Beyond Walls and Cages

Old jail to become for-profit detention center

2010-08-12T14:16:00.001-07:00

by Yasmine Regester

Carolina Peacemaker

Originally posted 8/11/2010

Plans are underway to turn the existing Guilford County jail in Greensboro into a for-profit detention center.

FaithAction International House, an organization that advocates for immigrant and refugee rights, is voicing concerns that law enforcement will be looking for people to detain in order to recoup some of the new jail costs. “I think it’s a really bad policy for us to be trying to raise money by incarcerating people. It creates a conflict of interest for law enforcement because it causes them to focus on capturing people and getting them in jail because there is a profit to be made, rather than on protecting public safety. It goes against every value that professional law enforcement should be upholding,” said Rev. Mark Sills, executive director of FaithAction International House.

He added, “This is a huge incentive to look for people to incarcerate, it just won’t be undocumented immigrants, they (law enforcement) will be looking for every excuse possible to fill up those beds.” Sills also accused Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes of stating publicly that the old jail will house federal inmates and immigrant detainees.

Barnes said, “Immigrant detainees are federal inmates. The state doesn’t deport people, the federal government does. We will house anybody they (federal government) want to put in there. That will be their call.”

Barnes says he is looking for ways to pay for the new jail and has found the solution in the old jail. He has proposed to use the existing Guilford County jail in Greensboro to house federal inmates. According to Barnes, this strategy will shift the tax burden of operating the new jail from the county to the federal government. “Basically what we’re looking to do is house federal prisoners which we are paid for by the federal government,” said Barnes. A $115 bond referendum approved in November 2008 for a new county jail has been put towards new jail construction costs and renovation costs to the old jail.

Once construction on the new jail is complete, renovations on the old building will begin. “The old building needs to be refurbished; once that is completed it will be eligible to receive inmates such as Mecklenburg and Alamance County does. Jails all across the state keep federal prisoners but we can’t because we are overcrowded. We can end up making enough money to take care of the debt service on the new jail, which will make it a lot easier on citizens because it is less they will have to pay,” said Barnes. Debt service consists of day to day operation costs, which Barnes says is about $10 million a year, and repayment for the new jail.

Barnes noted there are no private companies involved and the jail will be run by the sheriff’s department.

According to Barnes, Mecklenburg County gets a little more than $100 a day to house federal inmates. “I think Mecklenburg County gets about $100 a day per inmate, so I’m hoping somewhere in that ballpark. We’re talking about money that local taxpayers won’t have to pay towards the repayment of building the new jail.”

Since the Middle District of North Carolina’s federal court is located in Greensboro, Barnes believes having a local federal prison will help eliminate heavy costs and hassle of transporting inmates from other cities to Greensboro.

“We used to keep federal inmates and it generated money to go towards a revenue source to help the county pay for the operation of their jails.” Barnes noted that there could be legal complications from turning a profit on housing federal inmates in the new jail because bond money is being used to pay for construction. Therefore, the new jail will not be used as a federal prison but will free up space in the existing Guilford County jail which is already paid for.

Gerald Chapman, immigration attorney at Chapman Law Firm in Greensboro believes that a detention center in Greensboro will increase fear within the community, particularly the immigrant community. “The fear is already there. The immigrant community already feels that law enforcement has got it in for them. The fact that we will have a federal detention facility here in Guilford County is more geography than anything. The real issue is the administration’s emphasis on enforcement and appropriate strategies for dealing with the undocumented population. The fact that we will have a detention facility that will hold people in federal immigration detention temporarily, I think its part of a real bad idea.”

Chapman also noted that if government wants to secure the borders a more comprehensive worker visa program needs to be created that will make the legal system work for both the worker and the employer. “With a worker visa program in place, you won’t need to have this kind of enforcement. We are spending so much money on this, it is absolutely astounding,” said Chapman.

According to the county’s law enforcement officials, Guilford County’s jail has long ago reached capacity, exceeding the 397 limit with a total inmate population currently at 507. The new completed jail will have seven floors, housing a combination of individual cells, dormitory cells, and four man cells, as well as recreation centers, a medical and dental center. There will also be 45 beds designated for substance abuse inmates. Renovations on the old jail will include a new sprinkler system, and improvements to the building to aid in the supervision of inmates.
http://www.carolinapeacemaker.com/news/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=104703&sID=4&ItemSource=L

Youth on the Dividing Line

2010-08-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Youth on the Dividing Line: Life in Tucson, AZ from Barni Qaasim on Vimeo.

All U.S. counties on Mexican border now share inmate fingerprints with feds

2010-08-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

Homeland Security Newswire
August, 11, 2010

All 25 U.S. counties along the Mexican border are now enrolled in the Secure Communities project; federal immigration officials now have access to the prints of every inmate booked into jail in these counties; Secure Communities makes the notification automatic; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which plans to implement the program nationwide by 2013, says the program has identified more than 262,900 illegal immigrants in jails and prisons who have been charged with or convicted of criminal offenses, including more than 39,000 charged with or convicted of violent offenses or major drug crimes; ICE expects to remove 400,000 illegal immigrants this year; of the 200,000 illegal immigrants deported in the first ten months of fiscal year 2010, 142,000 illegal immigrants were with criminal records and about 50,000 were noncriminals; immigrant advocates say that some counties use Secure Communities to deport noncriminals: the national average of noncriminals flagged by Secure Communities is about 28 percent, but in Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of those removed through Secure Communities were noncriminals

Sharing of fingerprints in the Secure Communities program has led to hundreds of thousands of deportations // Source: sanfranciscosentinel.com

U.S. Immigration officials now have access to the fingerprints of every inmate booked into jail in all twenty-five U.S. counties along the Mexican border, DHS secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday, saying the program was a way of identifying and deporting “criminal aliens.”

Napolitano’s announcement came as immigrant rights activists criticized the fingerprinting program, known as Secure Communities, after obtaining documents showing that more than a quarter of those deported under its auspices had no criminal records (“Fingerprint sharing through Secure Communities led to deportation of 47,000,” 10 August 2010 HSNW).

Read more:

http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/all-us-counties-mexican-border-now-share-inmate-fingerprints-feds

Rights Groups Release Documents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency FOIA Lawsuit, Reveal Federal Government Has Been Dishonest with State and Local Police about its “Secure Communities” Program

2010-08-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

Groups Call “Secure Communities” Program a Racial Profiling Dragnet That Undermines Community Policing and Public Safety

August 10, 2010, New York, NY — Today, the National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law released internal government documents newly obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in a New York federal court in April. According to advocates who have reviewed the documents, they reveal a pattern of dishonesty regarding the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency’s “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) program. While ICE officials have declared their intention to expand S-Comm into every jurisdiction in the country by 2013, information about the nascent program has been scarce, and the development of operational details has been shrouded in secrecy.

S-Comm, which currently operates in 494 jurisdictions in 27 states, functions like the controversial 287(g) program and Arizona’s SB1070, making state and local police central to the enforcement of federal immigration law. The program automatically runs fingerprints through immigration databases for all people arrested and targets them for detention and deportation even if their criminal charges are minor, eventually dismissed, or the result of an unlawful arrest.

After reviewing the ICE documents and other information, advocates for NDLON v. ICE found evidence supporting the following primary claims. First, that ICE has been dishonest with the public and with local law enforcement regarding S-Comm’s true mission and impact. While ICE markets S-Comm as an efficient, narrowly tailored tool that targets “high threat” immigrants, it actually functions as a dragnet for funneling people into the mismanaged ICE detention and removal system. ICE’s own records show that the vast majority (79%) of people deported due to S-Comm are not criminals or were picked up for lower level offenses. Second, that the program serves as a smokescreen for racial profiling, allowing police officers to stop people based solely on their appearance and arrest non-citizens, knowing that they will be deported, even if they were wrongfully arrested and are never convicted. Preliminary data confirms that some jurisdictions, such as Maricopa County Arizona, have abnormally high rates of non-criminal S-Comm deportations. And lastly, the impression ICE fosters that S-Comm is not mandatory and jurisdictions can opt out is riddled with questions.

In fact, California Representative Zoe Lofgren, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law, wrote a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking for clarification on the program. The July 27 letter, which had not previously been made public, is available here.

“These records reveal a dangerous trend,” said Pablo Alvarado, NDLON Executive Director. “This program creates an explosion of Arizona-like enforcement at a time when the results have proven disastrous. Thanks to S-Comm, we face the potential proliferation of racial profiling, distrust of local police, fear, and xenophobia to every zip code in America.”

Said CCR attorney Sunita Patel, “S-Comm co-opts local police departments to do ICE’s dirty work at significant cost to community relations and police objectives. Without full and truthful information about the program’s actual mission and impact, police are operating in the dark. The bottom line is that thrusting police into the business of federal immigration enforcement isn’t good for anyone.”

Said Bridget Kessler, Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, “ICE is racing forward imposing its S-Comm program on new states and localities every day, without any meaningful dialog or public debate. ICE should immediately release the full data that communities need to understand the true costs of the S-Comm program.”

The three organizations will continue to litigate for the release of more data and records to uncover the truth behind S-Comm and other ICE efforts to draft local police into immigration enforcement.

Visit CCR’s NDLON v. ICE case page to read a fact sheet with citations, the text of the administrative FOIA request, the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York on April 27, 2010 and the documents ICE released on August 2, 2010.

Read more: http://uncoverthetruth.org/rights-groups-release-documents-from-u-s-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-ice-agency-foia-lawsuit-reveal-federal-government-has-been-dishonest-with-state-and-local-police-about-its-“sec

House approves more agents, drones on border

2010-08-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

By CHARLES BABINGTON

The Associated Press

Tuesday, August 10, 2010; 3:48 PM

Washington Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/10/AR2010081002464.html

WASHINGTON -- In a rare moment of bipartisanship Tuesday, the House approved $600 million to pay for more unmanned surveillance drones and about 1,500 more agents along the troubled Mexican border.

Getting tougher on border security is one of the few issues that both parties agree on in this highly charged election season. But lawmakers remain deeply divided over a more comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem, and it's unclear if Congress will go beyond border-tightening efforts.

The House passed the bill by voice vote after brief debate and the Senate passed an identical bill last week. But senators must act again, for technical reasons, before sending the bill to President Barack Obama for his signature.

Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, said leaders hope they can give the bill final passage by the end of the week, even though the full Senate is not in session.

The bill would offset its costs by raising fees on foreign-based personnel companies that use U.S. visa programs to bring skilled workers to the United States. These include the popular H-1B visa program. India says higher fees would discriminate against its companies and workers.

The bill includes $176 million for 1,000 new border patrol agents to form a strike force to be deployed at critical areas, $89 million for another 500 customs and immigration personnel, and $32 million to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles or drones.

It also provides $196 million for the Justice Department to bolster its forces of U.S. marshals, and FBI, DEA and ATF agents along the border.

Congress and the White House felt a greater urgency to act on border security after Arizona passed a law directing its law enforcement officers to be more aggressive in seeking out illegal immigrants. A federal judge struck down the law's main provisions, but many voters throughout the country favor crackdowns on illegal immigration.

Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., asked the Senate to move quickly. She said it's time for the federal government "to stop letting us down and start getting the job done" on tighter border security.

Dems Blasted for Border Bill

2010-08-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN

8/6/10 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40765.html

Immigration reform advocates blasted Democrats on Friday for pushing a $600 million border security bill through the Senate, accusing them of trying to placate Republicans who will never be satisfied with the government’s enforcement efforts.

“It is really unfortunate, misguided and a major political misstep,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, an immigrant rights group. “There will need to be a lot of repair work by the Democrat leadership with the immigrant advocacy community.”

In an unexpected move Thursday night, Senate Democrats won approval of a $600 million bill that includes money for 1,500 new border personnel, a pair of unmanned drones and military-style bases along the border. The bill by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), which fulfills a request from President Barack Obama, heads to the House for a final vote as early as next week.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Schumer and McCaskill told reporters in a conference call Friday that the bill paves the way for consideration of a comprehensive reform bill.

“My view is that we had a whole lot of people, both moderate Democrats and Republicans, who said they wouldn’t consider comprehensive reform until we did something about the border,” Schumer said. “It is smart, it is tough, it not punitive. It furthers the ability to get comprehensive reform done.”

But advocates said Republicans outsmarted Democrats, calling their bluff by agreeing to pass the bill by unanimous consent Thursday night. Schumer had introduced the bill only a few hours earlier, leading advocates to surmise that the Democrats never expected the GOP to accept the measure.

“They ate the Democrats’ lunch,” Bhargava said of Republicans, adding that the immigrant advocacy community was in “shock.”

The sharp criticism from immigration groups underscores the divide between advocates and congressional Democrats on political strategy.

Advocates want Democrats to remain focused on passing a comprehensive reform bill that includes a legalization program for 11 million undocumented immigrants, as well as a temporary worker program, an employment verification system and border security measures.

Passing a stand-alone border bill eliminated a bargaining chip for Democrats, they said.

Republicans won't consider any measures other than those that boost enforcement. And since Democrats do not have the numbers to move a comprehensive overhaul on their own, they are trying to meet Republican demands — in hopes that the GOP will accede to a broader reform early next year.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40765.html#ixzz0wDbC3ibF

Students Spared Amid an Increase in Deportations

2010-08-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

By JULIA PRESTON

Published: August 8, 2010

New York Times

The Obama administration, while deporting a record number of immigrants convicted of crimes, is sparing one group of illegal immigrants from expulsion: students who came to the United States without papers when they were children.

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09students.html

Too many laws, too many prisoners

2010-08-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

An International Organ of the OAS Finds that US Deportation Policy Violates Human Rights of Children and Families

2010-08-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

Detention Watch Network

An Urgent Need for Immigration Reform in the United States

Washington DC, August 4, 2010

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States, made public on August 02, 2010, its groundbreaking decision in the case Wayne Smith and Hugo Armendariz et al, v. United States. The Commission found that U.S. deportation policy violates fundamental human rights because it fails to consider evidence concerning the adverse impact of the destruction of families, the best interest of the children of deportees, and other humanitarian concerns.

Mr. Wayne Smith and Mr. Hugo Armendariz, lawful permanent residents of the United States for 25 and 35 years respectively, were deported from the United States for non-violent criminal offenses that had occurred many years prior. They were deported without any opportunity to present evidence of their rehabilitation, their family situation, and the equities in their favor. The refusal to consider this evidence led to substantive violations of the rights of their U.S. citizen family members to establish a family. The United States government also violated the special protections that should be accorded to children who are affected by deportation proceedings.

The Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), the law firm of Gibbs Houston Pauw, and the Center for Global Justice at Seattle University School of Law, legal representatives in the case, call upon the U.S. government to repeal its policy of mandatory deportation and provide comprehensive immigration legislation that protects human rights. “Under the current immigration regime, in many cases judges have no choice but to order deportation. This is the case in spite of the atrocious effects deportation has on the U.S. citizen family and children. This broken system offers judges no opportunity to keep families together”, said, Vivana Krsticevic, CEJIL’s Executive Director.

In this significant decision, the IACHR determined that when a decision-making process involves the potential separation of a family, there must be a hearing in which the judge accepts evidence and applies a “balancing test”, whereby the destruction of family life may be justified only where there is a more compelling need to protect the public order. The Commission found that “a balancing test is the only mechanism to reach a fair decision between the competing individual human rights and the needs asserted by the State.” According to the decision, the U.S. should allow Wayne Smith and Hugo Armendariz to return to the U.S. to be reunited with their families, and they should be given an opportunity to have their day in court – something that they were denied under the current U.S. deportation policy.

“This decision makes clear that there is an urgent need for immigration reform,” said Robert Pauw, lead attorney in the case. “New legislation should prioritize the best interests of U.S. citizen children and the unification of families. Deportation should be reserved for those individuals who present a real danger to our society.”

CEJIL believes that the United States’ compliance with its international human rights obligations is critically important for the U.S., its citizens and residents, and the world. Even in strong democracies with longstanding commitment to the rule of law, human rights treaties serve to safeguard fundamental rights. All Americans benefit when the U.S. commits to upholding certain basic standards of human dignity, and then takes concrete steps to meet these obligations.

Download the PDF of the report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Wayne Smith and Hugo Armendariz et al, v. United States.

Asylum seeker takes his own life after losing legal aid

2010-08-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

by Owen Bowcott and Natalie Hanman
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/01/asylum-seeker-osman-rasul-death-legal-aid
August 1, 2010

For two hours Osman Rasul perched on railings surrounding the seventh floor balcony of a Nottingham tower block. He blanked out police officers attempting to talk him down and at 7pm last Sunday, placing his hand on his heart, he looked up to the sky and leapt.

The 27-year-old Iraqi Kurd, classified by the local refugee centre as a "destitute asylum-seeker" and in a fraying relationship with the mother of his two children, had lost the legal aid he needed to pursue his application to remain in the UK. A trip south to confront Home Office immigration officers in Croydon saw him being turned away and told to find a solicitor.

Nine years of legal limbo, his friends suggested, had induced mounting desperation. Rasul anticipated deportation and all hopes of a life in Britain had evaporated by the time he jumped from Clifford Court tower. The waiting ambulance carried his body to the Queen's Medical Centre. At 7.21pm he was pronounced dead.

Rasul's inability to disentangle his life from the multiple restrictions of the immigration system were not unique. His problems became more acute last month when the charity Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ) was forced into administration, depriving him of access to legal aid and expert immigration advice.

The organisation blamed its demise on a policy of delayed payment by the Legal Services Commission [LSC], which runs the legal aid system in England and Wales. Charities including Amnesty International and Barnado's, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, had unsuccessfully lobbied the government to tackle the cash flow issue.On its dissolution the RMJ warned: "The legal representation of more than 10,000 vulnerable asylum seekers and victims of trafficking, including nearly 900 separated children, is now at risk."

Joanna Petersen, a former case worker for RMJ, said the number of lawyers and immigration advisers available to handle cases declined rapidly after changes made by the LSC four years ago meant solicitors were only paid fixed fees at the end of each case. "RMJ asked the government for it to be paid money it was already owed," Petersen explained. "The answer that came back [in June] was no. So we had to pack everything up. The worst part was boxing up files on which we wrote 'Urgent, Victim of Torture' or 'A Minor, Trafficking Victim' — and not knowing when the cases will ever be dealt with."

According to campaigners and lawyers, the reduction in legal aid is part of a broader national pattern that risks leaving hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people, including asylum seekers and victims of domestic violence, without access to advice.

The £2bn legal aid budget is already expected to be one of the hardest hit in Whitehall, with justice secretary Kenneth Clarke specifying in a recent interview that it was one area "where our cuts can come from".

"The LSC thinking was that they didn't need RMJ because they had plenty of suppliers willing to take on any new cases," Steve Hynes, director of LAG. "It must have been a political decision because it doesn't make financial sense. Everyone who knows about case work knows it isn't as simple as picking up a new case from another firm – there are always extra costs involved."The Law Society says firms providing legal aid are being "wiped out" by changes to the tendering process in which firms competitively bid for and are allocated legal aid work. In the family law sector – which covers domestic violence work – almost half (1,300) of the 2,400 firms have lost their bids, while only 252 of 410 firms applying for immigration and asylum work won contracts.

"Towns up and down the country have been left without a firm," said Richard Miller, head of legal aid policies at the Law Society. "Some firms can switch to private work and keep going. In a lot of cases the firms will collapse and the lawyers will become insolvent, closing down without finishing their current cases. Possibly hundreds of thousands of clients will have lost their current lawyer and will have to find another one."

The LSC insists its new tendering system works well. Its chair, Sir Bill Callaghan, said: "We are confident that we now have a quality provider base, and quality-assured advice provision across England and Wales."

Rasul, who arrived in Britain in 2001 claiming he was in danger from the Kurdish political factions that control northern Iraq, had been refused permission to stay in Britain once but was preparing a fresh claim. He had been receiving food parcels and £10 a month from a local charity, the Nottingham Refugee Forum. He was not allowed to work. "He was living on £20 a month in charitable donations plus gifts of food," said Bea Tobolewska, the manager of the forum. He was not allowed to work. "He was a destitute asylum-seeker and had been sleeping on the streets. When RMJ went into receivership it was his last opportunity of seeing a solicitor," she added.

For the last few months of his life, Rasul relied on the kindness of friends in Nottingham to provide support. Harry Woolner, who works with the homeless in the city, gave him shelter. "Osman had no resources," Woolner said. "He had gone through a traumatic period."

Receiving a letter from RMJ saying they could not help him any more was the last straw, said Woolner.

"He felt he was never able to take control of his life. He was frustrated that his case had not been progressed so he decided to go down to the Home Office [immigration centre] in Croydon and 'hand himself in', saying: 'Either send me home or help me'. He felt he was taking control at last. It was a brave thing to do. But when he got there they said 'Who are you? We don't know you. Get a solicitor'. In terms of his mental state it was too much to take.

"In London he stayed with friends some of the time but also slept rough and was not eating well. He was mentally and physically exhausted when he came back. We didn't realise the severity of the situation.

"He went out for a bike ride on the Sunday," Woolner said. "We thought that was positive. But he did not come back."

Woolner is now trying to raise money for Rasul's body to be returned to Iraq.Rasul was separated from his Polish partner and the mother of their sons, Malgorzata Gajda, 30, who lives in Coventry. She said he had become increasingly distant from their sometimes tempestuous relationship. "He was on the balcony for two hours, I was told. At 6pm that evening I received a call from a private number. I said 'Hello, hello' but no one answered. I'm sure it was him. He wanted to hear me and the kids for the last time."

"The police tried to keep speaking with him. He was very quiet. Then he put his hand on his heart and looked up to God and jumped."

Dasthy Jamal, of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, blamed the immigration system. "The Home Office's immigration policy is responsible for Osman's death. After nearly 10 years he didn't have a chance to build a life here."

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: "Any death of this kind is a tragedy and our deepest sympathies are with Mr Rasul's family and friends. We are working closely with Nottinghamshire police while this matter is being investigated. It would be inappropriate for us to comment further at this stage."

Alan Keyes: Lindsey Graham's Calls To Scrap Birthright Citizenship Are Too Crazy For Me

2010-08-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Evan McMorris-Santoro
August 4, 2010

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/alan-keyes-lindsey-grahams-calls-to-scrap-birthright-citizenship-are-too-crazy.php

Here's something you don't hear very often: a prominent Republican's policy position is too conservative for Alan Keyes. Speaking at a Tea Party Express-sponsored event in Washington this morning, Keyes said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is being irresponsible by suggesting, as he did recently, that the 14th Amendment may have been a bad idea.

Graham told Fox News that he plans to introduce a constitutional amendment that would remove automatic birthright citizenship for all babies born in the United States, even if their parents are here illegally. Graham and other Republicans have been whipping up opposition to the 14th Amendment, which they say encourages illegal immigrants to come to America with the plan to have babies who will automatically become U.S. citizens.

Keyes suggested that he shared the concern over so-called "anchor babies" with Graham and his allies, but he said that "the 14th Amendment is not the problem." Rather, he seemed to suggest, it's a mistaken interpretation of the amendment that's at fault. Changing the wording of the amendment would be a mistake, Keyes said -- and talk like Graham's is downright dangerous.

"The 14th Amendment is not something one should play with lightly," Keyes said in response to a question from ThinkProgress at the Tea Party Express press event today. "Lindsay Graham used the term -- as people have carelessly done over the years -- referring to the 14th Amendment as something that has to do with 'birthright citizenship' and we ought to get rid of 'birthright citizenship.'"

"Well, let me see," Keyes added sarcastically, "If citizenship is not a birthright then it must be a grant of the government. And if it is a grant of the government, it could curtail that grant in all the ways that fascists and totalitarians always want to."

See the Keyes statement on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyoCL_ZeoBs&feature=player_embedded

Illegal immigrants leaving the U.S. can be detained at the border

2010-08-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

by Denis Wagner
The Arizona Republic

NOGALES, Ariz. - Undocumented immigrants who decide to leave the United States because of increasing enforcement and decreasing job prospects now face one more obstacle: the threat of arrest and deportation by border officers inspecting outbound traffic.

When illegal immigrants are detected trying to leave the country, they are not just ushered across the line, said Bonnie Arellano, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Instead, their information is entered into a database before they are allowed to return to Mexico.

Arellano and Guadalupe Ramirez, director at the Nogales port, said the objective is not to deter illegal immigrants who want to leave America but to catch those who have criminal records or are involved in smuggling. For the past year, officials have been conducting round-the-clock screening of southbound traffic. The scrutiny is designed to catch smugglers delivering currency and firearms to Mexican cartels but also has helped identify immigrants heading south.

"The whole idea is there are going to be consequences now for people who come into the United States with the sole purpose of doing illegal activity," Ramirez said. "Our job tells us if we find somebody at a port coming or going that is in violation of our laws, we are going to document it."

Making climate unfriendly

Since April, when Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona's new immigration law, illegal immigrants have been leaving the state. Some are moving to other states and some are moving back to Mexico. Supporters of the law say that's the point: to make the climate in Arizona so unfriendly that illegal immigrants deport themselves.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton blocked key provisions from taking effect, including one that compelled officers engaged in a lawful stop, detention or arrest to, when practicable, ask about a person's legal status when reasonable suspicion exists that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

Although immigrants with otherwise clean records sometimes get caught on their way out of the country, Ramirez said, port inspectors use discretion in deciding whether to formally remove someone. Photos and fingerprints are entered into a database before the person is returned to Mexico, or the person is officially arrested and deported. The consequences of an arrest can be harsh: Those formally deported for unauthorized presence in the United States may be barred for 10 years from seeking legal-immigration papers. In addition, a later arrest for illegal entry may be prosecuted criminally.

During the past 10 months, Arellano said, inspectors in Arizona alone detained more than 5,000 people attempting to leave the country. That number includes those caught with contraband or wanted on warrants, she said, but CBP data does not indicate how many had no violation other than their illegal presence in the United States.

Some immigrant advocates say the CBP policy deters illegal immigrants from leaving the country, even though that's supposed to be the government's goal.

"It demonstrates the inconsistency and contradictions within our laws," said Isabel Garcia, co-chair of Derechos Humanos, an immigrant-rights group in Tucson. "Instead of permitting people who want to leave, we punish them in this fashion. . . . What purpose does this serve?"

Garcia said she believes the objective is to bolster CBP arrest statistics: "It's all about the numbers."

'Safe passage' urged

Even some groups dedicated to border security and immigration controls are critical of the federal policy. William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, last week called on the government to adopt a "safe passage" program allowing undocumented immigrants to depart without negative consequences.

"We are asking the Obama administration to designate border checkpoints that illegal immigrants can use to leave the U.S. without fear," he said. "This is about the only situation we would ever advocate that our immigration laws be waived."

Until last year, the government only sporadically checked vehicles and pedestrians leaving the United States at all Mexican land ports. However, the Obama administration, in an effort to intercept weapons and cartel money, set up full-time checkpoints with barricades on southbound lanes.

Ramirez said the campaign has exceeded expectations in Arizona. Since September, inspectors have seized $4.7 million in southbound cash on the Arizona border ($7 million borderwide), and more than 12,000 rounds of ammunition on the Arizona border.

"On a weekly basis, we make multiple seizures and pick up people who have warrants for rape, child molestation and murder," Ramirez said. He said inspectors, often supported by dogs trained to detect money and firearms, study southbound travelers for body language and bags, as well as other hints of lawbreaking.

"It really comes down to the officers' intuition. How good are your officers' gut feelings?" Ramirez said. "We're looking for the needle in the haystack - the bad guys who mix in with the good guys."

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/20100803illegal-immigrants-leaving-U.S.html#ixzz0vlqoAxTY

A Long Stay

2010-08-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Sunday 01 August 2010

by: Yana Kunichoff, t r u t h o u t Report http://www.truth-out.org/a-long-stay61888

More than 300,000 immigrants languish in detention centers around the country. Why are they there - and who is profiting from their imprisonment?

Pedro Guzman Perez speaks to his wife, Emily Guzman, by phone every evening. They speak around 8 PM, a talk filled with stories about their days, shared projects and love. Sometimes their three-year-old son, Logan, wants to get on the phone too, but usually Logan will be watching a show in another room. They have a great relationship, Emily says, and the conversations are often the highlight of her day.

There are, however, some logistical difficulties. Pedro, a Guatemalan native who was in the country on a work visa, can only speak to his American-citizen wife on the phone for 20 minutes at a time - precious little for a couple sharing the tumult of raising a three-year-old. Each phone card costs $5, and the already staticky connection is easily broken.

This is because Pedro is calling from the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, an immigration detention facility where he has been detained for nearly ten months. Many aspects of Pedro's case led him to the detention center - two ten-year-old charges of marijuana possession, one of which has since been dropped; an administrative mistake by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to which they have admitted; the harsh record of his immigration court judge and even the patchy memory of an older woman whose answers in an immigration interview led the federal government to look into Pedro's status.

But neither Emily, Pedro's lawyer nor the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) thinks these are enough to warrant keeping Pedro under lock and key, away from his family and with tax payers bearing the cost of his prolonged detention.

The Scope

Pedro is one of the 383,524 individuals detained by ICE while they await court dates, deportation or bail. Detention is a key aspect of the federal government's push to deport immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who have committed any crimes or misdemeanors.

More than 3.7 million immigrants have been deported since 1994, and in the past decade, immigration detention has tripled. In 2001, the US detained about 95,000 individuals, compared to the 380,000 detained in 2009.

Detention Watch, a national coalition of organizations working to educate the public about the US immigration detention system, called these measures extremely punitive for individuals going through a civil administrative process.

"US policymakers see detention and deportation as a politically salient 'quick fix' to broken immigration policies and to the complex issues of global and regional poverty and instability," Detention Watch noted in a policy report. "Instead of recognizing and addressing larger economic and political structures that cause people to immigrate, politicians focus on interior and border enforcement as a way to repel people from migrating."

It has been an administration policy across the aisle, with more people being deported per year under President Barack Obama than under his predecessor George Bush.

To the tune of strategies such as Operation Endgame, the March 2004 Department of Homeland Security's ten-year-goal to "remove all removable aliens," the nation now has 270 immigrant detention centers in which individuals picked up for immigration offenses are held.

The rise in immigration detention also has many critics pointing to a more sinister reason than political expedience or security fears - the profit that private prison corporations make from the detention of immigrants like Pedro.

Private Immigration Detention and CCA

One of the most notorious players is the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private immigration detainer. It runs Stewart Detention Center, where Pedro now languishes, and is the sixth-largest correction system in the country, behind only the federal government and four states.

At any one time, CCA houses about 75,000 offenders in more than 65 facilities in 20 states, about half of all immigrants currently detained in private facilities. It shares its business with Geo Group, Cornell Company and Avalon Correction Services, as well as several smaller companies.

In addition to detaining adults, CCA also detains children whose parents are being picked up for immigration offenses, housing them in centers such as the infamous T. Don Hutto Center in Taylor, Texas. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the Hutto Center on behalf of ten juvenile plaintiffs, arguing that they were receiving substandard education, medical care and little privacy.

CCA also runs a slew of other private prisons - in fact, immigration detention makes up for only 40 percent of CCA's revenue, according to its quarterly report.

ICE deals with its $140 million budget deficit by routinely farming out its immigration detention operations to private companies like CCA or state and county prisons. According to Detention Watch, only 13 percent of immigration facilities are ICE-owned and operated. The majority of detainees, 67 percent, are housed in local and county jail facilities, with another 17 percent in contract detention facilities and 3 percent in others such as the Bureau of Prisons.

That 17 percent housed in contract facilities is telling: it's yet another statistic in the story of how US corrections operations are being farmed out to private companies. According to Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, president of the Private Corrections Institute and a former CCA prisoner, ten states have 20 percent or more of their prisoners in for-profit facilities. These states include New Mexico, with 45.8 percent of immigrants housed in private centers; Hawaii, with 35 percent; and Arizona, with 23.1 percent.

Earnings of Immigration Detention

For the 273 days Pedro has been detained, CCA gets paid approximately $140, according to figures from the American Civil Liberties Union. In some of their facilities, such as the Hutto facility in Texas, the average rate ICE is contracted to pay the CCA an average rate of $200 per detained immigrant, per day.

The ICE budget allocated $250 million in 2008-2009 to raise the total number of detention beds to 32,000, while allocating only $10 million in funding to less expensive alternatives to detention, such as electronic monitors and regular visits with case managers.

Five of the most lucrative contracts CCA has with the federal government have no end dates, and several contain clauses that guarantee a certain amount of revenue regardless of the occupancy rates of the jails, the investigate online publication Business of Detention found. The rate of contract renewal is almost 95 percent.

These steady successes have reaped their benefits: CCA has managed to make a record profit every year since 2003. Their revenue in 2009 was $1.67 billion, the company has been estimated to bill $11 million a month, and between 2004 and 2008 the company's stock more than doubled, from $12.15 to $26.86 a share.

Who Else?

However, the profit from immigration detention does not end with CCA. Over 300 city and county governments across the country also have contracts with ICE and house the majority of detained immigrants. This acts as an incentive for local law enforcement to enforce immigration law, usually a national-level enforcement duty. This practice is already in place in some cities and states under the 287(g) Homeland Security program.

In addition, Friedmann notes, other industries that benefit from the boom in detention are prison food corporations, medical care, probation supervision, prisoner transportation services and financial firms that provide bond financing for new prisons.

Telephone access inside the prisons, as the frustrating reality of Pedro and Emily attests, has grown into a lucrative business. Companies such as EverCom run a virtual monopoly, leading to price hikes, in some areas as high as $17.34 for a 15-minute phone call. There have also been reports of county government's receiving kickbacks from phone companies, such as the 44 percent commission Davis County, Utah, makes from inmate phone calls.

Even when immigrants who have been picked up are released on bond, the price is steep: immigration bond can run up to $5,000.

Trimming the Fat

A central part of CCA's continuing profit stream is its ability to cut costs in immigration detention.

The ACLU has sued CCA for overcrowding and substandard medical treatment, and accused CCA of scrimping on the minimal services it is federally required to provide in order to cut costs.

Through his work, Friedmann has found that less training, lower benefits, lower wages and chronic understaffing of private detention facilities not only cuts costs, but also leads to instability in detention centers.

In addition to this, Human Rights Watch noted that ICE detention standards, most recently revised in 2009, are merely internal agency guidelines and do not have the binding authority of federal regulations or statutory law.

Transparency

In a 2008 interview with a former CCA senior quality assurance manager, Business of Detention was told that, when CCA conducts its own internal audits of its facilities, it often downplays violent incidents or attacks on detainees. The source said he was told to make the incidents appear less serious (an act which could have led to the nonrenewal of the center's contract.)

Recently introduced legislation, the Private Prison Information Act of 2009, seeks to require private correctional facilities and other institutions housing federal prisoners to make the same information available to the public that federal prisons and correctional facilities are required to make available. However, it has yet to pass the House.

What Is It Actually Like?

Azadeh N. Shahshahani, the National Security and Immigrant Rights Project Director for the ACLU of Georgia and chairwoman of Georgia Detention Watch, said the lack of transparency regarding immigration deaths is a serious problem.

"We expressed really great concerns about the treatment of the detainees that failed even ICE's own non-binding standards," Shahshahani said. In particular, she has found it difficult to access information regarding the death of Roberto Martinez Medina at Stewart Detention Center, where Pedro is currently being held.

Medina, a Mexican national, died in ICE custody in 2008. "The attorney representing his widow pressed for some records from ICE showing that he complained of chest pain three days before he collapsed," Shahshahani said, but these attempts have so far been unsuccessful.

Since 2003, there have been 111 reported deaths in immigration detention. According to Detention Watch, the majority of these deaths were caused by a lack of timely and thorough medical care. Detainees must request medical services through CCA staff, and as Business of Detention notes, detainees have said that staff members often deny medical care to both reduce costs and push detainees into voluntary deportation.

The psychological toll of detention is also great. Speaking over the crackling connection from Stewart Detention Center, Pedro detailed his difficulty in dealing with his indefinite detention.

Day to day, Pedro says, he deals with both the physical reality of CCA staff who "scream at you, they yell at you; They threaten you; They take your lunch away" and the ever-present threats of being put in solitary confinement for a month. This punishment is meted out for acts such as not being in bed when told three times in a row, says Pedro, who has so far avoided the experience.

But Pedro, who was a stay-at-home dad to Logan while Emily practiced as a mental health therapist, finds missing his family most devastating. "Every day that goes by there is something that he [Logan] does, that he says, that I cannot watch, something I cannot do with him."

Though he has been in the United States since the age of eight and has no memory of, or contacts in, his native Guatemala, Pedro says that it is a constant struggle to continue fighting his case when "Emily could already be with me in South America."

For Emily and Pedro, helping other detainees, many of whom are not bilingual like Pedro, provides a brief respite. During some of their limited phone time, Pedro passes along information to Emily regarding family members or lawyers of detained individuals for her to contact. This action helps them feel less helpless at a time when the only advice they are given is to wait.

Pedro's Story

Pedro's mother arrived in the United States from Guatemala with her young son in tow in 1988, seeking asylum she was never granted from the turbulent political situation following the overthrow of the country's president in 1982.

According to Emily, Pedro's mother's "memory is not great," which proved to be a serious problem when she was called into immigration services for a permanent residency interview. Her responses led to the denial of her request for permanent residence. Because he entered the country with her, Pedro's immigration status was connected with hers, and he was sent a notice to appear in court.

However, as Emily and Pedro's attorney, Glenn Fogle, confirmed, the letter was sent to the wrong address. Yet, Pedro's failure to appear at the court date resulted in the issuance of an order of deportation. The order came to the correct address, and on Monday, September 28, 2009, two black SUVs pulled up to the couple's home in Durham, North Carolina.

Two men handcuffed Pedro and, after allowing Logan to kiss his father goodbye, took Pedro to the first of three jails or detention centers in which he has lived over the past ten months. Immigration authorities have since admitted their initial mistake in sending information to the wrong address and stayed his deportation. Due to entering the detention center with two marijuana convictions, Pedro was not eligible for bail, but after one misdemeanor charge was dropped, the BIA recommended that Pedro be released on bail.

Meanwhile, his immigration judge, a notoriously tough one with an asylum case denial rate of 87 percent, has rejected Pedro's pleas for bond and residency under an asylum program known as the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), under which two of Pedro's siblings have gained residency. Pedro is now appealing with the BIA for both these issues, continuing to fight his case from the inside.

Prolonged Detention

The average length of stay in detention is 37 days, according to ICE, but the ACLU says these numbers are significantly skewed by Mexican nationals, who are often subject to expedited removal.

An Associated Press system snapshot found that, on the evening of March 15, 2009, at least 4,170 people had been detained for six months or longer. Of these, 2,362 were still fighting removal cases before immigration courts.

Pedro is lucky to be among the 16 percent of immigrants, according to the ACLU, who are represented by attorneys.

Fannin Anello, an attorney with the ACLU's Immigrant Rights Project, said another issue with prolonged detention is the trampling of prisoners' due process rights.

"Under the government's interpretation of the mandatory detention law, many people with viable legal challenges to deportation continue to be deprived of their liberty for many months or years," Anello said, adding, "even though they have never had a bond hearing to determine whether detention is necessary in their individual cases."

Laying Down the Law

Federal laws such as those surrounding the penalties for drug crimes also contribute to prolonged detention. Due to his two marijuana convictions, received in 1998 and 1999, Pedro was not eligible for bail.

Three-strikes and truth-in-sentencing laws also contribute to a more punitive system. These pieces of legislation and their desired policy outcomes began their life at ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council.

ALEC is the nation's largest public-private legislative partnership, which counts among its members more than 2,000 state lawmakers, about one-third of the nation's legislators and more than 200 corporations and special interest groups. Included in this list is the Corrections Corporation of America.

Central components of ALEC include ten task forces that work to develop model legislation in different areas, one of which is the Civil Justice task force.

"I am aware personally that CCA executives have been on the board of ALEC," said Friedmann. "The argument there is that CCA is being actively involved in an organization that pushes policy and legislation and therefore benefits the private prison industry."

Though federal law forbids corporations from helping form legislation, any ALEC bill must be approved by both its public and private sector members. Of the group's $6.9 million in annual revenue, about $5.6 million come from its corporate members.

According to an article by Beau Hodai of In These Times, Arizona's recent anti-immigrant bill, SB1070, is very similar to model legislation crafted by ALEC.

Furthermore, CCA retains the federal contract to house detainees in Arizona and would benefit greatly from heavier immigration enforcement in the state. During the bill's formation, Hodai reports, CCA enlisted Highground Consulting to represent it in Arizona.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's spokesman, Paul Senseman, was employed with an organization which lobbied for CCA, and his wife works with the Policy Development Group, which also lobbies for CCA. Brewer's chief policy adviser also lobbies for an organization of which the CCA is a "board level" member.

But CCA's ties with legislators do not end on the state level. According to Hodai, CCA spent nearly $3.5 million in 2005 for lobbying on immigration and national security, $3.25 million in 2007, $4.4 million between 2008 and 2010 lobbying the Department of Homeland Security and more than $175,000 during the 2010 election cycle. Of 43 CCA lobbying disclosure reports acquired by Hodai, only five do not express the intention to monitor immigration reform.

CCA has targeted its lobbying at both Republican and Democratic legislators. It has donated money to the Democratic Congressional and Senatorial Committees, the GOP, senators on the appropriations committee and the subcommittee on Homeland Security.

The path from the legislature to the CCA is also well trod. CCA's Senior Vice President, Mike Quinlan, served as the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1987 to 1992; Kim Porter joined CCA after nearly 25 years with the Immigration and Naturalization Service; and CCA's general counsel, Gustavus Puryear IV, was nominated by Bush for a federal judge seat in the Middle District of Tennessee, CCA's headquarters.

The Paradox

The ACLU notes the paradox in which immigration law and the detention industry have placed people. Forcing them to choose between waiting out their cases in jail indefinitely and giving up their immigration claims means that only the individuals with the strongest cases are most likely to continue to fight - and therefore face lengthy detention.

Pedro continues to wait for the BIA to rule on his eligibility for bond and residency under NACARA, so that he can come home and stay home. But it is a struggle - every day Emily and Logan lose with Pedro while he is detained, the Corrections Corporation of America profits.

Deportations Surge Under Obama | Deportation Nation

2010-08-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

Deportations Surge Under Obama Deportation Nation

Voting Behind Bars

2010-08-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

by Linda Greenhouse
New York Times opinion http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/voting-behind-bars/
July 29, 2010

Another public conversation about race may be the last thing the Obama administration wants, but thanks to the Supreme Court, one is very likely on the way.

It has been nearly three months since the court “invited” — that is to say, ordered — Solicitor General Elena Kagan to “express the views of the United States” on whether laws that take away the right to vote from people in prison or on parole can be challenged under the Voting Rights Act as racially discriminatory.

The order came in a case from Massachusetts, Simmons v. Galvin, an appeal by prison inmates challenging a 10-year-old state constitutional amendment that stripped them of the right to vote while incarcerated. They seek Supreme Court review of a ruling, issued a year ago by the federal appeals court in Boston, that Congress never intended the Voting Rights Act to apply in prison. The federal government was not involved in the case. Now the administration — presumably under the direction of whomever President Obama names to succeed Ms. Kagan as solicitor general — has to come up with a position.

Given the implications of the case, the Supreme Court’s order has received surprisingly little attention. Forty-eight states, all except Maine and Vermont, deny convicted felons the right to vote, a modern version of the old concept of “civil death” for those convicted of serious crimes. In some states, as in Massachusetts, the ban lasts for the duration of the prison sentence. More often, it extends for years longer, through the parole period, as in New York, where in 2006 the federal appeals court rejected a challenge over the dissent of four judges, including Sonia Sotomayor.

The issue of felon disenfranchisement turns the spotlight on some uncomfortable facts about who goes to prison in the United States, a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In every state, the impact on the black community is disproportionate, hardly surprising given that one in nine black men aged 20 to 34 is in prison. Even so, the numbers are startling, with disturbing implications for civic life in a democracy. According to an analysis by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, felony convictions have deprived 20 percent of African-Americans in Virginia of the right to vote, compared with a 6.8 percent disenfranchisement rate for Virginia residents as a whole. In Texas, a similar ratio applies: 9.3 percent for blacks compared with 3.3 percent for Texans as a whole. In New York, 80 percent of those who have lost the right to vote are black or Hispanic. Nationally, an estimated one in seven black men has lost the right to vote.

So clearly, the issue of felon disenfranchisement turns the spotlight on some uncomfortable facts about who goes to prison in the United States, a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than two million people, nearly half of them black, are behind bars, including many whose felony convictions are the result of relatively minor drug offenses.

(The House of Representatives took a step this week toward addressing one aspect of the problem by passing the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the simple possession of crack cocaine and moves toward equalizing the amounts of cocaine in crack and powder form that provoke the same sentences; the previous ratio of 1 to 100 — five grams of crack counting the same as 500 grams of powder — will now be 1 to 18. But the bill does not make any of its provisions retroactive.)

Some scholars of race and criminal justice have warned that the mass incarceration of African-Americans is “The New Jim Crow,” the title of a new book by Michelle Alexander, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. “We have allowed ourselves to be willfully blind to the emergence of a new caste system,” Professor Alexander writes, “a system of social excommunication that has denied millions of African Americans basic human dignity.”

This is where the Voting Rights Act claim enters the picture. Section 2 of the law bars any “voting qualification” that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” (The operative word here is “results”; Congress made clear in a 1982 amendment that Voting Rights Act does not require proof of intentional discrimination.) The civil rights organizations that have filed suits around the country argue that the racially disparate impact of the disenfranchisement laws fits clearly within the Section 2 definition of a Voting Rights Act violation as a matter of the plain meaning of the statute’s text, regardless of what a judge might deduce about Congressional intent or lack thereof.

This was Sonia Sotomayor’s point in her dissenting opinion in the New York federal district court case four years ago. The issue was not complicated, she wrote: “It is plain to anyone reading the Voting Rights Act that it applies to all ‘voting qualifications.’ ” And it was “equally plain” that the New York law “disqualifies a group of people from voting.” Consequently, she continued:

“These two propositions should constitute the entirety of our analysis. Section 2 of the Act by its unambiguous terms subjects felony disenfranchisement and all other voting qualifications to its coverage.”

Judge Sotomayor concluded her one-page opinion with a paragraph that foreshadowed remarks she would make three years later, at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing. “The duty of a judge is to follow the law, not to question its plain terms,” she said, adding that “if Congress had doubts about the wisdom of subjecting felony disenfranchisement laws to the results test of Section 2, I trust that Congress would prefer to make any needed changes itself, rather than have courts do so for it.”

Her opinion did not go unobserved at the time of her nomination to the Supreme Court. “Sonia Sotomayor wants to give jailbirds the right to vote,” the conservative Washington Times wrote in an editorial in May 2009. The newspaper said that her “remarkably dismissive” opinion should “make senators extremely wary of confirming her.”

It is impossible to know from the outside whether the Supreme Court’s “invitation” to the solicitor general was the result of Justice Sotomayor’s internal advocacy, but clearly the issue has the court’s attention. It takes the votes of four justices to “call for the views of the solicitor general” (“CVSG” in Supreme Court jargon). And it takes four votes for the court to accept a case for decision.

The court’s preliminary expression of interest is no guarantee that the justices will eventually decide to hear the Massachusetts case. In late September, the federal appeals court in San Francisco will rehear a case challenging Washington State’s felon disenfranchisement law. A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, splitting 2-1, ruled in January that the law violated the Voting Rights Act in light of “compelling” evidence of racial discrimination in the state’s criminal justice system. (African-Americans make up 3.4 percent of Washington’s population but 23 percent of its prison inmates.) But the full appeals court then vacated the panel’s opinion and ordered the case reheard by an expanded panel of 11 judges. The Washington case, now called Farrakhan v. Gregoire, has been traveling up and down the federal court system since the mid-1990’s and has accumulated a huge record. The justices may prefer to wait to see what the Ninth Circuit does with it.

Whatever the justices eventually decide to do, the Obama administration is on the hook right now, obliged to respond to the May 3 CVSG. There is no formal deadline, but the court’s general expectation is that the solicitor general will take no more than a few months to convey the government’s views when asked. The right-wing critique of Justice Sotomayor’s 2006 opinion, as well as the continued popularity of the disenfranchisement laws — in blue-state Massachusetts, the voting ban was added to the state Constitution by referendum a decade ago when voters approved it by a margin of nearly two to one — demonstrates how politically potent the issue is.

But while the justices have handed the administration a burden, they have also provided an opportunity, as the court’s agenda-setting process occasionally does by prompting other government institutions to confront issues that might more easily go unaddressed. It is an opportunity for public education, for engagement with a painful issue, for leadership.

Arpaio Arrests Dozens in SB 1070 Protests - COLORLINES

2010-08-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

Arpaio Arrests Dozens in SB 1070 Protests - COLORLINES

by Jamilah King

July 29 was a day of civil unrest across the country as hundreds took to the streets to protest Arizona's SB 1070. In Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio wasted no time rounding up protesters. A total of at least 50 people were arrested in Phoenix after peacefully confronting police dressed in riot gear, including several journalists covering the story, as well as faith leaders and at least one formerly elected official. Arpaio's office even had to postpone an immigration sweep scheduled for last night because his officers were too busy rounding up arrested marchers.

The actions in Phoenix began at dawn as protesters marched to Arpaio's office chanting," Sheriff Joe, we are here, we will not live in fear." The sheriff has taken criticism for years because of his frequent immigration sweeps and treatment of detainees.

As marchers gathered outside a Phoenix courthouse and blocked entry to a local jail, Arpaio demonstrated his landmark hubris.

"My deputies will arrest them and put them in pink underwear," Arpaio said, referring to one of his odd methods of punishment for prisoners. "Count on it."

Those arrested included civil rights leaders, politicians, clergy, and attorneys who had attempted to provide legal counsel to marchers.

At least three people were arrested at the courthouse, including former state Sen. Alfredo Gutierrez.

Hundreds of people also reportedly gathered at the county jail, where they beat on a metal door and blocked police entry. At least 32 people were arrested, including a photographer for the Arizona Republic.

Aarti Shahani reported for New America Media that Sunita Patel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who flew to Phoenix from New York to provide legal counsel to detained protesters, was also arrested and taken to Third Avenue Jail.

Longtime Phoenix civil rights leader Salvador Reza was also arrested, along with faith leaders, including Reverend Susan Frederick-Gray.

Hundreds gathered in cities across the country to protest Arizona's SB 1070. At least 300 marchers gathered in New York City, and of the 200 who protested yesterday in Los Angeles and shut down Wilshire Boulevard, at least 30 were arrested.

The battle against SB 1070 is far from over. Several lawsuits are still pending, and Gov. Jan Brewer has filed an appeal of a federal injunction earlier this week.

A Movement Rises in Arizona

2010-08-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

by Jordan Flaherty
Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-flaherty/a-movement-rises-in-arizo_b_663567.html
July 29, 2010

Three months ago, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the notorious SB 1070, a bill that put her state at the forefront of a movement to intensify the criminalization of undocumented immigrants.

Since then, activists have responded through legal challenges, political lobbying, grassroots organizing and mass mobilizations. More than a hundred thousand people from across Arizona marched on the state capitol on May 29. Today, hundreds more have pledged to risk arrest through nonviolent direct action. These are the public manifestations of a widespread struggle happening in this state. The organizations leading this fight offer a template of inspiring and strategic action for people around the US who want to join in resistance to these policies.

A Rogue State

Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction against sections of Arizona law SB 1070, which is scheduled to go into effect today. The judge put a hold on some of the most outrageous parts of the bill, such as language that mandates racial profiling by officers. However, Judge Bolton left much of the rest of the law intact, including sections that specifically target day laborers.

For Arizona activists, the legal ruling represents -- at best - a small respite. "It's not a victory, it's a relief," says Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). "We're putting a band aid on a wound."

Alvarado and the organizers with NDLON are part of a broad network of national organizations and volunteers who have joined with local organizers to fight not just against this unjust law, but also against a general climate of anti-immigrant hatred. "Arizona is a rogue state," says Alvarado. "We're going to use every single means that we have at our disposal to fight back."

Puente Arizona, a Phoenix-based organization that describes itself as a human rights movement working to "resurrect our humanity," has formed Barrio Defense Committees in neighborhoods across the city. Emulating the structure of groups founded by popular movements in El Salvador, the community-based structure work to both serve basic needs, and also build consciousness and help bring people together. The committees host regular "know your rights" trainings and ESL classes, and are organizing Copwatch projects. "We ask the community to unite and organize themselves," says Puente activist Diana Perez Ramirez. "And we are just there to support that." More than one thousand people have joined these neighborhood organizations so far, with more joining every day.

Puente has made use of volunteers from across the US, utilizing national support to help with local organizing, and initiating direct action with the support of out of town allies like The Ruckus Society, Catalyst Project, and various chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They have issued calls to action including a Human Rights Summer (modeled after the civil rights movements' Freedom Summer) and "30 Days for Human Rights," a month of actions culminating in mass civil disobedience today, the day SB 1070 will become law.

Just after midnight, as the law took effect, the first protest of the day began. Nearly 80 people blocked the intersection at the entrance to the town of Guadalupe, a small -- one square mile -- Native American and Latino community just outside of Phoenix. Residents and elected leadership in the town have a history of public criticism of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has been one of the main public faces of SB 1070, and most of the protesters (and all of the organizers) were from the community. Holding signs declaring their opposition to the new law and leading chants against police brutality, activists declared that Arpaio's officers are not welcome in their town -- a point they made concrete by physically blocking the main road leading in. The stand off against police lasted more than an hour before protest leaders in consultation with the town's mayor decided to open the intersection. Several more actions are planned for throughout today, and Arpaio has threatened mass arrests.

Working Proactively

The Repeal Coalition, a Flagstaff- and Phoenix-based grassroots organization, was formed in 2007. The group came together because they saw a vacuum in the immigrants' rights movement in Arizona. "Some of the left here were not being very audacious," explains Luis Fernandez of the Repeal Coalition. "The positions in the public debate ranged from 'kick them all out,' to 'get their labor and then kick them out.'" The Repeal Coalition has staked out a position of calling for the elimination of all anti-immigration laws, declaring, "We fight for the right for people to live, love, and work wherever they please." With this call, says Fernandez, "Now we can have a real debate."

When the coalition was founded, organizers brought in labor activists to advise them on how to build an organization along similar models to those that have built strong unions, utilizing house calls, neighborhood mapping, and group meetings. Although they are an all-volunteer group with little to no funding, they have developed a structure that has initiated large protests and provided direct service, and they are now strategizing more ways to take direct action and non-compliance in the post SB 1070 era.

Fernandez says that this struggle is ultimately about overcoming fear and moving from reaction to proactive action. "We've been in a crisis in Arizona for a long time," he explains. "Even if SB 1070 weren't implemented, it wouldn't matter. The political crisis would continue." To address this crisis, Fernandez believes organizations must build unity across race and class. "Traditionally in America, when the working class starts suffering, instead of connecting together and looking upwards at the cause of the problem, they look sideways or downwards for who to blame." Most importantly, he believes activists must take action to seize the initiative.

In this vision, he has been inspired by young organizers working on the DREAM ACT, a federal law that creates a path to citizenship for undocumented youth. "They came to Arizona and said, 'we're undocumented and we're going to commit acts of civil disobedience.'" At first, Repeal Coalition members tried to talk them out of this action, but the youth explained, "We are going to lose our fear because it is the fear of being arrested or the fear of being deported that fuels the inability of political action." The bravery and vision of these youth has inspired Fernandez to continue to search for new and bold ways to take action, rather than just continually respond to right wing attacks. "We need to set the agenda," explains Fernandez. "We have to say, 'No, you're going to react to us.'"

Despite a range of tactics and philosophies, one thing organizers here have in common is a dedication to exporting the lessons of their struggle. While Arizona's law is the first and most draconian, similar laws are pending across the country. And during this current national economic crisis, more and more politicians have found that they can score political points by demonizing immigrants. "The last two months we've had a lot of people calling us asking what they can do to help Arizona," says Fernandez. "We say, organize in your own town. You don't have to come to Arizona because Arizona is coming to you."

In Colorado, Debate Over Program to Check Immigration History of the Arrested

2010-08-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

By DAN FROSCH

New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30colorado.html

Published: July 29, 2010

DENVER — In September 2008, a Guatemalan immigrant named Francis Hernandez sped his S.U.V. through a busy Aurora intersection and plowed into a pickup truck, knocking it into an ice cream parlor.

Three people were killed, including a 3-year-old boy.

Mr. Hernandez, as it turned out, was in the country illegally and been arrested more than a dozen times over the years, but had managed to elude deportation.

A task force recommended that Colorado institute a federal background check program called Secure Communities, which helps the authorities check an arrested person’s immigration history through a government database, for possible deportation.

Now, as Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. weighs whether to use Secure Communities, already in effect in 480 jurisdictions in 27 states, immigrant rights groups have been privately pushing him to reject the program. Critics say it promotes racial profiling by the local police and would undermine trust between immigrants and law enforcement, in a state that has particularly strict immigration laws.

“Secure Communities is an overbroad dragnet that will end up destroying communities and families while driving victims and witnesses underground,” said Hans Meyer, policy coordinator for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition.

But officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the federal agency that runs Secure Communities, says the program is shoring up a system that has allowed illegal immigrants with criminal records to escape notice.

“It allows ICE and local law enforcement agencies to know as much as possible about people in local custody without any additional costs or procedural changes by local officers,” said Richard Rocha, deputy press secretary for the agency.

Under Secure Communities, created in 2008, people arrested have their fingerprints run through an immigration database, a process that takes only a few hours and is swifter and more efficient than the old method of local law enforcement making referrals to ICE. If they have had prior contact with immigration authorities — like having been previously deported, having been detained or having applied for a work visa — their names will appear in the database and the authorities can place an immigration hold on them.

Congress has allotted $550 million to pay for the program so far, and Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said she wants it available to every law enforcement agency by 2013.

Nearly three million people have been screened since the program’s debut in Harris County, Texas, in October 2008, through June of this year.

Of those, 39,054 were identified as having committed violent crimes like rape, murder and assault, and 9,831 have been deported. Of an additional 223,752 people who had committed less serious offenses, ranging from property crimes to misdemeanors, 24,805 were deported.

Mr. Rocha says the priority is finding violent criminal illegal immigrants. But critics say that most illegal immigrants identified by Secure Communities have committed low-level offenses and that the program is like an immigration sweep.

Bridget Kessler, a teaching fellow at Benjamin N. Cardozo law school at Yeshiva University in New York said the Obama administration was acting hypocritically by pushing for Secure Communities.

“It seems that the administration is speaking out of both sides of its mouth: standing strong to condemn state-imposed ICE and local partnerships in the context of Arizona, and quietly but forcefully, and on a much larger scale, promoting similar state-imposed ICE and local partnerships nationwide,” Ms. Kessler said.

Cheryl Little, executive director for the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami, said: “ICE claims, as it has done for years, that it is targeting dangerous criminals. Yet the program screens the fingerprints of anyone arrested by local police, not just those convicted of crimes.”

Florida is one of three states that have carried out the program statewide (Virginia and Delaware are the others).

Lt. Michael Lindsay, with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, said the program was effectively ferreting out illegal immigrants. “You’re being deported for being in the country illegally,” Lieutenant Lindsay said. “The crimes bring them to our attention. And the more heinous the crimes just gets them a front seat.”

Opinion on Secure Communities is divided among law enforcement in Colorado.

Keith Ikeda, the police chief of Basalt, a small mountain town with a sizable Hispanic population, said, “If we start talking about misdemeanor arrests and traffic infractions, then I believe it erodes the public trust.”

But Lance Clem, a spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which supports the program, predicted it would discourage racial profiling because everyone is subject to the same background check.

There is also the issue of the program accidentally ensnaring victims of crimes, particularly domestic violence, where the perpetrator can be unclear.

Domestic violence and immigrant rights’ advocates in Colorado have said that those arrested for domestic violence should not be subject to a Secure Communities screening until they are convicted, and that the program should exempt victims of crimes.

Mr. Ritter, a Democrat who is not seeking a second term, has not indicated whether he will sign on for the program.

Lost in the debate over the issue is the fact that Secure Communities would not have identified Mr. Hernandez, who was sentenced to 60 years in prison for vehicular homicide, had it been operating at the time, according to ICE.

Because Mr. Hernandez came into the country as a child and used multiple aliases to avoid deportation, ICE said, he was never referred to immigration officials despite his many arrests.

Deportation Madness

2010-08-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

by Melissa del Bosque
Texas Observer http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/deportation-madness
July 21, 2010

Carlos Roybal always thought of himself as an American. Born in Chile, he’d lived in the United States legally since he was five months old, growing up in a middle-class Miami neighborhood. In 2006, Roybal was studying to become a sound engineer at Miami Dade College. “That was my dream,” he says.

When Roybal—who asked that a pseudonym be used for this story—returned to the United States from a vacation in January 2006, things turned nightmarish. After Roybal presented his permanent resident card to U.S. immigration authorities, they checked it against a Department of Homeland Security database and found that he had a criminal record—dating back almost a decade—of two misdemeanor convictions for possessing half a marijuana joint and a single tab of LSD. That August, Roybal was ordered to appear in immigration court. He was deported to Chile, a country he had not visited since infancy—and where only a few of his relatives remained.

Like tens of thousands of others, Roybal had been swept up in the U.S. government’s push to deport immigrants—legal immigrants included—with multiple convictions. “I never thought in a hundred years that I would be deported,” he tells the Observer, speaking by phone from Chile. His father’s sudden death when he was 18 had led him to experiment with drugs briefly, he says. “I was trying to run away from myself and my problems.”

Roybal made another mistake during that difficult period. Roybal’s father, unlike most of his family, had refused to become an American citizen, declaring himself a proud Chilean. After his death, Roybal decided that he would honor his father by eschewing U.S. citizenship too.

When ICE agents locked him up in a Miami detention center to await his hearing, Roybal remembers thinking there had to be a mistake. “They took my clothes and told me I’d need to sign some papers to get them back,” he recalls. “I signed the papers. Then an agent came to me and said, ‘We’re sending you to Texas.’”

For any detainee, that is bad news. Roybal became one of thousands of immigrant detainees shipped to Texas in recent years—partly because the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which encompasses Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has a well-earned reputation as the nation’s toughest on immigration cases. Immigrant advocates charge that tens of thousands of detainees have been sent to Texas in recent years so their cases will be heard in the 5th Circuit. (Another, more pragmatic, reason: There are more detention beds here.)

Because Roybal wasn’t a U.S. citizen, he had no right to a court-appointed attorney. Unlike 86 percent of detainees in Texas, he had the means to afford a private immigration attorney. Still, he couldn’t stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement from holding his hearing in Texas, though his lawyer and family were in Miami.

Roybal and his attorney got the customary 20 minutes with an immigration judge. “I had already been in detention for two months,” he says. “The judge said I’d be charged with an aggravated felony”—a deportable offense. “My heart just sunk, and I couldn’t believe it. That’s when reality set in.”

Roybal refused to sign his deportation papers. After five months at the Port Isabel Detention Center near Brownsville and the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, he gave in. “I had no shoes for two-and-a-half weeks, and the food was so awful I wouldn’t even feed it to a dog,” he says. “They just wore you down.”

By the time Roybal reached Chile, news came that his mother had died back in Florida. His request for a temporary visa to attend her funeral was denied by ICE. “It’s still very hard to think about,” he says. “I was in the United States legally and had never committed any serious crimes. I thought deportation was for the bad guys—drug cartel members and murderers.”

Increasingly, the “bad guys” are people with minor offenses like Roybal's. Under much-disputed federal law, ICE maintains that two misdemeanor convictions for drug possession constitute an aggravated felony that mandates deportation. When you’re convicted, immigration judges are then unable to consider other factors, such as good conduct or family hardship, in deportation decisions.

It all began with the sweeping revision of immigration laws in 1996. This reform removed judicial discretion in cases like Roybal’s and expanded the list of crimes that could be defined as aggravated felonies. During the final years of the Bush administration, a renewed push to deport more immigrants landed thousands more legal residents with multiple misdemeanors on their records in detention centers and immigration courts.

Daniel Kanstroom, a law professor who founded Boston College’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, calls it a “radical policy experiment with devastating effects. Deportation was a relatively small-scale operation until the last 15 years or so. Since 1996, though, we have seen a tsunami of deportation because of harsh new laws that, in my view, overreacted to the problem. They removed discretion and mercy, and reduced judicial oversight.”

The results are clear. In 2009, a record 387,000 immigrants were deported. The feds do not report how many were legal immigrants like Roybal, or how many were kicked out of the country for minor drug possession. Immigration attorneys and scholars say the number has skyrocketed. For 2010, ICE set a goal of 400,000 deportations, according to an internal memo unearthed by The Washington Post.

Last month, ICE’s goal became a little harder to reach—and Roybal, along with thousands of others deported for minor drug offenses, got an unexpected shot of hope that he can someday return to the country he calls home.

On June 14, in a decision that received scant media attention, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of Houston resident Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo, whose case was strikingly similar to Roybal’s. Carachuri-Rosendo, who had lived legally in the United States since age 5, had been deemed an aggravated felon in immigration court—stemming from two misdemeanor convictions, one for marijuana possession and one for possessing a single tablet of Xanax without a prescription.

In 2006, Carachuri-Rosendo was deported to Mexico by an immigration judge in the 5th Circuit. The University of Houston’s Immigration Law Clinic took up his case, with law students helping clinic Director Geoffrey Hoffman with the appeals. When the case reached the nation’s highest court, the justices were openly critical of the harsh deportation rulings.

“Here we are talking about two crimes,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during oral arguments. “One is a small amount of marijuana. He gets 20 days in jail. The other is a pill that I never heard of, a Xan-something, and he gets what, 10 days in jail for that.

“If you could just present this scenario to an intelligent person who didn’t go to law school, that you are not only going to remove him from this country, but say, ‘Never, ever darken our doors again’ because of one marijuana cigarette and one Xan-something pill—it, it just seems to me that if there is a way of reading the statute that would not lead to that absurd result, you would want to read the statute ...”

“What controls is Congress’ judgment,” interjected U.S. Attorney Nicole A. Saharsky. “And Congress has taken a hard line over the past 20 years on criminal aliens, particularly recidivist criminal aliens.”

The high court, in a unanimous decision written by Justice John Paul Stevens, disagreed. The court ruled that a lawful permanent resident convicted of minor drug possession offenses does not warrant being convicted under federal immigration law as an aggravated felon. Its ruling will have an immediate impact on thousands of immigrants still in the United States fighting their deportations. “Anyone in proceedings in front of an immigration judge, it will allow them to seek relief,” Hoffman says.

For Roybal and thousands of others already deported, there’s a hitch. “The good news is that the Supreme Court says the government was wrong,” Kanstroom says. “The bad news is there is no mechanism to get back into the country, and now people are living a lifetime in banishment.”

The only hope for those already deported is to sail into the uncharted legal waters known as “post-deportation law.” As Hoffman says, “It’s a very open question as to how the government will handle this.” Attorneys and deportees are awaiting guidance from Congress or ICE about how to mount post-deportation challenges and petition for re-entry. There’s no sign so far that clarity is forthcoming. (Nina Pruneda, a spokesperson for ICE, said her agency would not comment “due to ongoing litigation.”)

Lawyers at Boston College’s Post-Deportation Human Rights Project have been trying to help Roybal, to no avail. That’s partly because he was deported by the 5th Circuit—not only the nation’s toughest with deportation cases, but also with post-deportation cases.

When it passed immigration reform in 1996, Congress gave deportees a chance—one chance—to file a motion to reconsider or reopen their cases. The 5th Circuit has ruled that this was inconsistent with an older federal regulation denying any motion to reconsider cases once a person had been deported. While the 10th has ruled similarly, two other circuits—the 4th and 9th—have taken a different view. If Roybal had been deported in these jurisdictions, his attorney could have moved to reopen his case, and he might already be headed back home.

Another case brought by the Post-Deportation Project challenges the courts’ differing interpretations of the law. The attorneys hope that it will end up in the Supreme Court, where the justices can resolve the inconsistencies in interpreting post-deportation law. “We need to come up with a solution for these people,” says Maunica Sthanki, the project’s Supervising Attorney. Even she won’t hazard a guess what that solution might be.

Roybal could end up being a pioneer of post-deportation law. He’s not banking on it. After experiencing the U.S. immigration system firsthand, he doesn’t expect to be back in Miami anytime soon, if ever. Now 33, Roybal teaches English in Santiago while he works on becoming fluent in Spanish—a language he barely spoke when he was deported. His three siblings, his niece, and his grandmother are all U.S. citizens.

His mother had become a citizen, too, shortly before she died.

Roybal is overcome with emotion as he talks about the last time he saw her. He was behind bars at the Port Isabel Center north of Brownsville, fighting to stay in the United States.

Maybe someday he can visit her grave in Florida, Roybal says. “At least the court ruling gives me some hope.” Hope, for those caught up in the United States’ rush to deport immigrants, is a rare and precious thing.

Border Communities Unite to Head Off Militarization

2010-08-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

by Melissa del Bosque
Texas Observer http://www.texasobserver.org/lalinea/border-communities-unite-to-fight-border-bashing
June 2, 2010

National Guard troops are on their way to the border and Republican South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint can’t wait to build himself a 700-mile double layered fence. DeMint has attached his amendment to just about anything moving through the Senate – so far Democrats have defeated DeMint’s attempts.

But what happens when elected officials get down to horse trading over immigration reform? It may not come this year, but it more than likely will come in 2011. What happens when the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress need Republican votes to pass immigration reform?

Border residents already know the answer. They only have to look out their windows at the rusty 18-foot wall. “We’ll get the shaft,” is how one resident aptly summed it up.

Residents are already bracing to become the sacrificial lamb for Democrats desperate for Republican buy-in on immigration reform. They're already seeing it with the 1,200 guard troops and a Predator Drone dispatched to El Paso.

Anticipating this backlash, border community organizations from across the southern border will meet in San Diego this month to strategize. Their goal is to come up with a unified platform of issues important to their communities, and to try and head off a raft of bad border security policies that will only make life on the border more insufferable.

“We’ve got to separate border security from immigration reform,” said Louie Gilot, director of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso. “We need to have an independent voice for the well being of the communities and so the border isn’t sacrificed the next time immigration reform is taken up,” Gilot says.

Participants in the meeting will include the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium (CA), the Border Action Network (AZ), the ACLU Regional Center for Border Rights (NM) and the Border Network for Human Rights (TX) and Texas Rural Legal Aid (TX).

Gilot pointed out that El Paso, where she lives, is the second safest city in the country. This is the case for most border communities on the U.S. side of the border. Despite this fact, where she lives is depicted in the media and by politicians as a “war zone.” So the solutions that policy makers come up with for the border “would be more at home in a war zone,” she says.

“In my opinion what we have already at the border is working,” Gilot says. “The fear of spillover violence is very real but there hasn’t been any spillover violence.”

El Paso doesn’t need National Guard troops, she says. What it needs is more investment in the ports of entry so that goods and people can flow more securely and efficiently between Mexico and the United States. “People wait for hours to cross,” she says.

Border residents would also like to see better training for Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

In my opinion this is something that has needed to happen for a long time. The Texas Border Coalition, which consists of elected officials and business leaders has been advocating for border communities in Texas for the past four years or so. They even have the high powered lobby firm Via Novo working for them in D.C. in an effort to penetrate the D.C. bubble. They’ve had some success but it’s difficult to break through the panic inducing rhetoric in the national media and among D.C. politicians whenever they want to ratchet the fear level up a notch and turn out voters.

A more unified voice from the border is needed to temper the national rhetoric. Because right now, the rest of the nation forgets that the border is the United States too. They seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable for the federal government to seize thousands of acres of private land to build an ineffective fence.

And they also don’t have a problem with the notion of armed troops patrolling American streets. If it weren’t for the Posse Comitatus Act we’d probably have soldiers in the streets today. Soldiers on the border matter to residents because in 1997, 18-year old Esequiel Hernandez, of Redford, Texas, was shot and killed by a U.S. soldier sent on a covert mission to patrol for drug smugglers. Every border resident knows it could happen again.

I remember getting on a plane in McAllen a few years back and having to board under the scrutiny of a National Guard soldier holding a M-4 rifle. It was something you’d expect in a developing country but not in the United States.

Last year El Paso, with a population of 612,374 had 4 murders, while Washington D.C. with a smaller population of 591,833 had 66, according to 2009 FBI statistics.

D.C. officials need to dial down the fear and panic and listen to the people who actually live on the border. Then they might actually come up with a border policy that works.

In the meantime, let’s send the National Guard to D.C.. Sounds like they’ve got a real crime problem. And while we’re at it, let’s build a double layered, eighteen-foot wall around Senator DeMint’s luxury brownstone and see how he likes it.

An Arizona Morgue Grows Crowded

2010-08-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Published: July 28, 2010

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/us/29border.html

TUCSON — Dr. Bruce Parks unzips a white body bag on a steel gurney and gingerly lifts out a human skull and mandible, turning them over in his hands and examining the few teeth still in their sockets.

The body bag, coated with dust, also contains a broken pelvis, a femur and a few smaller bones found in the desert in June, along with a pair of white sneakers.

“These are people who are probably not going to be identified,” said Dr. Parks, the chief medical examiner for Pima County. There are eight other body bags crowded on the gurney.

The Pima County morgue is running out of space as the number of Latin American immigrants found dead in the deserts around Tucson has soared this year during a heat wave.

The rise in deaths comes as Arizona is embroiled in a bitter legal battle over a new law intended to discourage illegal immigrants from settling here by making it a state crime for them to live or seek work.

But the law has not kept the immigrants from trying to cross hundreds of miles of desert on foot in record-breaking heat. The bodies of 57 border crossers have been brought in during July so far, putting it on track to be the worst month for such deaths in the last five years.

Since the first of the year, more than 150 people suspected of being illegal immigrants have been found dead, well above the 107 discovered during the same period in each of the last two years. The sudden spike in deaths has overwhelmed investigators and pathologists at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Two weeks ago, Dr. Parks was forced to bring in a refrigerated truck to store the remains of two dozen people because the building’s two units were full.

“We can store about 200 full-sized individuals, but we have over 300 people here now, and most of those are border crossers,” Dr. Parks said. “We keep hoping we have seen the worst of this, of these migration deaths. Yet we still see a lot of remains.”

The increase in deaths has happened despite many signs that the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally has dropped in recent years. The number of people caught trying to sneak across the frontier without a visa has fallen in each of the last five years and stands at about half of the record 616,000 arrested in 2000.

Not only has the economic downturn in the United States eliminated many of the jobs that used to lure immigrants, human rights groups say, but also the federal government has stepped up efforts to stop the underground railroad of migrants, building mammoth fences in several border towns and flooding the region with hundreds of new Border Patrol agents equipped with high-tech surveillance tools.

These tougher enforcement measures have pushed smugglers and illegal immigrants to take their chances on isolated trails through the deserts and mountains of southern Arizona, where they must sometimes walk for three or four days before reaching a road.

“As we gain more control, the smugglers are taking people out to even more remote areas,” said Omar Candelaria, the special operations supervisor for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. “They have further to walk and they are less prepared for the journey, and they don’t make it.”

Mr. Candelaria said the surge in discoveries of bodies this year might also owe something to increased patrols. He noted that some of the remains found this year belong to people who died in previous years. But Dr. Parks said that could not account for the entire increase this year. Indeed, the majority of bodies brought in during July, Dr. Parks said, were dead less than a week.

Human rights groups say it is the government’s sustained crackdown on human smuggling that has led to more deaths.

“The more that you militarize the border, the more you push the migrant flows into more isolated and desolate areas, and people hurt or injured are just left behind,” said Kat Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/us/29border.html

Federal Judge Won't Block all of Arizona's Immigration Law

2010-07-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

by Alia Beard Rau, Michael Kiefer and Kevin Kiley - Jul. 23, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

The fate of Arizona's tough new immigration law now sits in the hands of U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton.

Bolton held hearings Thursday on two of the highest-profile legal challenges to Senate Bill 1070, making attorneys on both sides of the aisle sweat as she challenged their legal arguments and forced them to focus on specific portions of the law.

The fate of Arizona's tough new immigration law now sits in the hands of U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton.

Bolton held hearings Thursday on two of the highest-profile legal challenges to Senate Bill 1070, making attorneys on both sides of the aisle sweat as she challenged their legal arguments and forced them to focus on specific portions of the law.

She didn't issue a ruling, and it is unknown when she will. But the clock is ticking toward next Thursday, when the law goes into effect.

Bolton did make one thing clear: She has no intention of invalidating the entire law but is considering halting the enactment of a handful of its 14 sections.

The hearings brought out high-profile politicians, media from across the country, high-powered attorneys and hundreds of the law's supporters and opponents.

The morning hearing involved a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil-rights groups and individuals. Three requests from defendants sought to have the suit thrown out; one from the plaintiffs asked the judge for a preliminary injunction, blocking the law from taking effect.

The afternoon hearing focused on a motion for a preliminary injunction filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

SB 1070 allows Arizona police officers who have stopped someone in connection with another violation to question him or her about immigration status if reasonable cause exists to suspect the person is in this country illegally. That person could then be arrested and charged under state law.

Whatever Bolton decides will determine whether SB 1070 takes full effect Thursday or portions of it are held in limbo until the courts have a chance to hear and rule on full cases.

A full court hearing is likely to involve appeals, possibly as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, and could take several years.

During the hearings, Bolton made it clear that she considers SB 1070 not a statute in itself but rather a large combination of new laws and amended existing laws.

She ignored the portions of the law that weren't up for debate, such as restrictions on day laborers, but said she was considering whether to block all or part of certain key sections of the law. She steered the attorneys toward the sticking points in those sections.

Section 2: Enforcement, arrest

There are two parts of this section of the law that Bolton and the attorneys debated.

The first prohibits state and local government from restricting law enforcement from enforcing federal immigration law to the fullest extent permitted by federal statute.

Bolton asked ACLU attorney Omar Jadwat and later Department of Justice attorney Edwin Kneedler why the state should not be allowed to require all local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law.

"Why can't Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have remained and entered the United States illegally?" the judge asked. "Who am I to stop the state of Arizona?"

But she also held the state's lawyer, John Bouma, to the fire with questions about whether this portion of the state law pre-empts federal law. Bouma said it did not.

"Law-enforcement officers have been enforcing federal immigration laws for years," he said.

The other part of this section of the law that was addressed was the portion that states that any person arrested must have his or her immigration status determined before he or she can be released.

Bolton asked Bouma whether lawmakers really intended that anyone arrested, regardless of his or her legal status or whether the arrest involved citing and releasing someone on the spot or booking him or her into jail, had to have immigration status determined before being released from jail.

Bouma gave her several different answers at different points in the day.

He first said that U.S. citizens don't have an "immigration status" and therefore SB 1070 wouldn't apply to them. He also said that part of the law was intended to follow the part allowing officers to ask someone about their legal status, which means it would apply only to individuals suspected of being in the country illegally.

"But (police) training materials specifically acknowledge that they don't know what it means and that it will be left up to each agency to decide what that sentence means," Bolton replied, adding that she had heard from some law-enforcement authorities that this portion of the law could lead to the arrest of tens of thousands of people who otherwise would have just been cited and released.

The ACLU's Jadwat said the plaintiffs interpret that portion to apply to any person arrested.

"And that goes far beyond anything contemplated in federal law . . . or that makes any real sense," he said. "You would be able to hold people for no other reason but to determine their legal status."

Bouma later admitted the sentence was "inartfully worded."

Section 3: Documentation

Section 3 of SB 1070 as amended creates the state crime of "willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document."

Attorney Nina Perales with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the civil-rights groups that filed the lawsuit along with the ACLU, said this portion of the law creates new classes of non-citizens because it doesn't offer exceptions for individuals who may be in the midst of citizenship or asylum proceedings and have permission to be in the country but don't yet have documents.

Bouma responded that that argument gets into a hypothetical "chamber of horrors" that people would be hauled off and thrown into jail to wait until someone could determine whether they belonged there.

Bolton agreed that all this portion of the law does is create a state punishment for violating federal statute. But she added that state punishment may create a pre-emption problem.

Bouma argued otherwise but then seemed to concede that he may lose on this part of the law.

"I didn't have the feeling I convinced you last week, either," Bouma said, referring to an earlier hearing.

Section 6: Removal

Section 6 of SB 1070 as amended allows law-enforcement officers to, without a warrant, arrest people suspected of committing offenses that make them "removable from the United States."

Bolton seemed to have serious concerns about this portion of the law. She said there is no list of crimes deemed to be removable offenses and questioned who would make that determination and at what point during the arrest it would be made.

"How can a police officer make a determination that a person has committed a removable offense when that decision can only be made by a federal judge?" she asked.

Hearing is crowded

Bolton's courtroom was packed with about 250 people throughout the day, forcing media and attorneys to quibble over available seating and share tight spots on wooden benches.

Outside, several hundred people representing both sides of SB 1070 gathered around the federal-court building.

Supporters say the law is necessary to stem a tide of illegal immigration. Opponents say it opens the door to racial profiling, particularly against Hispanics.

One of SB 1070's supporters, Martha Payan of Scottsdale, said, "We may be outnumbered, but this is our country and we're going to be out here to fight."

She said she believes undocumented immigrants game the system for government benefits.

"They're fleecing America, and that's why they're able to be out here in droves," she said.

Aaron Rivera of California, an opponent of the law, offered a different perspective.

"There's a lot of folks who want to be heard," he said. "I just hope we keep this focused on immigration."

In the afternoon, about 40 people blocked the street outside, shutting down an intersection. Police arrested six people holding a bedsheet that said, "Stop 1070 - we will not comply," and another man who refused to leave the intersection, all on suspicion of disrupting a public thoroughfare.

"We voted, we marched, we had 150,000 people in the street, but that was not enough," said Carlos Garcia, one of the men arrested. "We decided that it was time to escalate. It was time to act."

None resisted arrest.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/azelections/articles/2010/07/23/20100723arizona-immigration-law-federal-judge-reviews-law.html#ixzz0ubWCfsV4

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/azelections/articles/2010/07/23/20100723arizona-immigration-law-federal-judge-reviews-law.html#ixzz0ubVbywvH

Immigration Officials to Audit 1,000 More Companies

2009-11-25T13:21:00.000-08:00

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: November 19, 2009
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Immigration enforcement officials said Thursday that they were expanding a program for auditing companies that might have hired illegal immigrants and had notified 1,000 companies this week that they would have to undergo such a review.
John Morton, who heads Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, announced the new initiative, saying it was part of the administration’s plan to deal with companies that hire illegal workers. “ICE is focused on finding and penalizing employers who believe they can unfairly get ahead by cultivating illegal workplaces,” Mr. Morton said.
He said that because the program was a law enforcement operation, he would not identify the companies that would undergo an audit except to say that they had been selected as a result of investigative leads and their connection to public safety and national security.
The language suggests the audits will affect private companies involved in infrastructure operations like gas and electric utilities and contractors on military bases but not retailers and manufacturers of nonessential goods.
The announcement of the action appears to be part of a two-pronged strategy by Homeland Security officials to crack down on companies that regularly rely on illegal workers while simultaneously trying to reward companies that are diligent in checking the documentation of prospective workers.
At a separate event on Thursday, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, urged American consumers to favor companies that make efforts to ensure that they do not hire illegal immigrants.
To that end, Ms. Napolitano said that her department was permitting companies that use a new computerized system to check the legal status of employees to feature a special logo on their products and ads saying “I E-Verify.”
The E-Verify campaign allows employers to match a prospective candidate’s name against a database that combines several government lists, including Social Security, passport and border information.
The first audit conducted by ICE covered 654 companies and resulted in the filing of formal notices to seek a fine from 61. ICE officials said they were considering seeking fines from an additional 267 companies from that first audit.
An audit consists of ICE officials checking each worker’s Employee Eligibility Verification Form, known as an I-9, to determine what steps were taken to confirm the person was eligible to be hired. If irregularities are found, the companies may then be fined for lax monitoring.
The strategy is part of the Obama administration’s effort to reduce illegal immigration by forcing companies to fire unauthorized workers rather than by conducting raids at the workplace, actions that are often accompanied by great personal trauma, including deportation and the dividing of immigrant families.
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a leading Republican on immigration policy, on Thursday sharply criticized the administration’s approach. Mr. Smith said it was unwise to end “worksite enforcement” actions, or raids.
“The most effective means we have of making these jobs available to American citizens and legal immigrants is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement worksite enforcement actions,” he said. “Each time ICE detains and deports an illegal immigrant worker, ICE creates a job for an American worker.”
The audits, however, have resulted in large-scale dismissals at the hands of employers, leaving the government one step removed.
In September, American Apparel, a clothing maker with a large garment factory in downtown Los Angeles, fired about 1,800 immigrant employees — more than a quarter of its work force — after a federal audit turned up irregularities in identity documents the workers presented when they were hired.

Read at New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/us/20immig.html

Minor wrongs still risk deportation

2009-11-25T13:10:00.000-08:00

Kristin Collins
North Carolina News & Observer
Nov. 22, 2009

The federal government said it was revamping its deportation agreements with local sheriffs to focus on ridding the country of dangerous felons. But some North Carolina sheriffs who signed the agreements have not been asked to change their practices.
Lawyers and advocates say the controversial program, which allows sheriff's departments to help identify illegal immigrants and begin deportation proceedings, is operating virtually unchanged - resulting in the deportation of people charged with offenses as minor as disorderly conduct and driving without a license.
A month after the new agreements took effect, Wake County is still putting into deportation proceedings more illegal immigrants who were arrested on misdemeanor charges than those detained in felony cases.

Wake Sheriff Donnie Harrison confirmed that his department has not changed the way it implements the program.
"We do the same thing if you're charged for murder or if you're charged with no operator's license," said Harrison, one of seven North Carolina sheriffs who have the program. "Nothing has changed for us."
Officials with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced in July that they would ask all participating law enforcement agencies to sign new agreements, which they said would bring the program in line with its original goal of removing drug offenders and violent criminals from the country. Departments were required to sign the new agreements by mid-October.
The revamp came after Joe Arpaio, sheriff in Maricopa County, Ariz., drew national scrutiny by using the program to round up illegal immigrants and imprison them in tents in the desert.
Most North Carolina sheriffs use a different model of the program, in which they check the immigration status of those brought into jails for other crimes, but their programs have also drawn accusations of racial profiling. The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina says the program encourages law officers to jail immigrants on minor crimes for the purpose of checking their immigration status.
ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said last week that the new agreements discourage profiling by requiring that local agencies see through all criminal charges against illegal immigrants before they are deported. In the past, many minor charges were dropped and the inmates handed over to immigration authorities.
She also said the agreements "clearly articulated ICE's priorities: identifying and removing criminal aliens who pose a threat to public safety or a danger to the community."
New intent, old methods
The agreement, however, does not lay out new practices for sheriffs. All foreign-born people who come through participating jails - the vast majority of whom are accused of misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes - continue to have their immigration status checked and, if they are here illegally, to be processed for deportation.
Harrison signed the new agreement Oct. 16. His statistics show that the number of immigrants put into deportation proceedings has not declined since it went into effect.
In October, 150 inmates were processed for immigration violations, and 84 percent of their crimes were misdemeanors. So far this month, 82 illegal immigrants have been processed, and 60 percent of the charges against them were misdemeanors.
Harrison said he continues to check the status of all foreign-born inmates; he would consider it discriminatory to "pick and choose" inmates to screen based on the seriousness of their alleged crimes.
Harrison said checks sometimes reveal that immigrants arrested for minor charges are wanted for more serious crimes or have previous deportation orders. "ICE hasn't said anything to us about changing anything," Harrison said.
Randy Jones, spokesman for Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration and one of the state's first sheriffs to join the program, also said he has not changed the way he does immigration checks.
"We're doing it just like we've always done it," Jones said.
Jones and Harrison said it's the federal government's responsibility to decide which immigrants are deported.
'Really petty'
Marty Rosenbluth, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham who provides free services to immigrants, said he has represented people deported after such crimes as playing loud music and missing a child's truancy hearing. A few months ago, two teenage girls ended up in deportation proceedings after being involved in a fistfight at Wakefield High School.
Since the new agreements took effect, Rosenbluth said, he continues to field five to 10 calls a day, the majority from people picked up by local immigration programs.
"It's mostly driving and minor misdemeanors in every county," he said. "Most of the cases we're seeing continue to be really petty."
Rebecca Headen, an attorney with the Raleigh office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new agreement does little to address concerns that the program allows officers to target immigrants for minor crimes.
"It's more of an aspirational suggestion," Headen said.
One North Carolina sheriff, Earl "Moose" Butler of Cumberland County, declined to sign the new agreement and dropped out of the program.
Debbie Tanna, a public information officer for the Cumberland Sheriff's Office, said the program used county resources to help deport mostly minor criminals while largely failing to turn up dangerous felons or immigrants wanted for crimes in other states.
"The sheriff did not like the way the program was working," Tanna said. "He said it was more of a headache than a working tool."

Read @: http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/205289.html

U.S. Attorney Nominee Criticized Over Raids

2009-11-17T04:56:00.000-08:00

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: November 16, 2009
New York Times

Eleventh-hour criticism is arising over President Obama’s nomination for United States attorney in northern Iowa of a prosecutor who had a leading role in the criminal cases against hundreds of illegal immigrants arrested in a May 2008 raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
Those cases, the broadest use to date of tough criminal charges against immigrants caught working without authorization, were emblems of a crackdown on illegal immigration by the Bush administration.
In supporting the prosecutor, Stephanie Rose, Mr. Obama is following the recommendation of Senator Tom Harkin, the Democrat from Iowa who is an important ally — especially in the health care debate because he is chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Ms. Rose, a senior assistant United States attorney in the office she has been chosen to run, has also garnered support from criminal defense lawyers in Iowa, including at least 11 lawyers who defended immigrants from Postville. In those proceedings, “she exhibited a level of competence and ability that would be hard to overstate,” the lawyers wrote in a letter in April.
But some defense and immigration lawyers have said that felony identity-theft charges against the immigrants were excessively harsh, that immigration lawyers were not given adequate access to their clients, and that improper contact took place between prosecutors and one judge. They contend that possible civil rights and ethical violations by prosecutors should have been investigated.
“Does she stand by those tactics?” asked David Leopold, the president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the national immigration bar. “Would she engage again in this type of prosecution of scores of undocumented workers guilty of nothing more than civil immigration violations?”
The immigration lawyers’ association has not taken an official position on the nomination.
In May, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the identity-theft law could not be applied to prosecute immigrants only because they used false Social Security or visa numbers, as it was in many Postville cases.
Ms. Rose’s nomination was unanimously approved by the Judiciary Committee on Nov. 5 and is awaiting a vote by the full Senate.
Ms. Rose declined through a spokesman to comment at this point in the nomination process.
Katherine Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the White House, said: “As U.S. attorney, Stephanie Rose will be a great advocate for the people of Iowa. The president strongly supports her nomination.”
During 12 years in the northern district, Ms. Rose was the lead prosecutor in more than 200 criminal cases and argued 34 appeals, according to a fact sheet provided by Mr. Harkin.
After the raid at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, 270 immigrants entered guilty pleas and were sentenced in four days of fast-track hearings, in temporary courtrooms in a cattle fairground. According to lawyers who participated, Ms. Rose distributed prepackaged plea agreements and was the principal case manager for the prosecutors.
In an interview, Mr. Harkin vigorously defended Ms. Rose, saying she is “extremely bright and well versed with the law, has a lot of self assurance and a good demeanor for a U.S. attorney.”
In the Postville cases, Mr. Harkin said, officials in Washington made the strategic decisions about what charges to bring and what pleas to offer. “Within the powers she had, she bent over backwards to make sure justice was done,” he said.
But at a hearing before the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee in July 2008, Deborah J. Rhodes, then senior associate deputy attorney general, testified that “all of the charging decisions were made by career prosecutors in the local office.”
James Benzoni, an immigration lawyer in Des Moines whose office has secured visas for two dozen Postville immigrants as victims of exploitation, said, “There was a general failure of due process and common decency.”
“You can’t go forward, you have to clean it up, and she’s not going to do that,” Mr. Benzoni said.

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17attorney.html

White House Plan on Immigration Includes Legal Status

2009-11-17T04:46:00.000-08:00

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: November 13, 2009
New York Times

The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.
In her first major speech on the overhaul, Ms. Napolitano dispelled any suggestion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — would postpone the most contentious piece of immigration legislation until after midterm elections next November.
Laying out the administration’s bottom line, Ms. Napolitano said officials would argue for a “three-legged stool” that includes tougher enforcement laws against illegal immigrants and employers who hire them and a streamlined system for legal immigration, as well as a “tough and fair pathway to earned legal status.”
With unemployment surging over 10 percent and Congress still wrangling over health care, advocates on all sides of the immigration debate had begun to doubt that President Obama would keep his pledge to tackle the divisive illegal immigration issue in the first months of 2010.
Speaking at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, Ms. Napolitano unveiled a double-barrel argument for a legalization program, saying it would enhance national security and, as the economy climbs out of recession, protect American workers from unfair competition from lower-paid, easily exploited illegal immigrants.
“Let me emphasize this: we will never have fully effective law enforcement or national security as long as so many millions remain in the shadows,” she said, adding that the recovering economy would be strengthened “as these immigrants become full-paying taxpayers.”
Under the administration’s plan, illegal immigrants who hope to gain legal status would have to register, pay fines and all taxes they owe, pass a criminal background check and learn English.
Drawing a contrast with 2007, when a bill with legalization provisions offered by President George W. Bush failed in Congress, Ms. Napolitano said the Obama administration had achieved a “fundamental change” in border security and enforcement against employers hiring illegal immigrants. She said a sharp reduction in the flow of illegal immigrants into the country created an opportunity to move ahead with a legalization program.
Some Republicans were quick to challenge Ms. Napolitano’s claims that border security had significantly improved or that American workers would be helped by bringing illegal immigrants into the system.
“How can they claim that enforcement is done when there are more than 400 open miles of border with Mexico?” asked Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. He said the administration should “deport illegal immigrant workers so they don’t remain here to compete with citizen and legal immigrant job seekers.”
But Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the top Republican on the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, agreed that it was time to open the immigration debate. “My commitment to immigration reform has not changed,” he said in a statement Friday. “I am interested in seeing a proposal sooner rather than later from President Obama.”
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and the chairman of that subcommittee, has been writing an overhaul bill and consulting with Republicans, particularly Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Mr. Schumer said that the administration’s agenda was “ambitious,” but that he was “confident we can have a bipartisan immigration bill ready to go under whatever timeline the president thinks is best.”
Ms. Napolitano has been leading the administration’s efforts to gather ideas and support for the immigration overhaul, meeting in recent weeks with business leaders, religious groups, law enforcement officials and others to gauge their willingness to go forward with a debate in Congress.
Framing the administration’s proposals in stark law and order terms, she said immigration legislation should include tougher laws against migrant smugglers and more severe sanctions for employers who hire unauthorized workers.
Ms. Napolitano said that the Border Patrol had grown by 20,000 officers and that more than 600 miles of border fence had been finished, meeting security benchmarks set by Congress in 2007. She was echoing an argument adopted by Mr. Bush after the bill collapsed in 2007, and by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, in his race against Mr. Obama. They said Americans wanted to see effective enforcement before they would agree to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants.
Some immigrant advocates were dismayed by Ms. Napolitano’s approach. Benjamin E. Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council, praised her package of proposals, but said some enforcement policies she outlined “have proven to do more harm than good.”

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/us/politics/14immig.html

Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands

2009-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: October 23, 2009
New York Times

FLORENCE, Ariz. — One of the newest residents on Arizona’s death row, a convicted serial killer named Dale Hausner, poked his head up from his television to look at several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests to protect against the sharp homemade objects that often are propelled from the cells of the condemned.
It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates like Mr. Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal justice world, the state’s death row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for 9 of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row. It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control.
The privatization effort, both in its breadth and its financial goals, demonstrates what states around the country — broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs — are willing to do to balance the books. Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state’s roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said State Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican who supports private prisons. “If we were not in this economic environment, I don’t think we’d be talking about this with the same sense of urgency.”
Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state, then charge them per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million up front to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the private firm.
The privatization move has raised questions — including among some people who work for private prison companies — about the private sector’s ability to handle the state’s most hardened criminals. While executions would still be performed by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.
“I would not want to be the warden of death row,” said Todd Thomas, the warden of a prison in Eloy, Ariz., run by the Corrections Corporation of America. The company, the country’s largest private prison operator, has six prisons in Arizona with inmates from other states.
“That’s not to say we couldn’t,” Mr. Thomas said. “But the liability is too great. I don’t think any private entity would ever want to do that.”
James Austin, a co-author of a Department of Justice study in 2001 on prison privatization and president of the JFA Institute, a corrections consulting firm, said private companies tended to oversee minimum- and medium-security inmates and had little experience with the most dangerous prisoners.
“As for death row,” Mr. Austin said, “it is a very visible entity, and if something bad happens there, you will have a pretty big news story for the Legislature and governor to explain.”
Arizona is no stranger to private prisons or, for that matter, aggressive privatization efforts (recently, the state put up for sale several government buildings housing executive branch offices in Phoenix). Nearly 30 percent of the state’s prisoners are being held in prisons operated by private companies outside the state’s 10 complexes.
In addition, other states, including Alaska and Hawaii, have contracts with private companies like Corrections Corporation of America to house their prisoners in Arizona.
For advocates of prison privatization, the push here breathes a bit of life into a movement that has been on the decline across the country as cost savings from prison privatizations have often failed to materialize, corrections officers unions have resisted the efforts and high-profile problems in privately run facilities have drawn unwanted publicity
“We have private prisons in Arizona already, and we are very happy with the performance and the savings we get from them,” said Representative John Kavanagh, a Republican who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and an architect of the new legislation authorizing the privatization. “I think that they are the future of corrections in Arizona.”
Under the legislation, any bidder would have to take an entire complex — many of them mazes of multiple levels of security risks and complexity — and would not be permitted to pick off the cheapest or easiest buildings and inmates. The state also wants to privatize prisoners’ medical care.
Louise Grant, a spokeswoman for Corrections Corporation of America, said the high-security prisoners would be well within the company’s management capabilities. “We expect we will be there to make a proposal to the state” for at least some of its complexes up for bid, Ms. Grant said.
In pure financial terms, it is not clear how well the state would make out with the privatization. The 2001 study for the Department of Justice found that private prisons saved most states little money (there has been no equivalent study since). Indeed, many states, struggling to keep up with the cost of corrections, have closed prisons when possible, and sought changes in sentencing to reduce crowding in the last two years.
As tough sentencing laws and the ensuing increase in prisoners began to press on state resources in the 1980s, private prison companies attracted some states with promises of lower costs. The private prison boom lasted into the 1990s. Throughout the years, there have been high-profile riots, escapes and other violent incidents. The companies also do not generally provide the same wages and benefits as states, which has resulted in resistance from unions and concerns that the private prisons attract less-qualified workers.
Then the federal government stepped in, with a surge of new immigrant prisoners, and began to contract with the private companies. The number of federal prisoners in private prisons in the United States has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008 from 15,524 in 2000. The number of state prisoners in privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from 75,000 in that time.
With bad economic times again driving many decisions about state resources, other states are sure to watch Arizona’s experiment closely.
“There simply isn’t the money to keep these people incarcerated, and the alternative is to free many of them or lower cost,” said Ron Utt, a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group whose work for privatization was cited by one Arizona lawmaker.

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html

A Death in Texas: Profits, poverty, and immigration converge

2009-10-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Tom Barry
Boston Review Nov/Dec 2009

County Clerk Dianne Florez noticed it first. Plumes of smoke were rising outside
the small West Texas town of Pecos. “The prison is burning again,” she
announced.
About a month and a half before, on December 12, 2008, inmates had
rioted to protest the death of one of their own, Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32. When
Galindo’s body was removed from the prison in what looked to them like a large
black trash bag, they set fire to the recreational center and occupied the
exercise yard overnight. Using smuggled cell phones, they told worried family
members and the media about poor medical care in the prison and described the
treatment of Galindo, who had been in solitary confinement since mid-November.
During that time, fellow inmates and his mother, who called the prison nearly
every day, had warned authorities that Galindo needed daily medication for
epilepsy and was suffering from severe seizures in the “security housing unit,”
which the inmates call the “hole.”
I arrived in Pecos on February 2, shortly
after the second riot broke out. I had driven 200 miles east from El Paso
through the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert.
Pecos is the seat of
Reeves County in “far west” Texas and home to what the prison giant GEO Group
calls “the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in
the world.” The prison, a sprawling complex surrounded by forbidding perimeter
fences on the town’s deserted southwest edge, holds up to 3,700 prisoners.
Almost all are serving time in federal lockup before being deported and are what
the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) call “criminal
aliens.”
Although the term “criminal aliens” has no precise definition, its
broadening use reflects a trend in dealing with immigrants. With the post-9/11
creation of DHS and its two agencies—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—a wide sector of aliens increasingly
became the focus of joint efforts by immigration and law enforcement officers.
ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, working with local police, began targeting for
deportation both legal and illegal immigrants with criminal records. And CBP’s
Border Patrol began to turn over illegal border crossers to the justice system
for criminal prosecution, instead of, as in the past, simply deporting them.
Many criminal aliens are long-term legal residents of the United States and are
also the parents, children, or siblings of U.S. citizens and lawful residents.

Texas: Mexican Human Rights Official Held

2009-10-21T07:57:00.000-07:00

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: October 19, 2009
New York Times

A Mexican human rights official who has accused the Mexican Army of abuses has been detained by United States customs officials and is being held against his will in El Paso, said his lawyer, Carlos Spector. The official, Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, who works in Juarez for the Chihuahua State Commission for Human Rights, was taken into custody by customs agents Thursday night as he tried to cross into El Paso with his border-crossing card to visit friends. Though Mr. de la Rosa told customs officers he was not seeking asylum, agents took him into custody anyway after he acknowledged that he had received threats because of his work. In a statement, Mr. de la Rosa said the officers had told him he was being detained for his own safety. A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said he was being held “due to mandatory detention provisions” but declined to explain why.

Read @ NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/us/20brfs-HUMANRIGHTSO_BRF.html

Months to Live: Fellow Inmates Ease Pain of Dying in Jail

2009-10-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

By JOHN LELAND
Published: October 17, 2009
COXSACKIE, N.Y. — Allen Jacobs lived hard for his 50 years, and when his liver finally shut down he faced the kind of death he did not want. On a recent afternoon Mr. Jacobs lay in a hospital bed staring blankly at the ceiling, his eyes sunk in his skull, his skin lusterless. A volunteer hospice worker, Wensley Roberts, ran a wet sponge over Mr. Jacobs’s dry lips, encouraging him to drink.
“Come on, Mr. Jacobs,” he said.
Mr. Roberts is one of a dozen inmates at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility who volunteer to sit with fellow prisoners in the last six months of their lives. More than 3,000 prisoners a year die of natural causes in correctional facilities.
Mr. Roberts recalled a day when Mr. Jacobs, then more coherent, had started crying. Mr. Roberts held his patient and tried to console him. Then their experience took a turn unique to their setting, the medical ward of a maximum security prison. Mr. Roberts said he told Mr. Jacobs to “man up.”
Mr. Jacobs, serving two to four years for passing forged checks, cursed at him, telling him, “‘I don’t want to die in jail. Do you want to die in jail?’ ”
“I said no,” said Mr. Roberts, who is serving eight years for robbery. “He said, ‘Then stop telling me to man up,’ and he started crying. And then he said that I’m his family.”
American prisons are home to a growing geriatric population, with one-third of all inmates expected to be over 50 by next year. As courts have handed down longer sentences and tightened parole, about 75 prisons have started hospice programs, half of them using inmate volunteers, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Susan Atkins, a follower of Charles Manson, died last month in hospice at the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla after being denied compassionate release.
Joan Smith, deputy superintendent of health services at the Coxsackie prison, said the hospice program here initially met with resistance from prison guards. “They were very resentful about people in prison for horrendous crimes getting better medical care than their families,” including round-the-clock companionship in their final days, Ms. Smith said.
The guards have come to accept the program, she said. But still there are challenges unique to the prison setting. Some dying patients, for example, divert their pain medication to their volunteer aides or other patients, who use it or sell it, said Kathleen Allan, the director of nursing. She added that patients can be made victims easily, “and this is a predatory system.”
But she said the inmate volunteers bond with the patients in a way that staff members cannot, taking on “the touchy-feely thing” that may be inappropriate between inmates and prison workers.
At Coxsackie, 130 miles north of New York City, administrators started the hospice program in 1996 in response to the AIDS epidemic using an outside hospice agency, then changed to inmate volunteers in 2001. The change saved money and was well-received by the patients.
Perhaps more significant, said William Lape, the superintendent, was the effect the program had on the volunteers. “I think it’s turned their life around,” Mr. Lape said.
John Henson, 30, was one of the first volunteers. When he was 18, Mr. Henson broke into the home of a former employer and, in the course of a robbery, beat the man to death with a baseball bat. When he entered prison, with a sentence of 25 years to life, he said, “I thought my life was over.”
At Coxsackie he met the Rev. J. Edward Lewis, who persuaded him to volunteer in 2001. “You go in thinking that you’re going to help somebody,” Mr. Lewis said, “and every time they end up helping you.”
Before hospice, Mr. Henson said he had given little thought to the consequences of his crime. Then he found himself locked in a hospital room with another inmate, holding the man’s hand as his breathing slowed toward a stop.
Like many men in prison, the dying man had alienated his family members, who rejected his efforts to renew contact. In the end, he had only Mr. Henson for companionship. When the prison nurse declared the man dead, Mr. Henson broke down in tears.
“They just came out,” he said. “I don’t even know why I was crying. Partly because of him, partly because of things that died within me at the same time.”
Mr. Henson, dressed in prison greens and with his blond hair buzzed short, spoke directly and without hesitation.
“I was just thinking about why I’m in here and the person’s life that I took,” he said. “And sitting with this person for the first time and actually seeing death firsthand, being right there, my hand in his hand, watching him take his last breath, just caused me to say, ‘Wow, who the hell are you? Who were you to do this to somebody else?’ ”
Ms. Allan, the nursing director at Coxsackie, said that with a number of inmate volunteers, “You can identify in each of these guys something inside them driving them to do this. It’s a desire to redeem themselves, so even when it gets hard they’re able to plow through it. “
She added, “I think Mr. Henson made me a better mother.”
Benny Lee, 38, has spent half his life in prison for manslaughter, and for most of that time, he said, “the only thing I regretted was getting caught.” Four months ago he began as a hospice volunteer, feeling he needed a change. “I’m trying to offer some payback,” he said.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Lee was scheduled to sit with Eddie Jones, 89, who was dying from multiple causes. Mr. Jones, who was convicted of murder at age 70, said, “I can talk with them better than staff members, because staff members have their minds made up about how things should be.”
Mr. Lee said he does not know how Mr. Jones’s death will affect him. “I’m hoping it will have an effect, period,” he said. “Growing up and in prison, I put up walls. But I have to be more emotionally receptive to these guys. This is going against everything I’ve tried to do. But I realize it’s a change I have to make.”
Mr. Lee said hospice was forcing him to learn to trust people.
“It’s helping me mature,” he said. “My views of life and death are changing. I was unsympathetic when it comes to death. I’ve had friends die, and I was callous about it. Now I can’t do that. I’ve come to identify with these guys, not because we’re inmates, but because we’re human beings. What they’re going through, I’ll go through.”

Read @ the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/health/18hospice.html

Wrong Paths to Immigration Reform

2009-10-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

New York Times Editorial
Oct 11, 2009

All last week the people of Phoenix witnessed public outbursts by their sheriff, Joe Arpaio, as he railed against the Department of Homeland Security for supposedly trying to limit his ability to enforce federal immigration laws. He vowed to keep scouring Maricopa County for people whose clothing, accents and behavior betrayed them as likely illegal immigrants. He said he had already nabbed more than 32,000 people that way, and announced his next immigrant sweep for Oct. 16.

The spectacle raises two critical questions that the Obama administration is in danger of getting wrong.
One is the specific question of whether the federal government should keep Sheriff Arpaio in its 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration agents in street patrols and in jails. The answer is absolutely not. Sheriff Arpaio has a long, ugly record of abusing and humiliating inmates. His scandal-ridden desert jails have lost accreditation and are notorious places of cruelty and injury. His indiscriminate neighborhood raids use minor infractions like broken taillights as pretexts for mass immigration arrests.
To the broader question of whether federal immigration enforcement should be outsourced en masse in the first place, the answer again is no.
It was only days ago that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano unveiled a plan to repair the rotting immigration detention system. The Bush administration had outsourced the job to state, local and private jailers, with terrible results: inadequate supervision, appalling conditions, injuries and deaths.
Ms. Napolitano wants to centralize federal control over the system that handles detainees. But she insists on continuing to outsource and expand the flawed machinery that catches them, including 287(g) and a system of jailhouse fingerprint checks called Secure Communities, which increase the likelihood that local enforcers will abuse their authority and undermine the law.
Rather than broadening the reach of law enforcement, using local police can cause immigrant crime victims to fear the police and divert the police from fighting crime. It leads to racial profiling, to Latino citizens and legal residents being asked for their papers. Responsible sheriffs and police chiefs across the country have looked at 287(g) and said no thanks.
Programs like 287(g) rest on the dishonest premise that illegal immigrants are a vast criminal threat. But only a small percentage are dangerous felons. The vast majority are those whom President Obama has vowed to help get right with the law, by paying fines and earning citizenship. Treating the majority of illegal immigrants as potential Americans, not a criminal horde, is the right response to the problem.

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/opinion/12mon2.html

Talking About Insurrection

2009-10-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

Tom Barry
Borderlines

Friday, October 9, 2009

Getting into the federal building in Pecos, Texas takes political sophistication – something I was apparently lacking when attempting to enter the building for the trial of a couple of immigrant inmates indicted for their role in the Dec. 12-13 incident, let’s call it, at the immigrant prison in this far West Texas town.It’s the same all over the country. After Sept. 11 the federal halls of justice have been on virtual lockdown status. To get into these buildings – which typically house the district courts and U.S. Marshals Service offices, you need to pass through metal detectors, present identification, and rid yourself of all electronic devices. As many as half dozen or more federal security guards – usually retired police officers and sheriff deputies – are usually in the courthouse foyer to block entry to criminals and terrorists.In Pecos, which has a privately run, federally supplied, and locally owned immigrant prison on the outskirts of town, people are feeling jittery about the criminal alien business. It’s a business that has for the past two decades been a source of a steadily expanding number of local jobs and increasing county revenues, as the prison has gone through three expansions to accommodate the ever larger number of immigrant inmates under Bureau of Prisons custody.I felt it as soon as I stepped pass the doorway: suspicion and outsider disdain. “What are you here for? Who are you,” one of the guards demanded.“Well, I am here for the trial of the immigrant prisoners indicted for the disturbance at the prison last December,” I said, handing the questioning guard my business card (from Center for International Policy).“Disturbance, there was no disturbance,” says he. (It wasn’t until later that I asked how HE was.) “There was a riot, and it’s costing us tens of millions of dollars.”During several trips to Pecos since the second inmate news event of Jan. 31 –Feb. 5, I had been alternating between “riot,” “protest,” “mutiny,” and “disturbance.”What happened at the Reeves County Detention Center in two separate occasions was that immigrant inmates – officially classified “criminal aliens” who will be processed for deportation upon completing their 1-5 year sentences – set fire to prison buildings to protest the deaths and untreated illnesses of fellow prisoners. In both cases, the main prisoner concern was that sick inmates were being placed in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) assigned for “medical observation.”The SHUs in modern prisons and detention centers are the modern equivalent of the old “solitary confinement” – intended as both punishment for disciplinary infraction and as deterrence to prevent unruly behavior. But, as the practice at the Reeves County Detention Center, SHUs are often used simply to better manage prison populations – to isolate and punish problem inmates whether they break the rules or not.At the Reeves County Detention Center (RCDC) – which since 1985 has expanded from 300-bed prison to one that holds up to 3700 inmates – the SHU is systemically and routinely used to house severely ill inmates. That’s because there is no infirmary at what the prison giant GEO Group (which the county contracts to run the BOP prison) calls RCDC “the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world.”The first incident was precipitated by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32, who was serving a 30-month sentence for illegal reentry from Mexico. Galindo was picked up by the Border Patrol after an epileptic seizure at a convenience store near the borderland town of Anthony, NM, where he had lived with his family since he was in his mid-teens. The local police, who responded to the call for assistance from the clerk at the local 7-11, turned Galindo over to the Border Patrol after it was determined he was an “illegal alien.” Galindo, after being deported to Ciudad Juárez (about 20 miles from his home in the United States), attempted to return home to his extended and nuclear family (three children and second wife) – all of whom were legal residents or citizens -- two years ago after spending a month in the Mexican border town across from El Paso.But increased border security and a new “criminal alien” policy that criminalizes and penalizes illegal border crossing combined to put Galindo into the federal slammer in Pecos, where an estimated 75% of his fellow inmates were also serving time for illegal border crossings and the balance for nonviolent crimes, mostly drug violations.Another severe epileptic seizure in mid-November 2008 sent Galindo to an area hospital – and in the SHU. The greatest fear of inmates at the Reeves County Detention Center is getting sick and being consigned to the SHU – what they call “el hoyo” (the hole). It’s the hole not because it’s so dark or dirty, but rather because it’s where there is no relief from the walls, the loneliness, the emptiness.Galindo corresponded frequently with his mother, Graciela Galindo. His letters from mid-November until the day before he died tell of his fear and despair at being kept in the hole without any company, without the friends he made in prison. He tells his mother of the inhumanity of most of the guards who didn’t seem to recognize the humanity of the immigrant inmates. He writes of the urgency to get the right medicine to prevent his seizures – medicine, his mother told me, for which he had a prescription before he was imprisoned but was replaced by the nurses at Reeves with sedatives that kept him sleepy and unable to stand up. On Dec. 5 he wrote of being “afraid” of what would happen to him if he stayed in the hold any longer, of how his was being ignored by the guards and nurses, of his bruises from thrashing around during unattended seizures.The day before he died he wrote a letter to his mother that the family didn’t read until much later when they received his few personal belongings along with his body.In his Dec. 11 letter he wrote: “I told them that I have been here (in SHU) for a month, and I’ve gotten sick twice, and let’s see if they move me or do something quickly. All they say is 'yes, yes.' and they don't do anything.”What happened after two of his fellow inmates in the SHU saw his body being removed in a black body bag on the morning of Dec. 12 is a matter of interpretation and interests.The Dec. 12-13 incident resulted in some damage – several hundred thousands of dollars -- to the SHU and in a badly burnt recreation building. Reeves County attributed the property loss at the RCDC III prison (the most 2005 expansion of the immigrant prison) to a “disturbance.” Calling it a “riot” would have precluded the insurance company from covering the losses, said County Judge Sam Contreras.The inmates themselves referred to it as a “motín” or mutiny – a term that conveys the sense of an uprising against authority.After the Dec. 12-13 incident in Pecos and after the second closely related incident of Jan. 31-Feb 5 (when inmates also rebelled and set fire to prison buildings in an incident also sparked by medical malpractice and mistreatment concerns involving the use of the SHU for “medical observation”), the criminal justice system, the insurance system, and the financial system are providing most of the follow-up.Despite demands by the Texas ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups, the Office of Inspector General of the Justice Department has not initiated an investigation. But the criminal justice system did immediately kick in other respects. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Midland, Texas immediately began investigating the new crimes of the immigrant inmates who, in part out of solidarity with those sick fellow prisoners shut in the hole and in part out of fear that too would be released from prison in a body bag, took control of the two different sections of the prison to highlight their concerns.Like the inmates, the U.S. attorney called the incidents “mutinies” and like the media and the security guards in the federal building lobby is also referring to the incidents as riots. Twenty six inmates from the first incident have been indicted. At first, they faced two counts – causing a riot or mutiny, or aiding and abetting in a mutiny or riot. The first count declared that the defendants “and other persons known or unknown to the grand jury, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, did combine, conspire, confederate and agree together and with each other and others to instigate, connive, attempt to cause, assist, and conspire to cause a riot at the Reeves County Detention Center, a federal penal, detention, or correctional facility.”(Apparently, the U.S. attorneys are as confused as everyone else about what the Reeves County Detention Center really is, a prison or detention center. And while it does hold federal prisoners – all immigrants with orders for deportation – there is much confusion about whose prison is it. It is county owned – hence the Reeves County – but it is operated by GEO Group while the BOP contracts with the county to run it and the county subcontracts with GEO.)The second count was the essentially the same but in this count the defendants purportedly “aided and abetted by each other and others did instigate, connive, attempt to cause, assist, or conspire to cause a riot.” In brief, the criminal indictment described the incident as a “mutiny or riot.” Those two counts were filed April 9 and May 12.But they didn’t have the desired result. Not all the defendants were entering guilty pleas, thereby saving the U.S. attorney the trouble of presenting evidence and actually trying the case. Then, on July 14, the U.S. John Murphy came to the grand jury with a superceding indictment that includes a new charge: “the use of fire to commit a federal felony offense.”Mary Stillinger, one of the court-appointed attorneys appointed to represent the immigrants, said the new indictment “really hammered” the immigrants, since it came with a mandatory ten-year sentence.There was little hard evidence against the men, and even with the court-appointed defense attorneys, most of whom simply go through the motions of defending immigrants in the flood of criminal charges resulting from immigration violations that is overwhelming the judicial system along the border. As part of the prison reconstruction, GEO has insisted that the county install a comprehensive system of security cameras and video recording units so as to insure that the next time around, as was explained in a county commissioners meeting in Pecos by the architect directing the reconstruction: “Cameras and recording equipment are among the highest things on their list, because if say that if they had more security cameras, better recording equipment, when they had this disturbance, they would have been able to prosecute more, indict more people, if they had more proof of what everybody did.”No one in a position of responsibility– not in county government, not in GEO, not in the correctional healthcare subcontractor Physicians Network Association (of Lubbock, Texas), not in the BOP , not in the U.S. Attorney’s Office – is apparently concerned of prosecuting, indicting, gathering evidence, or even investigating the conditions at RCDC that sparked the riots and the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo.But the county has other concerns that involve high finance and keeping prison jobs in Reeves County.Since 1985 the county has issued approximately $115 million in revenue bonds to finance the construction and maintenance of the RCDC immigrant prison complex. Going into the riots/mutinies/disturbances, the county had $92 million in outstanding prison debt. This debt is in the form of tax exempt municipal bonds called project revenue bonds that are issued by a specially established county public facility corporation to create a project that brings revenue to the county.The county got off relatively easily from the first incident. The insurance companies paid by the county over the past couple of decades for the prison covered most of the rebuilding expenses. But then came the proverbial ‘fire next time.’Less than two months after the first inmate protest, inmates renewed the Dec. 12-13 protest with a much larger incident – one that completely destroyed the oldest prison unit and resulted in reconstruction and upgrading expenses project to approach $40 million. This time the insurance companies are expected to come through with only $25 million, leaving the county $15 million short.Here comes Barry Friedman of Carlyle Capital Markets, the bond underwriting firm that has been with Reeves County since the beginning of its prison enterprise. Friedman assures the county that he can sell another $15 million plus in bonds to cover the gap. “I have been on the side of Reeves County since 1986,” Friedman recently told the county commissioners, assuring them that he only wants what is good for the county.Not only is Friedman underwriting the new bond issue but after the prison disturbances he was hired as a special financial consultant to the county for about $15,000 a month. In addition to his commission for bond underwriting, he is also advising the county on what is in their best financial interest, as he told the commissioners. “As financial adviser, my responsibility is to the county,” he explained, angrily and righteously dismissing a complaint raised by County Attorney Alva Alvarez. “Do you represent the bondholders,” he was asked. “No, I represent the county,” he replied.Reeves County is angry, worried, and deep in debt – and going deeper. No wonder then the reaction of the elderly security guard at the federal building. After I asked who he was, he threatened to call the U.S. Marshals. Knowing about justice in Reeves County, I turned around and walked out. Just as well, the immigrants had all decided to plead guilty. The scheduled trial was cancelled.Tempers are also flaring in the county building across the street with conflict-of-interest charges swirling around having Carlyle’s Friedman work two sides of the prison business and with fears that if the county doesn’t get the prison back together the BOP might, as one county official noted, “bring in the buses and bring the inmates out.”That would leave Reeves County with massive prison bond debt, Pecos with any empty prison complex on the edge of town, and more than four hundred area residents without a job. It would be a near fatal blow to the county, where a quarter of the population lives in poverty and unemployment stands at 14.1%. Poor Reeves County.And poor immigrants who still suffer the same medical conditions that sparked the incidents.
Read @ Borderlines: http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/talking-about-insurrection.html

Proposal to expand L.A. deputies' duties in deportation process draws criticism

2009-10-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

Anna Gorman
LA Now

Los Angeles County sheriff’s staff would assume a greater role in the processing and deportation of illegal immigrants identified in the jails under a newly proposed agreement with the federal government, placing an “inordinate strain” on department staff, according to a new report.
The department signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2005 authorizing its custody assistants to check the immigration status of foreign born inmates.
The new agreement would require those same assistants to complete all of the required paperwork to process illegal immigrants for possible deportation, according to the report prepared by Merrick Bobb, a special counsel to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors.
The degree to which the proposed agreement turns the sheriff’s department into the “primary enforcer of federal immigration law is indeed breathtaking,” Bobb wrote in the nearly 50-page report. In addition, the county would not be reimbursed for the additional work, Bobb wrote.
More than a quarter of inmates transferred from the county lock-up to immigration custody from July 2008 to June 2009 had been charged with minor crimes, such as displaying a false identification or disorderly conduct, the report found. Some inmates had serious criminal records, but Bobb wrote that he didn’t believe that the supervisors intended for minor criminals to be turned over to immigration authorities.
“Some of the supervisors suggested that immigration enforcement in the jails should be limited to the more dangerous criminals committing felonies, in contrast to persons held for traffic violations or other minor misdemeanors,” Bobb said in an interview today.

ICE project deal dead: Emerald says it will offer facility to other cities after City Council fails to support public financing proposal

2009-10-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

ICE project deal dead: Emerald says it will offer facility to other cities after City Council fails to support public financing proposal.http://www.mineralwellsindex.com/local/local_story_281100232.htmlBy Christin Coyneccoyne@mineralwellsindex.comA two and-a-half year effort to bring an illegal immigrant detention center to Mineral Wells ended Tuesday night with several long seconds of silence from city council members. A resolution to continue negotiations with Emerald Correctional Management to build a detention facility funded by non-recourse revenue bonds issued by the Mineral Wells Local Government Corporation failed when council members failed to second a motion in support. “That’s a pretty clear message that the city council has no interest in doing this project,” Steve Afeman, chief operating officer of Emerald, said Wednesday morning. “We’re not about to go back.” The failure to move ahead with negotiations seemed to come as a surprise to several. Afeman said Emerald met with mayor Mike Allen, Industrial Foundation representative Steve Butcher and city manager Lance Howerton and was told they believed council would support the public finance proposal. Allen told those attending the meeting there would be no public comments. “This is for the council to understand,” he said before a presentation from Hull Youngblood, Emerald’s attorney and representative. “[While switching sites earlier this year], we lost that window to get private financing that you could use,” Youngblood said. Initially the city offered Emerald land near Mineral Wells Municipal Airport, but 11th-hour public opposition to the site forced its move to Wolters Industrial Park, with the Industrial Foundation buying land to accommodate the switch.Youngblood told the council the city would not be obligated if they authorized the local government corporation to issue non-recourse revenue bonds.“The LGC will not have to pay anything on the debt except what is generated by project revenue,” Youngblood said. “[If the bonds were defaulted on] think of it like lenders and they’ve got a lien on the building. They could sell it or refinance it.”Because the local government corporation would own the title to the building, the facility would also be exempt from ad valorem taxes. “We would now take that pool of money [that would go to the city and Parker County] and give it to the city [as the per diem fee per inmate],” Youngblood said. Councilman Bill Terry wanted to know if the facility went defunct how much control the city would have.“[Once the facility is foreclosed on] they could do whatever they want,” Youngblood said, but added they would have to abide by applicable law. “What kind of black eye is it to the city or the LGC [if they are unable to pay off the bonds]?” council member Tommy Blissitte asked.Howerton said they talked with the city’s financial advisor and were told a default on the bonds would not technically affect the credit rating and would not likely impair the city. However, the city might have to explain the situation and that could raise a red flag with other possible underwriters, Howerton said. “What risk, if any, does Emerald have?” council member Deartis Nickerson asked.“[There is] not additional equity being paid to the lender beyond the significant development costs [already incurred],” Youngblood said. “I’ve been dealing with this for about a month and I’ve come to a conclusion our liability (would be) no different than private financing,” Allen said. Allen noted unemployment is over 8 percent in the county and said the project would generate jobs and bring in at least $6 million for the city over a 20-year period. Afeman said they’ve received about 30 job applications for the proposed Mineral Wells facility, which was supposed to have created 140 jobs, though many of the applications were from people in other parts of the state looking to return to Mineral Wells.Council member John Ritchie moved to approve the resolution authorizing the local government corporation to continue negotiations for the publicly financed proposal but did not receive a second. After several seconds of silence from the council, Allen requested a second to the motion but did not receive it from the other four council members present. Chris Crawford was absent.“It’s been a long, hard journey,” Allen said after the meeting. “I’ve put a lot of time into it.”Richard Ball, president of the Industrial Foundation, said afterward it was time to replace some city council members. “I don’t think it’s the right thing at the right time,” Terry said. “I want to see the Baker Hotel situation [succeed] and I don’t want anything to get in the way … I just think there are better deals out there and eventually they’ll come. I feel that Emerald is not being up front with us.” Terry was the lone dissenting vote when the council agreed to accept a lower impact fee than Emerald announced they would pay the city before the site was moved, asking whether it would be a sign of things to come. “I don’t like the idea of the city having to issue bonds,” councilman Tommy Blissitte told the Index Wednesday. “It would look bad on the city if they defaulted.”Blissitte said he also had concerns that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would still be interested in an detention facility for illegal immigrants when it came time to write an agreement after several months of issuing bonds and then the 16-month building phase. “If they got their own financing, I don’t have a problem,” Blissitte said. “I voted my conscience.”“It’s a business decision that the city made and we respect that,” Afeman said. “There are two other sites that we’ve been in contact with this week.”

Report Critical of Scope of Immigration Detention

2009-10-07T07:43:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: October 6, 2009
New York Times

A report on immigration detention released Tuesday by the Obama administration paints a picture of a costly, inappropriately penal system that is growing without basic tools for management and monitoring, while the government office nominally in charge struggles with high turnover and a lack of expertise.
Though the administration has indicated that it wants to concentrate immigration enforcement on serious criminal offenders, the report shows that one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the population in detention is noncriminals picked up in the enforcement programs the government has embraced.
Those figures are among the surprises in the 35-page report, produced for Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, by Dora B. Schriro, an adviser who has since quit to become the correction commissioner in New York City.
The report shows that 60 percent of the 380,000 people detained during the 2009 fiscal year had been turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by state and local police, mostly through the Criminal Alien Program, which identifies possible immigration violators in local jails. Others were sent by local law enforcement officers deputized to enforce federal immigration law through a program known as 287(g).
Both programs have the stated goal of improving safety through federal-local partnerships that single out serious criminal offenders for deportation. But well over half the immigrants taken into custody under the programs had no criminal convictions, the figures show.
According to the report, 57 percent of the 178,605 people sent through the Criminal Alien Program in the 2009 fiscal year had no criminal convictions, an increase since 2008, when noncriminals were 53 percent of the 149,067 detainees sent through the program.
An even higher proportion of noncriminals were sent through the 287(g) program — 65 percent of 44,692 in 2009, down from 72 percent of 37,776 in 2008.
Those numbers are likely to fuel conflicts over both programs, which have been criticized by advocates for immigrants, who say they give license to racial profiling. The Schriro report warns that computerized information exchanges between federal immigration authorities and local police, which are being expanded, are likely to swell the number of noncriminals transferred into immigration custody. “This new technology has the potential to identify large volumes of aliens with low-level convictions or no convictions,” the report said.
In an interview before she left the administration, Dr. Schriro spoke of the “cognitive dissonance” between this system and the administration’s support for a path to citizenship for many of the country’s estimated 12 million unauthorized residents.
The tension has been heightened as Citizenship and Immigration Services, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, begins planning for that path, in case a bill authorizing one is passed.

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/us/politics/07detain.html

Immigration Hard-Liner Has His Wings Clipped

2009-10-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: October 6, 2009
New York Times

PHOENIX — The Maricopa County sheriff, who has drawn scorn and praise for a running crackdown on illegal immigrants in this city’s metropolitan area, said Tuesday that federal officials had taken away his deputies’ authority to make immigration arrests in the field.
The sheriff, Joe Arpaio, whose high-profile sweeps have been cited in the fevered debate over the need for an overhaul of immigration laws, said he had sought a renewed agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to allow both field arrests and immigration checks at his jails. But a high-level department official presented a document a couple of weeks ago allowing only for jail checks, Mr. Arpaio said.
That prompted an angry, rambling outburst from the sheriff Tuesday at a news conference at which he called Homeland Security officials “liars” and vowed to press on with his campaign, using state laws, against illegal immigrants. He said he would drive those caught on the streets to the border if federal officers refused to take them into custody.
Homeland Security officials declined to comment, saying they are still reviewing their agreement with the sheriff’s department and the other 65 agencies that participate in a program that allows local and state officers to make immigration arrests.
Immigrant advocates and some lawmakers have called on the department to end the program, known as 287(g) after the section of the 1996 law that authorized it, saying it has led to racial profiling and other abuses. Several advocates put out statements Tuesday expressing dismay that the department was keeping any relationship with Mr. Arpaio.
Last week, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus wrote to President Obama, urging him to “immediately terminate” the program because of the complaints.
A report this year by Congress’ watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, found that the program had not been closely supervised and that it had often led to the arrest of minor offenders instead of the criminals it was intended to pursue.
The Homeland Security Department has sought to mend it the program, not end it.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that runs it, this summer announced an overhaul of the program and sought to reach new agreements with the agencies involved. Two agencies in Massachusetts have since announced their withdrawal from the program.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, with some 160 federally trained deputies, is the largest in the program and the most closely scrutinized by people on all sides of the immigration debate.
Mr. Arpaio conceded that the vast majority of the 33,000 arrests of illegal immigrants his office has made in the past two years under the agreement followed a check on the immigration status of people in jails. About 300 have been arrested in the field during “crime suppression” operations, he said. He called those arrests symbolically important.
“It has to do with public perception,” he said, noting reports that some illegal immigrants are leaving the area in part because of his deputies. “I think the bad guys apparently are leaving because they know they are here illegally. This is a crime deterrent program, too.”
In March, the Justice Department’s civil rights division announced that it was investigating the department, but Mr. Arpaio has conducted sweeps since then and he predicted that he would be exonerated.
The Maricopa agreement was also being watched to see if Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a Democrat and the former governor of Arizona, would take the opportunity to rein in Mr. Arpaio, a Republican and one of the state’s most popular figures. Although they did not often clash publicly, their political supporters often lashed out at one another.
By the account of Mr. Arpaio and his aides, he signed a copy of a new agreement on Sept. 21, allowing for both field and jail arrests. But that evening, Alonzo Pena, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, called from Washington and said he would be arriving in Phoenix the next day to discuss it.
After he arrived, Mr. Pena presented Mr. Arpaio another agreement that allowed only for jail checks.
Mr. Arpaio signed it, but it still must be approved by the county’s governing board. The board has been sympathetic to Mr. Arpaio on immigration matters, but he suggested the vote was far from a done deal.
Either way, he and his supporters vowed to press on.
Andrew Thomas, the county attorney, appeared with Mr. Arpaio to voice his support and condemn the “setback in the fight against illegal immigration.” Mr. Thomas said, “The fight goes on.”
He and Mr. Arpaio suggested that deputies could use the state anti-human smuggling law to make stops and refer suspected illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though it was not clear whether the agency would take them.
If not, the sheriff said, “I’ll take a little trip to the border and turn them over to the border.”

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/us/07arizona.html

Guilty by Immigration Status: A report on U.S. violations of the rights of immigrant families, workers and communities in 2008

2009-10-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

NNIRR's newest report couldn't come at a better time than the day Homeland Security head, Janet Napolitano, releases plans for reforming the immigrant detention system.

Guilty by Immigration Status: A report on U.S. violations of the rights
of immigrant families, workers and communities in 2008 calls for restoring
due process and suspending detentions and deportations, and urges a thorough
investigation into immigration enforcement practices.
The report was produced by HURRICANE, the Human Rights Immigrant Community Action Network, an initiative of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR).
Guilty by Immigration Status details how the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) has built up over the last eight years an "immigration control regime,"
whose goal is to deport everyone who can be deported. According to the report,
DHS is almost exclusively promoting the criminalization of immigration status to
detain and deport persons, often for minor offenses.

Read the entire report published by National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights: http://www.nnirr.org/hurricane/GuiltybyImmigrationStatus2008.pdf

Salvaging Immigration Detention

2009-10-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

New York Times editorial
Oct. 5, 2009

The Obama administration is unveiling on Tuesday an ambitious plan to
repair the immigration detention system, a scandal-plagued mix of federal, state
and local lockups that grew vastly and rotted under the enforcement crusade led
by former President George W. Bush.
The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, and John Morton, the
director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, deserve credit for
proposing to clean up a system notorious for shabby and abusive conditions, poor
or nonexistent medical treatment and a trail of preventable injuries and deaths.
The reforms, if they work and are maintained, would be a necessary corrective to
years of willful neglect.
Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Morton say that they want to
make the system more efficient, more accountable and less costly. The whole
point of detaining immigrants, after all, is to quickly figure out which ones
should be deported and to deport them, not to let them languish and certainly
not to inflict punishment or undue suffering.
But immigration detention has
strayed far from that basic mission. Tuesday’s
announcement includes statements of “core principles” so fundamental that
you have to wonder what they are replacing. Consider these:
• “ICE will
detain aliens in settings commensurate with the risk of flight and danger they
present.” That means the government has finally come to understand that
detainees are not all violent criminals. They include young mothers and their
children, asylum seekers, upright members of communities who, but for a lapsed
visa or bureaucratic snafu, would not be in trouble with the law. Those who can
make no case for staying here should be deported. But it’s gratifying to hear
Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Morton acknowledge that nonviolent noncriminals —
particularly those seeking refuge — should not be warehoused behind bars. They
have promised to increase alternatives to detention, and we expect them to do
that — even if it means a vast effort nationwide.
• “ICE will provide sound
medical care.” This fundamental government responsibility has been shamefully
neglected in centers around the country. The reform plan refers vaguely to a new
“medical classification system” for detainees that should improve treatment and
reduce unnecessary and disruptive medical transfers. ICE should make clear what
that means and how that will help those who become sick or injured only after
they are admitted and classified.
Perhaps the most important principle
behind these reforms is the reassertion of central control over the sprawling,
subcontracted system. The new plan asserts that central control is not only
smarter and more efficient but also cheaper. “Each of these reforms,” the agency
says, “are expected to be budget-neutral or result in cost savings through
reduced reliance on contractors to perform key federal duties.”
Immigration
detention is a prime example of things going bad when the government
subcontracts a vital mission to poorly supervised outsiders. The Obama
administration, like its predecessor, is under ferocious political pressure to
be seen as tough on people who have been unfairly depicted as a fundamentally
criminal, dangerous crowd. It is pushing back with an effort to be sane and
proportionate. If the reforms announced on Tuesday work half as well as
promised, the country will be closer to a detention system it does not have to
be ashamed of.

Read @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/opinion/06tue1.html

Ideas for Immigrant Detention Include Converting Hotels and Building Models

2009-10-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: October 5, 2009
New York Times

The Obama administration is looking to convert hotels and nursing homes
into immigration
detention centers and to build two model detention centers from scratch as it
tries to transform the way the government holds people it is seeking to
deport.
These and other initiatives, described in an interview on Monday by Janet
Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, are part of the
administration’s effort to revamp the much-criticized detention system, even as
it expands the enforcement programs that send most people accused of immigration
violations to jails and private prisons. The cost, she said, would be covered by
greater efficiencies in the detention and removal system, which costs $2.4
billion annually to operate and holds about 380,000 people a year.
“The
paradigm was wrong,” Ms. Napolitano said of the nation’s patchwork of rented
jail space, which has more than tripled in size since 1995, largely through Immigration
and Customs Enforcement contracts for cells more restrictive, and expensive,
than required for a population that is largely not dangerous. Among those in
detention on Sept. 1, 51 percent were considered felons, and of those, 11
percent had committed violent crimes.
“Serious felons deserve to be in the
prison model,” Ms. Napolitano said, “but there are others. There are women.
There are children.”
These and other nonviolent people should be sorted and
detained or supervised in ways appropriate to their level of danger or flight
risk, she said. Her goal, she said, is “to make immigration detention more
cohesive, accountable and relevant to the entire spectrum of detainees we are
dealing with.”
Several of the initiatives Ms. Napolitano described, to be
formally announced on Tuesday afternoon, are steps on a road
outlined in August, when John Morton, the assistant secretary for
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced an ambitious plan to transform
the penal network into a “truly civil detention system.”
But the corrections
expert he had put in charge of the overhaul, Dora B. Schriro, quit last
month to become the corrections commissioner in New York City, after
delivering a report on her eight-month top-to-bottom review of the system. The
report had remained under wraps until now.
Dr. Schriro’s departure, and the
delay in making her report public, dismayed many of the dozens of immigrant
advocacy groups she consulted. Her 35-page report, provided to The New York
Times after the interview on the condition that it not be posted on its Web site
until Tuesday afternoon, calls for prompt attention to individual complaints
about a lack of medical care, and “a credible grievance process, sustained in an
environment free from intimidation and retaliation.”
In her interview, Ms.
Napolitano said little about medical care but promised that within six months
the Department
of Homeland Security would “devise and implement” a classification system to
better place people with medical or mental health needs in the right detention
centers.
That vow puzzled some immigrant advocacy groups that deal with
seriously ill detainees, including some who have died in federal custody after
not getting proper treatment. The groups said they were concerned about the gap
between announced plans to improve medical care and the actions of immigration
officials.
Cheryl Little, the director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy
Center, pointed to the case of a woman she called Rosemarie, who, while being
detained at the Glades County Detention Center, has suffered severe daily
bleeding as a result of a fibroid tumor in her uterus.
“This has gone on for
more than the five months she has been in ICE custody,” Ms. Little said. “Since
June, we have tried everything to get her proper treatment. We started the
requests at the local level and escalated up to D.H.S. headquarters. Ultimately
we’ve had to file a lawsuit, and Rosemarie still hasn’t had the surgery she
needs.”
Ms. Napolitano noted repeatedly that some of the initiatives she was
announcing were “easier said than done.” Plans to speed the implementation of an
online system for families and lawyers to locate detainees, for example, have
been complicated by privacy issues and by the fact that many detainees share
names and some stay in the system for only a couple of days, she said.
Likewise, though alternatives to detention are much cheaper than the jails
under contract — $14 a day at most per person, compared with more than $100 a
day — the overall cost is more complicated to calculate, she said.
About
19,000 noncitizens are supervised daily using alternatives like electronic
bracelets, but their immigration cases are moved to the back of the line for
adjudication. Homeland Security is working with the Justice Department, which
oversees immigration courts, to modify that practice, she said, and this fall
will submit a proposal to Congress to expand detention alternatives.
A
request for proposals to build two model detention centers, one in California,
will be issued within a year, said Mr. Morton, the ICE official. On Oct. 30, he
said, he will solicit proposals and market research about converted hotels,
nursing homes and other residential facilities that could serve as less
expensive and less restrictive detention centers.
Mr. Morton said that on
Sept. 18 the agency began housing nonviolent detainees, including new asylum
seekers, at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., near free
legal help. But Charu al-Sahli, the statewide director of the Florida Immigrant
Advocacy Center, said the Broward center, run for profit by GEO, a large prison
company formerly known as Wackenhut, had been housing asylum seekers since 2003.
A former work-release center now surrounded by barbed wire, it is being
expanded to house 700, up from 530.
“Even though it’s a nicer environment
than a jail,” Ms. al-Sahli said, “these are still the people we would hold up
for release, not just nicer detention.”

Read article @ New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/us/politics/06detain.html

That Promise of Detention Reform

2009-09-22T07:48:00.001-07:00

New York Times Editorial
Sept. 21, 2009

Last month the Obama administration announced that it was going to overhaul
immigration detention, to impose accountability and safety on a system
notoriously deficient in both. This month, the official chosen to lead the
effort, Dora Schriro, announced that she was leaving Washington to become the
commissioner of correction for New York City. But the job of fixing the
detention system, and all of its horrors, must move ahead.
On Friday, her last day on the job, Ms. Schriro delivered a report on the
detention system to Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary. We hope
that it fully reflects the desperate reality: the brutal mistreatment;
isolation, filth and deprivation; the shabby or nonexistent health care and the
ill and injured detainees who languished and sometimes died, their suffering
untreated.
Ms. Schriro’s successor will have a big job in fulfilling the
administration’s promise of reform. The abuse and neglect must end. The system
must also become much more discriminating about whom it holds — dangerous
criminals, not the harmless and sick.
It will also have to rein in the
private for-profit prisons that deliver brutal service on the cheap. And it will
have to increase accountability and transparency. Ms. Napolitano can start by
releasing Ms. Schriro’s report. Americans need to find out what happened in
Basile, La., where detainees staged a hunger strike to protest detestable
conditions, or downtown Los Angeles, where inmates filed a lawsuit to protest
the squalor.
While Ms. Napolitano and her team promise to make detention a
“truly civil” system, they show no interest in reforming the corrupt mechanisms
that feed it. Instead, they are expanding the programs that have allowed corrupt
local officials to round up thousands in unjust raids. The same people whom
President Obama has promised a decent shot at citizenship remain easy prey to
racial profiling, and are terrified of ending up in this truly uncivilized
system. Mr. Obama and Ms. Napolitano must resolve that fundamental
contradiction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/opinion/21mon3.html

With Scuffles, Police Remove Migrants From French Camp

2009-09-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

By NADIM AUDI and CAROLINE BROTHERS
Published: September 22, 2009

CALAIS, France — French authorities dismantled and bulldozed a camp for
undocumented migrants outside this English Channel port on Tuesday, rounding up
almost 300 Afghans, Pakistanis and others who had gathered there for years in
the hope of making clandestine journeys across the 22 miles of water to
Britain.
Starting at daybreak, hundreds of paramilitary officers scuffled with
migrants and campaigners from a group called No Borders as the authorities
closed down the camp, known as “the jungle” by migrants and Calais residents
alike for its location among the thorn bushes and sand dunes of Calais.
Hours later, yellow earth movers began flattening the makeshift shelters
used by hundreds of migrants seeking to sneak — or be smuggled by organized
gangs of traffickers — across the channel to Britain, which is itself seeking to
tighten border controls against unwanted migrants. Workers with chain saws moved
in to cut down the brush that had hidden the area from view.
The camp, with
huts and a mosque made of packing crates, blankets and tarpaulins, grew after
the closing of a Red Cross shelter for migrants in nearby Sangatte in late 2002.
The operation on Tuesday had been loudly signaled by the authorities, and many
migrants — possibly 1,000, according to news reports — had slipped away before
the raid.
With migrants outnumbered by 500 riot police officers, the
half-hour operation began at 7:40 a.m.. Under the gaze of about 200 waiting
journalists, police dragged or escorted away the mainly Afghan migrants who had
gathered in silence under a banner written in Pashto and English declaring: “The
jungle is our house, please don’t destroy it — if you do so then where is the
place to go?”
Some were led away in tears.
The immigration
minister, Eric Besson, defended the operation on RTL radio Tuesday. “This is not
a humanitarian camp,” he said. “It’s a base for human traffickers.”
At a news
conference in Calais, Mr. Besson said 276 people, including 135 teenagers, were
arrested and their fate would be determined on a “case by case” basis.
French authorities say some migrants will return to their countries of
origin, some will apply for asylum in France
and some will be expelled to Greece, the country where most of them entered the European
Union.
According to Pierre de Bousquet, the Pas de Calais prefect who
directed Tuesday’s action, shelter has been made available for those migrants
wishing to seek asylum, while minors will be taken to hostels for people under
18. Others will be held pending deportation.
Human rights bodies have urged
Paris not to return migrants to Greece, but Mr. Besson declined to comment
Tuesday on whether he had raised the issue with his Greek counterpart on a visit
to the country on Friday.
Khaled Hadarhy, a 21-year-old Afghan, was rounded
up along with two friends who were 16 and 17. “We are all young, but we look old
because the jungle has made us old,” said Mr. Hadarhy, a former policeman from
Helmand Province who has been in Calais for four months.
“The police will
come and we will do what they tell us,” said Exel Palav, 20, from
Afghanistan.
Pierre Henry, president of a campaign group called France Terre
d’Asile, said Tuesday’s operation was an effort to make the migrants disappear
“like a coin in a three-cup magic trick,” displacing them to neighboring Belgium
or the Netherlands.
“The operation in Calais won’t stop departures from
Kabul,” he said. “The smugglers will find other routes that are more complex and
more dangerous.”
The move to eliminate the tents and ramshackle housing
around the port is designed to halt migrants without papers from getting into
Britain, and to crack down on the smuggling networks that assist
them.
“Smugglers will not lay down the law,” the immigration minister, Mr.
Besson, said last Wednesday. He first announced the plan to dismantle the camp
in April, responding to complaints from local businesses.
The closure took
place as European countries increasingly use force to crack down on unwanted
migrants. On July 12, Greece eliminated a makeshift camp in the port city of
Patras; in May, Italy struck a controversial accord with Libya allowing it to
turn back migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean. The European Union estimates
that 500,000 people cross its borders without papers each year.

Read full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/world/europe/23france.html

Scathing Report on Border Security Is Issued

2009-09-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: September 17, 2009

LOS ANGELES — Government auditors reported Thursday that the effort to secure the Mexican border with technology and fences has fallen years behind schedule, will cost billions of dollars extra in maintenance costs and has no clear means of gauging whether illegal crossings have been curtailed.
Mark Borkowski, who directs the Secure Border Initiative for the Department of Homeland Security, stood by the program as “transformational,” but did not challenge the findings. “We are as frustrated as anybody is” with the setbacks, Mr. Borkowski said in an interview.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog, said the department had fallen about seven years behind its goal of putting in place the technology the Bush administration had heavily promoted when it announced the Secure Border Initiative in 2005.

In 2006, the report said, the department estimated it would have a system of cameras, radars and sensors in place to aid a force of border guards by the end of 2009, but the completion date is now projected as 2016.

“Flaws found in testing and concerns about the impact of placing towers and access roads in environmentally sensitive locations caused delays,” said Richard M. Stana, an author of the report. The cameras and radars, a “virtual fence” in a system designed by the contractor, Boeing, have fallen prey to weather and mechanical problems.

The effort to build 661 miles of fences blocking vehicles or pedestrians is nearly complete, but with 28 miles left to go, it has been delayed by lawsuits from landowners in Texas.

The government has spent $2.4 billion on such “physical infrastructure,” but the report said it could cost $6.5 billion over 20 years to maintain it.

For all the money spent, the department has not set up a way to evaluate the fences’ impact, relying mainly on the judgment of senior Border Patrol agents.

Mr. Borkowski said the government auditors were overly “pessimistic,” and, while he offered no guarantees, he predicted the system would prove successful. He said the department was studying ways to judge its success beyond managers’ opinions.

The apprehension of illegal immigrants at the border has fallen to lows not seen in decades, but scholars and Mexican officials say the recession and the lack of jobs in the United States have contributed to the drop.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in response to the report that department officials needed to get the Secure Border Initiative “right or find an alternative technology solution.”

Read article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/us/18fence.html

Settlement Aids Detainees in Los Angeles

2009-09-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 16, 2009

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Federal immigration
officials have settled a lawsuit that claimed people suspected of being illegal
immigrants were kept in “barbaric” conditions in a downtown Los Angeles
detention center, civil rights groups announced Wednesday.
The federal court
agreement restricts detention at the facility to 12 hours at a stretch except
under unusual circumstances like epidemics or natural disasters. It requires
that detainees be provided with soap, access to lawyers and writing materials
for those who need to prepare legal documents.
The agreement, which applies
only to the downtown facility and runs until June of next year, “restores
detainees’ dignity and their right to due process,” said Ahilan T. Arulanantham,
director of immigrants’ rights and national security for the American Civil
Liberties Union of Southern California. “It is one step, but an important one,
in correcting our severely broken immigration detention system
nationwide.”
The A.C.L.U., the National Immigration Law Center and a private
law firm claimed that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency
maintained overcrowded and squalid conditions in B-18, a temporary holding
center in the basement of a downtown federal building.
But a statement from
the groups said many of the problems were corrected after the lawsuit was filed
in April.
Detainees have included illegal immigrants, others who have
overstayed visas, felons fighting deportation after completing prison terms and
some who have pending claims for political asylum.
The lawsuit asserted that
B-18 has held 200 or more people at a time. Immigrants are not supposed to be
held at the detainee center for more than 12 consecutive hours because it has no
beds. The lawsuit contended that some detainees were held for 20 hours or more,
slept on the floor and drank from a sink because there was no other water
source.

NEW SENATE HEALTH CARE REFORM PROPOSAL FAILS TO MEET THE NEEDS OF AMERICANS

2009-09-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

National Immigration Law Center FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, SEPTEMBER 16, 2009CONTACT: Adela de la Torre 213.674.2832

WASHINGTON – In yet another attempt to derail progress on health care reform, opponents have tried again to generate fears and false claims about immigrants. Unfortunately, rather than strengthening its resolve to improve the health care system, the Senate Finance Committee, apparently following the administration’s lead, has responded by taking the bait. Today the committee introduced a health care reform proposal that denies millions of U.S. workers and their families the opportunity to purchase affordable health care and that will threaten the health and well-being of the nation’s communities. Below is a statement from National Immigration Law Center Executive Director Marielena Hincapié on efforts to deny immigrants access to affordable health care.
“In an effort to appease the anti-immigrant minority who fundamentally oppose health care reform, the health care reform proposal released today by the chair of the Senate Finance Committee falls far short of the original goal of making health care available or affordable for everyone. Lawmakers have once again allowed disruptive, counterproductive voices to prevent us from moving forward as a country with real solutions for the broken health care and immigration systems. Instead, they offer half-hearted solutions that leave too many families and workers behind while Americans continue to lose access to affordable health care. Instead of cowering before those who believe the status quo works for the average American, Congress needs to prescribe real solutions to the health care crisis and fix the system in a way that addresses the diverse needs of our nation.
“We cannot allow the shouts of a few extremists to prevent us from repairing a health care system that has been broken for decades. We urge Congress to make the most of this historic opportunity to move the country forward by ensuring that all Americans — including immigrants and their families — have access to quality affordable health care. Common-sense measures, such as ensuring that low-income legal immigrants do not have to wait five years for affordable care, will go a long way in improving our national health.”

For more information:
"Why Excluding People from the Health Care Exchange is Impractical and Harmful to All of Us" (www.nilc.org/immspbs/health/exchange-imms-2009-09-14.pdf)

More information about the health care reform bills and how they affect immigrants will be available soon at www.nilc.org.

Rep. Jared Polis: The Case for Detention Reform

2009-09-17T14:55:00.001-07:00

Rep. Jared Polis: The Case for Detention Reform
Sept 15, 2009

For the inaugural edition of the Denver Huffington Post, I thought I'd
write about an issue that is close to my heart -- reforming our nation's
immigration detention facilities, which hold tens of thousands of immigrants who
were mostly picked up for trivial offenses like speeding or loitering and are
now in detention at taxpayer expense for months or even years.

Imagine that one day you are home with your family, and the next day your
kids return from school to find that you've been placed for an indefinite period
in a detention facility with limited visitation rights.

The need for comprehensive immigration reform is felt by Americans in
Colorado and across the nation, but few are aware of the high cost, deplorable
conditions, and general failure that is our detention system. In this blog I
hope to shine some light on what is becoming an increasingly costly
embarrassment to our nation and an affront to our American values.
Just last
week, I met with the National Day Laborers' Organizing Network (NDLON), their
Colorado affiliate organization, Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores, and
the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, who have been working on
detention reform. During our meeting, we talked about abysmal conditions at the
Basile detention facility in Louisiana, where dozens of immigrants were denied
basic access to basic sanitation and medical assistance. Enduring humiliation
and further abuse, hundreds of detainees participated in a series of hunger
strikes demanding to be treated with dignity and afforded their basic human
rights.
Sadly, the stories of abuse, malnutrition and lack of basic health
care are altogether too common in detention facilities. The experience of New
Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice resonated deeply with similar groups
in Colorado, seeking to support those who are struggling to gain access to basic
medical assistance or regular meals.
This summer, I toured a GEO detention
facility in Aurora, where I met some of the thirty thousand immigrants
throughout the country being held in detention facilities due to an immigration
violation. They are children, pregnant women, asylum-seekers, victims of human
trafficking, survivors of torture and other vulnerable individuals. Some are
undocumented, but many were not and are simply "waiting" for a decision of an
immigration court.
Currently there are 400 facilities being used to house
immigrants in detention at an annual cost of more than $1.7 billion. Depending
on the facility, the average cost of detaining an immigrant is $99 per day. Here
in Colorado, it costs over $133 dollars a day to detain an immigrant at the GEO
Detention Facility in Aurora. Given the absurd amount of money the government is
spending on immigrant detention facilities, it is all the more ludicrous
considering that most of the immigrants being held in detention pose no threat
to our community. These individuals are not criminals and have no place in
detention centers.
Even more disturbing is the alarming number of deaths in
detention. Since 2003, Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims there have
been at least 104 deaths in immigration detention. Many of these deaths have
been caused by a lack of timely and thorough medical care and nearly one fifth
of them have been suicides. Although the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
owns and operates select detention centers, the government also "buys" bed space
from private facilities such as the GEO in Aurora and over 312 county and city
prisons nationwide. These for-profit contractors are not directly supervised by
DHS staff, creating a lack of communication and a gross lack of accountability.
Consequently, individuals have routinely experienced egregious conditions of
confinement, physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding and discrimination. For a
hundred dollars per day, the amount of money taxpayers are spending on
detention, we could afford to house immigrants at hotels across the country, but
instead we place them under dangerous conditions where they are denied basic
human rights.
Thankfully, effective alternatives to detention are readily
available. Systems that include reporting and electronic monitoring have been
found to yield an appearance rate before immigration courts of well over 90
percent. They are effective and significantly cheaper, with some programs
costing as little as $12 per day compared to the $99 per day in the average
detention center. Prisons should be for criminals, not honest, productive people
caught up in the byzantine morass of our broken immigration system.
By the
end of 2009 the U.S. government will have more than 440,000 people in
immigration custody -- more than triple the number of people in detention just
ten years ago. While it is not good policy to put immigrants with no criminal
record and who pose no threat to our community behind bars, it is certainly not
in our best interest to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on detaining a
civilian population when alternatives have been proven to work.
This August,
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced the beginning of major
detention reforms at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), shutting down
the deadly and infamous T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas and increasing
direct government oversight of privately-run detention centers and
accountability within ICE for substandard detention facilities.
While I am
thrilled that the Obama Administration is beginning to address these issues, it
is merely the first step toward reforming our failed immigration detention
system. As Congress begins consideration of comprehensive immigration reform
next year, it is crucial to continue to shine a light on the need to re-haul our
current immigration detention system, which has failed to make Americans safer
while undermining our values and wasting taxpayer dollars. Regardless of what
internal policies are implemented at the DHS, Congress must define humane
enforcement and ensure that detention standards are enforced if ICE is not able
to do so. Decisions about whether vulnerable populations should be held in
detention, the conditions immigrant detainees are subject to, and how much of a
role alternatives to detention should play a part of a truly humane civil
detention system are too important to leave up to DHS to decide
internally.
With President Obama committed to enacting comprehensive
immigration reform and the Congress set to consider and debate reform early next
year, it is crucial that we reform our immigration detention system immediately.
By strengthening accountability and oversight to of detention facilities,
investigating abuses in detention and expanding cost saving and more cost saving
and humane "alternatives to detention" for law-abiding immigrants we can reform
our detention policies to better reflect our American values and save taxpayer
money.

Read at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-polis/case-for-detention-reform_b_287260.html

As detention center shuts down in Texas, advocates worry about future for immigrant families

2009-09-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

Annabelle Garay
AP writer
Sept. 9, 2009

DALLAS (AP) — As immigrant children and their parents depart a disparaged former Texas
prison that housed them while they awaited decisions in their immigration cases,
advocates are questioning if the government has fully thought out what happens
to the families now.Federal officials announced last month that the T. Don Hutto
facility in Taylor would no longer hold immigrant families and they instead
would be detained at the much smaller Berks Family Residential Center in
Leesport, Pa. But with only 84 beds — and more than 100 people once housed at
Hutto — some advocates wonder if there will be enough space, or if immigrants
will be released."We still have a lot of questions and would like to hear more
details," said Denise Gilman, of the Immigration Clinic at the University
of Texas School of Law, which along with other advocates filed a lawsuit
contending that family detention at Hutto was inhumane.Hutto is set to stop
holding immigrant families by the end of the year, government officials say, and
families have slowly been leaving. Instead of transferring the families to
Berks, the government has been trying to process the cases of families at both
facilities.The Texas facility went from holding 127 men, women and children last
month to just 22 people this week. They were either deported to their home
countries or released while they pursue asylum or another immigration status to
remain in the U.S.As the change takes place, advocates are watching to see if
the Pennsylvania
facility has better conditions, if cases are handled fairly and if new problems
arise because of the shift.

Baker County Press (FL): ICE inmates finally arriving

2009-09-12T06:20:00.000-07:00

Sept 9, 2009
Joel Addington
Baker County Press

About two weeks after finalizing an agreement with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), the newly constructed sheriff’s complex accepted its first 38
prisoners from the federal agency last week.
Federal officers had transferred
three inmates by September 2 and another 35 arrived in a handful of nondescript
vans the afternoon of September 3, accompanied by a large bus with a US
Department of Homeland Security logo.
Baker Correctional Development
Corporation (BCDC) board members and ICE officials joined Sheriff Joey Dobson
and facility staff for a handoff.
“It’s exciting for us,” said the nonprofit
corporation’s secretary Paul Whitehead. “I’ve been looking forward to this day.
It’s a good thing for the county.”
The BCDC oversees management of the new
jail and repayment of $45 million bonded to fund its construction. The
organization was formed in 2007, but planning for the 512-bed facility began as
early as 2002.
Six years later the bonds were sold and construction began.
The project was completed and the sheriff’s department, emergency management
services, dispatchers and local inmates moved into the complex last June. Since
then it’s housed about 100 local inmates and a small group of prisoners from
other federal law enforcement agencies.
“I’ve been anxious about getting to
this day,” said Sheriff Dobson, who along with other county officials have been
eager to see cells at the complex occupied and federal dollars start to trickle
in.
Since that roughly $84 per day per prisoner is expected to repay the
bonds, the slow churning of ICE’s Washington bureaucracy took its toll in recent
months as local officials fielded numerous inquiries about when, if ever, the
prisoners might be transferred.
Last week Sheriff Dobson asked for assistance
from Senator Bill Nelson’s office in moving the paperwork along. He said
the senator’s office called September 1 to inform him that ICE inmates
would arrive within the week.
“They got it done,” said Sheriff Dobson. “My
blood pressure is probably somewhat down now … This day is historical. It’s what
we built this facility for.”
The sheriff’s department, which has a management
contract with BCDC to run the jail, hired 16 new guards to handle additional
inmates. The staffing plan calls for two more waves of hiring that will
culminate with 60 sworn officers at the complex.
“It’s not a lot of change,
just in the numbers,” said Sheriff Dobson about the impact of housing ICE
inmates. “It changes the complexity of dealing with them on an everyday
basis.”
More than 350 cells remain empty, and it’s unclear when the new jail
might reach full capacity.
“It’s going to be slowly,” said an ICE supervisor
from Jacksonville who asked not to be identified. “Once you go into this, it’s
like making jambalaya — you add the rice, let it cook, then the beans; you take
your time.”
In the view of BCDC president Todd Knabb, it’s good the facility
didn’t fill up immediately. “It gives them a chance to get all the kinks worked
out,” he said.
According to a 10-year cash flow forecast for the BCDC, the
jail’s projected income won’t reach $15.6 million annually until 2013. That
figure represents how much revenue would be generated if all 512 beds were
occupied continuously for 365 days.
The forecast also shows that by this time
next year, the BCDC is expected to have $12.4 million coming in with only $10.4
million in operational expenses and debt payments.

"Immigrant Detention: Can ICE Meet its Legal Imperatives and Case Management Responsibilities"

2009-09-12T04:55:00.000-07:00

Migration Policy Institute issued a new report, "Immigrant Detention: Can ICE Meet its Legal Imperatives and Case Management Responsibilities", analyzes select data for all 32,000 detainees held in ICE custody on one night in January 2009 and examines the sufficiency of ICE's database and case tracking system. The question has taken on new urgency in light of the ICE announcement in August that it plans to revamp its detention system to reduce its reliance on local jails and private prisons, address longstanding concerns related to conditions of confinement and centralize management.

Some highlights of the report's analysis of the ICE data on detainees in the system on January 25, 2009:

* Of the 32,000 immigrants in ICE's custody, 18,690 had pending removal cases (in other words, they had not received final orders of removal).
* The average length of detention for the 18,690 pre-removal order detainees was 81 days. Seventy-four percent had been detained for less than 90 days, 13 percent for between 90 days and six months, 10 percent for between six months and one year, and 3 percent for more than one year.
* A high percentage of ICE detainees (58 percent) do not have criminal records, even though mandatory detention laws largely apply to criminal aliens; ICE includes persons who have committed immigration-related offenses in its criminal alien nomenclature, and ICE's expanding Secure Communities program places large numbers of arrested and imprisoned noncitizens into removal proceedings.
* ICE held detainees in 286 facilities, which were concentrated in southern and U.S.-Mexico border states; 68 percent of the total were held in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.
* Nearly 70 percent of detainees were held in state and local prisons pursuant to Intergovernmental Service Agreements, 17 percent in contract detention facilities, 10 percent in service processing centers, 2 percent in federal prisons and 3 percent in Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities, medical centers, shelters, and other alternative or "soft" detention settings.

The report makes a range of recommendations, among them that ICE:

* Undertake an intensive analysis of its information systems, particularly its detention database and case tracking system, in light of its legal mandates, management imperatives and detention transformation initiative.
* Comprehensively review its contracts for detention space, with the goal of maximizing the cost savings realized by expanding alternative-to-detention programs.
* Capture information that would allow the agency to adhere to its national standards, including information on when and how the agency has complied with the standards. For standards related to detainee transfers, ICE should record information on the U.S. residence of detainees, their family members and legal counsel.
* Collect all information related to detainee medical needs, interventions, treatment and causes of death.

To read the full report, click here.

Health Care Debate Revives Immigration Battle

2009-09-08T04:44:00.000-07:00

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: September 5, 2009
New York Times

The Obama administration took an overhaul of the country’s immigration
laws off its legislative agenda this year, but the prickly issue of public
benefits for illegal immigrants has resurfaced in the health care debate.
[...]

Republicans argue that some of the voters’ concerns are justified because,
they say, the proposals before Congress do not spell out procedures to verify
the citizenship of those who would receive health coverage. [...]

Broad explanations, not intricate detail, were what voters in Georgia were
looking for in recent meetings with Representative Phil Gingrey, a Republican
who was a practicing physician in the state for 26 years. Mr. Gingrey said there
had been an influx of illegal immigrants in his district in the last decade.
“A lot of their kids are in the school system,” Mr. Gingrey said in a
telephone interview. “They get a free public education without any question. My
constituents don’t want the same thing to happen with regard to health
care.”
Mr. Gingrey said the prohibitions against illegal immigrants in the
bills were “reassuring,” but he, too, suggested that eligibility verification
remained weak. According to local news reports, Mr. Gingrey drew cheers in one
meeting when he said he would work to make sure the health plan did not become a
magnet drawing new illegal immigrants to the United States. [...]

Democrats reacted sharply to the prospect of a fight over verification. Senator Max
Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Finance Committee, said citizenship
checks already included in federal programs like Medicaid
would be preserved in new legislation. He said the health care debate should not
be a forum for a battle over immigration.
As a result of a 2005 law,
Medicaid, the federal low-income health program, now requires all applicants to
verify their citizenship. Current health care proposals would expand Medicaid to
more families, keeping the proof-of-citizenship requirements.
Democrats are
reluctant to expand those requirements to everyone seeking insurance under a
health care overhaul, because several studies on the
impact on Medicaid have found that citizenship verification increased
administrative costs for states and made it difficult for some American citizens
to join the program.
Many of those left out were elderly patients, who did not have originals of
identity documents that the 2005 law demands.
“Many states view the proof of
citizenship as very onerous on American families,” said Diane Rowland, executive
director of the Commission on Medicaid and the
Uninsured at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, speaking of the Medicaid
requirements.
In six states that were
reviewed in 2007 by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
verification increased federal costs by $8.3 million, but only eight illegal
immigrants were detected on the Medicaid rolls of the states.

Low-Wage Workers Are Often Cheated, Study Says

2009-09-03T06:05:00.000-07:00

By Steven Greenhouse
Sept 1, 2009

Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often
paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey
of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a
decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at
least one pay-related violation in the previous work week. [...]

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including
apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found
that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations,
out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss
in pay.
The researchers said one of the most surprising findings was how
successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for
workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on
the job filed for compensation to pay for medical care and missed days at work
stemming from those injuries. [...]

The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage
violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal
immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate
nearly triple that for whites.
“These practices are not just morally
reprehensible, but they’re bad for the economy,” said Annette
Bernhardt, an author of the study and policy co-director of the National
Employment Law Project. “When unscrupulous employers break the law, they’re
robbing families of money to put food on the table, they’re robbing communities
of spending power and they’re robbing governments of vital tax revenues.”

Changes in illegal immigrant detention policy may impact Utah company, county jails

2009-09-01T18:03:00.000-07:00

Law enforcement » The new detention centers will be more like secure dorms than jails.

By Matt Canham
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 08/29/2009 08:43:03 AM MDThttp://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13225808

Washington » The Obama administration's plan to streamline and civilize federal detention for immigration violators could have major impacts on some Utah jails and one company based in the state.
As it stands now, the government scatters tens of thousands of soon-to-be-deported detainees among 350 jails, prisons and contract facilities with little federal oversight.
But in the next three to five years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, plans to drop that number and move undocumented immigrants into their own facilities, which will resemble locked-up dorms more than prison cells. The agency will also examine alternatives, such as community supervision.
"This change marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to enforce immigration laws smartly and effectively," said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who announced the policy change earlier this month.
The move may mean Weber, Washington and Utah county jails would house fewer immigrants awaiting deportation and receive less federal funding. It could also impact the business of Management & Training Corp., a Centerville-based company that runs two out-of-state ICE lockups.
But federal officials say they are months away from determining the details. What is known is that ICE wants fewer locations, but more regulations and oversight. And it plans to make the changes within its existing $3 billion detention budget.
The announcement also makes it clear that the Obama team is critical of the way detainees were treated under President George W. Bush.
In the years following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the federal government took a much tougher approach to immigration violators, resulting in a boom in the number of detainees. The government had to quickly negotiate deals with individual county jails and rush construction on ICE facilities, relying almost exclusively on private contractors.
Since then, investigators have uncovered shoddy and sometimes fatal medical treatment and repeated violations of federal standards for food, clothing and legal counsel at the contract facilities
At the same time, immigration law groups and civil libertarians have argued against using county jails and state prisons, saying that people held only on administrative grounds shouldn't be treated the same as hardened criminals.
In response to these criticisms, ICE Director John Morton announced the creation of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning, which is in charge of designing the new civil detention system.
"This growth has presented significant challenges to a system that was not fundamentally designed to address ICE's specific detention needs," Morton said.
Reed Richards with the Utah Sheriffs' Association is surprised the federal government would move to a centralized system.
"It is very expensive to build facilities," he said.
ICE runs no detention centers in Utah. Instead it contracts with Weber, Washington and Utah counties to hold detainees, some of whom were already incarcerated for a state crime, while others are held solely on their immigration violations.
Undocumented immigrants convicted on a state charge must serve that sentence before being placed on what is called a civil detainer or ICE hold. As immigration enforcement ramped up nationwide, so did the number of detainees in county jails, including Weber. If ICE drops its county contracts, some jails would be in a bind.
"Yeah, it is going to cost them some money," Richards said.
The Weber County jail gets $55 per day for every immigrant held on an ICE detainer. And while the stay is normally short, the jail has recently averaged about 120 immigrants locked up each day.
If that trend held, it would add up to about $2.4 million per year or a tenth of the jail's budget. If ICE decides to move these detainees to their own facilities, Weber County may be forced to cut some jobs.
"It would actually have a significant impact," said Weber County Capt. Kevin Burton. "You start talking about people's employment and everything else."
That's exactly why the Washington County jail accepts only about 25 immigration violators at a any given time when they are contracted to take up to 100.
"We don't get too dependent on contract inmates because they can go away," said Washington County Chief Deputy Jake Schultz.
His facility generally is an overflow holding area when ICE has too many people locked up in Las Vegas.
Both Weber and Washington counties participate in ICE's 287(g) program that allows county corrections officers to investigate the immigration status of their inmates. They can slap ICE holds on those deemed to be undocumented.
Utah County started taking ICE detainees in the past three years and now averages about 90 per day, according to Sheriff Jim Tracy.
He says he doesn't look at it as a long-term money maker, but more a way to help an immigration system struggling to deal with the effects of stricter enforcement. Tracy said if ICE decides to end its contract with the county, which receives $61 per day per detainee, then so be it. As the county's population grows in the next few years and more criminals are locked up, his plan is to gradually reduce the immigration violators.
"We are not going to displace county prisoners for ICE people," he said.
When ICE does announce the changes, it won't completely move away from contracting with states and counties or away from its private prison contractors, such as Utah's Management & Training Corp., referred to as MTC.
"We are not talking about moving to a wholly-owned and operated government structure at this point," Morton, who leads ICE, told reporters.
In responding to the ICE directives, MTC, the nation's third largest private prison contractor, struck an upbeat tone.
"MTC is encouraged by the direction ICE appears to be taking," said Scott Marquardt, the company's president and CEO. "ICE is concerned about the quality of health care detainees receive, that detainees are treated humanely and that they have substantial opportunities for recreation and programs."
The government fast tracked the design and creation of its Willacy immigration facility in Texas in 2006, opening its doors less than a month and a half after MTC won the contract. It now has 3,000 beds, making it ICE's largest detention facility.
MTC also runs ICE's Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico that can house up to 1,086 immigration detainees.
In recent years, MTC's Willacy and Otero facilities have received deficient ratings in inspections for such things as access to a telephone, food service and environmental health. They have not had the more serious medical violations found in other contract facilities.
"MTC is prepared to make any management changes ICE officials determine to be prudent and appropriate," said Odie Washington, the company's senior vice president.
mcanham@sltrib.com

N.C. native wrongly deported to Mexico

2009-08-31T05:20:00.000-07:00

By Kristin Collins
Charlotte Observer
8/30/09

The U.S. government admitted in April that it had wrongly deported an N.C. native, but newly released documents show that federal investigators ignored FBI records and other evidence showing that the man was a United States citizen.
At the time of Mark Lyttle's deportation, immigration officials had criminal record checks that said he was a U.S. citizen. They had his Social Security number and the names of his parents. They had Lyttle's own sworn statement that he had been born in Rowan County.
None of this stopped them from leaving Lyttle, a mentally ill American who speaks no Spanish, alone and penniless in Mexico, where he has no ties.
Lyttle's 350-page Department of Homeland Security file, released to The (Raleigh) News & Observer, shows that the government deported him based entirely on some of his own conflicting statements, even though agents knew that Lyttle is bipolar and has a learning disability.
“I tried to tell them I was a U.S. citizen born right here in Rowan County,” Lyttle says now. “But no one believed me.”
Lyttle is one of a growing number of people who have been swept up in the federal immigration detention system since 2001, when terrorist attacks prompted an unprecedented effort to find and deport illegal immigrants. The U.S. government deported 350,000 people in the fiscal year that ended in October 2008.
When The N&O first reported on Lyttle's case in April, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said that Lyttle had caused the mistake by declaring that he was from Mexico. They maintain that position now.
“Individuals who misrepresent their true identity and make false statements to ICE officers create problems both for law enforcement and themselves,” ICE spokesman Ivan Ortiz-Delgado said in a written statement.
Lyttle swore to immigration agents on two occasions that he was Mexican, but he also swore that he was a U.S. citizen born in Rowan County. His Homeland Security file does not reflect any attempt by ICE officials to confirm Lyttle's citizenship claims.
The agent who took Lyttle's statement that he was born in North Carolina dismissed it, saying in a report that Lyttle “does not possess any documentation to support his claim.”
A few dozen pages were withheld from the file released by ICE. But the file provided to The N&O shows no search for a Rowan County birth certificate and no attempts to reach the family members Lyttle named before his initial deportation.
The ICE file states that Lyttle's Mexican citizenship “was established based on interview results and numerous background system checks.” But repeated background checks, from an FBI fingerprint database and the National Crime Information Center, showed he was an American citizen.
Asked by The N&O why they had not accepted the findings in these background checks, ICE officials said they were reviewing their information and could not provide a response after a week.
The inconsistencies in his case were not discussed when Lyttle appeared before an Atlanta immigration judge and was ordered deported on Dec.9. On Dec. 18, he was loaded onto a plane and left at an airport just across the border from Hidalgo, Texas.
On Dec. 29, he returned to the U.S. border threatening to hurt himself and the border patrol agents. “Subject appears to be mentally unstable,” the report notes.
Lyttle, who now lives with his mother in Georgia, says that during his travels he didn't take medications that treat his mental illness and was subject to cycles of manic activity and depression.
Lyttle again told immigration agents he had been born in Rowan County. This time the file shows that they checked for his birth certificate there. They didn't find it because Lyttle is adopted. In cases of adoption, birth certificates are stored in Raleigh, said Shirley Stiller, the deputy register of deeds in Rowan County.
Lyttle was deported a second time, within hours. With no documents to prove legal residency in any country, he soon found himself on an international odyssey.
Mexican authorities sent him to Honduras, where he was imprisoned before being sent to Guatemala.
In late April, he found the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Within a day, officials there contacted Lyttle's brother at the military base where Lyttle told them he was serving, got copies of his adoption papers and issued him a U.S. passport.
Three days after his arrival in Guatemala City, his brother had wired him money and Lyttle was on a flight to Atlanta.
U.S. Immigration officials worked Lyttle's case for 31/2 months and held him in immigration detention for more than six weeks.
“This is not rocket science,” said Jacqueline Stevens, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who brought Lyttle's case to light on her blog and is now writing a book about it. “It took someone in Guatemala one day to prove he was a citizen.”
Lyttle, 32, has spent much of his adulthood bouncing among mental institutions, halfway houses and prisons. He has been convicted of more than a dozen crimes, including assault and sexual battery.
He also lost touch with his mother, who had moved during his time in prison, and did not have phone numbers for his two brothers, who are in the military. His father is deceased.
When he entered prison, his country of birth was listed as Mexico. Prison officials say Lyttle made that claim, but in an interview with The N&O, Lyttle said he never invented such a story. Regardless, he was flagged for a federal immigration check.
In September and November 2008, he met with immigration agents three times, each time signing a different sworn statement.
Lyttle says he claimed to be Mexican at the first interview because he thought it was pointless to argue with the agent, who was convinced that he was an illegal immigrant. His birth father was Puerto Rican, and Lyttle says he is often mistaken for Mexican.
He says he figured he would take a free trip to Mexico.

Read article: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/local/story/917007.html

L.A. County inmates to have immigration status checked as part of new program

2009-08-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

LA Now Aug. 27, 2009

All inmates booked into jails throughout Los Angeles County will have their
immigration status checked beginning today, but federal officials said they
don’t have the resources to deport all illegal immigrants with criminal records
who are identified.

Immigration Officials Often Detain Foreign-Born Rikers Inmates for Deportation

2009-08-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 24, 2009
New York Times

In a city with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to immigration
status, it may come as a surprise to many that the New York Department of
Correction routinely gives a list of foreign-born inmates at Rikers
Island to immigration authorities, who use it to question, detain and try to
deport thousands of them.
At least 13,000 Rikers inmates have been placed in
deportation proceedings since 2004 through this practice, a coalition of
immigrant advocacy groups has learned from data obtained in a Freedom of
Information Act request. The groups, and their lawyers at the Immigrant
Justice Clinic of Cardozo School of Law, will discuss the findings and start
a protest campaign Tuesday morning at Judson Memorial Church in Lower
Manhattan.

Read more about local-federal collaboration and this new campaign: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25rikers.html

Berks County may stop housing illegal aliens [sic]

2009-08-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

By Holly Herman
Reading Eagle

While federal officials are planning to move families seeking American
citizenship from a Texas detention center that is closing to a Berks County
shelter, the county commissioners are considering getting out of the
alien-housing business.
The Family Center in Bern Township is the only other
facility in the country that houses families awaiting hearings or the results of
hearings on requests to stay in the U.S.But with tight economic times, the Berks
County commissioners may end up closing the Bern Township center, which opened
in 2001.So far, no definite plans have been made to shut down the 84-bed center
housing detained immigrant families captured at the borders and in other
places.
Closing the facility would mean the loss of 50 county jobs, officials
said.But the county isn't profiting from the money the U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement service pays the county for housing the detainees .
"At the initial stages we were permitted to make a profit, but now we are breaking even on it," Commissioner Chairman Mark C. Scott said. "We have been helpful to the federal government for a decade.

Hurdles Shown in Detention Reform

2009-08-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 20, 2009
New York Times

In the fall of 2006, a man’s death brought a team of government
investigators to the large, privately run immigration
jail in Eloy, Ariz., in the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. Medical care was
so poor, the team later warned federal immigration officials, that “detainee
welfare is in jeopardy.”

Another death there soon spurred another inquiry, and another scathing
report was issued about the care provided by the private company, the Corrections Corporation of
America.
But the government scrutiny did not add up to much for Felix
Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorean construction worker who wound up in
Eloy that fall as an unauthorized immigrant after being jailed for petty larceny
in New York City. By mid-December, a fellow detainee told the man’s relatives,
Mr. Rodriguez lay pleading for medical help on the floor of his cell, unable to
move.

He died weeks later of testicular cancer, a typically fast-growing but
treatable disease, which had gone undiagnosed and untreated during his two
months at Eloy, which holds more than 1,500 detainees. And despite a high-level
discussion of his case among federal immigration officials while he was dying —
captured in e-mail
messages between Washington and Arizona — his death on Jan. 18, 2007, was
not listed on the roster of detention fatalities that the agency produced under
pressure last year and updated in April.

His death, and the damning reports that preceded it, are coming to light
now only through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American
Civil Liberties Union. On Monday, after
inquiries about Mr. Rodriguez’s death by The New York Times, the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency added his name and nine others to the public
roster — including another unrecorded detainee death at Eloy, in 2005.

ICE boss says he suspended use of arrest quotas

2009-08-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

Who needs quotas when there's "Secure Communities"?

Amy Taxin
AP 8/17/09

The head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday the agency is
no longer using arrest quotas in a program aimed at tracking down immigrants who
have ignored court orders to leave the country. [...]

Agency records from ICE's fugitive operations program show that beginning
in 2004, teams were assigned to arrest at least 125 so-called fugitive
immigrants. In 2006, each team's quota was increased to 1,000 fugitive
arrests.
Immigrant advocates voiced outrage at the quotas and accused agents
of racial profiling to net more arrests. An internal ICE report released earlier
this year showed that agents arrested two dozen Latinos at a Maryland
convenience store in 2007 after their supervisor told them to boost arrests
because they were behind reaching their goal. [...]

Morton also said he expects a relatively new program that lets local law
enforcement check arrestees' immigration status eventually could reduce the need
to train local officers to run immigration checks in jails.
The program,
dubbed "Secure Communities", gives local law enforcement access to an
immigration database. That way, when an arrestee's fingerprints are taken, their
immigration history is checked along with their criminal background. ICE aims to
finish rolling out the program nationwide in 2013.
Immigrant advocates said
they worry that both Secure Communities and the jail check program can lead
local police to carry out minor arrests with the intent of checking a person's
immigration status.

Officials Say Detainee Fatalities Were Missed

2009-08-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 17, 2009
New York Times

More than one in 10 deaths in immigration
detention in the last six years have been overlooked and were omitted from an
official list of detainee fatalities issued to Congress in March, the Obama
administration said Monday.

Water in the Desert

2009-08-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

August 15, 2009
Editorial, New York Times

When the government cracks down on illegal crossings while refusing to establish
a safe, sane alternative, funneling people into the remotest stretches of a
burning desert, it shares responsibility for the awful results. One of those
results is plastic bottles. Another is corpses.

ICE: Detention overhaul won't lead to fewer beds

2009-08-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

AP 8/12/09

SAN ANTONIO —

A planned overhaul of the immigration detention system might result in
fewer concrete cells and lower fences — but it won't mean more releases, even
with electronic ankle monitors, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director
John Morton said Wednesday. [...]

Morton told The Associated Press on Wednesday that "I don't think the
overall number of detention beds will decrease significantly. It will remain
roughly the same."

The agency will still look at whether alternatives, like electronic
monitoring, can be used to ensure immigrants attend court hearings and comply
with deportation orders — but will not use them to replace the housing of
substantial numbers of people in government-funded facilities, he said.

Napolitano Focuses on Immigration Enforcement

2009-08-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: August 11, 2009
New York Times

EL PASO — A day after President
Obama announced that legislation to overhaul immigration
laws would have to wait until next year, the secretary of homeland security
played down the need for change in a speech here and took a tough stance on
enforcing current immigration laws. [...]

Her remarks disappointed advocates for immigrants, who questioned whether
increasing enforcement would improve security as much as overhauling immigration
laws would.

“How many more millions if not billions of dollars are we going to put
into the border without fixing the immigration system?” asked Ali Noorani,
executive director of the National Immigration Forum.Joshua
Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee
Rights, said of Ms. Napolitano, “She’s increasing enforcement of laws that
President Obama and she have both said are broken, and the result is going to be
a lot of human misery.”

Ms. Napolitano and other administration officials have argued that a
tough stance on illegal immigration is necessary to convince American voters to
accept a wider overhaul that would give legal status to millions of foreigners.

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants

2009-08-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York Times
Published: August 5, 2009

The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday
to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration
violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to
what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.”

Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to
complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s contracts with more
than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many
detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some
possibly in centers built and run by the government.

The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system,
which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and
more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for
mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care.

Guatemala: A Tale of Two Villages

2009-08-06T07:02:00.001-07:00

check out this Frontline film and related materials by Greg Brosnan and Jennifer Szymaszek, July 30, 2009, on the effects of deportation on one small town in Guatemala: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2009/07/guatemala_a_tal.html

Inside Immigrant Prisons

2009-08-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

By Maria Muentes and Familes for Freedom

Recently, the Donald Wyatt Center in Rhode Island lost its contract with U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to house 153 immigrant prisoners after
the horrific death of a detainee. Center representatives publicly bemoaned the
loss of $100,000 per week and quickly began looking for a way to get more
prisoners. The chairman of the board for the center, Daniel Cooney, said,
“Frankly, I’m looking at it like I’m running a Motel 6. I don’t care if it’s
Guantanamo Bay. We want to fill the beds.” He was eventually fired in the
fallout from this remark, but his candor is revealing. Immigrant prisoners are
valuable commodities to local jails. This approach boosts the economies of
private prison companies and municipalities but costs the federal government
millions—perhaps billions—of dollars.

Firm Stance on Illegal Immigrants Remains Policy

2009-08-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: August 3, 2009
New York Times

After early pledges by President
Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration
enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an
illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by
his predecessor.

A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr.
Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them,
including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.
[...]
“We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way,” Janet
Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said in an
interview.

Immigrant Detainees Hunger Strike Over Conditions

2009-07-31T20:31:00.000-07:00

AP
7/30/09

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A group of detainees at a Louisiana immigration detention center have begun three-day hunger strikes to protest poor conditions there, immigrant advocates said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/30/us/AP-US-Immigrants-Hunger-Strike.html?_r=1

Report from New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice: http://www.nowcrj.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/detention-conditions-and-human-rights-under-the-obama-administration.pdf

Immigration detention centers fail government's own standards

2009-07-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

7/27/09
LA Times blog

The federal government routinely failed to follow its own standards
regulating immigration detention centers across the country, denying detainees
sufficient recreation time and adequate access to attorneys, legal materials and
telephones, according to a new report issued today.

As a result of the widespread violations, hundreds of thousands of
detainees faced tremendous challenges in making their case to stay in the U.S.
and were frequently denied basic due process rights, according to the report.

“The findings in our report raise serious of doubts as to whether the
hundreds of thousands of immigrant detained each year get a fair shot at
justice,” said one of the authors, Karen Tumlin of the National Immigration Law
Center.

The report is based primarily on thousands of pages of reviews conducted by
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2001 to 2005, turned over by court
order in a legal case. The authors also studied reviews of detention centers by
the American Bar Assn. and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Immigrant Detention Rules Rejected

2009-07-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: July 28, 2009
New York Times

The Obama administration has refused to make legally enforceable rules for immigration
detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their
advocates and embracing a Bush-era inspection system that relies in part on
private contractors.

The decision, contained in a six-page letter received by the plaintiffs this
week, disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the
country. They pointed to a stream of newly available documents that underscore
the government’s failure to enforce minimum standards it set in 2000, including
those concerning detainees’ access to basic health care, telephones and lawyers,
even as the number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year.

Debate Intensifies Over Deportations

2009-07-27T04:56:00.000-07:00

Homeland Security's new Secure Communities program is one to watch and criticize in the coming months.

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: July 25, 2009
New York Times

HOUSTON — The Obama administration is vastly expanding a federal effort begun under President George W. Bush to identify and deport illegal immigrants held in local jails. But here in the city where the effort got a trial start eight months ago, people on each side of the immigration debate have found fault with it.

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/us/26secure.html

Big-City Police Chiefs Urge Overhaul of Immigration Policy

2009-07-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: July 1, 2009

MIAMI — Seeking to inject their views into the revived debate over immigration
overhaul, several big-city police chiefs urged Congress on Wednesday to draft a
new policy that improves public safety by bringing illegal immigrants out of the
shadows.

The chiefs — updating recommendations
made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments — called
for an overhaul that would integrate immigrants into the legal system, possibly
with driver’s licenses, and separate the local police from immigration
enforcement.

READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02florida.html

Immigrant’s Criminal Past Colors a Group’s Legal Challenge to Detentions

2009-07-27T04:41:00.000-07:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: June 11, 2009
New York Times

The news media campaign was all set to go. There was even a Web site ready
with a sympathetic profile of Alexander Alli, 49, the man the American
Civil Liberties Union had chosen as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking
custody hearings for more than 1,000 legal immigrants long locked up while they
challenged the government’s efforts to deport them on the basis of criminal
convictions.

But at the last minute someone at the civil liberties union checked the
details of Mr. Alli’s criminal history. It turned out that Mr. Alli, a native of
Ghana whose wife and three children, all United States citizens, live in the
Bronx, had taken part in one of the biggest cases of identity theft in this
country. [...]
Not a perfect poster boy. The press release and the Web site were scuttled,
and lawyers even considered dropping Mr. Alli in favor of a plaintiff whose
offense was less serious. But last month, the lawsuit went forward in his name —
without publicity.

The case shows the difficulties of making an important constitutional
argument on behalf of a not-always-sympathetic group: people battling
deportation based on past crimes. Maria Archuleta, a spokeswoman for the civil
liberties organization, called the original plan to showcase Mr. Alli a mistake,
saying, “We have learned a very hard lesson to more thoroughly check all of our
clients.”

Still, the lawyers said, his case illustrates the lawsuit’s central
argument: that it is illegal for the government to lock someone up for months or
years without a hearing to determine if prolonged detention is justified.

Cities and counties rely on U.S. immigrant detention fees

2009-03-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

By Anna Gorman
March 17, 2009
Los Angeles Times

"At a time when local law enforcement agencies are being forced to cut
budgets and freeze hiring, cities across Southern California have found a
growing source of income -- immigration detention.

"Roughly two-thirds of the nation's immigrant detainees are held in local
jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased
as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal
records and outstanding deportation order.

"Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house detainees at 13 local jails
in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The
U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

"The largest federal contract in the state is with the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department, whose 1,400-bed detention center in Lancaster is dedicated
to housing immigrants either awaiting deportation or fighting their cases in
court. The department received $34.7 million in 2008, up from $32.3 million the
previous year. [...]

"Santa Ana's Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15%
budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more
than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters
said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at
the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an
additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million
more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly
price per detainee from $82 to $87.

""We treat [the jail] as a business," Walters said. "The cuts could have
been much deeper if it weren't for the ability to raise money there.""

The Ballad of Joe Arpaio

2009-03-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: March 15, 2009
New York Times

Voy a cantarles un corrido a los presentes,
que le compuse a Joe Arpaio de Arizona,
un sinvergüenza, desgraciado, anti-inmigrante,
que se ha ganado el repudio de toda la gente.

I will sing a corrido to all those present
that I wrote for
Joe Arpaio from
Arizona,
a shameless, disgraceful immigrant hater
who has earned the
repudiation of the people.

Report Questions Immigration Program

2009-03-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: March 3, 2009
NEW YORK TIMES

"PHOENIX — A government report questions the effectiveness of a federal program,
long criticized by immigrant advocacy groups, that deputizes police officers as immigration
agents.

"The report, prepared by the Government
Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, says the
government has failed to determine how many of the thousands of people deported
under the program were
the kind of violent felons it was devised to root out. [...]

"The report
analyzed 29 of the 67 local law enforcement agencies in the program. It found
that they arrested 43,000 illegal immigrants last year, including 34,000 taken
into custody by the immigration bureau.

"Of the 34,000, the report said,
about 41 percent were put in removal proceedings, 44 percent waived their right
to a hearing and were immediately deported, and 15 percent were released for
reasons including humanitarian grounds, the “minor nature of their crime” and
their having been sentenced to prison.

"Citing lapses in data
collection, the G.A.O. was unable to determine how many of the arrested
immigrants were suspected of committing serious crimes."

Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement

2009-03-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Justice Strategies report issued February 2009 on Operation Endgame and federal-local 287(g)cooperation agreements

"287(g) represents the fusion of two separate systems of law enforcement
power. Once in place, it can lead to further entanglement of these powers as
state and local politicians jump into the campaign to “crackdown” on immigrants.
But civil immigration and criminal law are fundamentally incompatible. The grey
area between civil and criminal law creates a situation ripe for abuse. The
Constitution’s protections against arrest without probable cause, indefinite
detention, trial without counsel, double jeopardy, and self-incrimination, as
well as the statute of limitations, do not apply equally (or in some cases at
all) in the civil immigration context."

The New Political Economy of Immigration

2009-02-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

By Tom Barry
January/February 2009 Dollars & Sense magazine

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional
political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those
who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and
working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow
population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate,
immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security.
Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s
flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new
unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward. [...]

Rather than addressing immigration as the complex socioeconomic issue that
it is, Homeland Security has reduced immigration policy to a system of crime and
punishment. Applying the simplistic law-and-order logic propagated by
restrictionists, DHS regards undocumented immigrants not as workers, community
members, and parents but as criminals. [...]

In the prison industry, bed is a euphemism for a place behind bars. Even
President Bush talked the prison-bed language when discussing immigration
policy. When visiting the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas in 2006 to promote
the immigrant crackdown, the president said: “Beds are our number one
priority.”

The number of beds for detained immigrants in DHS centers has increased
by more than a third since 2002. There are now 32,000 beds available for the
revolving population of immigrants on the path to deportation, and another 1,000
are scheduled to come on line in 2009. This doesn’t include beds for immigrants
in Homeland Security custody that are provided by county, state, and the federal
Bureau of Prisons.

At the insistence of such immigration restrictionists as Rep. Tom
Tancredo (R-Colo.), the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004
contained an authorization for an additional 40,000 beds to accommodate
immigrants under U.S. government custody.
At the onset of the immigration
crackdown two years ago, ICE dubbed its promise to find a detention center or
prison bed for all arrested immigrants “Operation Reservation Guaranteed.” The
Justice Department has a similar initiative to ensure that the U.S. Marshals
Service has beds available for detainees—about 180,000 a year, of whom more than
30% are held on immigration charges. [...]

Chained Immigrants on Parade: Who Will Stand Up to the Sick Antics of a Racist Sheriff? via AlterNet

2009-02-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

Jorge Rivas

Last week in Maricopa County, Ariz., more than 200 Latino immigrants were
chained, dressed in prison stripes and forced to march down a public street from
a county jail to a detainment camp in a desert industrial zone outside
Phoenix.

Along the way they were filmed by television news crews and guarded by
at least 50 Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) deputies, wearing body armor
and combat fatigues, armed with shotguns and automatic rifles. At least two
canine units were present; a Sheriff’s Department helicopter hovered
overhead.

SEE VIDEOS & READ MORE: http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/02/chained_immigrants_on_parade_w.html

For Russia’s Migrants, Economic Despair Douses Flickers of Hope

2009-02-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
Published: February 9, 2009

Marginalized and maligned in the best of times, Russia’s millions of
migrants are facing increasing hardship as the country enters its worst economic
decline since the 1998 ruble collapse. Recruited in droves mostly from former
Soviet republics in Central Asia to build shopping malls, skyscrapers and luxury
homes during Russia’s decade-long economic boom, migrant workers now top 10
million people by some estimates, giving Russia the second largest immigrant
population in the world, trailing only the United States.

Work on construction sites or renovations in private homes, the two
most lucrative migrant professions, are becoming more scarce and employers are
increasingly withholding wages for work already completed, leaving migrants
increasingly desperate. [...]

Russian officials, themselves besieged by the effects of the economic
crisis, are mostly concerned with reining in the number of migrants to preserve
jobs for Russian citizens.
Pressed by the gathering economic crisis, Prime
Minister Vladimir
V. Putin, while acknowledging Russia’s dependence on migrant labor, has
called for quotas on work permits for migrants to be temporarily cut in half.
[...]

Increasing attacks by aggressive nationalists also weigh on their minds, as
jobs grow scarcer and a public backlash against migrant labor gains strength. A
Moscow-based human rights group recently announced that 10 people had been
killed in what were apparently racist attacks just since the start of the year.

On top of these problems, migrants often find themselves at the mercy
of the police, who can confiscate cash and other valuables on seemingly any
pretext, or without reason at all, experts and witnesses said.

In the last few months, police officers have raided the shantytown at
Chelobityevo several times, witnesses said, ostensibly to check for illegal
migrants. As often as not, however, legal status is no guarantee of protection.

“Even when all your documents are in order, they can beat you and take
your money,” Mr. Khamroyev said. “It’s not helpful to be here legally.”

Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions

2009-02-09T09:25:00.000-08:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: January 27, 2009

He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words “Raised American” tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection.

Accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s last days echo other cases of deaths in
immigration custody, including one at the same jail in December 2006, which
prompted a review by immigration officials that found the medical unit so
lacking that they concluded, “Detainee health care is in jeopardy.”

But Immigration
and Customs Enforcement never released those findings, even when asked
about allegations of neglect in that death, of Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born
mechanic with no criminal record whose kidneys failed over several weeks.
Instead, officials defended care in that case and other deaths as Congress and
the news media questioned medical practices in the patchwork of county jails,
private prisons and federal detention centers under contract to hold noncitizens
while the government tries to deport them.

Immigration Detention Reform Moves to Front Burner

2009-02-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

Robert Lovato - Of América
Posted Feb. 2, 2009

“I went through that system. I was there. I could have died too,” says
Velazquez upon hearing of Newbrough’s death. Velazquez, a recently released
immigrant detainee from Oaxaca, Mexico who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, is
looking for action from Washington. “I wish I could speak to Mr. Obama. I would
tell him ‘They (immigration authorities) jail so many people and they don’t know
what they’re doing. They have no right to let people die,’” said
Velazquez.

His mobility and work possibilities are limited by the big black ankle
bracelet that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is forcing
him to wear until his hearing in June. He cannot leave his sister’s apartment in
the evenings. But Velazquez does not let his undocumented status limit his
freedom.

“I want him (Obama) to know that we should be building schools and
hospitals, things that help people, not these prisons,” the very soft-spoken
Velazquez declared in his most strident cadence as he took a break from folding
flyers for a protest to halt the construction of another immigrant detention
center in Farmville, where Newborough died.

Target of Immigrant Raids Shifted

2009-02-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: February 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04raids.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned
hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation
Return to Sender. [...]

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas
for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a
requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the
teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent
of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation
order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their
homes, and deported.

U.S. Issues Scathing Report on Immigrant Who Died in Detention

2009-01-18T09:16:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2009

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Federal immigration officials investigating the death of a New York computer engineer from China who died in their custody last summer said Thursday that supervisors at a Rhode Island detention center had denied the ailing man appropriate medical treatment on multiple occasions and that employees had dragged him from his cell to a van as he screamed in pain.
As they disclosed their findings, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ordered an end to their contract with the center, the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., a locally owned jail where the engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, spent his final month after a year in immigration detention. They said they had asked that the United States attorney in Boston review the case for possible criminal prosecution.
The federal investigation began last summer, soon after The New York Times reported on the death of Mr. Ng, 34. His extensive cancer and fractured spine had gone undiagnosed, despite his pleas for help, until shortly before he died in custody on Aug. 6.
Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the federal agency, said the investigation showed that supervisors at the Wyatt detention center had in effect prevented Mr. Ng from meeting with his lawyer by refusing him the use of a wheelchair when he was too ill and in too much pain to walk.
The 33-page investigation report also found that the guards and medical staff, acting on orders of the warden, violated the jail’s policy on the use of force when Mr. Ng was dragged to a van for a trip to Hartford, where his lawyers say he was pressured to withdraw all his appeals and accept deportation.
The jail’s overhead surveillance video cameras captured everything. But another, hand-held camcorder turned on and off 13 times at a signal from the captain in charge, according to the report, created another version of the episode, apparently in an effort to document that Mr. Ng was faking his illness and refusing to go to the hospital for a CT scan.
Investigators interviewed 158 people in the course of their inquiry, but the surveillance videotapes clearly told them most of what they needed to know. At one point, they wrote, the captain cursed Mr. Ng, calling him an idiot, and ordered him to “stop whining.”
Mr. Ng kept saying that he could not walk, begged for a wheelchair, and “continued to scream,” the report said, as he was pulled under his armpits from his bed, and to another part of the jail to be shackled.
John J. McConnell Jr., the lawyer representing Mr. Ng’s family in a planned lawsuit against the jail and the federal immigration agency, called the report “damning” but added that the investigating agency shared the blame because Mr. Ng “should not have been detained in the first place.”
“The people involved in that torturous treatment,” he said, “should be ashamed of themselves.”
Dante Bellini, a spokesman for Wyatt, called the results of the investigation “disappointing.” Last month, citing its investigation, the immigration agency removed all of its detainees from Wyatt.
“We will continue to look at ways to reverse this,” Mr. Bellini said. “We will continue to look at all our options and filling our beds. But we will steadfastly maintain that we had nothing to do with the detainee’s death.”
Last week, Wyatt announced that it was punishing seven employees in connection with the case, with penalties ranging from termination to reprimand. “We took stern and appropriate action,” Mr. Bellini said.
Mr. Ng, who had no criminal record, overstayed a visa years ago and had been applying for a green card through his wife, a United States citizen, when he was taken into detention in July 2007 and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.
One of the most harrowing parts of the federal report is its detailed description of the videos made as Mr. Ng was forcibly taken from his cell to a van.
The tape from the hand-held camcorder begins with the captain’s instructing Mr. Ng that “he needed to move on his own,” telling him he would not be given a wheelchair and repeatedly ordering him to stand up.
“Mr. Ng was visibly crying and appeared to have difficulty standing,” the report said, adding that the captain then appeared to signal the officer holding the camcorder to stop recording.
“Mr. Ng asked captain to believe him that he could not move his legs,” the report went on. As he struggled to put on his shoes, apparently in pain, the captain urged him to hurry up. When Mr. Ng told a nurse that he wanted to go to the hospital to take the medical test to determine the cause of his pain and disability, but needed a wheelchair, she was dismissive: “She stated that he could go; he was just refusing to go.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/us/16detain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=detention%20center&st=cse

Push on Immigration Crimes Is Said to Shift Focus

2009-01-18T09:09:00.000-08:00

By Solomon Moore, Jan. 11, 2009 New York Times

"Immigration prosecutions have steeply risen over the last five years, while white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent, according to the Syracuse group’s statistics."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/us/12prosecute.html?_r=2&ref=us

Malta: where hysteria is no answer to the plight of refugees

2009-01-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

Aidan Jones in Valletta The Guardian, Tuesday 30 December 2008

[...]

Since 2002 the Maltese government has processed 11,500 refugees and economic migrants, a figure, it says, equating to about 1.7 million arriving in France, Italy or the UK. The tensions are palpable. Anti-immigrant daubings have sprung up amid the sandstone walls of Valletta, Malta's fortified 16th century capital; Africans say they frequently suffer racism, and a prominent Jesuit charity has been the victim of arson attacks for its outspoken support of migrants.

"There's an ugly xenophobia developing here and I think the government carries some responsibility for that," says Dr Neil Falzon, the local representative of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. "It is selling the idea that Malta can't cope. The truth is it has to. There's already a settled African population on this island, they just live in a different reality to the rest of Maltese society. The government should be leading the process of integrating them with jobs, education and homes instead of taking part in this kind of national hysteria."

Criticism of Malta's detention policy is mounting. The island is the only EU nation to automatically detain all illegal migrants for a legal maximum of 18 months: there are currently 2,000 in ramshackle camps. The UNHCR has voiced concerns over whether the policy could violate the Geneva Convention, while other NGOs are urging Malta's government to soften its attitude to migrants.
READ MORE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/30/malta-refugees

City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells With Its Own

2009-01-01T17:28:00.000-08:00

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: December 26, 2008

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. —

Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.
[...]
In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.
If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.
Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.

Immigration Enforcement Benefits Prison Firms

2008-12-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

Immigration Enforcement Benefits Prison Firms
By MEREDITH KOLODNER
Published: July 19, 2006

As the Bush administration gets tougher on illegal immigration and increases its spending on enforcement, some of the biggest beneficiaries may be the companies that have been building and running private prisons around the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/business/19detain.html

Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

2008-12-02T22:53:00.000-08:00

Tom Barry | December 1, 2008

Americas Policy Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)
americas.irc-online.org

Immigrants are behind one of America's fastest growing, most profitable industries. That shouldn't come as a surprise. Immigrants have always been a core factor in U.S. economic development.

Mining, railroads, agribusiness, and, recently, construction have been among the many U.S. industries that historically been driven by an abundant supply of immigrants. But now, when the economy is imploding, most industries are shedding immigrants. The private prison industry, however, is booming, largely because of the ever-increasing supply of immigrants supplied by the federal government.

Read the full article here

Outside of Europe

2008-12-02T22:40:00.000-08:00

'Outside of EUrope' is a critical, short documentary examining the exclusionary nature of EU immigration and border policies and the responsibilities that are placed on periphery countries to handle the flow of migrants and refugees. Ukraine is used as the case study. Far from the eyes of the public, and never seen before on film, the documentary takes the viewer inside the Mukachevo Detention Centre for Women and Children Refugees, as well as the Pavshino Detention Centre for Illegal Migrants and Refugees in Ukraine. Through diverse interviews that include refugees who failed in their attempt to cross into the EU, as well as officials such as the Immigration Minister for the Transcarpathia region, 'Outside of EUrope' throws light on various human right issues that incur from the expansion of the European Union.
If you want to purchase a DVD copy of 'Outside of EUrope'
please contact us.

VIDEOGRAPHY
'Outside of EUrope' (2007)
27:40 min MiniDV, NTSC 4:3
Filmed in Ukraine, August 2007.
Post-produced in Belgrade,
Serbia, November 2008.

There are 15 and 28 minute cuts of this film available from www.wideopenexposure.com. Or email wideopenexposure@gmail.com.

CFPs: Beyond Cages and Walls

2008-10-23T12:17:00.000-07:00

Beyond Cages and Walls: Bridging Prison Abolition and Immigrant Justice Movements

Call for Submissions – Please circulate widely
Deadline February 15, 2009

Description and Purpose:
In the US, some 2.4 million people are imprisoned while 1.6 million migrants have been deported since 1996. On a world scale, while most people’s movement is constrained by a system of global apartheid, policing strategies are shared across national borders that are commonly used to crack down on political organizing and dissent. What are the connections between the prison industrial complex and migration policies that are symbolized by deadly cages and walls? How do these different state policies both divide and connect different groups of people across nationality, citizenship, race, class, gender, and sexuality? What work do these sturdy tools of division, isolation, and control do at this moment of economic crisis? What are the ideologies that make walls and cages seem so durable, and what cracks in these edifices can movements for social justice and liberation open up?

Making links between prison policies and migration policies is important for being able to understand and challenge white supremacy, US imperialism, capitalism, and militarization. We want to understand the ways in which the prison abolition and immigrant justice movements are opposing state violence and the creative ways in which they are working to build a world without walls and cages. How might organizing around the “right to stay” be a way of bridging communities who face economic dislocation – whether through free trade policies or gentrification – and repressive state policies alike?

This collection will bring materials from people who are directly affected by these systems together with work from organizers, activists, advocates, artists, poets, and researchers. We invite a range of submissions, including poems, testimonies, visual arts, analyses, criticism, strategies and campaigns for change. We will be publishing this book with a popular independent press.

About the editors:
Jenna Loyd is a scholar-activist who is a member of the Syracuse-based Detainment Task Force, which organizes against migrant detention and raids. Matt Mitchelson is a geographer researching imprisonment and working with former prisoners. Andrew Burridge is a geography graduate student and activist working towards freedom of movement within the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and beyond.

If you are interested in learning more about or contributing to this project, please see http://beyondcagesandwalls.blogspot.com, or contact Jenna Loyd at jloyd@gc.cuny.edu, 310-490-9166, Center for Place Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth St, New York, NY 10016.