Dec 27

Anti-Immigrant Fervor Translates to Terror for Women

By Advocate Featured, ICE & DHS Comments Off

Anti-immigrant fervor in the United States makes injustice for immigrant women tolerated - even encouraged

Anti-immigrant fervor in the United States makes injustice for immigrant women tolerated - even encouraged

by: Melissa Nalani Ross, On the Issues Magazine

In my work on civil and human rights, especially with immigrant populations, I was contacted recently about a woman without documentation who worked at a fruit stand in the northeast. A male customer approached her and asked if she had any waitressing experience, as he needed servers at his restaurant. Seeing this as an opportunity to make a little more money to support herself and her family, the woman agreed to stop by the establishment for an interview. When she arrived, instead of sitting down and discussing a job opportunity, the woman was met by a group of men who took turns raping her. They then told her that if she went to the authorities, they would have her deported.

Too afraid to go to the police out of fear of being separated from her family and livelihood, she will be left in isolation, with no recourse, no justice and no security. Her tale will not be covered by the mainstream media. The men who raped her will never be brought to justice.

In July, The New York Times published an article about Juana Villegas, a woman stopped for a routine traffic violation by a police officer. Villegas was jailed for six days for violating U.S. immigration laws. An undocumented immigrant, she was nine months pregnant, and, while imprisoned, went into labor. She was handcuffed to the bed during the birthing process, then was separated from her newborn baby and sent back to jail. Authorities would not allow Villegas to bring a breast pump into her cell, leading to a breast infection.

The experiences of these women are frighteningly emblematic of the challenges immigrant women face across the country from immigration enforcement policies gone awry. Villegas and countless other women experience fear, anxiety, degradation and harm on a daily basis. Few of their stories reach the public, but as someone who works with the immigrant community, I hear them regularly.

Anti-immigrant fervor in the United States makes injustice for immigrant women tolerated – even encouraged. As a result, immigrant women are living in situations of sheer terror.

Change in Tactics Targets Women

Both of these women’s stories are the byproduct of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement – widely known as “ICE” – and its 287(g) program. Under 287(g), police forces enter into Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) with ICE. Officers are trained and then authorized to enforce federal immigration law. This partnership hands local and state officers “necessary resources and latitude to pursue investigations relating to violent crimes, human smuggling, gang/organized crime activity, sexual-related offenses, narcotics smuggling and money laundering,” according to ICE.

This, however, is not how the program plays out on the ground. Typically, women, whose only real violation of the law is being in the country without documentation, have become, because of their vulnerability, some of the program’s main targets.

Anti-immigrant groups have been pushing this brand of immigration enforcement for years, without care for the human and civil rights violations that follow. Groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which calls itself by the acronym “FAIR,” the nation’s largest and most powerful anti-immigrant organization, travel the country, advocating for the expansion of the 287(g) program and asking for more police forces to buy-in. FAIR is now listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alongside the KKK. According to ICE, “more than 60 municipal, county, and state agencies nationwide have requested 287(g) MOUs … and more than 400 local and state officers have been trained under the program.”

Now FAIR is also advocating for increased ICE raids in factories and meatpacking plants. While this might not seem like an extreme or unjust measure on its face, the impact it has on local communities is destructive, separating mothers from their children. Some of the largest and most inhumane raids have occurred in the last year in the United States, with little public attention or concern. In May of 2008, ICE conducted the biggest raid up to that time in U.S. history in Postville, Iowa. The small town of 2,300 residents, in one solemn sweep, lost 10% of its population, leaving the community in shock.

Subsequent raids have surpassed – in number of agents, community upheaval and arrests of workers – the one in Postville.

Family members were separated from each other and children were left to fend for themselves. The Postville raid did not just negatively affect those without documentation, described in eyewitness accounts, it also disrupted and devastated the lives of the U.S.-born residents in the community. Principals, teachers and parents reported school children having nightmares and drawing pictures of their families and friends being taken away.

Wrong Policy

Despite the community outrage and the utter terror it brought to the immigrant population, FAIR rallied “in support of ICE’s stepped-up enforcement activities.” Susan Tully, FAIR’s National Field Organizer, said,

“The American public has waited far too long for ICE to finally begin taking worksite enforcement seriously and, by our presence in Postville, we hope to demonstrate that we want to see such efforts increased, not ended.”

This type of enforcement serves no public good. It does not deter immigration, nor does it solve – or even address – the reasons behind increased migration to the United States. The only real purpose it serves is to create an environment so toxic that immigrant women are forced into the shadows and live in a constant state of fear and anxiety.

FAIR and the anti-immigrant movement are guiding the United States down a path strewn with civil and human rights violations, dehumanization and suffering, especially by women and children. Instead of actually paying any mind to the real causes of migration to the U.S. – such as the North and Central American trade agreements, NAFTA and CAFTA – the focus has largely been on its consequences. The root issues of immigration, for this reason, will never actually be dealt with, creating a situation where there are no humane or real solutions. By only pushing for enforcement, more raids and more 287(g) buy-in, more women will be subjugated and live in terror.

Immigration Is a Women’s Issue

The violence and abuse immigrant women face on a daily basis in the United States are challenged, mostly in solitude, by the immigrant rights movement. By and large, the women’s movement has failed to stand in solidarity with the women who suffer under anti-immigrant activity. Why haven’t more women leaders and women’s organizations added their voices to the national dialogue and opposed the push for stricter immigration enforcement practices and the dehumanization they portend?

Part of the problem is that the gender aspects of harmful immigration policies go unrecognized and unacknowledged. The women’s rights movement over the last several decades has largely been about equal rights and equal treatment But women, always on the frontline, are the most deeply and intimately impacted by systems and institutions wrought with injustice. The tragedies suffered by Juana Villegas and other immigrant women are intolerable in a just society, yet without women of conscience taking a stand, these violent practices will undoubtedly continue.

Efforts around the country are beginning to address the problems caused by both enforcement tactics and policies that are guided by groups like FAIR. The Campaign for a United America is a collaborative effort by anti-racism, religious, labor, immigrant-rights and grassroots groups to promote a fair, values-based discussion around immigration, free of bigotry and sexism.
As evidenced by the terror that immigrant women face in the United States, the struggle for women’s rights is not over. It will take the efforts of women throughout the country to ensure that all women, whatever their “status,” live in a safe and just environment.

Melissa Nalani Ross is the Director of the Campaign for a United America, a national initiative of the Center for New Community in Chicago to push back against the racism of the anti-immigrant movement with organizing, strategic research, investigation and analysis. Melissa previously worked at the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based social justice company, focusing on police brutality and violence against women, and served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law.

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Dec 26

Getting Immigration Right for a Change

By Advocate Headline Comments Off

Barak ObamaIt’s way too early to tell whether the United States under President-elect Barack Obama will restore realism, sanity and lawfulness to its immigration system. But it’s never too early to hope, and the stars seem to be lining up, at least among his cabinet nominees.

If Mr. Obama’s team is confirmed, the country will have a homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and a commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who understand the border region and share a well-informed disdain for foolish, inadequate enforcement schemes like the Bush administration’s border fence. And it will have a labor secretary, Hilda Solis of California, who, as a state senator and congresswoman, has built a reputation as a staunch defender of immigrants and workers.

The confluence of immigrants and labor is exactly what this country — particularly, and disastrously, the Bush administration — has not been able to figure out.

In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans. If you ignore and undercut the rights of illegal immigrants, you encourage the exploitation that erodes working conditions and job security everywhere. In a time of economic darkness, the stability and dignity of the work force are especially vital.

This is why it is so important to reverse the Bush administration’s immigration tactics, which for years have attacked the problem upside down and backward. To appease Republican nativists, it lavished scarce resources solely on hunting down and punishing illegal immigrants. Its campaign of raids, detentions and border fencing was a moral failure. Among other things, it terrorized and broke apart families and led to some gruesome deaths in shoddy prisons. It mocked the American tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrant workers.

But it also was a strategic failure because it did little or nothing to stem the illegal tide while creating the very conditions under which the off-the-books economy can thrive. Illegal immigrant workers are deterred from forming unions. And without a path to legalization and under the threat of a relentless enforcement-only regime, they cannot assert their rights.

It’s a system that the grubbiest and shabbiest industries and business owners — think of the hellish slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, running with immigrant child labor — could not have designed better. Through it all, the Bush administration’s response to criticism has been ever more enforcement.

Ms. Solis, whose father immigrated from Mexico and was a Teamsters shop steward and whose mother, from Nicaragua, worked on an assembly line, promises a clean break from that past. She lives in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb where two compelling stories of immigrants and labor have emerged in recent years.

The first was tragic: a notorious 1995 raid at a sweatshop where Thai workers were kept in slave conditions behind barbed wire. The second is less well-known but far more encouraging: a present-day hiring site for day laborers at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot. The Latino men who gather in that safe, well-run space uphold an informal minimum wage and protect one another from abusive contractors and wage thieves. It’s good for the store, its customers and the workers.

Ms. Solis is a defender of such sites and has opposed efforts in other cities to enact ordinances to disperse day laborers and force them underground. She understands that if day laborers end up in our suburbs, it is better to give them safe places to gather rather than allow an uncontrolled job bazaar to drive wages and working conditions down.

That’s a bit of local wisdom that deserves to take root in the federal government.

SOURCE:New York Times Editorial

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Dec 26

GUSTAVO ARELLANO: MY DAD, THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT

By Advocate Featured Comments Off
Ask a Mexican

Ask a Mexican

Millions of Americans point to Ellis Island as the place where their family was first introduced to the United States. Others trace their ancestry to ships that dropped anchor centuries ago in New England. Still more greeted Lady Liberty by way of airplanes and a visa.

My father? He fondly remembers the comfortable space in the trunk of a Chevy Bel Air that was his ticket to the American dream.In 1968, Dad left his dying village of Jomulquillo, in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, to join his three older brothers in East Los Angeles.

Eighteen years old, impetuous and with a fourth-grade education, Lorenzo Arellano would have had to do months’ worth of paperwork to enter the United States legally – and there was still no guarantee that he’d be allowed to enter. Youth and a growling stomach have little patience, so my father paid a white woman – a U.S. citizen – to sneak him into the United States. In Tijuana, he squeezed into the Chevy’s trunk alongside a cousin and another man and prayed.

The Bel Air passed across the U.S.-Mexico border with no problem – the agents just waved it through. It sped north on Interstate 5 for an hour until it came to the Border Patrol checkpoint just south of San Clemente. The car slowed to a crawl, then stopped. A moment of tension. The migra gave the Chevy the OK to leave.
“We made it!” the other man whispered to Dad and his cousin. They wouldn’t speak another word until the woman finally stopped in Chinatown, where two of my uncles greeted young Lorenzo by taking him to a bar and drinking long into the night.

That wasn’t the only time Papi entered the United States illegally. Twice, he climbed a fence from Tijuana and ran through the desert east of San Ysidro. Once, he spent a month in jail for using false documents. Perhaps Dad’s most dramatic border crossing was when he crawled through a sewage-filled pipeline for about an hour to San Ysidro, in total darkness and with others ahead and behind him. The sewer emptied out near a McDonald’s – insert your own Big Mac joke here.

My father, now a naturalized citizen, never tires of telling these stories to anyone who’ll listen – his eyes light up, he gestures wildly and a smile always cracks wide. And, frankly, neither do I. Although millions of Americans might consider Dad a repeat violator of national sovereignty, I see in his borderland adventures the pluck of the Pilgrims, the resolve of a homesteader, the type of pioneer ethos that has fueled this country for so long. Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong; the American frontier will never close, not as long as there are people like my father who were and are willing to cross deserts, stuff themselves into cars, float across water – just for the chance to establish themselves in this country and thrive.

Almost every Mexican family I know has followed the same trajectory we have: illegal entry, rough times, hard work leading to success and assimilation for the kids, with the 1986 amnesty helping mucho.

Twenty-nine years of living among illegal immigrants and their American-born children has taught me this truism. And that’s why my father’s example is crucial and I’ll retell it again and again. His story isn’t important because it’s special; it’s important because it’s the rule rather than the exception, a rule few want to believe and that therefore must be repeated as often as possible.

I’m glad that my father entered this country illegally. If he had come “the right way,” our family’s success would’ve been chalked up as just another example of immigrant can-do. But as an illegal, his accomplishments (as well as mine and my siblings’) contradict the conventional wisdom regarding undocumented Mexicans that’s been prevalent for this decade. My father’s repeated breaking of immigration law is further proof that this country can and does rehabilitate all of her huddled masses, whether legal or not.

Personally, his stories motivate me. If my father could leave his life back in the rancho and risk everything at age 18, I have no excuse to whine about anything. And his stories reward me with the pleasure of watching anti-immigrant loons stumble for words when I ask them to explain how my father and my family could’ve excelled considering that we come from alien stock.

Dad isn’t perfect by any means – indeed, he’s suffered through most of the pathologies that many people attribute to illegal immigrants: Alcoholism. Fecundity. Lack of education. Failure to fully assimilate. It doesn’t matter. The life he’s crafted for himself is no different from your typical white, middle-class Valley resident who rails about the Mexican invasion.

Does my pride in Dad’s outlaw past mean I support a free-for-all at the border? No. We deserve an accurate account of who enters and leaves the United States. We deserve immigrants who don’t cheat the system, don’t commit crimes against others, who better their communities and don’t become burdens. But the traits embodied by Dad and so many more immigrants that spurred them to enter this country illegally – courage, an indomitable spirit, the ambition to seek a better lot in this country – are to be lauded and copied. (And spare me the letters about the illegal-entry bit; the Sooners did the same thing, yet we don’t flinch when Oklahomans celebrate their spirit). To say this isn’t traitorous or even an endorsement of the Reconquista, it’s the truth.

We recently celebrated Dad’s 57th birthday in the Anaheim home he’s just a couple of thousand dollars away from finally paying off. His brothers were there, no longer scared teens running from the law but middle-aged U.S. citizens who want Barack Obama to win the presidential election but hate L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (ever since his extramarital affair was uncovered). Their children – my cousins, almost all children of former illegal immigrants – sat alongside the pool, feasting on carne asada and keeping an eye on their kids, who don’t speak a lick of Spanish. My dad told his tales again, with my uncles corroborating each detail. When we brought out the cake, everyone sang “Happy Birthday” in English. Somewhere, Lou Dobbs cries.

Gustavo Arellano is author of the “¡Ask a Mexican!”,and one of the funniest columnists working today, writes a column for the Orange County Weekly uses depreciating humor and cutting edge commentary to show folks how stupid their attitude about Mexicans and anything hispanic is. His e-mail address is themexican@askamexican.net.

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Dec 26

Governor’s Border Policy aimed at the 2010 GOP Primary

By Advocate Politics, Pro-Blogosphere Comments Off

Texas Governor "Slick" Rick PerryBy:Grits for Breakfast

To understand Texas’ border security policy, you don’t actually need to know anything about security, but it sure helps to know about elections.

Since at least 2005, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s re-election priorities have openly dominated Texas’ border security policy. Campaign ads stoking fears of “terrorists” crossing the border were the centerpiece of Perry’s 2006 gubernatorial re-election bid, and in 2007 the Legislature ponied up more than $100 million in pork-barrel grants – some of it going to people who where themselves working for the drug cartels – in an effort to create what’s really quite a tenuous, money-driven coalition between law enforcement on the border and anti-immigrant activists in Texas cities and suburbs.

Perry’s incumbency advantage combined with a strategy of pandering to xenophobia worked well enough to earn his 2006 re-election, albeit in an odd, 4-way contest in which only 39% of the electorate voted for him. Though his message didn’t resonate with a majority of Texans, the math of re-election required only lockng down the right wing of the GOP base.

Now, once again electoral policies are dominating Texas’ approach to border safety, with Governor 39% dishing up lots of red meat for the nativist base with an array of feel-good, do-nothing policies. The impetus this time around is well-liked US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s semi-declared intentions to run for Governor in 2010, which easily poses the most serious challenge to Rick Perry since his campaign against John Sharp for Lt. Governor in 1998.

In a Texas GOP primary, abortion and immigration are the touchstone issues and it’s immigration where Perry thinks he can tack to Hutchison’s right and lock up his third gubernatorial nomination. Based on 2006 and 2008 election returns, it’s still doubtful a Democrat can compete head to head with a Republican for governor statewide, so if Perry wins the Republican primary, he’ll likely continue on as Governor through 2014.

Sen. Hutchison supports a border wall and opposes comprehensive immigration reform, but she’s taken pragmatic votes in Washington that Perry’s people will be able to portray as “soft” on illegal immigration compared to his own politicized grandstanding.

Given that backdrop, I’m hardly surprised to see more border-related security theater from the governor as we head toward the 81st Texas Legislature in 2009. Perry wants to expand the $100+ million border security grant program the Lege gave him in 2007 to include urban police departments in the state’s interior – essentially a pork barrel program similar to President Bill Clinton’s COPS initiative. And he’ll probably be asking them to pay for the security camera program he’s launched along the Rio Grande river bottoms. Both requests IMO should be rejected.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t doubt for a second that Texas needs to spend money on “border security,” but a smarter place to start would be to finance Sen. John Carona’s proposed law enforcement integrity unit at DPS, using limited state resources to take aim at police corruption. Instead, Governor Perry’s pet initiatives are all PR or pork-related but don’t seem designed to produce results.

That goes double for the Governor’s longstanding push to put webcams on the border, which the Houston Chronicle reported yesterday has so far been security bust (“Border cameras worth the cost?,” Dec. 25):

More than a month after the launch of a state-funded Web site that allows people to monitor footage from surveillance cameras along the Texas border, the effort has netted one drug bust of more than 500 pounds of marijuana, officials said.

Since the Internet site went live Nov. 19, more than 21,000 people have signed up as “virtual deputies” and Web traffic has topped more than 5 million hits, according to BlueServo, the company that runs the site.

The program allows “virtual deputies” to monitor activity on 13 cameras in South Texas and report suspicious activity through www.BlueServo.net, which automatically notifies local sheriff’s departments via e-mail of the reports, said Donald Reay, executive director of the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition.

The surveillance program, funded with a $2 million grant from Gov. Rick Perry’s office, scored its first and only drug seizure Nov. 28 with the discovery of 540 pounds of marijuana and the arrest of a suspected drug smuggler, Reay said. He declined to disclose the location of the bust or the agency involved, saying that would provide too much information about the camera’s location.

Hmmmm. Don’t you think the drug runners already know where their man got caught with 540lbs of pot? For that matter, anyone watching THROUGH the cameras could identify enough landmarks to tell their vantage point. The only people for whom the camera’s location is a secret is the public, not the drug cartels!

Indeed, there’s a real chance these webcams actually aid drug traffickers instead of deter them: If I’m a cartel strategist, I’d make sure a half-dozen false tips were reported through the website every time I made a run.

In any event, there are only 13 cameras along 1,254 miles of Texas border, so this is an impotent and useless strategy no matter how many people view the website. It’s a program created for the benefit of the web viewer, not with an aim toward catching the bad guys. Indeed, the Governor’s people say it would be wrong to judge their program by so crude a measure as results:

Allison Castle, a spokeswoman for Perry’s office, said Tuesday that the governor is pleased with the new program so far.

She said it’s designed to deter crime, much like a surveillance camera in a bank lobby, or a police car parked on the side of the road.

“If you try to measure its success on the number of people that are caught or pounds of marijuana seized, you kind of miss the point,” she said. “We want to keep people from committing crime in the first place.”

Got that? When they catch a mule with 540 pounds of dope it’s a success, but when they don’t catch anybody, it’s also a success because it’s evidence of deterrence. Really?

Does anybody think there’s less dope flowing across the border since the cameras went up in November? If Texas can’t keep contraband off death row, it’s a dead-sure bet a few cameras won’t keep it from crossing the Rio Grande.

Gov. Perry spent $2 million in law enforcement grants to finance this web circus, and he’ll certainly be asking the Legislature to pick up the tab going forward. They should tell him “no.” For too long Texas’ border policy has been held hostage to the governor’s political concerns, and for once the state should prioritize security over showmanship.

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Dec 24

Hip Pocket Politics – Contract renewed at immigrant family detention center

By Advocate Headline Comments Off

T Don Hutto Family Detention Center free to abuse families for another two years

Williamson County officials voted Tuesday to renew a contract with a private prison firm that operates a criticized detention center for immigrant families.

 

The Central Texas county is home to the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a 512-bed former prison in Taylor where immigrant families are held while awaiting deportation or other outcomes to their immigration cases.

By a 4-1 vote, commissioners approved continuing the county contract with Corrections Corporation of America to operate the facility for another two years, the Austin American-Statesman reported. The former prison houses children and families with no criminal records or violent histories for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“If I thought kids and adults were being mistreated, I’d run backwards from it,” said Commissioner Ron Morrison, whose precinct includes the facility. “What I’ve seen is very humane treatment. As much as possible, they’ve converted it to a user-friendly facility.”

Commissioner Lisa Birkman voted against the contract. Although the facility helps in enforcing immigration laws and created jobs, it is still a prison.

“They’ve made some positive changes, but there are still children sleeping in cells,” Birkman said.

A federal judge approved a settlement agreement last year that called for changes at the Hutto facility, where families live in cells with bunk beds and a toilet. The changes included installing privacy curtains around toilets, adding a full-time pediatrician and eliminating a counting system that required families to be in their cells 12 hours a day. A federal magistrate also will periodically review conditions at Hutto.

Former Georgetown mayor Mary Ellen Kersch called the vote “reprehensible.”

“They didn’t respond to the basic business issues or that the county is being maligned around the world for participating in the holding of children.”

County Judge Dan A. Gattis said the problems opponents point to at the facility do not exist.

“If I had my druthers, I’d rather keep families together,” he said.

ICE officials have always contended residents at the facility are treated with dignity and respect. They describe Hutto as a residential, nonsecure environment that keeps families together while they seek asylum, await deportation or seek other outcomes to their immigration cases.

The facility is meant to end the “catch and release” practice that in the past permitted families in the U.S. illegally to remain free while awaiting a court hearing

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