only reinforced Senator Obama's view that this country is not as divided as our politics suggest."

...through the Obama campaign, some young people are having their first experience joining a cause and meeting cruel reaction.

On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.

for complete WP article click here

*for more photos by M.T. Hernandez click here

Immigrants & Medical Neglect Part II

This video is from a 60 Minutes segment made in conjunction with the WP series on immigrants and medical neglect. Edwidge Danticat is being interviewed, a winner of the National Book Award, she wrote about her 81 year old grandfather who died while in detention.

See dreamacttexas post about Danticat "It just doesn't happen to Latinos" from March 24, 2008

In Custody, In Pain

Beset by Medical Problems as She Fights Deportation, A U.S. Resident Struggles to Get the Treatment She Needs

by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers

Page A1; May 12, 2008

FLORENCE, Ariz. -- Underneath her baggy jail-issue pants, Yong Sun Harvill feels the soft lump just below her left knee. Sometimes it tingles. Sometimes it is numb. Like her cancer felt when it arrived behind the knee a few years ago.

She noticed the lump under the thin, blue cotton in August, five months after federal immigration officers, to her amazement, took her into custody to try to deport her for buying stolen jewelry more than a decade ago. The lump grows slowly. It is now three inches across. And though she keeps asking, no one has done a test to see whether her sarcoma has come back.

Her leg is painful and swollen from hip to foot, damaged by past surgeries and radiation treatments. Some nights, liquid seeps through cracks in her distended skin. Her left ankle is three times as big as her right. For years, she relied on a leg pump to boost her circulation and keep the swelling in check. But as an immigration detainee in this desert prison town, Harvill, 52, has been unable to persuade anyone to get her a pump, or to let her family back in Florida send hers from home.

Nor has she gotten the biopsy that a doctor has told her she needs to determine whether the spots on her liver might be tumors. And it remains uncertain whether her frequent crying spells are part of bipolar disorder, as some records suggest, or a flare-up of old anxieties -- heightened now by chronic pain, bewildering medical problems, and the fact that, three decades after she arrived from South Korea as a teenage Army bride, she is in a jail far from home with the government trying to eject her from the United States...

for complete WP article click here

ICE takes 300 to National Cattle Congress Fairgrounds

Photo by Jeff Raasch, Cedar Rapids Gazette


The name of the new detention center in Iowa is symbolic of how undocumented people are being treated these days. Weren't cattle cars used to transport people to concentration camps in Germany during WWII?


The Gazette has a number of articles on the raid, including one on how the local fairgrounds were turned into a detention center:

"A sign on a chain-link fence near one entrance reads, "Consulate and Interpreter Entrance." A Federal Protective Service command center truck with satellites attached to the roof is parked on the site. The raid comes after immigration rights activists said they feared the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo may have been converted into a detention center. Those concerns were prompted by an announcement last week that federal officials have leased the fairgrounds through May 25."

The government said earlier this month that it leased the fairgrounds for a training exercise."

for complete article on the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds turned ICE detention center click here.

---

Postville raid is 'the largest of its kind in Iowa'

The Gazette

POSTVILLE - More than 300 people here have already been arrested in what is being called the largest operation of its kind in Iowa, federal officials said this afternoon.

At 10 a.m., Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered Agriprocessors, Inc., as part of an ongoing investigation and to execute criminal search warrants for aggravated identify theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, as well as a civil search warrant to find people living illegally in the United States.

At a 2 p.m. news conference in Cedar Rapids, ICE spokesman Tim Counts said most of the arrests so far are for administrative immigration violations, although more information about the identities and jobs of those arrests are not being released at this time.

Those arrested are being held in Estel Hall at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, until at least Wednesday night, he said. Estel Hall, also known as Cedar Valley Expo, serves as the grounds’ merchant showroom...

for complete Gazette article, click here

Texas History: A Story from 1844

There seemed to some interest in dreamacttexas posts on Texas /Mexican American History. See previous posts on Sgt. Macario Garcia and the 1978 Moody Park Riot in Houston.


Below is a short narrative Simon Gonzalez, who was a soldier in the Texas Revolution. Gonzalez was part of the 3rd Company of Rangers for the Texas Republic, enlistment from March 10, 1836 to August 23, 1836. This excerpt is from my book Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire:

----
He was eligible for a land bounty through the Republic of Texas, and ultimately held patent to over 2,100 acres in east Texas Wood County. Gonzales also had a family. A document from 1851 (from the Texas Archives) stated that his heirs were requesting a patent for his land in Wood County. Martin Varner was his neighbor. Simon and Martin had possibly some contact before their last encounter in 1844. Simon had been to Brazoria County in the late 1830s, where Martin had his previous land patent. They were both in the Texas Army in April, 1836.13
In 1844, the two men argued over a debt. Simon shot Martin. In an article written in October 2000, an East Texas historian explains that Martin’s son came to help, and that Simon shot and killed the boy. In retaliation, Varner, then seriously wounded, proceeded to:

…cut the tendons in Gonzales' legs…Gonzales pleaded with Varner to kill him quickly, but Varner refused, reasoning that a quick death would not be commensurate with the crime he had committed…Gonzales was thrown into a hog pen where the animals began to chew on his body. When he finally died the next morning, his remains were hauled to a remote part of his own farm and buried in a shallow grave.(Bowman, 2000)

Washington Post List of Questionable Deaths in ICE Custody

How many deaths have not been disclosed? If we don't just look at deaths at medical facilities, can we count the people who burned to death during the Southern California fires? They were hiding in the brush because they knew if they went to shelters they would be detained and deported.

--- A Closer Look At 83 Deaths

Based on confidential medical records and other sources, The Washington Post identified 83 deaths of immigration detainees between March 2003, when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was created, and March 2008. The Post found that 30 of the deaths were questionable [for interactive WP map click here]--

* QUESTIONABLE DEATHS: In 30 of the cases examined by The Post, action taken -- or not taken -- by the medical staff may have contributed to the deaths, according to medical records, confidential internal reviews, or the assessment of outside physicians who reviewed some cases for The Post.

List of Questionable Deaths in Detention March 2003 to March 2005

Name Location of Death	Date of Death	Age	Country of Birth
Luis Dubegel-Paez Rolling Plains Detention Facility (Tex.)	3/14/08	60	Cuba
Francisco Castaneda Home after release from Otay Mesa (Calif.)	2/16/08	36	El Salvador
Juan Alejandro Guevara-Lazaro Thomason Hospital (Tex.)	8/13/07	21	Mexico
Rosa Contreras-Dominquez El Paso Service Processing Center (Tex.)	8/7/07	35	Mexico
Victor Arellano Little Company of Mary San Pedro Hospital (Calif.)	7/20/07	23	Mexico
Boubacar Bah University of Medicine (N.J.)	5/30/07	52	Guinea
Nery Romero Bergen County Jail (N.J.)	2/12/07	22	El Salvador
Jesus Cervantes-Corona Northwest Detention Center (Wash.)	11/18/06	42	Mexico
Antonio Martinez-Rivas Houston Contract Detention Facility (Tex.)	10/4/06	44	Mexico
Carlos Cortez-Raudel Mira Loma Detention Center (Calif.)	10/3/06	22	Mexico
Jose Lopez-Gregorio Eloy Federal Contract Facility (Ariz.)	9/29/06	32	Guatemala
Yusif Osman Otay Mesa detention facility (Calif.)	6/27/06	34	Ghana
Miguel Rodriguez-Gonzalez San Pedro Peninsula Hospital (Calif.)	5/21/06	43	Mexico
Geovanny Garcia-Mejia Newton County Correctional Center (Tex.)	3/18/06	27	Honduras
Felipe Garcia-Sanchez Oakdale Federal Detention Center (La.)	2/10/06	21	Colombia
Juan Salazar-Gomez Eloy Federal Contract Facility (Ariz.)	12/14/05	29	Mexico
Reinaldo Prado-Arencilia Northeast Medical Center (Tex.)	10/3/05	37	Cuba
Walter Alvarez-Esquivel Laredo Medical Center (Tex.)	6/30/05	46	Guatemala
Hassiba Belbachir McHenry County Jail (Ill.)	3/17/05	27	Algeria
Sung Soo Heo Passaic County Jail (N.J.)	2/16/05	51	Korea
Ignacio Sarabia-Vallasenor Otay Mesa detention facility (Calif.)	1/4/05	32	Mexico
Joseph Dantica Jackson Memorial Hospital (Fla.)	11/3/04	81	Haiti
Simon Reyes-Altimirano Mesa Hills Specialty Hospital (Tex.)	10/12/04	25	Hondurus
Ervin Ruiz-Tabares Guaynabo Metropolitan Detention Center (P.R.)	9/25/04	24	Colombia
Sebastian Mejia Vicentes Hampton Roads Regional Jail (Va.)	8/22/04	27	Mexico
Juan Figueredo-Lopez U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (Mo.)	5/29/04	45	Cuba
Cesar Rioz-Martinez Frio County Jail (Tex.)	2/16/04	25	Mexico
Adetunji Popoola Parkland Memorial Hospital (Tex.)	2/1/04	48	Nigeria
Bill Roy Kurt Marion San Diego Correctional Facility (Calif.)	7/31/03	?	Unknown
Kwan A. Chong San Pedro/UCLA-Harbor Hospital (Calif.)	6/10/03	?	Unknown

SOURCES: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other sources | By Justin Ferrell, Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Julie Tate and Larry Nista, The Washington Post - May 10, 2008.

for WP's interactive map quick here

Dying in detention: deaths in ICE custody

Wilfredo Hernandez

died in 2004 at age 69

was in ICE custody in Olney, IL

Underground Youth Movement

E-MAIL FORWARD:


I am working with youth in the bay area who have developed an incredible underground youth movement that began with 20 undocumentedyouth. The following is their story:

An organization of 20 undocumented youth have devoted themselves todemonstrating humanity for undocumented immigrants, whose country wasonce chosen for them and one they choose for themselves today.

Our national public awareness campaign illuminates the plight of undocumented youth as a dignified human experience.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q16uB0hFi3Q) This underground youthmovement, known as, One Dream 2009, is giving a voice to the voiceless and appreciates your support. The intention of this campaign is toemphasize not an immigration issue rather a human rights issue.

Ultimately, we want to bridge the divide of racism, classism, ageism,and nationalism; we live on one planet.

We not only appreciate yoursupport, but your support is necessary to reach our goals:
• To gather 15 million signatures (petitions) in recognition of thenumber of undocumented individuals in this country.
• To sell 3 million `Human Being' cards symbolizing the 3 millionundocumented youth in this country.
• Present these symbolic messages (powers of people, money and respect- representing the voice of human solidarity) to the new President onInauguration Day, January 20th 2009.

We urge you to read the list below and see other ways you are willingto support this cause.
1. Sign the Petition at www.onedream2009.org
2. Buy a card/key tag www.onedream2009.org
3. Join us on Jan. 20, 2009
4. Invite us to speak to your group/organization for a presentation ortraining for the go-kits
5. Spread the word to EVERYONE you knowa.

Forward the message to your list-serve, organizations, individualsb.

Link our website to your email signatures, webpage, etc.c. Share the video http://youtube.com/watch?v=nIWV8-cJ1c0 d. Share our products (t-shirts, cards, DVD, stories, music)e. Sell the human being card/ key tag as your own fundraising eventThank you. Together we can make this happen!

Immigrants and Medical Neglect Part I

Considering how much hate mail newspapers get when they run sympathetic articles on undocumented immigrants, it is interesting that the Washington Post has decided to invest in such a detailed study on medical care for immigrants in detention.

It reminds me of the Rev. Wright's comment on how AIDS was spread by conspiracy in the U.S. - he stated that the U.S. Government made a decision to do this. In the case of immigrants and medical neglect in detention centers, there was probably no secret meeting somewhere where DHS officials consciously decided to let so many people go without proper medical care. Trouble is, that consciously or un-consciously people are still dying.

If you die from lack of medical care you are just as dead as if you had been murdered. Michel Foucault, who wrote extensively on crime, philosophy, and history said it is not the intention motivating an action that counts - it is the final result of an action.


-----

System of Neglect

As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care Often Pay a Heavy Cost

by Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein | Washington Post Staff Writers

Page A1; May 11, 2008

for video on series by Goldstein and Priest click here

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.

During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" -- even though it had no medical information in it.

Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems...


for complete WP article click here

Dying in Detention: Deaths in ICE Custody

Maria Solis-Perez

died in 2004 at age 44

was in ICE custody in Houston

More detentions in Houston

-

----

May 9, 2008, 10:52PM

Federal agents capture fugitives
89 immigrants arrested in surge await processing

By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Government agents will work today processing 89 illegal immigrants arrested in Houston during a four-day "surge" operation this week, an effort to reduce a backlog of 30,000 immigration fugitives in the area, officials said.

"We're continuing to move forward with their removal process," said Greg Palmore, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston.

...

During the operation, which began early Tuesday and ended Friday, a total of 89 illegal immigrants were arrested, including 28 who had criminal convictions. Of the total apprehended, 77 had orders of removal and another 12 were encountered during the operation, Palmore said.

Teams of agents spread out across Houston during the operation, arresting immigrants at their homes or their jobs.

One of those arrested Tuesday has been hospitalized, and is in fair condition, after medical screening at ICE processing facilities in north Houston indicated he was suffering from hypertension.

Fugitive operation teams in the Houston area have "30,000 cases assigned to this area and their goal is to get them all, or as many as they can, especially the criminals," Palmore said.

He was referring to immigration absconders who reside in the 52-county Houston field office's area of responsibility, which extends from the Louisiana border to Corpus Christi.

Kenneth Landgrebe field office director for ICE detentions and removals in Houston, stressed the operation was not part of "mass raids."...

james.pinkerton@chron.com

for complete HC article click here

Dying in Detention: Deaths in ICE Custody

Jose Rangel Rodriguez

died in 2004, at age 36

had been held at Kern County Jail, Bakersfield CA

Latina Stereotypes: that's not me

Don't you just love demographic studies? They often give people justification to see the bad side of others (or other groups)

First of all, these days, the studies done by places like Pew Research center get their information by telephone. I met Roberto Suro when he was still director of the Hispanic division of Pew. I asked him about the problem with making phone calls to get demographic information. He said it was true that there was a risk in accuracy but there were some formulas to compensate for bad data.

Well, back to the stereotype issue.

This study just released is telling us a few things:

1. More than half of all Latinas report that they speak only English at home or that they speak English very well.
Thank you for noticing that I have a good vocabulary. Surprise that most of us speak English, especially those who are U.S. citizens? We are in America after all.

2. Latino women are more likely to live in poverty
I have never lived in poverty, neither has my mother, or her mother, or her mother. For most of my family history we were not rich, but always had enough to eat - thanks to the men either having a ranch or working on one. Plus the women would sew or iron clothes to make money. Depends what your definition of poverty is....

My next door neighbor who immigration from El Salvador is not in poverty either. She isn't even working full time these days. Well you may think there is something fishy. Actually no. She has always saved a good percentage of her income. She bought a house 6 years ago. Her husband and oldest son live with her... they pay the bills these days. Now she doesn't speak much English, but she is regularized (meaning she has a green card).

She doesn't make a lot of money, probably earns around what Pew says women make. But she is extremely resourceful. She doesn't drive a Lexus, but is doing just fine thank you.

3. Latinas are generally less educated
Now, if you don't count recent immigrants, this may be an issue. Latinas may be less educated but take a look at urban schools these days. No Child Left Behind made schools like something from Bentham's Panopticon - with everyone watching and measuring. In other words I am saying that educational statistics may not be so great, but five words describing the situation does not do justice to the injustice in American education (for working class and poor people).

This is just an anecdote - but there have been plenty of Latinas in my undergraduate and graduate classes. Maybe Pew missed some of them.

4. Latinas who work full time earn less than non-Latinas . I am not sure if I made up this saying, but "no cuenta lo que te pagan, cuenta como rindes el dinero." What you get paid doesn't count, it's how you manage and save your money. Maybe Latinas don't make as much, but I bet many don't have huge car payments and giant credit card balances (of course that excludes those who live in the suburbs - being in heavy debt is a very contagious disease in the U.S.)

5. Native-born Latinas are more likely to have children out of wedlock than immigrant Latinas. Maybe the immigrant women are better at strong arming the father of the child. But really, think about American mores about sex - American born Latinas follow the same social rules that most other American women do. But (and this is always my favorite comment) - they still haven't gotten to the point where they feel comfortable with abortion... hence they have sex (thanks to the U.S. sexual revolution) but they haven't gotten so far that they can separate the idea of a tiny fetus from that of a live human being. Plus their grandmothers would kill them. (disclosure - I am neither pro-life nor pro-choice)-

6. Latinas have a higher fertility rate.
Well maybe in towns where there is no Planned Parenthood, or among women who are recent immigrants. Unfortunately this is a story I hear all the time, people tell me, and with some anger that Mexicans have too many babies. I can see how some would think that - in my neighborhood their are always young women walking around with several babies in their strollers.

For a positive spin on this - if the fertility rate is higher then that must mean a lower incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. If Pew could find a way to ask 2nd and 3rd generation Latinas, they would find that most everybody has only 2 - sometimes 3 (max). I only know of one 3rd generation Latina who has more than 3 kids, and very few who have 3. (disclosure -I have 2 kids - here is the breakdown in my generation from both sides of the family which by the way could be considered Latino/Hispanic)

11 female first cousins -counting myself- born in the U.S. between 1945 - 1968 had the following number of children (the one with five is the oldest cousin)

mothers children
2 -- 0
2 -- 1
3 -- 2
3 -- 3
1 -- 5


Be careful with statistics.

-----

La Plaza Blog
Los Angeles Times
May 9, 2008

New study contrasts immigrant and native-born U.S. Latinas

Fascinating statistics released today on the demographic makeup of the female Latino community in the United States show some striking, if unsurprising, differences between non-Latino and Latino women, and between native-born and immigrant Latinas.

Nearly half of the 14.4 million Latinas in the United States today were born in this country, or abroad to a U.S parent, according to a report released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center. The other 52% of Latinas were born in other countries and came to live in the U.S.

More than half of all Latinas report that they speak only English at home or that they speak English very well. Among immigrant Latinas (about half of all Latino women in the U.S), seven in 10 (73%) say that they do not speak English in their homes or that they do not speak English very well.

There are important differences between Latino and non-Latino women in the U.S. For example, Latino women are more likely to live in poverty and are less educated than non-Latino women.

Although both groups are equally likely to be married, Latinas are generally less educated and have a higher fertility rate that non-Latinas. Immigrant Latinas have a higher fertility rate that native-born Latinas. Native-born Latinas are more likely to have children out of wedlock than immigrant Latinas.

Latinas who work full time earn less than non-Latinas who work full time: a median of $460 per week, compared with $615 per week. Native-born Latinas earn a median of $540 per week, while immigrant women earn $400.

Why you Should not Bark at Dogs...

Family hoping for miracle as Tucson man faces deportation
By: Angela Le, Cronkite News Service
05/09/2008

TUCSON - Victor Napoles, a 21-year-old Mexican national who grew up in Tucson, is facing deportation after losing a case that began with him barking at another man's dog.

That man turned out to be a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Now Napoles, the oldest of five children and "the man of the family," is facing the consequences of the impulsive late-night joke that occurred more than a year ago in Tucson. The case shows how, for an undocumented immigrant, even a seemingly insignificant joke can have dire effects.
Napoles' mother, Angelica Martinez, is terrified that her son will be deported.
At 43, Martinez is the mother of five children-four of them born in the United States and Napoles, who was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, in Mexico. She and Napoles are in this country illegally.
Losing Napoles would be very hard for his younger siblings, Martinez said.
"(He's) their father, their mentor ... he's their everything," she said.
Her 10-year-old son, Cesar, looks up to Napoles the most.
"He's my superhero," Cesar said. "I love Victor very much. If he leaves, I'll miss him."

The case of the barking dog

On Nov. 8, 2007, Martinez was the only family member present for her eldest son's deportation hearing.
Border Patrol agent James Spiering testified that his reason for pulling Napoles over was "the way he was shouting over my lane at my K-9 dog made me think he wasn't in the right state of mind."
"I thought he could have been mentally ill and forgot to take his medicine or was driving under the influence," Spiering said.
Martinez doesn't believe the agent's explanation. And she says the agent was out of line when he said to the judge that he also thought Napoles might have a connection to a drive-by shooting six months previously at the same intersection.
Napoles said he had no idea that a simple bark could land him in such trouble. (mORE)

Raid in Richmond, VA - For information 804-646-0145

Immigration Agents Arrest 33 Workers in Raid at Site of New U.S. Courthouse

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 8, 2008; B05

Federal immigration agents raided the construction site of a new federal courthouse in Richmond on Monday, arresting 33 workers on charges of violating federal immigration laws and being in the United States illegally, officials said yesterday.

Ernestine Fobbs, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said the 29 men and four women who were arrested were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. All were found to lack documents that would allow them to live or work in the United States, Fobbs said.

Officials had received information that illegal immigrants were working at the site, Fobbs said. The investigation is ongoing, and no information was available about the employers, she said. Those arrested were being processed for deportation.

According to radio reports, federal agents and Virginia State Police officers surrounded the work site about 8 a.m. and rounded up about 50 workers while others attempted to hide inside the half-built complex. The reports said that officials were still searching the site hours later and that the remaining workers were required to wear wristbands showing that their IDs had been found valid.

Aaron Samsel, a representative of the Virginia Immigrant People's Coalition in Richmond, said his organization and others would be available to assist relatives and friends of the arrested workers if they contact the Hispanic Liaison Office in Richmond at 804-646-0145. He said the groups would provide food, day-care services and help in obtaining information about the detained workers.

The raid was the third roundup of illegal immigrant workers in Virginia in the past two months. On April 8, federal agents arrested 59 Hispanic workers at the Lansdowne Resort in Loudoun County on charges of immigration violations and said most would be deported. In March, immigration officials arrested 43 Latin American immigrants at a construction site in Manassas.

Dying in detention: Deaths in ICE custody

Hector Mosley

died in 2004 at age 59

was in custody of New York State

Houston Latino History - 1977- 1978

A couple of months ago I asked some students in a cultural studies course if they knew anything about the Moody Park Riot of 1978. No one knew about the incident.

The problem was directly related to the death of a Vietnam veteran named Joe Campos Torres - the students didn't know about him either.

Here is an article from The Economist on Campos Torres' death. At the bottom of this dreamacttexas post is a recent story by KUHF, Houston Public Radio.

"Mr Joe Campos Torres was arrested by six police officers for being disorderly in a bar. They beat him so badly that the jailer refused to accept him and told them to take him to hospital. Instead they dropped him into the Buffalo Bayou "to see if he could swim". His body was found three days later. " from The Economist

For many decades it was a common thing for police (from most anywhere in southeast Texas) to beat the Latino and Black men when they were arrested.

listen to KUHF story

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The Economist
October 22, 1977
Texas;
Licence to kill?

SECTION: THE WORLD; AMERICAN SURVEY; Pg. 50

LENGTH: 410 words



The deaths of two Mexican-Americans at the hands of police authorities in Texas are attracting unusual attention, both in the state and at the department of justice in Washington. For nearly 20 years the department has had a rule that it would not try to prosecute anyone who had been tried earlier for the same offence in state or local courts "unless the reasons are compelling". In February Mr Griffin Bell, the attorney general, stated that in future each case would be considered on its merits - and that in the case of the shooting of Mr Richard Morales by the police chief of Castroville. Texas, the allegations were so serious that they would have warranted being presented to a federal grand jury even if Mr Morales had not died. He was shot in 1975 on a lonely road, by accident the police chief, Mr Frank Hayes, said, and buried secretly by Mrs Hayes and her sister.

My Hayes was charged with murder last year but the state jury reduced the charge to aggravated assault, as it has a right to do in Texas, and he was sentenced to 2-10 years in prison (the maximum possible); he will be eligible for parole. Prominent Texans, including both senators, Mr Lloyd Bentsen and Mr John Tower, several congressmen and the governor, joined the Chicano community in calling for federal action.

On September 30th the jury in a federal trial convicted Mr Hayes of violating Mr Morales's civil rights (the only federal charge that could be brought). Sentence is to be passed on October 28th and could be for life imprisonment.

Meanwhile another case has evoked Texan requests for the federal authorities to step in. In Houston in May Mr Joe Campos Torres was arrested by six police officers for being disorderly in a bar. They beat him so badly that the jailer refused to accept him and told them to take him to hospital. Instead they dropped him into the Buffalo Bayou "to see if he could swim". His body was found three days later. One of the police, a 20-year-old rookie, only two months on the force, has testified against the others. Two of them were acquitted of murder in a state trial, but found guilty of negligent homicide, a misdemeanour, and sentenced to a year in prison and fines of $2,000 each. The sentences were suspended. The department of justice in Washington is considering whether to enter the Torres case and also whether to launch an enquiry into the many other charges of brutality against the Houston police.

from Lexis-Nexis


Moody Park- The Aftermath
kuhf.org
Thursday, May 8, 2008

By: Jack Williams

Thirty years ago today, fires from the Moody Park Riot were still smoldering. Destroyed police cars and looted businesses were evidence of what had happened the day before. But as Jack Williams reports in the third of a three part series, the destruction was just the beginning of a gradual healing process. It also marked a new era in how the Houston police department related to the City's minority communities.

A Mexican-American fiesta in a Houston park turned into a riot last night, the result of long-simmering hostility between police there and Mexican-Americans who make up about 23-percent of Houston's 1.2 million residents."

It was May 8th of 1978 when Walter Cronkite told the rest of the nation what had happened in Moody Park. The near north side around the park looked like a war zone.

"Today, a small crowd watched as store-keepers secured what was left of their shops as officers tried to keep scavengers out of the rubble." "It was a challenging time because the people in the Hispanic community did not trust the police department."

Harris County Precinct Six Constable Victor Trevino was a Houston Police officer in 1978.

"They didn't feel comfortable with us. They really didn't feel like we were there to provide a good public service, that we were there really to intimidate and talk down and harass."

"Joe Torres, a name that has provoked protests and seething resentments among Houston's Mexican-American residents for a year."

Less violent protests continued for a few days, but already, members of the Hispanic community and HPD were working to heal the wounds caused by the death of Joe Torres.

"It was a trying time. It was very challenging for everybody to work together."

Former LULAC district director Mamie Garcia had been hired by then police chief Harry Caldwell as a community liaison.

"My job was to get people involved in the community process of establishing positive interactive programs with the police department."

"Much to Mamie Garcia's credit, she helped to channel that energy, that frustration, in a much more productive way."

Houston City Councilman Adrian Garcia was in Moody Park when the riot started and later became a Houston police officer.

"She helped to make sure that if people had concerns that they didn't keep it to themselves but found a way to effectively get those issues on the table so to speak."

The Houston Police Department had established a permanent Internal Affairs Division and a Spanish language program for officers. It also set-up police store fronts in minority neighborhoods.

"The Houston Police Department from that period forth would start to undergo changes, albeit subtle, but by the time you get ten years later, the Houston Police Department doesn't even look the same, doesn't even act the same."

Dwight Watson wrote the book Race and the Houston Police Department. He says the death of Joe Torres and the Moody Park Riot was the beginning of real change in Houston.

"It brought people who were very conservative and very quiet to become very vocal and very political and people began to hold the police accountable."

Today, Moody Park looks better than it did in 1978, with a pool, ball fields and a community center. The scars of the riot are gone now, but the changes are still echoing 30 years later.

Dying in detention: Deaths in ICE Custody

Cesar Roig-Martinez

died in 2004 at the age of 47

in Pearsall, Texas

cause of death: suicide

Going to Court to Become Citizens

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Applicants for Citizenship Take To the Courts to Force Action

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 7, 2008; A19

Mark Sapir got fed up waiting years for immigration officials to act on his citizenship application. So the native of Russia did the most American thing he could think of: He filed a lawsuit.

Sapir, a mathematics professor at Vanderbilt University, asked a federal court to enforce the law that requires U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to decide whether to grant citizenship within 120 days of interviewing an applicant. In Sapir's case, that deadline had long passed.

"Since nothing worked, I decided this was the only thing I can do," Sapir said in an interview last week.

He is not alone. An increasing number of immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship are using legal action to force a decision from the perennially backlogged immigration office, which in 2003 became a part of the new Department of Homeland Security.

In fiscal 2005, applicants filed 370 such lawsuits against the agency. By last year, the number had jumped to 3,900, and applications this year are on pace to surpass 5,200.

"We acknowledge a significant increase in litigation against the agency during the last few years," CIS spokesman William G. Wright said in an e-mail.

A big reason for the agency's slow pace is that immigration officials began scrutinizing applicants' backgrounds more extensively after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Applicants for citizenship must undergo an FBI name check to determine whether they appear on any terrorism watch lists or are mentioned in a federal law enforcement investigation. If red flags arise, the applicant must prove that he is not the person in question.

Since October, immigration officials have submitted 792,397 name check requests to the FBI. In March, 345,600 were pending, including 72,000 that had been in process for more than six months.

"We are making significant progress in reducing the backlog," said Wright, who noted that the vast majority of name checks are completed within six months.

Sapir and his family came to the United States in 1991 on a work visa, obtained permanent resident status in 1994 and applied for citizenship in 1999. In 2000, immigration officials interviewed them and gave them the required exams in English, civics and U.S. history, all of which they passed.

"After that, nothing happened for like three years, during which I tried all possible ways to speed it up," Sapir said. "After some time, it was clear they had lost my file."

By April 2003, Sapir decided that he had waited long enough. With the help of an attorney, he filed his federal lawsuit that month. He even managed to garner some press coverage. A trial was set for August 2003, but it never got that far. By July, he and his wife and their older daughter had been granted citizenship. (Two of his other children were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born here.)

The court ordered the government to pay half of Sapir's legal fees -- about $4,000, he said.

The government received nearly 1.4 million applications for naturalization last year, according to federal figures. Most applicants will never reach the point where suing the government would make sense tactically, and even among those who do, the cost might be a powerful deterrent.

Such lawsuits cannot force immigration officials to grant citizenship only to make a timely decision on an application. In defending itself in these cases, the government has argued that the "examination" stage includes the FBI check, so the 120-day clock should not begin ticking until that is completed.

Federal courts have come down on both sides, experts say. Even so, filing a lawsuit has become an increasingly popular tactic.

"The mere bringing of an action puts pressure on the immigration service by the assistant U.S. attorneys, who call them and say, 'Look, I don't want to deal with these 400 cases. Why aren't you acting on them?' " said Muzaffar A. Chishti, a lawyer and senior official at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

"And that inevitably may result in the senior bureaucrats making those cases rise to the top of the pile."

Underground Undergrads

Friday, May 9, 2008

'The only thing that we have the power to do is speak out'
'Underground Undergrads' tells plight of undocumented students at UCLA.

By R. W. Dellinger

When Stephanie Solis turned 18, she learned from her parents something she could hardly fathom: She was an undocumented immigrant. That meant she couldn't vote or get a driver's license. But, most of all, she probably wouldn't be able to go to UCLA, where she had been accepted after working hard in high school to earn stellar grades.

Instead of feeling a sense of elation and independence, she felt isolated with all her future plans seemingly down the drain. As a result, her budding sense of identity suffered a deep psychic blow. The teenager couldn't help thinking that instead of entering adulthood, she would remain a permanent child never realizing her career goals and life dreams.

"When most teenagers have their 18th birthday, they think about how they're an adult now," recalled Solis, who is now 22. "But instead of having a sense of adulthood, I usually had a feeling of permanent childhood because, well, 'I can't drive, I can't vote, I can't travel, I can't work.' I didn't have an ID, so I couldn't even prove my age."

But the driven coed from a low-income family decided to go ahead and try UCLA anyway, even though she wasn't eligible for financial aid, student loans or most scholarships. And once there, she met other undocumented students in the same boat. It was going to be harder - a lot harder - but at least she wasn't the only struggling student in Westwood.

Solis took on multiple jobs, cleaning houses, making cardboard boxes - whatever she could physically do to earn money. Another coping strategy was taking quarters off school to work fulltime. Today she's a senior with a major in creative writing, and one of the 11 student and faulty editors of "Underground Undergrads," a new UCLA-produced publication unveiled at an April 30 press conference.

"I wish that I had this book as a resource on my 18th birthday, knowing about the possibilities and that I wasn't alone," she said. "This book is so important. This is the only real way that we can bring about change on this issue. Because we are afraid to speak out. We feel powerless.

"Also, we can't vote, so we can't really speak for ourselves politically," she added. "So the only thing that we have the power to do is speak out."

First class on undocumented

"Underground Undergrads," an 84-page glossy paperback, is the product of UCLA's first class on undocumented students: Immigrant Rights, Labor and Higher Education. Through in-depth interviews, firsthand accounts, personal histories,...(More)

More information on how to get a hold of the book

HR 5950 - Standards of care for Immigrant Detainees

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Press Release

Rep. Lofgren Introduces Bill Mandating Standards of Care for Immigration Detainees

May 6, 2008

Washington, D.C. – Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) recently introduced H.R. 5950, the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008, which would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish procedures for the timely and effective delivery of medical and mental health care to all immigration detainees. The procedures mandated by the bill must take into account all detainee health needs, including primary care, emergency care, chronic care, prenatal care, dental care, eye care, mental health care, medical dietary needs, and other medically-necessary specialized care. The bill would also require the Secretary to report all detainee deaths to the Inspector Generals of both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) within 48 hours. Additionally, the Secretary would be required to submit a report to the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate and the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives containing detailed information regarding the death of all immigration detainees in the Secretary’s custody during the preceding fiscal year.

“This legislation will help guarantee that minimal standards for care are put into place,” noted Rep. Zoe Lofgren. “We are not talking about Cadillac health care here, but the government is obligated to provide basic care. Many of those in immigration custody are there for minor violations, many for administrative and paperwork related mistakes. Their detention should not be a death sentence.”

Lofgren looking into conditions of immigrant detention

This is the first time I have heard a Congressperson use the phrase "minimun standards of civilization" (see below) - I am surprised it has not been used during the debate on habeas corpus.

“This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,”...“This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.” Zoe Lofgren, Chair of Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law

May 7, 2008

Better Health Care Sought for Detained Immigrants

By NINA BERNSTEIN and JULIA PRESTON

The head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate medical care in immigration detention announced on Tuesday that she had introduced legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.

“This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,” the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill, which she introduced late last week. “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.”

The need for the bill, she said, was underscored by an article in The New York Times on Monday about the 2007 death of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea. His name was one of 66 on a government list of detention deaths obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Records show that Mr. Bah, who suffered a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, was left in an isolation cell there without treatment for more than 14 hours.

Ms. Lofgren’s legislation would require the federal government to establish mandatory standards for medical and mental health care, replacing the voluntary standards that apply now in the network of more than 300 publicly and privately run jails where the government holds people while it decides whether to deport them.

The bill would also require the secretary of the Homeland Security Department to report all deaths in immigration detention within 48 hours to the Justice Department’s inspector general as well as its own. Immigration officials would be required to submit a detailed report on such deaths to Congress every year.

“We are not talking about Cadillac health care here,” Ms. Lofgren said, “but the government is obligated to provide basic care. Many of those in immigration custody are there for minor violations, many for administrative and paperwork-related mistakes. Their detention should not be a death sentence.”

Officials of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said they would not comment on Ms. Lofgren’s proposal because they did not discuss pending legislation.

But officials said that while the number of immigrants detained had increased by 34 percent from 2004 through last year, the numbers of deaths in its detention centers had declined each year.

“While a single death of an ICE detainee is a serious matter, we strive to maintain safe, secure and human detention conditions and to ensure that all detainees receive quality health care,” said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the agency.

According to figures the agency provided on Tuesday, from January 2004 until last Friday it recorded 71 deaths of immigrants in its custody, including 5 since the list was released to The Times, 4 of them this year. Ms. Nantel did not provide details of those cases.

In the 2004 fiscal year, according to the figures, the agency detained 231,804 immigrants, and about one out of every 9,200 died. In fiscal 2007, when the agency detained a total of 311,213 immigrants, roughly one out of every 28,000 died. Immigration officials said the agency spent $91.6 million last year on health care for its detention centers, an 82 percent increase since 2004.

Ms. Lofgren said the agency’s count of deaths could understate the problem, because detainees who were denied critical treatment could die after they were released or deported.

She cited the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran who testified at the hearing last fall that he was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his penis for 11 months while he was in detention as an illegal immigrant, despite his pleas and doctors’ recommendations. By the time he received the treatment he had been seeking, in February 2007, he was found to have metastasized penile cancer, records show; his penis had to be amputated.

He was released from detention after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and died on Feb. 16 this year at age 36, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the government could be held liable in a lawsuit his family is pursuing. The federal government admitted medical negligence in the case last month.

An Obituary for Boubacar Bah - who died in detention

Boubacar Bah

Union des Forces Démocratiques de Guinée

"Le Bureau exécutif de la GCA, les familles Bah, Barry et Diallo allies et amis ont la profonde douleur d'annoncer le décès de feu Boubacar Bah.

Détenu pendant 9 mois par les services d'Immigration des USA, par manque de document légaux, notre compatriote feu Boubacar bah s'est éteint à UMD hôpital, New Jersey à la suite d'une crise cardiaque, le 30 Mai, 2007. Né à Gonkou Labé, le 1er Janvier 1955, fils de Mamadou Bailo Bah et Fatimatou Barry, feu Boubacar Bah est Marie et père de 3 enfants. "
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May 6, 200

Editorial
New York Times

Death by Detention

A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.

Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.

Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.

It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.

Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.

What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.

As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.

Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.

Dying in detention: deaths in ICE custody

Adetunji Popoola

died on February 16, 2004, age 49

Dallas, Texas

Bush, McCain and shrinking GI Education Benefits

There needs to be no discussion on the expansion of GI education benefits... especially to Iraq veterans who are serving 2 and 3 tours of duty.

The bill is sponsored by Democrats and Republicans - but not supported by the Bush Administration. McCain doesn't support it either and has presented a bill with significantly fewer benefits.

Speaking of the GI Bill - on my mother's side of the family, in my generation, there have been 9 cousins who finished college. This would not have happened if my father and two uncles would not have gotten GI education benefits during WWII.

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Op-Ed Columnist
New York Times
Mary 6, 2008

Doing the Troops Wrong

By BOB HERBERT

At the top of the list of no-brainers in Washington should be Senator Jim Webb’s proposed expansion of education benefits for the men and women who have served in the armed forces since Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s awfully hard to make the case that these young people who have sacrificed so much don’t deserve a shot at a better future once their wartime service has ended.

Senator Webb, a Virginia Democrat, has been the guiding force behind this legislation, which has been dubbed the new G.I. bill. The measure is decidedly bipartisan. Mr. Webb’s principal co-sponsors include Republican Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia, and Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.

(All four senators are veterans of wartime service — Senators Webb and Hagel in Vietnam, Warner in World War II and Korea and Lautenberg in World War II.)

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are on board, as are Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House.

Who wouldn’t support an effort to pay for college for G.I.’s who have willingly suited up and put their lives on the line, who in many cases have served multiple tours in combat zones and in some cases have been wounded?

We did it for those who served in World War II. Why not now?

Well, you might be surprised at who is not supporting this effort. The Bush administration opposes it, and so does Senator John McCain.

Reinvigorating the G.I. bill is one of the best things this nation could do. The original G.I. Bill of Rights, signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, paid the full load of a returning veteran’s education at a college or technical school and provided a monthly stipend. It was an investment that paid astounding dividends. Millions of veterans benefited, and they helped transform the nation. College would no longer be the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and those who crowned themselves the intellectual elite.

As The New York Times wrote on the 50th anniversary of the G.I. bill: “Few laws have done so much for so many.”

“These veterans were able to get a first-class future,” Senator Webb told me in an interview. “But not only that. For every dollar that was spent on the World War II G.I. bill, seven dollars came back in the form of tax remunerations from those who received benefits.”

Senator Lautenberg went to Columbia on the G.I. bill, and Senator Warner to Washington and Lee University and then to law school.

The benefits have not kept pace over the decades with the real costs of attending college. Moreover, service members have to make an out-of-pocket contribution — something over $100 a month during their first year of service — to qualify for the watered-down benefits.

This is not exactly first-class treatment of the nation’s warriors.

The Bush administration opposes the new G.I. bill primarily on the grounds that it is too generous, would be difficult to administer and would adversely affect retention.

This is bogus. The estimated $2.5 billion to $4 billion annual cost of the Webb proposal is dwarfed by the hundreds of billions being spent on the wars we’re asking service members to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s important to keep in mind is that the money that goes to bolstering the education of returning veterans is an investment, in both the lives of the veterans themselves and the future of the nation.

The notion that expanding educational benefits will have a negative effect on retention seems silly. The Webb bill would cover tuition at a rate comparable to the highest tuition at a state school in the state in which the veteran would be enrolled. That kind of solid benefit would draw talented individuals into the military in large numbers.

Senator Webb, a former secretary of the Navy who specialized in manpower issues, said he has seen no evidence that G.I.’s would opt out of the service in significantly higher numbers because of such benefits.

Senator McCain’s office said on Monday that it was following the Pentagon’s lead on this matter, getting guidance from Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Under pressure because of his unwillingness to support Senator Webb’s effort, Senator McCain introduced legislation with substantially fewer co-sponsors last week that expands some educational benefits for G.I.’s, but far less robustly than Senator Webb’s bill.

“It’s not even close to the Webb bill,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group.

Politicians tend to talk very, very big about supporting our men and women in uniform. But time and again — whether it’s about providing armor for their safety or an education for their future — we find that talk to be very, very cheap.

1,000 Vet Suicide Attempts per Month

A few months ago while I was shipping a package to my son in New York, I had a short conversation with a couple of young men who were working at the Fedex counter of a Fedex-Kinkos. It turned out that one was an Iraq veteran.

After he told me, I said to him that I was glad he made it back. Then the other guy said that it was a bad situation because many who came back alive were dying after they got home. When I read the VA email stating that there were 1,000 suicide attempts per month I was not surprised.

See video of CBS report: http://youtube.com/watch?v=GePao3-2HL8

Tempers Flare At Hearing On Vet Suicides
WASHINGTON, May 6, 2008

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(CBS) The name of the hearing said it all: "The truth about veteran suicides."

After playing clips of recent CBS News reports outlining attempts within the VA to "cover up" suicide data, Committee Chairman Bob Filner lashed out at the man in charge, Secretary James Peake, accusing the Department of Veterans Affairs of "criminal negligence," reports CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian.

"What we see is a pattern -- deny, deny, cover up, cover up," Filner said.

Filner's colleagues quickly followed, piling anger on top of disbelief.

With his embattled Director of Mental Health Dr. Ira Katz at his side, Secretary Peake presented a detailed series of charts and graphs generally backing CBS News suicide data.

"I've never had a concern with their overall numbers," Katz told the committee.

"We're as far from hiding information from the public as anyone I know," Peake said.

But several lawmakers weren't buying it, citing a Feb. 13 e-mail titled "Not for CBS News" where Katz appears to be trying to keep attempted suicide numbers quiet.

"That was very unfortunate," Katz said. "I deeply regret that subject line. I apologize for that."

Outside the hearing room we asked Peake to answer repeated calls from Congress for Katz's resignation.

"I do not have any intention of relieving Dr. Katz," Peake said.

"So Dr. Katz stays?" asked Keteyian.

"That's my plan absolutely," Peake answered.

The hearing opened with Chairman Filner showing two CBS News reports from April 21st and 25th of this year, detailing the VA’s reluctance to provide information about veteran suicide.

CBS News first reported on the epidemic of suicide in the VA in November 2007, finding that over 6,000 veterans killed themselves in 2005 alone. That averages out to more than 120 per week. Katz immediately dismissed our report at a December 12th committee hearing, saying CBS’s numbers were not “an accurate reflection of the rates.”

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Looking for DREAMERS in Frederick County, Maryland

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Official seeks survey of illegal immigrant students

May 2, 2008 Washington Times

By Tom LoBianco - A Frederick County, Maryland, commissioner wants the school board to survey the number of illegal immigrants who are students and has proposed withholding school funding if members fail to agree.

"It would be useful information because that would indicate the extent of public funds that are being used to educate those who are not in the country legally," County Commissioner John L. "Lennie " Thompson Jr. said yesterday.

Federal law bars school systems from inquiring after a students' immigration status.

However, Mr. Thompson said his proposal asks only for a review of student files and that he has never even "contemplated" an inquiry of students or their parents.

The proposal has rankled school board members who question the legality of Mr. Thompson's proposal.

"The fact is that federal law requires that all children be educated in the public schools of the United States, regardless of their immigration status or the immigration status of their parents," board member Kathryn B. "Katie" Groth said. "Further, the law prohibits public schools from inquiring about immigration status of students and their families. In other words, we in the public school system do not, and in fact cannot, collect such information from students and their families."

A Maryland Department of Education spokeswoman also said it is illegal for school systems to question a student's immigration status.

This is not the first time Mr. Thompson and other Republican lawmakers in largely conservative Western Maryland have proposed aggressive measures against the wave of illegal immigration.

Mr. Thompson recently supported a resolution asking state lawmakers to call for a national Constitutional Convention to address the issue of illegal immigration.

In addition, County Commissioner Charles A. Jenkins last week attempted to make English the only language used in county documents. Commissioners instead stripped his proposal and made English the "primary" language of Frederick County.

Mr. Thompson said he has been forced into such action because state and federal officials have not taken action.

Of the dozens of bills proposed in the 2008 General Assembly session to aid or crack down on illegal immigrants, the Democrat-controlled legislature passed one. Congress also has failed to agree on an immigration policy.

The county commissioners and school board members are scheduled to consider Mr. Thompson's request at a joint May 20 meeting.

Jan H. Gardner, president of the Board of County Commissioners, already opposes the plan.

"Since the county commissioners fund over half of the school system's budget, [Mr.] Thompson is effectively proposing to compromise the education of all the students in the school system in his quest for this information." she said.

Mr. Thompson acknowledged that immigration is an issue better handled by federal authorities but said it must be "solved from the grassroots up."

The masked men have returned with rifles, but this time they are bad guys

detail of image from Time Machine 9

This sounds like something right out of a Clint Eastwood western. A story like one of masked men with rifles raping 3 people sounds like it's from 1880 instead of 2008.

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3 immigrants say masked men raped them

May. 5, 2008 03:18 PM
Associated Press

TUCSON - Two teenagers and a 20-year-old woman say armed men wearing masks raped them after they illegally crossed the Arizona-Mexico border.

The Arizona Daily Star reports on its Web site that the three reported a group of masked men carrying rifles approached their group of 10 border-crossers on Friday and then raped the three of them.

The teens were 16 and 17 years old.

.S. Border Patrol spokesman Rob Daniels says one of the three said she was raped by six men, and the other two said they were each raped once.

He says the Mexican Consulate was called and Santa Cruz County Sheriff's deputies took statements on the incident. The three declined to file a formal complaint.

They voluntarily returned to Mexico.

Dying in Detention: deaths in ICE custody

Every day for the next few months, we will list the name of a person who died while in ICE custody



Ramiro Gutierrez

died in 2004, at age 42

Sacramento, CA

Mis-spelling dampens argument for English as official U.S. language

Photo by Johnny Hanson, Houston Chronicle


This is a group of anti-immigrant protesters that are demanding English be the official U.S. language. Check the spelling of the word official on the sign.


Thanks to B.T. for sending me this photo

Immigration Agency's List of Deaths in Custody

ICE FOIA - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: ICE FOIA

Or direct link to PDF doc

People dying while in ICE custody

It is really important for this information to be disseminated. This is an atrocity.

Hope you are not diabetic if you are detained by ICE.

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May 5, 2008

Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody

New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

Lingering Questions

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

After the Fall

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

Preventing Diabetes, Part I - Avoid Soft Drinks

photo: freedigitalphotos
This will be the first of a number of post that will discuss basic things we can do to prevent diabetes. Second generation Latino immigrants are some of the most vulnerable...


Avoid soft drinks - yes, this means Coke, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, Fanta, Mountain Dew, Snapple, bottled fruit juices and all the others. They are full of High Fructose Corn Syrup. They trick us into drinking double the number of calories posted on the can. They say 150 calories per serving, but a can is two servings, and who leaves a can of Coke half empty?!

Remember High Fructose Corn Syrup encourages your body to develop diabetes.

This is especially important for kids, because if they get used to drinking lots of Coke before age 10, you know it will be something they will want to do all their lives (the Coke people love this).

What can you drink? how about water?

I used to think that drinking bottled juice was better for me than a carbonated drink, until I looked at the label and saw that High Fructose Corn syrup was second on the list of ingredients.

Austin's jails filling up with undocumented immigrants

"critics question the fairness of an enforcement strategy that can lead to the deportation of family members arrested on misdemeanor charges such as traffic offenses — hardly the kinds of crimes that are threats to society, they say. Nearly 62 percent of the immigration detainers issued at the county jail through March 31 were for people whose worst offense was a misdemeanor." Austin American Statesman

Austin, the city people love; the home of progressives; may not be progressive anymore.

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As federal presence at county jail grows, so do numbers of immigrant detainees

But some clash over public safety merits, exposing another layer of the illegal immigration debate and how best to deal with it

By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 04, 2008

For the past 30 years, federal immigration agents have regularly popped in the Travis County Jail and other correctional institutions, combing records and quizzing inmates to identify deportable immigrants and those with criminal records.

But sometime in the future — apparently for the first time ever, and with the blessing of Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton — the periodic visits will grow into a permanent presence, as federal agents work around-the-clock in a roughly 8-foot by 10-foot office in the downtown jail.

There, they can question people brought in on any charges — from traffic offenses to murder — about their immigration status. If agents believe someone is in the United States illegally, they can place a "hold" to detain the inmate for possible deportation after the original charges are adjudicated.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are already spending more time at the downtown jail and the county jail complex in Del Valle, with striking results: From Jan. 1 through March 31, agents placed 763 immigration holds on county inmates, an almost 400 percent increase over the same period last year.

Depending on whom you ask, those statistics are either commendable or troubling. Hamilton and his supporters say that giving ICE full-time use of the jail office will increase the agency's efficiency and help keep the community safe from what the sheriff terms "individuals who could possibly be a menace to our society."

But others see a slippery slope of dangerous consequences: immigrants discouraged from reporting crimes or cooperating with police because they fear deportation; crowded jails imposing financial burdens on taxpayers; families separated; and the possibility of racial profiling taking hold, to name just a few.

By driving undocumented immigrants further underground, "this change in policy has undermined public safety for all residents in Travis County. That's really the basic issue here," said Rebecca Bernhardt, with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Texas.

Since announcing in January that he would give ICE agents greater access to the jail, Hamilton has been criticized by immigrant and civil rights advocates.

"I was floored, to be frank," Hamilton said of the criticism. He said ICE, the FBI and other law enforcement routinely use the jail to interview inmates for their investigations.

Hamilton disputes claims that the Travis County sheriff's department is enforcing immigration law, which is a federal responsibility. The department has a policy that prohibits deputies from asking about immigration status unless it is relevant to a nonimmigration criminal investigation, and it does not participate in a federal program that trains local officers to enforce immigration law.

But critics question the fairness of an enforcement strategy that can lead to the deportation of family members arrested on misdemeanor charges such as traffic offenses — hardly the kinds of crimes that are threats to society, they say. Nearly 62 percent of the immigration detainers issued at the county jail through March 31 were for people whose worst offense was a misdemeanor.

That leaves more than 260 people accused of felony crimes who were detained on immigration violations. (In addition, 26 people issued detainers had no other charge against them. The sheriff's office says they were either picked up on ICE warrants or were held temporarily at the jail en route to a federal detention facility.)

"That's not my call" who gets deported, Hamilton said.

'No magic ball'

Beyond local concerns about law and order and constitutional rights, the controversy highlights the national debate over illegal immigration and the tightening of enforcement after congressional attempts to overhaul immigration laws collapsed last year. Federal officials are arresting, detaining and deporting more people accused of being here illegally than in previous decades.

One of their enforcement tools is the Criminal Alien Program, which seeks to ensure that unauthorized immigrants are not released into communities after their sentences. In a vast area of Texas that includes Austin, the program is well on pace to detain considerably more immigrants than in 2007.

Immigrant and civil rights advocates fear ICE's greater presence in the county jail will lead to profiling and overzealous enforcement, such as the recently reported case of a Latina pulled over by police in Houston. The officer thought it suspicious that the woman, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was driving a new car, the Associated Press reported.

Critics also worry about an erosion of due process rights. Immigration bails are often high. Rather than face long stays in jail, some immigrants — too poor to hire a lawyer and unaware that they may have a legal right to stay in the U.S. — will choose not to fight their case, critics say. In civil immigration law, there is no right to a court-appointed attorney.

Officials stress that inmates accused of immigration violations have access to attorneys' phone numbers. Booking officers also advise foreign-born inmates of their right to have their government notified of their arrest and/or detention.

In recent weeks, a number of criminal defense and civil immigration attorneys accused ICE of wrongly holding U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, commonly known as green-card holders.

A high-ranking ICE official in San Antonio said attorneys had not provided names of those being wrongly detained, though he said he has asked for them. Immigration law allows for the detention of green-card holders who are accused of certain crimes for which they can be deported, even though they are in the country legally, said Adrian Ramirez, assistant field office director for the San Antonio Office of Detentions and Removal.

At the Travis County Jail, Ramirez said he instructs his agents to talk to all inmates who are foreign-born "and then some," adding: "There's no magic ball that says this person is not here legally."

Should everyone be targeted?

Federal immigration officials say the Criminal Alien Program's mission is to identify the "worst of the worst" criminals who are also violating immigration laws but that their investigations also turn up immigrants charged with lesser crimes.

While significant, arrests through the Criminal Alien Program and ICE's enforcement efforts pale against the millions of people thought to be living in the country illegally — including an estimated 1.6 million in Texas.

Dan Kowalski, an immigration attorney who is not involved in the local protests, said he would rather see ICE focus on catching the worst criminals that it and other federal agencies are already tracking. "By that I mean gangbangers, (human) smugglers, drug-runners. There are probably enough out there that it's a rich pool of target for ICE to go after instead of trying to pick up" someone whose visa expired, he said.

Immigrant advocates say that Hamilton's decision will lead to more separation of families as ICE deports parents booked into the jail for misdemeanors. More than 3 million children born in this country have parents who are undocumented immigrants. It is not uncommon for illegal immigrants, legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens to belong to the same family.

"Well, we didn't separate the families," Ramirez said. "The individuals who are here in the U.S. illegally and go and commit a so-called minor crime are responsible for their bad decisions."

"People may think I'm looking through rose-colored glasses, but if individuals are not arrested for a crime, they will not be seen at the Travis County Jail," Hamilton said.

He said he doesn't intend to change his mind on the arrangement with ICE: "I would be derelict if I did."

Opponents, who count among their ranks more than 30 grass-roots organizations and institutions, have beat a steady drum of protest, including news conferences, meetings with the sheriff, and a community forum where emotions ran high and critics expressed their outrage in blunt terms, with Hamilton sitting a few feet away. They played a prominent role in last week's immigrant rights march in Austin.

"We can't stop what we're doing just because he says 'I'm not going to change,' " said Nicole True, an Austin criminal defense attorney who compared opponents' efforts with fights to abolish slavery and to give women the right to vote. "People said then, 'Well, that's just the way it is. We're just enforcing the law.' But you know what? Sometimes the law isn't just."

A cornerstone of immigrant advocacy is that enforcement crackdowns unfairly punish families who have been allowed to establish roots over many years under an immigration system that people on both sides of the debate agree is dysfunctional. Advocates want laws that secure the border while expanding the numbers of visas — so that more people can come here legally — and create opportunities for undocumented immigrants already here to legalize their status.

Kowalski, the immigration attorney, agrees that protests can push reforms forward.But immigrant advocates may harm their cause when they criticize enforcement, Kowalski said.

"It makes us look like we don't care about the law — and really, we should be focused on changing the law so that we don't need all these enforcement efforts or need fewer of them or more targeted ones," he said.

Meanwhile, Ramirez said the immigration agency's goal of staffing the county jail full-time "is still pretty far away." And Hamilton said that even if ICE did not have office space in the jail, "they will come and do what they have done in the past, which is stand in the corner and do their business."

The Criminal Alien Program

People arrested in Travis County are asked their place of birth when they are booked into custody at the county jail. Immigration agents can review those records, interview inmates and detain people they determine are in the country illegally.

Unless they are able to pay bail for their release, these inmates generally remain in local jails until their original charges are resolved. Then they are moved to federal detention facilities until their immigration case is heard, which can take months or longer.

Nationally, agents issued holds on more than 164,000 unauthorized immigrants jailed on criminal charges in 2007, more than twice the 2006 total. The San Antonio ICE field office has already issued 4,138 holds or detainers this year. In all of 2007, they issued 5,349.

The Criminal Alien Program screens all inmates at all federal and state prisons. Officials say they screen all inmates at 10 percent of the approximately 3,100 local jails throughout the United States. Their goal is to attain full screening at the Travis County Jail.

5,000

Estimated number of visas for low-skilled workers in 2005.

500,000

Estimated number of low-skilled Mexican workers who entered the U,S. illegally in 2005.

278,000

Approximate number of illegal immigrants removed in 2007.

95,000

Approximate number removed with criminal histories.

Source: U.S. State Department, Travis County Sheriff's Department, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635

Think twice DREAMERS, is calling the police the right thing to do?

She came as a DREAMER, at age 13 with a visa from Mexico. She graduated from high school in Austin, Texas. At age 30 she might be deported because she called Austin police during the domestic dispute with her ex-husband.

If she cannot call the police, she cannot defend herself when her husband is violent - it's a risk, he has done this several times before.

But Austin has changed, it is no longer the laid back beautiful city of Texas. When people are arrested in Austin, even on misdemeanor violations, they are taken in and interrogated by federal agents - their residency status is checked. Doesn't matter if they have been here for 17 years as was this former DREAMER.

Austin police are concerned that the relationship between their department and the immigrant community is being damaged. The city is actually less safe, because crimes will not be reported if people are concerned they will be deported.

Unfortunately, most of the country is moving this way - arrest, detain, deport - immigration reform seems to have been forgotten.

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After a spat with her ex, Austin mother faces deportation

By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 04, 2008

Maria came to Austin from Mexico on a visitor's visa at 13. She quietly built a life, attending middle school, graduating from Austin High, marrying, divorcing, raising two children on her own and working full-time at a child care center.

But Maria, now 30, had a secret with the potential to throw her life into a tailspin: Like millions of people in the United States, she is unauthorized to live and work here. A federal immigration officer discovered that secret in the Travis County Jail, where Maria had been booked on a misdemeanor assault charge after she was involved in a dispute with her ex-husband.

They had argued during a custody exchange of their children. Maria said that knowing her ex's history of domestic violence, she thought it wise to call police. (According to public records, her former spouse has twice been charged with assault/family violence; both cases were dismissed.)

When they arrived, police found "bleeding scratch marks" on her ex-husband's neck and forearm, according to an arrest affidavit. Maria said she had only blocked his attempt to strike her after she tried to take their 8-year-old daughter from his arms.

Maria spent the night in jail, paid $2,000 bail and signed documents for her release. Then the immigration officer approached. She told Maria she was now in federal custody.

"I said, 'This is not happening to me.' I mean, I am not a criminal," Maria recalled, overcome with emotion. (The American-Statesman is not using her real name because she said she fears retaliation from the government and her ex-husband.)

Now out on $11,000 bail in her immigration case, she ponders an uncertain future.

At home after a long day's work, wearing sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, she shuttles from one bathroom to the other, giving her children baths with her mother's help. With her 5-foot-2-inch frame and girlish looks, she resembles a teenager.

Her 6-year-old son has been diagnosed with mild autism, Maria says. Both kids were born here and are U.S. citizens, and her family lives in this country. If Maria is deported, the whole family would suffer.

"I just don't think it's fair, what's happening." Maria says.

Nicole True, a criminal defense attorney who initially represented Maria, agrees. She says stories like hers — a reported victim of abuse who called police and now could be separated from her children — show the pitfalls of putting federal immigration agents in the county jail full time.

Critics contend Immigration and Customs Enforcement's increased presence also undoes years of work by Austin police to win the trust of undocumented immigrants, who are frequently the victims of robberies and other crimes. Police have sought to assure them that they would not be turned over to immigration authorities for reporting crimes or cooperating in criminal investigations. But Maria said that knowing ICE is in the jail will make immigrants think twice before calling police.

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said the controversy has no impact on his department's operations.

"Our message is always very clear. If you break the law and you're out there victimizing folks, we don't care if you're an illegal immigrant, a legal resident or naturalized citizen, or a person born here — we're going to treat everybody the same and that is as a criminal (suspect)," Acevedo said.

The Travis County sheriff's office says it does not investigate the legal immigration status of people they arrest or their family members.

An immigration official said agents work strictly within the confines of the jail.

"We're not identifying people here illegally and then taking that information and going out and looking for more people," Adrian Ramirez said.

jcastillo@statesman.com; 445-3635

Diabetes is eating us alive: Part III

This article is a few years old, but even more relevant today. Did you know that Fenway Park was rebuilt because the seats are too small for today's heavier set baseball fans?

"Over the last decade, diabetes rates rose 60% in the U.S. (Over half of diabetes cases are due to overweight, poor diet and physical inactivity."

from commondreams.org

WASHINGTON - July 31 - Many experts agree that obesity is one of the most pressing health problems facing the country. Over the last twenty years, obesity rates have doubled in adults and children and tripled in teens. Two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese. Yet some food industry groups question whether obesity rates are increasing and instead, claim that the rising rates are due to a change in the definition for obesity (Body Mass Index). For anyone else who is skeptical, here are some other signs that obesity rates are going up.

1• Because of safety concerns, the Federal Aviation Administration has instructed airlines to add ten pounds to approved passenger weights.

2• When administering vaccines and drawing blood, doctors now need longer needles to penetrate thicker layers of fat on Americans’ bodies

3• Almost 25% of women in their 50's are too large to have their body fat measured with a traditional skinfold caliper, an instrument developed in the 1950’s

.4• Liposuction is the most commonly performed cosmetic surgical procedure in the U.S., increasing 118% between 1997 and 2001.

5• Over the last decade, diabetes rates rose 60% in the U.S.5 (Over half of diabetes cases are due to overweight, poor diet and physical inactivity.

6• Today’s size 10 was sold as a women’s size 14 in the 1940's

.7• The Gap, Limited Too and Target are selling plus-sized clothes for youth

.8• Plus-size boutique Lane Bryant is expected to increase its number of stores from 650 to 1,000 over five years. Catherine's Plus Sizes is projected to increase from 470 to 700 stores. The plus-size clothing market generates $23 billion in sales a year, accounting for a quarter of women’s clothing sales

9• Nike changed the size scale for its women’s fitness apparel. A small sports bra use to fit a woman with a 33-inch to 35-inch bust. Now it fits a 35- to 37-inch bust.

10• One of the reasons that the Boston Red Sox decided to rebuild the legendary Fenway Park was that the seats were too narrow for today’s baseball fans. The seats in the new ballpark are four inches wider

11• More benches and bigger seats have been installed in Seattle’s Puget Sound ferries to accommodate wider riders.

12• Despite the rising obesity rates and the tremendous impact they are having on Americans’ health and health-care costs, federal and state governments still are doing little to address the problem. To reduce obesity, federal, state and local governments need to mount campaigns to promote healthy eating and physical activity, require calorie labeling in fast food and other chain restaurants, decrease the availability of junk food in schools, make walking and biking safer and more convenient by building bike lanes, sidewalks and trails, increase physical education in schools, restrict junk-food advertising and marketing aimed at children, and put into place other policies and programs that help to make it easier for Americans to eat better and be more physically active.

For more information on what local, state and federal governments can do to promote healthy eating and physical activity, visit www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy.

Sources

1 Phillips D. “Airlines Told to Adjust for Heavier Passengers: FAA Raises Weight Estimates for Safety.” Washington Post, May 13, 2003, p. A4.

2. Nagourney E. “Bigger Needles for Better Vaccinations.” New York Times, November 28, 2000, p. F9.

3. Grady D. “The State of Weight: Many Are Too Fat for the Calipers.” New York Times, January 9, 2001, p. D7.

4. American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Accessed at on July 1, 2002.

5. Mokdad AH, et al. “Prevalence of Obesity, Diabetes, and Obesity-Related Health Risk Factors, 2001.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 2003, vol. 289, pp. 76-79.

6. McGinnis JM, Foege WH. “Actual Causes of Death in the United States.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1993, vol. 270, pp. 2207-2212. Hu F, et al. “Diet, Lifestyle, and the Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Women.” The New England Journal of Medicine, 2001, vol. 345, pp. 790-797.

7. Nifong C. “The Incredible Shrinking Woman.” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), January 5, 1999, p. E1.

8. Boccella K. “Plus Sizes for Kids Make Way into Stores.” Providence Journal, March 24, 2002.

9.Van Allen P. “Chains to Grow with Plus-Sizes.” Philadelphia Business Journal, September 27, 2002.

10. Givhan R. “As Its Market Expands, Nike Elects to Super-Size.” Washington Post,May 3, 2002, p. C2.

11. Patton P. “America's Ever-Bigger Bottoms Bedeviling Seating Planners.” Miami Herald, September 23, 1999.

12. Sanchez R. “A Fitting Problem for Prosperous Century’s End.” Washington Post, April 15, 1999, p. A1.

Diabetes is eating us alive, Part I

How you can be affected by diabetes

image from Australian Gov't Dept of Veterans Affairs







Several of us that work on the DREAMACTTEXAS blog have been deeply affected by diabetes. Donajih just lost her father, and as I am writing this my 47 year old brother is in the hospital and was just told that his kidneys are failing.

Epidemiologists say that Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans have the market cornered on diabetes. I think it is much more complicated than that. And even though some of us may have a genetic predisposition towards diabetes, that does not exonerate western society from all the things it promotes that lead to a diagnosis of diabetes.

Maybe it's the age of McDonalds. When the fast food places started growing like an epidemic throughout the U.S. countryside, many of us didn't think that the food could be dangerous. We all took part. I remember many midnight trips to Jack in the Box when I was in my early 20s.

It could also be like Alzheimer's - we are noticing it more because people are living longer. But then what is to explain the numerous kids in elementary school that are clearly showing signs of impending diabetes (the ominous black mark on the child's back of the neck)? This symptom is called "Acanthosis nigricans" - and " is often associated with conditions that increase your insulin level, such as type 2 diabetes or being overweight. If your insulin level is too high, the extra insulin may trigger activity in your skin cells. This may cause the characteristic skin changes." (from Mayo Clinic webpage ) Acanthosis is considered a precursor to developing diabetes.

Diabetes is eating us alive, Part II

detail of image from the New York Times





continued

One culprit that is increasing the incidence of diabetes is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This concoction is a cheap sweetener, much less expensive than regular sugar. Food processors everywhere are using it. It is in regular bread, hot dog buns, hamburger buns, crackers, breakfast cereal, cookies, catsup, soft drinks, juice, and any number of food products. A few days ago I bought some vegetarian sushi and found it also contained high fructose corn syrup! This concoction does something strange to our system and fools our bodies into becoming insulin resistant.

A team of noted scientists, headed by Chi-Tang Ho* found that soft drinks sweetened with HFCS are up to 10 times richer in harmful carbonyl compounds, such as methylglyoxal, than a diet soft drink control. Carbonyl compounds are elevated in people with diabetes and are blamed for causing diabetic complications such as foot ulcers and eye and nerve damage."

"Other foods that contain High Fructose Corn Syrup: Coke, Pepsi and Snapple iced tea to Dannon yogurt and Chips Ahoy cookies. It also lurks in unexpected places, like Ritz crackers, Wonder bread, Wishbone ranch dressing and Campbell's tomato soup."(from NYT)





*Chi-Tang Ho (Chinese: 何其儻; born 1944) is a Chinese-born American food scientist. He received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1974 and immediately started working professionally as a researcher and professor in the food science department at Rutgers University. He is now director of the food science graduate program at Rutgers.

Prince William County's Segregationist History

Image from Princeton University Press

Prince William County Virginia has been in a "racial stalemate"* for a long time, before Clinton, before the two Bushes, before Vietnam - back to 1959. That year PWC shut down its public schools in order to avoid the Supreme Court's rule on school desegregation. The shut down lasted for five years. The white kids went to private academies, but where did the black kids go to school?

Now that I have read Sara Fritz' op-ed piece I wonder why anyone in the world would want to move to PWC - I don't think that even South Africa schools have separate cheer leading squads anymore, but sure enough they still exist in Prince William County Virginia.

For all the Latinos in PWC, please consider moving to Houston. Our city is not perfect, but at least our public high school cheer leading squads are integrated.

In Virginia, a Small Town's Racial Lessons

Sunday, May 4, 2008; B08
Washington Post

Amid the controversy last week over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's latest comments and his relationship with Sen. Barack Obama ["Obama Calls Minister's Comments 'Outrageous,' " front page, April 30], it might be useful to take a look at some of the racial politics we've had in our region. The tiny town of Farmville in Southside Virginia offers a rich case study in what Obama has called "the racial stalemate," the failure of black and white people to openly discuss their mutual resentments.

In 1959, Prince Edward County shut down its public schools for five years to resist the racial integration ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. The white children went to a hastily organized private academy that was subsidized by the state government; the black kids were left to fend for themselves.

Today, blacks and whites in Prince Edward County still live racially isolated lives. The children of well-off white residents attend the private school established in 1959, leaving the predominantly black public schools starved for resources. The high school even has two cheerleading squads: one black, one white.

There has been precious little racial healing in Prince Edward County because white and black folks avoid discussing what happened there. None of the town fathers ever admitted the school shutdown was wrong. African Americans deprived of an adequate education continue to seethe with anger, passing it on to their children and grandchildren.

Obama, in his Philadelphia speech on race, called on Americans to participate in a genuine dialogue about racial attitudes. Conservatives dismissed his suggestion, comparing it to President Bill Clinton's now largely forgotten "national conversation on race" in the 1990s. Others saw it only as an effort to rescue Obama's presidential bid.

Yet even in Farmville, there is evidence that Obama's proposed remedy can work. For more than a year, members of the Prince Edward Dialogue for Reconciliation -- both black and white -- have been meeting monthly to openly discuss their prejudices with each other. It is the first time that any of them have talked about these issues in a biracial setting.

The results are remarkable. Despite some bitter exchanges, members of the group have developed strong personal bonds. Their most healing conversation came the night they were asked to recall a time of suffering in their lives. While the black men and woman mourned the loss of their life's potential for lack of education, whites acknowledged the town's tragic history had left them with feelings of loss and guilt. In such moments, blacks and whites recognize their common humanity.

Two weeks ago, the process expanded when the community's black and white pastors came together for the first time to discuss how they can assist racial reconciliation. When they meet again on May 17, they will discuss new ways to bring their congregations together.

Social science supports this approach. Two Smith College professors, Joshua Miller and Susan Donner, published a study showing that well-run small group racial dialogues offer perhaps the best alternative for improving race relations. They concluded: "If the talk is genuine talk, informed talk and persistent talk, it will identify the waste, cost, evil and tragedy of institutional racism."

Building racial trust does not require an expensive national program. It can be accomplished in small, voluntary gatherings hosted by local churches, schools and civic groups. But we must encourage open conversations about race. As we have seen recently in Farmville and in the presidential campaign, we can and we must try to end "the racial stalemate."

-- Sara Fritz

Washington

The writer, a Washington journalist, is working on a book about the racial history of Prince Edward County.

*racial stalemate, a term used by Barack Obama

Rick Noriega needs your help!

Know any kids who might want to intern/volunteer with Rick's campaign this summer?

http://ricknoriega.com/pages/bootcamp

Draw your view of immigration and win big!!

Win $500 with Student Voices Immigration Illustration

Student Voices is looking for your view on the immigration debate. Lend your voice to the debate by creating an illustration, political cartoon or piece of art about Mexican/American immigration reform and you could win $500.

Click on the title of the post to redirect you to www.studentvoices.matt.org

Students have 75 days left to submit their drawing. I encourage all talented young students to participate. This is a great opportunity that will lead your destiny into a brighter one future..

I'm back...

Dear readers,

It has been over two months since my last post.

Please everyone educate yourself and others about DIABETES!

It's a silent killer.

donajih-

Immigration, Fascism, and Berlusconi, Part I

Mussolini & Berlusconi. Image from berlusconite.blog.excite.it

A few years ago, a colleague of mine from Brazil told me about her theory regarding the rise of the new right. It seemed like a novel idea, and as time has passed I agree with her more and more. She said that globalization, technology and the diminishing boundaries between countries, ethnic and racial groups were making people really anxious - and the result was a resurgence of right wing ideology. The article below from the Guardian of London spells it out in scary detail -

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The triumph of the right?

Silvio Berlusconi has swept back into the presidential palace, the far right have won Rome's mayoral election - no wonder many Italians are worried their country is slipping back into its dark past. But are comparisons between the new right and Mussolini's fascists accurate, wonders Tobias Jones

• Tobias Jones
• The Guardian,
• Friday May 2 2008
  

The images of voters celebrating the recent election results in Italy were as eloquent as they were alarming: amid the sea of