Feds Raid L.A. Union Station for Illegals, Tweeters Claim; 'Union Station' Starts Trending on Twitter

By Simone Wilson
LA Weekly Blog
Jul. 1 2011


​[Update, 2:30 p.m.: The Twitterverse is still a complete mess of warnings that ICE is raiding Union Station for illegals, all seemingly based on one call received by KPFK radio. The U.S. Marshals Service says it wasn't them. Amtrak police say they were only on their usual "24/7" patrol.]

[Update, 1:30 p.m.: Jorge Mario Cabrera, of CHIRLA, says he has confirmed with witnesses that the checkpoint was actually not run by ICE, but a different law-enforcement agency -- wearing black, with dogs in tow -- checking IDs and/or tickets after the LAX scare yesterday. Headline has been modified to include new information; it previously read, "ICE Raids L.A. Union Station for Illegals." Cabrera says it's great that KPFK radio "now has an open line that folks can call and report this type of thing" -- but it will need some honing. Indeed: Today was a lesson in how fast these things can blow up. Cabrera says this "could have been a trial, or an actual operation -- a sweep or something." We're still trying to figure out which agency was at the station.]

Ah, the modern age of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) evasion!

We've got online manuals on how not to get deported, Facebook-fueled rallies to keep fellow aliens in country -- and now, a Twitter stream of checkpoint warnings so steady it became a trending topic.

At about 10 a.m., civilians and immigrant-rights orgs began Tweeting reports of an ICE raid, or checkpoint, at Union Station in downtown L.A. By noontime, "Union Station" was trending.

"At Union Station, we're dealing with people of low means, who don't have money for a car," says immigration attorney Robert Perkins, who joined the Twitter stream to inform Angelenos of their rights. "And there are a lot of shops ... at which illegal immigrants might be working."

ICE did not respond to immediate requests for comment. Updates to come as they're available.

Many Tweeters indicated they got confirmation of the "raid" from KPFK radio, though no further announcements have been broadcast since we started listening at about 12:15 p.m.

Perkins' legal assistant says he has gotten multiple confirmations, from people either at the station or passing by, that ICE is conducting an immigration checkpoint.

The attorney himself says it's not technically illegal for ICE agents to request IDs from passerby, but if the ID is, say, from Mexico, they might consider that "reasonable suspicion" to believe the person is undocumented, and might then ask for their papers.

One Twitter user says:

​ Though immigrants have the right to ask for a trial before deportation -- during which they could be granted citizenship due to longtime residency, kids in the U.S., lack of criminal history, etc. -- many are either unaware of those rights or are scared to cause a disturbance.

"The area there is a neighborhood with a lot of Latinos," says Perkins. So his biggest question is: "How are they conducting this? If I walked in, as white and Jewish as can be, would they ask for my ID?"

If you were at Union Station today or know anything about the "raid," please contact us.

[@simone_electra/swilson@laweekly.com]

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/07/ice_raid_la_union_station_illegal_immigrants.php

Deportations Before Reform: Anatomy of an Immigration Bust

By Marianne McCune
WNYC
Tuesday, August 03, 2010

The men and women who knock on illegal immigrants’ doors and take them away in handcuffs are members of what are called fugitive operations teams. They often meet up before dawn in some dim parking lot near the homes of the immigrants they're looking for.

The job of fugitive operations teams is to find and arrest "fugitive aliens," or people who've officially been told to leave the U.S., but have not. As lawmakers continue to debate immigration reform, President Barack Obama is pushing for a path to citizenship for people who are here illegally. But at the same time, the Department of Homeland Security is deporting more immigrants than ever –- around 400,000 a year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says its priority is to deport those who’ve committed serious crimes. But more than half of the immigrants arrested do not have convictions. And among those who do, many of the crimes are minor. Critics say the government is breaking up families for crimes that should be forgivable and that people should be given a chance to make amends.

On a Tuesday morning earlier this year, Fugitive Operations supervisor Darren Williams met his colleagues from the New York office at a Queens diner. By 5:30 a.m., they were gathered around team leader Raul Concha to get briefed on the plan.

"All right, this morning we’re going to be going after three targets," Concha told the team. First on the list: a Moroccan couple living in East Elmhurst, Queens, Abe and Fatima (they asked that WNYC leave out their last names for fear that talking to the media would somehow count against them in immigration court). Concha told the group that Abe and Fatima were both convicted felons. Their crime: immigration fraud.

As Darren Williams leads half a dozen fugitive operations vehicles toward Abe and Fatima’s apartment building, he prepares to meet the individuals behind the case descriptions. "Everyone has a story," Williams says. "Everyone has their own individual story that’s unique to them. And I listen. I’m not going to say I believe every story. But I do listen to the stories.”

Abe and Fatima’s story has many layers, but we’ll start with their crime: marriage fraud. When Fatima moved to the U.S. to be with Abe, he was working legally and waiting for a green card, but the green card fell through. By that time Fatima was pregnant with their first child. The two had been married in a mosque, but there was no official record. So when an American friend offered to get Fatima a green card by becoming her legal husband, they went for it. And they got caught: Fatima, for the fake marriage, Abe for paying off the friend.

When it was time to begin court proceedings, the couple had a one-month old baby. The prosecutors offered what Abe thought was a pretty good deal. He says they told him, “the deal is plead guilty, no jail time.” So they did. What they didn’t know was that marriage fraud is a felony and under current immigration law, a conviction means an automatic order of deportation, regardless of the circumstances. “Every lawyer we go to, they say, 'you know it was a big mistake to plead guilty,'” Abe says.

After two years on probation, the two were officially told to leave the U.S. By that time they already had two American children, and they chose to stay. And that’s how, almost a decade later, Abe and Fatima ended up a target of a fugitive operations team.

Last spring, at six in the morning, the agents gather in front of their building. The landlord lets them in, they head upstairs, press the bell on the couple’s apartment and Fatima appears. She's wearing jeans, a white sweatshirt and a tangle of morning hair.

”So, six o’clock in the morning, I’m trying to do my breakfast, I open,” Fatima says. She says she’d been expecting this day for years. “I say good morning, come on in!”

She went immediately to wake Abe up. “I told her, so we’re leaving? She told me, yes, I think we’re leaving,“ Abe says.

That morning, the two were are calm. But, to Abe and Fatima, the idea of going back to Morocco is horrifying. This next layer of their story will give you an idea why. Fatima says she grew up in a lower class, traditional family in Morocco, under the rule of her father and six brothers. She couldn’t choose her own clothes, watch television or listen to music. When she tried to learn guitar, she says her father came in and broke it. “Because I have no right,” she says. “He told me, 'why? You gonna go play in the bars?'”

When she was in her 20s, Fatima moved to France, but she was under her brother’s strict command. She says she dreamed of coming to the U.S. "For me it’s freedom," Fatima says. She believed it's a place where a woman "can have all her rights, she can do whatever she wants.”

Abe was already living in the U.S. at the time. He was separated from his first wife –- a Haitian-American –- and he says he was longing to start a family with someone more like him. So when his cousin in France told him about Fatima, he courted her over the phone.

Fatima says the first time she talked to Abe, he told her he trusted the cousin who’d said good things about her. And Abe remembers telling her, “Listen, I’m not trying to have a girlfriend, or pass time with you. If you are willing to put your hand in my hand and walk together, I would love to get married with you and run a family together.”

Fatima’s recalls thinking, “Wow, that’s the perfect man for me! I’m going to go to America. I’m going to be free and I’m going to raise my kids different than I was raised in Morocco.”

On the pretense of visiting family friends, Fatima made two secret trips to see Abe. And on the second, they got married on the way home from the airport. When Abe told his family, they disapproved of his choice, so he cut off ties with them. And when Fatima called her brother, she says he was very upset. “He threatened me,” she says. She says he told her if he saw her again, he would kill her. Being from Morocco himself, Abe says he knows how it is. “For them it’s like a black spot on the family honor.”

Before immigration agents entered Abe and Fatima’s home, they didn’t know the couple had children. After 10 minutes of explaining to the couple what’s going on, team leader Raul Concha comes out to the stairs to explain to Williams that there are two girls in the apartment, ages 9 and 12.

“We’re going to leave the mother here,” Concha says. “And I’m going to bring the husband with us.” They take Abe downstairs –- away from his family –- before they handcuff him.

"We try to make it as smooth as possible for everyone concerned,” Williams whispers.

As her husband is led out the building’s front door, Fatima follows him to the bend in the stairs, finally losing hold of her calm and letting tears pour down her cheeks. As he leads Abe out into the morning, Concha assures her he’ll be fine.

“It’s a tough job,” Concha says later, “But we enjoy it. It’s our daily routine.”

In the car on the way back to immigration headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza, Williams says there are stories that move him. “I’m human,” he says. “There are situations that are heart-wrenching. Anytime you deal with kids it’s touching. Anytime.”

But when asked whether he thinks it’s unfair, as advocates charge, to deport people who’ve been here 10 or 20 years, paying taxes and raising American children, Williams argues that there are wait-lists across the world for would-be immigrants to come to the U.S. legally.

"Is it fair to have individuals who are here illegally jump over those folks who’ve been waiting all this time?” Williams says “I don’t think so! What would you tell all those family members out there that are waiting?”

At 26 Federal Plaza, Abe is fingerprinted and photographed, but Williams has discretion over whether or not to detain him. And because Abe is the sole-breadwinner and does not seem likely to runaway Williams sends him home. However, he’ll have to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and report weekly to immigration officials. Fatima has only to report once a month.

Sitting on their couch some weeks later, the two say they’re making a last-ditch effort to re-open their cases, anything to delay being sent home to Morocco.

"I do this mistake. It’s a big mistake,” Fatima admits. “It’s a crime! So I’m paying for it.” But she says she cannot go back to Morocco.

Until now, the couple had never told their children they were here illegally. But the older daughter, Selma, says she figured it out when she heard them say deportation in Arabic. “Because sometimes, to be honest, I eavesdrop on what they’re saying on the phone in Arabic,” she says. When she heard the word "deportation," she says she ran to look it up in the dictionary. “I just kept it to myself until they told us.”

Selma says she hasn’t told a single friend. “I’m 12. I don’t know about this stuff yet,” she says. “I’m not old enough to go through this yet. So it’s a little weird.”

All their lives, Abe says, these girls have been asking about Morocco: "What is our family? Who we have in our family? What is Morocco, how is Morocco?"

Now Selma says, “I don’t think I have any family in Morocco. So we don’t know who we’re going to live with and we don’t know who’s going to take care of us.”

"Where is home? Back home where?” Abe asks repeatedly. “Those girls have a right to a life, a basic life, that they will not have at all back home.”

There are many more layers to this story, but under current immigration law, none are relevant. Abe and Fatima are fugitive aliens. They lost their right to stay in the U.S. when they were convicted of immigration fraud. And as lawmakers debate immigration reform, some are likely to push for more discretion for immigration judges, especially when American children are involved.

As things stand, Abe and Fatima are likely to be deported. And they’ll have to decide whether or not to take their American daughters with them.

http://beta.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2010/aug/03/deportations-reform-anatomy-immigration-bust/

ICE Outlines Plan to Increase Alien Deportation

The New ICE Age
by Julian Aguilar
The Texas Tribune
June 16, 2010

The federal government could begin cracking down on employers who hire undocumented workers and on residents with expired visas, according to a copy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s new strategic plan obtained by The Texas Tribune.

The plan — “Strategic Priorities for Fiscal Years 2010-2014” — was sent to ICE employees but has yet to be made public. It also outlines the agency’s coming internal realignment; its expansion of operations in Mexico, Colombia and Canada; and the proposed construction of at least four additional regional immigration detention centers. (Read the full plan here.)

An agency spokesman said the action items “speak for themselves” but that the document could be amended. Its disclosure comes amid the outcry of state officials, including many in Texas, who complain that Washington has been lackadaisical in enforcing immigration laws. With the respect to the timing of the plan, the spokesman said it was conceived when ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton accepted that job about a year ago, but he conceded it had “gained steam” within the past four months.

Part of ICE’s objective to “create a culture of employer compliance,” as the plan calls it, involves “aggressive criminal and civil enforcement against those employers who knowingly violate the law,” with an emphasis on employers who exploit and abuse workers and “engage in egregious conduct.”

ICE also proposes a campaign to support the E-Verify program, which grants businesses access to a database to determine employment eligibility. Currently, participation is only mandatory for federal-contract employees. Some anti-immigration hard-liners have argued the program should be mandatory for all businesses, but only a handful of states have adopted such a policy. The agency plans to hire additional auditors to “support a meaningful civil audit system.”

Additionally, ICE intends to invest more money and staff to deport aliens who overstay non-immigrant visas. The documents are generally granted to foreigners who arrive in the country legally — often for business, to study or to get medical treatment. ICE attorneys could be asked to serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys to assist prosecutors in their efforts to ferret out document fraud.

And ICE proposes an ambitious campaign to inform the public about its operations and “better define itself and promote its mission” to Congress, the media, other law enforcement groups and community groups, the plan says. “Over the next five years, young people interested in law enforcement careers will increasingly understand the unique and exciting mission of ICE.”

The agency will also completely overhaul the current immigration detention system to shorten an alien’s time in custody and to “reduce reliance on excess capacity in State and local penal facilities.” ICE often enters into agreements with local facilities and negotiates a per-diem rate of reimbursement for each inmate housed; such agreements are often a lucrative source of income for cash-strapped local jails. The plan does not indicate whether such agreements would be curtailed or eliminated but says the agency, over the next five years, will “apply new detention standards to existing facilities and solicit proposals for no less than four regional facilities.” The agency envisions the new models would expand access to medical care, recreation and legal resources, though advocates for immigrant-detention reform are likely to remain skeptical. Many of the same improvements were proposed in a report last year, but advocates say the government is dragging its feet. Meanwhile, the average wait time for an immigrant detainee has exceeded a year, according to a report released last month by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Budget permitting, ICE will expand its operations abroad through increased electronic surveillance in Mexico, Canada and Colombia and will seek to improve relationships with the Drug Enforcement Agency and Customs and Border Protection. The agency’s Visa Security Program, which dispatches immigration agents to foreign countries to conduct visa security operations — in-depth investigations of applications to deter terrorism or crime — will expand to embassies and consulates deemed by the U.S. Department of State as high-risk “from a terrorism perspective.”

The agency is also poised to undergo a significant management overhaul. In a letter to agents, Morton introduced three new directorates: Homeland Security Investigations, Enforcement and Removal Operations, and Management and Administration, part of ICE’s mission to better fulfill its “core operational responsibilities — criminal investigation and civil immigration enforcement.” An executive associate director will lead each new directorate, and the shift in strategy would not abolish any current agency or affect congressional appropriations, Morton said.

The new investigations office will oversee the agency’s offices of Intelligence, International Affairs and Investigations. James Dinkins, the current director of the Office of Investigations, will oversee the new department. The Enforcement and Removals office will oversee the Office of Detention and Removal Operations and the Secure Communities program, which uses fingerprint technology to identify aliens booked into local jails. It will be headed by James Chaparro, the director of ICE’s Detention and Removal Operations. Chaparro recently came under fire after the Washington Post leaked an internal memo in which Chaparro explained that ICE’s deportation levels were low — leading many to assume the agency used quotas to gauge the success of its operations.

“The current non-criminal removal rate projections will result in 159,740 removals at the close of the fiscal year," the memo read. "Coupling this with the projections in criminal removals only gives us a total of just over 310,000 overall removals — well under the Agency's goal of 400,000."

© 2010 The Texas Tribune

Rumors of immigration raids at Wal-Mart are false, group says

Fontana Herald News
Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Inland Empire Rapid Response Network Friday denounced false rumors that Wal-Mart is allowing a large-scale operation of ICE raids in stores around the nation.

The network's hotlines have received a large volume of calls from people worried about the rumors, forwarded by text messages or via the Internet.

Over the last few days, the rumors have spread like wildfire, striking terror in immigrant communities all over the Inland Empire.

But even though the company itself has released a statement reassuring the community that it is not working with ICE, reports of mass Wal-Mart raids continue.

"We are asking people not to forward these text messages," said Jennaya Dunlap, a volunteer with the Rapid Response Network. "Our immigrant communities have already faced enough fear and heartbreak with the intense wave of raids here in the Inland Empire over the past year without this false alarm."

Still, the network urges vigilance, as Border Patrol and ICE actions continue to impact Inland Empire communities.

"If you witness a raid in progress or see immigration and local law enforcement working together, it is important if possible to document it without putting yourself in danger, by taking photos or videos or by talking to other witnesses," said Emilio Amaya, a member of the Rapid Response Network. "You can also report raids and checkpoints by calling one of our information hotlines, (866) 946-9594, or (951) 345-4043."

http://www.fontanaheraldnews.com/articles/2010/03/13/news/doc4b9ae4f78b69d524520966.txt

The Nation: Immigration Agents Holding US Residents in Unlisted, Unmarked Facilities

Democracy Now
December 24, 2009

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is holding an untold number of people in secretively maintained detention facilities all over the United States. That’s according to an explosive report that’s the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine. They also report that ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other illegal tricks to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. We speak with the author of the two-part investigation, Jacqueline Stevens. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Jacqueline Stevens, professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the recently published book States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D - AZ), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, is holding an untold number of people in secret detention facilities all over the United States. That’s according to an explosive report that’s the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine.

In addition to its publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is holding people in 186 unlisted and unmarked spaces known as sub-field offices. Many of the offices are hidden in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants. According the report in The Nation, they are mainly used to house individuals in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE detainees.

The Nation is also reporting that ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other illegal tricks to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. ICE agents have posed as Occupational Safety and Health inspectors, insurance agents, and even religious workers.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited ICE to respond to the allegations, but they refused to comment on any aspect of The Nation‘s investigation. In a telephone call with Democracy Now!, a spokesperson from ICE’s Office of Public Affairs simply described the articles as, quote, “conspiratorial nonsense” and “fiction.”

For more on this story, we’re joined here in New York by the author of this two-part investigation, Jacqueline Stevens. She filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a partial list of the sub-field offices. Her articles are available at thenation.com, the latest issue of The Nation magazine, as well. They’re called “America’s Secret ICE Castles” and “ICE Agents Ruse Operations.” Jacqueline Stevens is a professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And her new book is called States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.

JACQUELINE STEVENS: OK. So, I found that there are 186 ICE sub-field offices that are scattered around the country and that are designed, according to ICE’s own reports by Dr. Dora Schriro, to hold people on a temporary basis, typically for no more than sixteen hours. And the problem with these is that they’re not marked, they’re not—information about their whereabouts is not publicly available, and there’s no accountability for the treatment of people who are held in those facilities.

I am not making any claims about a conspiracy. I’m not making any claims about the intentions behind, you know, not having these offices marked or the information publicly available, so that’s a very surprising claim on their part. I’m simply noting that, according to their own records, there are 186 sub-field offices, and their locations are not publicly available.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And were you able to get a sense of the capacity, in terms of the numbers of people that they’re holding, and for how long they end up actually being held?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: Yeah. Well, their own report says that about 910 people a day are held in these facilities, and that amounts to about 340,000 people a year who are going through these facilities. And that’s their data. So I have no idea why they’re claiming that that’s not true. I mean, that’s their report.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how immigrants are picked up.

JACQUELINE STEVENS: So, there’s a number of ways that immigrants can be picked up. The majority of people are picked up through something called a Criminal Alien Program. And that might suggest that most of the people being picked up are criminal aliens, but again, according to ICE’s own statistics, among the 48 percent of people who are picked up through the Criminal Alien Program, 57 percent are not criminals. And this is—the number has actually gone up. So, in 2008, 53 percent of the people who were picked up through the Criminal Alien Program were not criminals. These Criminal Alien Program offices are typically in these ICE sub-field locations.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when they say Criminal Alien Program, they’re talking about people who may have been previously convicted of a crime, who they were trying to deport—to pick up and deport? Or are they talking about people who are actually wanted criminals?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: So, it’s typically people who are already booked in jails or in prisons and there’s some indication that they are foreign-born. And those records then come to the attention of the Criminal Alien Program. So they might not even be charged with anything. Their arrests could be pretenses for bringing them into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the part of local law enforcement. And that’s a pattern that has occurred and been noted frequently in the South, where local police will pick people up on pretextual violations, not charge them with crimes, and bring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices through the Criminal Alien Program.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stevens, you quote James Pendergraph, an ICE official, speaking at a conference last year, saying, “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but” you know—“you think he’s illegal, we can make [him] disappear.”

JACQUELINE STEVENS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What is he talking about?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: So he’s talking about the facilities that ICE makes available through not just these sub-field offices—and just to be clear, you know, the vast majority of detainees who are held are not held on a long-term basis in these sub-field offices. They are held in about 300 jails and ICE-run detention facilities across the country. And so, what he’s talking about is the ability of ICE to distribute people among these facilities, and the typical system that governs the organization of detainee records would mean that it would be very difficult for anybody to locate the whereabouts of the people they pick up.

AMY GOODMAN: Are family members notified when someone is arrested?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: No, they’re not notified. And not only are they not notified, even when they make very diligent efforts to locate their relatives, they meet obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And, you know, the phones don’t get answered. When they do get answered, people are non-responsive.

AMY GOODMAN: So they don’t know if they’ve been killed on the street or something.

JACQUELINE STEVENS: No, no, no, there’s no information that’s made available. And ICE doesn’t dispute that. ICE claims that it’s not their position to find—you know, to locate people, that it’s not their responsibility to even notify attorneys when their clients are transferred from one facility to another facility. They’re on record stating that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the whole issue of how many of these people are picked up, the question of ICE agents impersonating, in some cases, Mormon missionaries, you write about, or insurance agents. Could you—how does that work?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: OK. So, one consequence of the detention operations and the removal operations moving away from these big workplace raids—that is something that the Obama administration has, you know, dedicated itself to—has been more surreptitious operations, and an increase in those. I mean, these have been going on under the Bush administration, as well, but there’s an impression that there’s been a shift to these more surreptitious operations for targeting people.

And among the operations that I encountered, and ICE calls these “ruse operations”—and just to be clear, under our law, ruse operations, for the most part, are legal. It is legal for, you know, federal agents to impersonate civilians for the purpose of tricking people who they suspect have arrest warrants and so forth in obtaining their custody.

It is not legal for federal agents to impersonate religious workers. And a spokesperson for the ACLU explained why, and I, you know, quote her in the article, but it’s a pretty obvious principle. If religious workers are suspected of being federal agents, then that makes it very difficult for them to fulfill their duties. If it’s part of the Mormon practice to proselytize and a community is suspecting Mormons of being federal agents, then they’ll be hostile to them. And that will, you know, constrict their ability to practice their religion. So that is one operation that ICE has been reported as doing.

The federal government’s response to this was really shocking to me. I sent them a question, and I said, “Is it consistent with ICE policy for ICE agents to impersonate religious workers?” And I would have expected a flat-out “no.” But instead, they explained exactly why and how it was consistent for ICE agents to impersonate religious workers.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And just to be clear, this would be a situation where supposed Mormon missionaries are knocking on doors trying to find out who lives in a particular house or not?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: Right. Well, it’s actually more targeted than that, typically. The ICE agents will suspect that a particular individual who has an outstanding warrant lives in a certain address and want to ascertain the time that that person will be there for purposes of effecting an arrest. And so, you know, they’ll go to any means necessary to try to obtain that information, including impersonating Mormon missionaries.

AMY GOODMAN: Has policy under Obama improved over policy over President Bush?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: I wish I could say yes. I think that there are a lot of people who are hopeful, and, you know, there’s some lip service to making certain changes on the ground. I haven’t seen any positive changes, you know, overall, that would suggest that there’s—

AMY GOODMAN: Has it become worse?

JACQUELINE STEVENS: I think in some respects. You know, the increase in these kinds of operations would suggest that that’s worse, because as different people have observed, that drives this activity underground. It makes it less available publicly for people to scrutinize what they’re doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Congress member Raul Grijalva, as co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, your response to this stunning exposé in The Nation magazine?

I thought he was—

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: —response is gratitude for exposing it. We have been—in my role and my membership with the Hispanic Caucus, been meeting with Homeland Security specifically about detention problems: lack of medical services, lack of access to any legal representation, family contact, the conditions in general, the huge growth in it. And now you add this layer of the 186 sub-field stations that are really under no public knowledge or notification. There’s—whatever minimal rule of law is applicable, it’s not applicable there. Yeah, this is something that not only the Hispanic Caucus, but certainly the Progressive Caucus, are going to need to aggressively follow up on and demand some real transparency and some real information about that.

It’s disturbing for many reasons. But, you know, here—a good example, the impersonating religious workers. Right now in Arizona, we have religious workers that are being prosecuted for aiding and abetting “illegals,” as they say, for putting water out in the desert so they won’t die. They are being prosecuted by the federal government for aiding and abetting. And at the same time, the irony is that now we have ICE agents impersonating religious workers in order to be able to apprehend people. That’s the kind of not only inconsistency, but hypocrisy, that worries us.

When we filed our bill for immigration reform in the House this—on the 16th of December, one of the areas was the whole area of detention that we added to this bill, about the fact that it had to be—there had to be judicial discretion, there had to be transparency, and there had to be a human contact in following the rules of law and the rules of detention of this country. And obviously these 196 don’t fall under even that minimal standard. And we need to do—we need to be aggressive about finding out what is really going on with this.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Congressman Grijalva, what about this issue of how things have changed in terms of immigration enforcement under the Obama administration, the less of an emphasis on these massive workplace raids, but increases— attempts at other means of increasing deportations?

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: No, I—you know, it’s like a—they’re movable parts, in the sense that until, you know, this Congress and this administration get very serious about reforming immigration, dealing with the human aspect of immigration, making that process just, making the legal process under the rule of law, we can say, on one hand, that we are deemphasizing the raids and, on the other hand, find other mechanisms and other methods and other strategies to basically accomplish the same end. And so, until we deal with the fundamental root cause of all this, you know, agencies, whether it’s Homeland Security or this administration or Congress, can continue to shuffle the cards, but, you know, the game has not changed entirely.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will certainly continue to follow this issue. Congressman Raul Grijalva, thanks for being with us, Democrat from Arizona, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And Jacqueline Stevens, professor at UC Santa Barbara and the author of an investigation on secret ICE facilities published in The Nation magazine. We’ll link to that report. Her new book is called States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals.

http://i3.democracynow.org/2009/12/24/the_nation__immigration_agents_holding