By Matt O'Brien
Oakland Tribune
11/16/2011
OAKLAND -- Alameda County officials said Wednesday they have no authority to stop immigration agents from detaining and deporting an Occupy Oakland protester who was arrested while meditating outside City Hall.
The District Attorney's office dropped misdemeanor charges against 36-year-old activist Pancho Ramos Stierle for loitering and refusing to disperse from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza as riot police were clearing out the Occupy encampment there on Monday.
But while the criminal charges were dropped on Wednesday afternoon, a federal immigration hold on Ramos Stierle remains in effect and friends fear he could be deported to Mexico.
"I don't have the authority to go against the federal government," said Alameda County Superior Court Commissioner Karen Rodrigue, speaking to dozens of Ramos Stierle's supporters who came to his arraignment in a downtown courthouse.
The peace activist was among those arrested as riot police cleared the Occupy encampment in a predawn raid Monday.
He had been meditating on the plaza for more than three hours as police officers surrounded the camp and most other protesters fled.
After he was booked in a county jail, a federal fingerprints database flagged him as a deportable immigrant from Mexico. Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent a note to jailers asking him to be held.
The activist's lawyers argued on Wednesday that the note -- called an immigration detainer -- is
merely a request for local authorities to keep him detained, not a demand, and that the county has the ability to reject it.
"Our position is that they don't have to honor the hold. That's clear as day," said lawyer Francisco Ugarte. "The federal government has said the hold is a request."
The sheriff's department and district attorney's office disagreed.
"The sheriff's department is going to pay attention to what the feds tell them to do," said Deputy District Attorney Josefa James, speaking in the courtroom to one of Ramos Stierle's lawyers.
On the immigration hold, James said, "we don't have anything to do with it, but there's nothing we can do about it, either."
About 50 activists and friends formed a meditation circle outside the courtroom and shared stories about Ramos Stierle as they awaited his arraignment.
Equipped with notepads, pens, cellphones and laptops, they spent hours making phone calls and writing emails and handwritten letters to local authorities.
"We all have the responsibility to do the right thing, and we're asking (District Attorney) Nancy O'Malley to do the right thing in this instance," said his lawyer, Yolanda Huang.
O'Malley did not return a request for comment.
Although Ramos Stierle is now in the county's custody, not the city's, Huang said county and federal authorities should respect ordinances approved by the Oakland City Council, which declared the city a sanctuary for all immigrants -- first in 1986, and then again in 2007.
"He was arrested on city property," Huang said. "He was arrested by Oakland police officers. And he's been held in the city of Oakland."
However, that "City of Refuge" policy has not been enforced, especially since Alameda County and all other Bay Area counties joined the federal Secure Communities network last year. Fingerprints of everyone arrested by local police get automatically sent to a federal database, which flags arrestees who appear to be immigrants subject to deportation, either because they are in the country illegally or committed a crime.
Lawyers and immigration authorities have declined to discuss how Ramos Stierle was able to live in the U.S. and whether or not he had permission to be living here.
"We are not at liberty to disclose further details about Mr. Stierle's immigration history," said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice, citing privacy restrictions. The agency has also not said if it intends to take custody of Ramos Stierle, but it did ask the county to keep him detained until agents decide if they wish to pick him up.
Lawyers said the immigration agency has 48 hours after the arraignment, which was late on Wednesday afternoon, to make that determination.
Friends said Ramos Stierle was from Mexico City and had studied at UC Berkeley on a student visa.
He dropped out of a graduate astrophysics program at the university in 2008 and became a full-time activist, they said.
A resident of Oakland's Fruitvale district, he gathered fruits from neighborhood trees and leftover organic produce from farmers markets and distributed the food for free to residents who needed it. He was involved in a range of causes, from immigrant rights to environmentalism, and had protested the city's gang injunctions. Much like a Buddhist monk, he lived off a "gift economy," supported by friends he inspired through his activism and secular spirituality.
"He only rides bikes," said friend Miriam Dowd, visiting the courtroom Wednesday. "He calls gasoline 'dinosaur juice.'"
Inspired by Gandhi, Ramos Stierle spent each Monday in silence, communicating only through writing. He was following that practice when Oakland police officers approached him after 6 a.m. Monday and arrested him.
When they asked him questions, he answered on a notepad. He maintained the vow of silence all day in the county jail, but cracked a smile every once in a while, said cellmate Paul Bloom of San Francisco.
"He was doing nothing but being a peaceful presence. That was our intention," said Adelaja Simon, 24, who was meditating with Ramos Stierle and another activist when the three of them were arrested. Simon, Bloom and more than 30 other arrested protesters were released later that day, but Ramos Stierle was kept in the county's custody because of the immigration hold.
Simon said Ramos Stierle was conscious of his actions and he did not feel worried about what would happen to his friend.
"He's calm and he's present, and wherever he lands, he'll still stand for love and he'll keep doing good work for the community," Simon said.
Staff writer Robert Salonga contributed to this story.
http://www.mercurynews.com/occupy-oakland/ci_19349925
Showing posts with label Social Justice and Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Justice and Politics. Show all posts
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Legislation targets employers who shortchange illegal immigrants
By ABBOTT KOLOFF
The Daily Record
March 27, 2011
One woman said she had been threatened with deportation if she continued to press for pay at her restaurant job. One man said he made repeated calls for back pay to a former employer who kept putting him off. Another said a former boss set aside a week's salary as a "deposit" and then kept it.
A group of day laborers, all illegal immigrants, gathered Thursday night at the offices of Wind of the Spirit, an immigrant advocacy group, to go over the status of grievances against former bosses and to learn about a proposed state law that would beef up punishments for employers who withhold wages from workers.
Julio Lopez, a 43-year-old Morristown resident, said he left a job at a painting company in mid-December because he hadn't been paid in weeks and needed money to buy clothes and Christmas gifts for his three children, two of them born in the U.S. He said he has a tax identification number and pays taxes on his wages.
"He kept telling me not to worry," Lopez said of his former boss. "I said "I'm worried; I have a wife and kids.' "
Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, D-Union, filed a bill almost two weeks ago called the Wage Protection Act that would increase penalties for employers found guilty of violating the state's wage laws. Not only would such employers be required to repay illegally withheld wages, they also would be required to pay damages and be fined $1,000 plus 20 percent of withheld wages on the first offense. Convicted employers also would be subject to losing various state licenses.
Justin Braz, Quijano's chief of staff, said the bill was inspired by a Seton Hall Law School report released in January focusing on the alleged exploitation of day laborers. But he added that the bill was broader than that because the problem of employers violating the state's wage laws goes beyond those who hire undocumented workers.
"The intent is to protect all workers who deserve to get paid," he said.
Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, R-Morris, known as one of the most conservative members of the Legislature, at first responded negatively to the idea of aiding day laborers, saying they do not pay taxes. He then said the bill might be a "good idea."
"The more risk you put on hiring day laborers, the less likely you'll hire them," Carroll said. "Maybe then they'll go home. . . . I don't think many people feel sympathy for employers stealing from illegals. If this is an attempt to make sure businesses play by the rules, that's certainly not unfair."
The proposed bill also would allow some workers to file anonymous civil suits because of a fear of retaliation by employers, although they would be required to file a second set of papers using their names. Braz said the proposal would allow a complainant's identity to be kept from the defendant, at least at first — a concept that drew a critical response from a prominent labor attorney last week.
"Due process requires you know who it is to defend yourself," said Wayne Positan, a Roseland attorney. "It's repugnant to due process."
Positan said state and federal laws already deal with the issue of retaliation, and that the bill might create an unnecessary burden on local courts by sending additional complaints there instead of to state and federal agencies designed to deal with them.
The recent Seton Hall report addressed the vulnerability of day laborers, saying they are easy targets for unscrupulous employers because they often are afraid to go to authorities, fearing deportation, or did not know about their legal options. The report was based on a survey of 113 day laborers, mostly Latinos, at seven sites across New Jersey, including Morristown. It included observations of more than another 100 day laborers who did not want to participate in the survey.
Of those surveyed, 54 percent said they had been paid less than they had been promised over the past year, 48 percent had not been paid at all at some point, 94 percent had not been paid for overtime, and 26 percent had been assaulted on the job. Typical weekly incomes during the winter were less than $200, and between $300 and $400 during the spring and summer, the report said.
Yet just three surveyed workers filed complaints with the state Department of Labor, according to the report.
Department of Labor spokeswoman Kerri Gatling said the state does not keep track of types of complaints, so there is no way to know how many of the 9,598 complaints made to the state between June 30, 2009, and July 1, 2010, were from day laborers. The state did recover $8.3 million of wages or overtime for 8,845 workers over that time period, she said. The state does not ask about immigration status, Gatling said.
Diana Mejia, a co-founder of Wind of the Spirit, said her group helped 47 Morris County workers get close to $30,000 in lost wages last year by negotiating with employers, all without help from the state. She said her group routinely holds meetings to help day laborers deal with employers who won't pay them. It also helps clients file complaints with the state.
Just two of the six workers attending Thursday night's meeting had made such a complaint.
Delsi Cardona, a 23-year-old single mother of a 4-year-old boy, said an employer threatened her with deportation after she asked to be paid money that she was owed. She has not yet filed a complaint.
"I'm very afraid," she said.
Alfonso Ortiz, 47, of Morristown hasn't filed a complaint because he came to Wind of the Spirit three years after he said a flooring company stiffed him for $1,100. The law requires filing within two years, Mejia said.
"It's too long," she said of Ortiz's case. "We still say we'll try to help him."
Silvano Jimenez Camacho, 28, of Morristown and Alejandro Flores, 22, of Parsippany both filed complaints with the state. Camacho said he is owed $1,200 from a flooring company where he worked last year. Flores said a pizzeria owner held a week's salary as a "deposit" and kept it, along with his last week's pay, a total of $1,350.
Both of those complaints are waiting to be adjudicated and are not yet available as public records.
Flores has been in the U.S. since he was 16 and has a 4-year-old daughter. He was not initially aware that keeping a week's salary as a "deposit" was unusual.
He also did not seem to know about overtime. He said he has since found another job that pays better, about $800 a week for at least 10 hours a day, six days a week. He added that he sometimes works more than 12 hours a day but gets the same pay.
http://www.dailyrecord.com/article/20110327/NJNEWS/103280301/Legislation-targets-employers-who-shortchange-illegal-immigrants
The Daily Record
March 27, 2011
One woman said she had been threatened with deportation if she continued to press for pay at her restaurant job. One man said he made repeated calls for back pay to a former employer who kept putting him off. Another said a former boss set aside a week's salary as a "deposit" and then kept it.
A group of day laborers, all illegal immigrants, gathered Thursday night at the offices of Wind of the Spirit, an immigrant advocacy group, to go over the status of grievances against former bosses and to learn about a proposed state law that would beef up punishments for employers who withhold wages from workers.
Julio Lopez, a 43-year-old Morristown resident, said he left a job at a painting company in mid-December because he hadn't been paid in weeks and needed money to buy clothes and Christmas gifts for his three children, two of them born in the U.S. He said he has a tax identification number and pays taxes on his wages.
"He kept telling me not to worry," Lopez said of his former boss. "I said "I'm worried; I have a wife and kids.' "
Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, D-Union, filed a bill almost two weeks ago called the Wage Protection Act that would increase penalties for employers found guilty of violating the state's wage laws. Not only would such employers be required to repay illegally withheld wages, they also would be required to pay damages and be fined $1,000 plus 20 percent of withheld wages on the first offense. Convicted employers also would be subject to losing various state licenses.
Justin Braz, Quijano's chief of staff, said the bill was inspired by a Seton Hall Law School report released in January focusing on the alleged exploitation of day laborers. But he added that the bill was broader than that because the problem of employers violating the state's wage laws goes beyond those who hire undocumented workers.
"The intent is to protect all workers who deserve to get paid," he said.
Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, R-Morris, known as one of the most conservative members of the Legislature, at first responded negatively to the idea of aiding day laborers, saying they do not pay taxes. He then said the bill might be a "good idea."
"The more risk you put on hiring day laborers, the less likely you'll hire them," Carroll said. "Maybe then they'll go home. . . . I don't think many people feel sympathy for employers stealing from illegals. If this is an attempt to make sure businesses play by the rules, that's certainly not unfair."
The proposed bill also would allow some workers to file anonymous civil suits because of a fear of retaliation by employers, although they would be required to file a second set of papers using their names. Braz said the proposal would allow a complainant's identity to be kept from the defendant, at least at first — a concept that drew a critical response from a prominent labor attorney last week.
"Due process requires you know who it is to defend yourself," said Wayne Positan, a Roseland attorney. "It's repugnant to due process."
Positan said state and federal laws already deal with the issue of retaliation, and that the bill might create an unnecessary burden on local courts by sending additional complaints there instead of to state and federal agencies designed to deal with them.
The recent Seton Hall report addressed the vulnerability of day laborers, saying they are easy targets for unscrupulous employers because they often are afraid to go to authorities, fearing deportation, or did not know about their legal options. The report was based on a survey of 113 day laborers, mostly Latinos, at seven sites across New Jersey, including Morristown. It included observations of more than another 100 day laborers who did not want to participate in the survey.
Of those surveyed, 54 percent said they had been paid less than they had been promised over the past year, 48 percent had not been paid at all at some point, 94 percent had not been paid for overtime, and 26 percent had been assaulted on the job. Typical weekly incomes during the winter were less than $200, and between $300 and $400 during the spring and summer, the report said.
Yet just three surveyed workers filed complaints with the state Department of Labor, according to the report.
Department of Labor spokeswoman Kerri Gatling said the state does not keep track of types of complaints, so there is no way to know how many of the 9,598 complaints made to the state between June 30, 2009, and July 1, 2010, were from day laborers. The state did recover $8.3 million of wages or overtime for 8,845 workers over that time period, she said. The state does not ask about immigration status, Gatling said.
Diana Mejia, a co-founder of Wind of the Spirit, said her group helped 47 Morris County workers get close to $30,000 in lost wages last year by negotiating with employers, all without help from the state. She said her group routinely holds meetings to help day laborers deal with employers who won't pay them. It also helps clients file complaints with the state.
Just two of the six workers attending Thursday night's meeting had made such a complaint.
Delsi Cardona, a 23-year-old single mother of a 4-year-old boy, said an employer threatened her with deportation after she asked to be paid money that she was owed. She has not yet filed a complaint.
"I'm very afraid," she said.
Alfonso Ortiz, 47, of Morristown hasn't filed a complaint because he came to Wind of the Spirit three years after he said a flooring company stiffed him for $1,100. The law requires filing within two years, Mejia said.
"It's too long," she said of Ortiz's case. "We still say we'll try to help him."
Silvano Jimenez Camacho, 28, of Morristown and Alejandro Flores, 22, of Parsippany both filed complaints with the state. Camacho said he is owed $1,200 from a flooring company where he worked last year. Flores said a pizzeria owner held a week's salary as a "deposit" and kept it, along with his last week's pay, a total of $1,350.
Both of those complaints are waiting to be adjudicated and are not yet available as public records.
Flores has been in the U.S. since he was 16 and has a 4-year-old daughter. He was not initially aware that keeping a week's salary as a "deposit" was unusual.
He also did not seem to know about overtime. He said he has since found another job that pays better, about $800 a week for at least 10 hours a day, six days a week. He added that he sometimes works more than 12 hours a day but gets the same pay.
http://www.dailyrecord.com/article/20110327/NJNEWS/103280301/Legislation-targets-employers-who-shortchange-illegal-immigrants
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Embracing My Undocumented Immigrant Identity
By Alberto Ledesma
Color Lines: The National News Magazine on Race and Politics
February 5, 2010
One Latino reflects on how he overcame his fears to find that the best use of his citizenship today is to speak against anti-immigrant attacks.
We’ll call him Jim—Jim Garcia. Before this night in late May 2009, I had never met him. He stood about five foot seven in his Crocs—my height, but he was about 40 pounds heavier. He wore rimless glasses, but unlike me he sported a scruffy beard and a buzz haircut. We were assembled at a Holiday Inn bar in Albuquerque, where we were all attending a Latino writers’ conference. I’d been told that he was a children’s book writer, that he had just won some award in Texas for his first picture book and that he was funny. All I noticed at first was that I liked how he giggled.
The other two writers sitting at our table I knew from a past conference. To protect their privacy I’ve changed their names in this essay, but suffice it to say that all of us, it seemed, identified as Latino writers: Rafael the Nicaraguan, Andrew the Puerto Rican, and I the Mexican immigrant. As for Jim? I didn’t know but assumed he was Latino. I would soon find out differently.
After a long day of seminars on how to write marketable fiction and the like, the four of us had sat down to unwind over a few drinks. By half past midnight, we had the bar to ourselves and were sitting at the far corner of the tiny place, while behind us, on a flat screen above our heads, analysts discussed again the Lakers’ lopsided win over Orlando and the bartender cleaned glasses.
We crowded around a table no larger than a Little Caesar’s pizza box, its surface a cityscape of nacho platters, half-full schooners with remnant arcs of salt on their rims, a nearly empty third pitcher of margaritas, and four of those ridiculously small plates that make you realize just how impossible it is to scoop guacamole and Monterey Jack when someone offers a corn chip—at least not without dripping it on your shirt.
I held my lemonade on my lap, grasping the cool glass with the fingertips of my right hand, taking sips as the minutes of conversation passed and the voices of my new friends began to slur. Having long ago made a commitment to avoid drinking, I smiled, still painfully sober in spite of the hour. I laughed when they laughed, happy to be in a community of writers like me. I listened as they spoke of their work and the places they’d been. After ten years of living there, Rafael still missed Spain. Andrew was happy that his new novel was getting so many positive reviews. Jim was thinking of a new idea for his second children’s book. Some day soon, I thought, that would be me—recently published and still ambitious.
Someone raised a glass. “Here’s to the writer’s life!” And I, too, raised my lemonade. Then it happened. Jim sighed, downed the last of his margarita and leaned forward on his chair.
“Don’t get me started with these damned illegals,” he said with a giggle. “I just think we ought to deport them all.”
The rest of us froze, then gazed at each other, as if each of us was waiting for the other to say something. Even the bartender stopped the flurry of his towel.
That pause, that moment while we waited to continue the conversation seemed to last forever. Now, the fatigue our eyes had betrayed just seconds before transformed to something different: anger, confusion, fascination.
My heartbeat quickened. I drank the rest of my lemonade in one gulp and placed the empty glass at the edge of the table. I took in a deep breath, slowly seeking to calm the beginning of convulsions in my asthmatic lungs. And I spoke.
“Excuse me. What exactly did you mean by that comment?”
His smile dissolved until his mouth was left agape. He looked at me, seemingly puzzled at first, and then he tilted his head, pensive as he weighed his approach to my question. He pushed his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger.
“Look,” he said, his once nasal, high-pitched voice now deeper and more serious. “I’ve spent my whole life living in Eastern Texas. My family has been there for generations. I am sick and tired of all these illegals coming over the border and making a mess of things for the rest of us. It’s about time we do something about it.”
There was no hesitation in his remarks, not even a hint of discomfort or of the irony of what he was saying and where. Here we all were, at a writers’ conference by and for Latinos, most of us feeling optimistic about our growing demographic of readers, and even here there was an immigration debate.
I crossed my arms and massaged the stubble on my chin as he continued. He was not backing down. Instead, he looked at Rafael and Andrew and nodded as he commented about how much undocumented immigrants were costing our country. “Isn’t that right?” he asked rhetorically.
Rafael and Andrew shrugged, their faces mirroring one another like identical Rorschach blots. Rafael took a drink from his nearly full margarita. Andrew looked away, towards one of the empty tables of the restaurant adjacent to the bar. Then Jim spoke again.
“Hispanics are never going to be accepted as true Americans so long as we condone the flood of illegals coming to this country. They have absolutely no respect for our laws.”
* * *
In that moment, I felt the urge to tell Jim about my past—that for a decade my family and I had lived in the heart of East Oakland’s African American ghetto as undocumented Mexican immigrants. That even now, 25 years after normalizing our status, I held my breath whenever a police cruiser pulled close. But my undocumented immigrant past is not something I can easily talk about. In fact, years after becoming a citizen, I avoided talking about it altogether, even when I felt the urge to do so. The more I suppressed the urge, the greater it grew.
For a while, I thought I could appease that restless desire to confess my undocumented immigrant past by pursuing an academic degree. I wrote a dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley that focused on the ways undocumented immigrants have been represented in Mexican American novels and stories. I was proud of my achievement, of documenting, as it were, the silences of undocumented immigrants who have been part of the Mexican American community for most of the last 100 years. I discovered that even in stories where authors did not intend to focus on undocumented immigrants, indocumentado experiences were chronicled as part of the setting. They were the aunts and uncles, the long-lost cousins, the nameless faces of passersby that have appeared here and there in many Chicano classics.
When I worked as a faculty member, I taught courses that compared Mexican undocumented immigrant experiences to those of previous immigrant generations from Asia and Europe. I also looked at the parallels between the exploitation of undocumented immigrant and African American labor. “Mexican undocumented immigration is another kind of American experience,” I argued.
Still, I was not satisfied. It was my story I wanted to tell. The problem, however, was that I was scared, that I am still afraid that any disclosure of my family’s undocumented immigrant past will come back to haunt me. Who in their right mind would embrace an illegal immigrant identity at a time of increased ICE raids and deportations? And, even if I were successful in publishing a memoir about my life as an undocumented immigrant, what would happen to my family? Would they be okay with it? Would they be okay that I wanted to confess what I thought was an unforgivable sin—that I actually resented my parents for bringing our family to the United States to suffer one humiliation after another?
But, there are so few trained writers, scholars with doctoral degrees or educational activists who have actually experienced life in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Is it not my responsibility to represent?
The dirty little secret is that regardless of all the credentials I have accumulated, of all the books on law and argumentation that I’ve read, of all the impassioned speeches I have recorded and reviewed, talking about or writing stories about my undocumented immigrant past has not gotten easier.
In truth, it’s only been a few years since I gave in and started calling myself a writer. Even now, I writhe in my seat whenever I have to confess to an old friend or new acquaintance that I’ve yet to publish something more than the poetry and critical essays I produced decades ago. Yes, I have a lot of material that I've sketched out in journals. What I lack is the courage to follow through, to finish editing my work so publishers seriously consider it.
Because I’m that afraid.
So I recognize the fear that compelled Jim’s comments—a fear that, like mine, probably comes from shame. A fear that, similar to mine, is likely born out of the pain of being associated with what society tells us is repugnant. A fear that reminds us that others, particularly those who possess power over our lives, will see us solely as illegal and nothing else.
* * *
Maybe it was the lateness of the day. Maybe it was the thought that unless I spoke up I could never honestly belong to this or any community of writers. The fact is that there, in that tiny hotel bar in Albuquerque, I heard myself verbalizing a sequence of words with a speed, precision and volume I had never experienced before.
“I don’t understand how you can say these things when you are attending a Latino writers’ conference. Do you seriously think that Mexican immigrant experiences have no business being included in this conference?”
The fire that had lighted Jim’s eyes seemed to cool. He sat back, his glasses now perched near the tip of his nose. He held the padded armrests of his chair tightly, as if at any moment he would need to jump to his feet and walk away. Now, the lines across his forehead grew deeper, and tiny beads of sweat condensed everywhere on his brown skin, reflecting the bar’s green-hued lamp lights in a nervous glow.
“It, it, it’s just that where I grew up near Waco...well, you know, everybody’s a redneck, and illegals are really screwing things up.”
The more he leaned back, the more I leaned forward. The fainter his voice became, the more I felt my nostrils flaring and my top lip quivering. And the fainter his voice became, the louder my words sounded in the empty bar, until all that I could hear was the echo of an unknown voice emanating from my lips.
“But why do you even call the undocumented illegals?” I heard myself asking. “Are you an immigration judge? How many deportation trials have you adjudicated to determine if any of these immigrants is worthy of residency? Aren’t people in the United States supposed to be innocent until proven guilty? If there is even one person who can convince a judge that she should not be deported, how can you deny any undocumented immigrant the opportunity to appeal their status?”
He said nothing. He looked at me as if he were the illegal and I the agent deporting him. Rafael and Andrew said nothing.
The bartender walked to our table to tell us he was closing for the night. In unison, we turned to look up at him. In turn, he focused on Jim and me, apparently disgusted with one or both of us.
That night, as we walked across the pastel pink and turquoise carpet of the empty hotel lobby and headed towards the elevators, I realized Jim wasn’t the person with whom I had been arguing most. It had been towards myself that I felt the most anger.
I thought back to a summer morning in 1974, when I was 8, in our little blue house in East Oakland. It was a few weeks after papá had arranged for mamá, me and the rest of our family to be smuggled across the border at Tijuana. It was early—maybe six or so—and my parents were sitting at the kitchen table sharing a cup of coffee. That’s when I overheard papá asking mamá why I was so miedoso.
“He’s not scared,” mamá had answered matter-of-factly. “It’s just that this place is too new for him.”
But I had been scared. Very scared. And because of it I grew up to become a man who was overly cautious, nauseatingly polite, always worried about offending others. I was the perpetually smiling, self-effacing immigrant Cantinflas, who deflected insults as if they were the most natural and innocent wisps of autumn air.
But that fear, that approach had failed me. Silence would not protect me from being caught.
Oddly enough, Jim stayed close to me that night. We waited several minutes for the elevator to come down, all of us staring at the flashing lights above the elevator doors until one of us remembered that no one had pushed the button. It was then that Jim pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned to me.
“Look man, maybe I was wrong to have said that stuff. It’s just that when you said you wrote stories about undocumented immigrants, well, I just snapped.”
Earlier that night, long before Jim had blurted his comment, Andrew had asked me about my work. I had told him what I do, that I write stories about how a family of undocumented immigrants struggles to adjust to life in East Oakland and ends up having all of the kids graduating from UC Berkeley, two of them with doctorates.
It’s my family’s story.
When Rafael had asked if the agents at the conference had been interested in my work, I’d told him they had, especially if I wrote the work as non-fiction.
“So, are you?” he asked. I didn’t respond.
* * *
Psychologists say that fear is an emotional response to real or imagined dangers. Humans react to threats by confronting, evading or becoming paralyzed by them. The truth is that I don’t really know what will happen to my family or me if I publish the details of my undocumented immigrant past.
What my confrontation with Jim made clear is that unless Americans of undocumented immigrant heritage break our silence about what it feels like to live undocumented, unless I publish this and other work, the notion that undocumented immigrants are brain-dead parasites incapable of intellectual and ethical reflections regarding their social, political, and historical condition in American society will persist. And, unless these ideas are challenged, undocumented immigrants will continue to be regarded solely as cheap rental equipment, machinery devoid of spiritual or intellectual worth.
But I know what I am worth. I am more than a label or my citizenship status. My parents are more than their third-grade education. And my Berkeley Ph.D. means nothing if I remain quiet in the face of anti-immigrant attacks.
* * *
The day I confessed to my parents my intention of attending college they were rightfully afraid, especially my dad, concerned that such an action would reveal my status to school officials and jeopardize any chance our family would have at legalization under the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill. That bill became The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and with it my family and I gained amnesty and I a legitimated role as a college student.
In an effort to do the right thing, to make sure we all kept clean, my parents were willing to see me reject the acceptance letter Berkeley had sent me.
It was only when I argued that I would enroll in the Army if I was not permitted to attend college that mamá and papá agreed to let me go to Cal. In all likelihood, I wouldn’t have been able to volunteer for military service without also revealing my undocumented status. That did not stop me from thinking about it, from hoping that such a gesture would earn me points as a potential patriot that I could use if I were ever caught.
“I’ll help you as much as I can, but you have to pay for most of your education yourself,” papá said the morning my confirmation of acceptance letter was due. As I sped through the rain-slicked streets of East Oakland up 82nd Avenue and down East 14th to the post office on 90th Avenue, I played George Benson’s “On Broadway” on my father’s car stereo at least five times. And yet, the terror I saw in mamá’s and papá’s eyes as I left, and every day that I attended Berkeley after that, told me that boot camp might have been an easier road to take.
I saw that same terror in mamá’s eyes 15 years later when I told her I was leaving my academic position to pursue the life of a writer. She looked at me from where she had been standing in front of the kitchen sink. She turned off the faucet, straightened up after wringing her towel and wiped her hands on her apron.
“Pero mi’jo, why would anyone ever want to read stories about our lives? We are little people just struggling to make it from one day to the next.” She smiled when she sat on the chair next to mine.
We spoke for almost an hour; she asked questions and nodded as I tried to explain. She never asked me not to write about what we had been through—the dozens of times we had almost gotten caught—she didn’t have to. I could see it on her face, in the subtlety of her frown and the way she crossed her arms, as if that self-embrace was the only thing keeping her from collapsing mere inches in front of her first-born son. She seemed anxious about what I had in mind, worried about the kinds of secrets I might expose in my stories. Still, she said nothing and merely sat tense, quiet, looking at me as if I were a puzzle she would never learn how to solve.
It reminded me of the way she had sat in the passenger seat of papá’s green station wagon in the summer of 1976 as we rode home after a hot day at the San Jose Flea Market. Papá had bought a box full of strawberries—big, luscious, perfectly ripe fruit. On the way home, as we moved slowly through the Sunday afternoon traffic on the Nimitz Freeway, papá, really all of us, had one of those moments where we forgot about our status. A coworker had told him about a park not far from the highway we were now stuck on. It had a lake, dozens of pine trees and a picnic area where we could enjoy our strawberries. As soon as he saw an off-ramp, papá exited the freeway and headed towards the area his friend had told him about. As we looked for a place to park, papá found himself driving the opposite way into the City of Fremont Police Department’s parking lot, just as a police cruiser was exiting.
“It is a common mistake,” the officer said to my sister Silvia as he pointed towards the right entrance to the park. Mamá remained quiet in the passenger seat, her eyes towards the front, a subtle frown on her face and her arms wound tightly across her torso. That’s the way she stayed all the way home. And, that’s the way she sat as I told her I would no longer be a college professor, that I would instead write our family stories.
Maybe I learned my own fear from mamá. More precisely, the main lesson I learned from her was to protect family at all costs, that the needs of the many must always outweigh the wishes of the few. This, after all, is the way she has always led her life, the reason that she ventured to the United States with her children in tow to find her husband. This also seemed to be the reason for her concern about my writing and why she silenced her terror so many years ago in that Fremont Police Department parking lot.
Today, the family needs have changed. I am no longer hunted. Today, I am a Mexican American citizen of the United States. Safety is no longer contingent on remaining silent and invisible. And every endangered community eventually learns that silence equals death. If I want my citizenship to matter I must learn how to speak to the Jim Garcias of the world. If I want my people to know their worth, I must learn how to speak for the immigrants in the United States who cannot yet speak for themselves.
Alberto Ledesma is a writer in Northern California. The author can be contacted at albertoledesma@comcast.net.
http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=682&p=4
Color Lines: The National News Magazine on Race and Politics
February 5, 2010
One Latino reflects on how he overcame his fears to find that the best use of his citizenship today is to speak against anti-immigrant attacks.
We’ll call him Jim—Jim Garcia. Before this night in late May 2009, I had never met him. He stood about five foot seven in his Crocs—my height, but he was about 40 pounds heavier. He wore rimless glasses, but unlike me he sported a scruffy beard and a buzz haircut. We were assembled at a Holiday Inn bar in Albuquerque, where we were all attending a Latino writers’ conference. I’d been told that he was a children’s book writer, that he had just won some award in Texas for his first picture book and that he was funny. All I noticed at first was that I liked how he giggled.
The other two writers sitting at our table I knew from a past conference. To protect their privacy I’ve changed their names in this essay, but suffice it to say that all of us, it seemed, identified as Latino writers: Rafael the Nicaraguan, Andrew the Puerto Rican, and I the Mexican immigrant. As for Jim? I didn’t know but assumed he was Latino. I would soon find out differently.
After a long day of seminars on how to write marketable fiction and the like, the four of us had sat down to unwind over a few drinks. By half past midnight, we had the bar to ourselves and were sitting at the far corner of the tiny place, while behind us, on a flat screen above our heads, analysts discussed again the Lakers’ lopsided win over Orlando and the bartender cleaned glasses.
We crowded around a table no larger than a Little Caesar’s pizza box, its surface a cityscape of nacho platters, half-full schooners with remnant arcs of salt on their rims, a nearly empty third pitcher of margaritas, and four of those ridiculously small plates that make you realize just how impossible it is to scoop guacamole and Monterey Jack when someone offers a corn chip—at least not without dripping it on your shirt.
I held my lemonade on my lap, grasping the cool glass with the fingertips of my right hand, taking sips as the minutes of conversation passed and the voices of my new friends began to slur. Having long ago made a commitment to avoid drinking, I smiled, still painfully sober in spite of the hour. I laughed when they laughed, happy to be in a community of writers like me. I listened as they spoke of their work and the places they’d been. After ten years of living there, Rafael still missed Spain. Andrew was happy that his new novel was getting so many positive reviews. Jim was thinking of a new idea for his second children’s book. Some day soon, I thought, that would be me—recently published and still ambitious.
Someone raised a glass. “Here’s to the writer’s life!” And I, too, raised my lemonade. Then it happened. Jim sighed, downed the last of his margarita and leaned forward on his chair.
“Don’t get me started with these damned illegals,” he said with a giggle. “I just think we ought to deport them all.”
The rest of us froze, then gazed at each other, as if each of us was waiting for the other to say something. Even the bartender stopped the flurry of his towel.
That pause, that moment while we waited to continue the conversation seemed to last forever. Now, the fatigue our eyes had betrayed just seconds before transformed to something different: anger, confusion, fascination.
My heartbeat quickened. I drank the rest of my lemonade in one gulp and placed the empty glass at the edge of the table. I took in a deep breath, slowly seeking to calm the beginning of convulsions in my asthmatic lungs. And I spoke.
“Excuse me. What exactly did you mean by that comment?”
His smile dissolved until his mouth was left agape. He looked at me, seemingly puzzled at first, and then he tilted his head, pensive as he weighed his approach to my question. He pushed his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger.
“Look,” he said, his once nasal, high-pitched voice now deeper and more serious. “I’ve spent my whole life living in Eastern Texas. My family has been there for generations. I am sick and tired of all these illegals coming over the border and making a mess of things for the rest of us. It’s about time we do something about it.”
There was no hesitation in his remarks, not even a hint of discomfort or of the irony of what he was saying and where. Here we all were, at a writers’ conference by and for Latinos, most of us feeling optimistic about our growing demographic of readers, and even here there was an immigration debate.
I crossed my arms and massaged the stubble on my chin as he continued. He was not backing down. Instead, he looked at Rafael and Andrew and nodded as he commented about how much undocumented immigrants were costing our country. “Isn’t that right?” he asked rhetorically.
Rafael and Andrew shrugged, their faces mirroring one another like identical Rorschach blots. Rafael took a drink from his nearly full margarita. Andrew looked away, towards one of the empty tables of the restaurant adjacent to the bar. Then Jim spoke again.
“Hispanics are never going to be accepted as true Americans so long as we condone the flood of illegals coming to this country. They have absolutely no respect for our laws.”
* * *
In that moment, I felt the urge to tell Jim about my past—that for a decade my family and I had lived in the heart of East Oakland’s African American ghetto as undocumented Mexican immigrants. That even now, 25 years after normalizing our status, I held my breath whenever a police cruiser pulled close. But my undocumented immigrant past is not something I can easily talk about. In fact, years after becoming a citizen, I avoided talking about it altogether, even when I felt the urge to do so. The more I suppressed the urge, the greater it grew.
For a while, I thought I could appease that restless desire to confess my undocumented immigrant past by pursuing an academic degree. I wrote a dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley that focused on the ways undocumented immigrants have been represented in Mexican American novels and stories. I was proud of my achievement, of documenting, as it were, the silences of undocumented immigrants who have been part of the Mexican American community for most of the last 100 years. I discovered that even in stories where authors did not intend to focus on undocumented immigrants, indocumentado experiences were chronicled as part of the setting. They were the aunts and uncles, the long-lost cousins, the nameless faces of passersby that have appeared here and there in many Chicano classics.
When I worked as a faculty member, I taught courses that compared Mexican undocumented immigrant experiences to those of previous immigrant generations from Asia and Europe. I also looked at the parallels between the exploitation of undocumented immigrant and African American labor. “Mexican undocumented immigration is another kind of American experience,” I argued.
Still, I was not satisfied. It was my story I wanted to tell. The problem, however, was that I was scared, that I am still afraid that any disclosure of my family’s undocumented immigrant past will come back to haunt me. Who in their right mind would embrace an illegal immigrant identity at a time of increased ICE raids and deportations? And, even if I were successful in publishing a memoir about my life as an undocumented immigrant, what would happen to my family? Would they be okay with it? Would they be okay that I wanted to confess what I thought was an unforgivable sin—that I actually resented my parents for bringing our family to the United States to suffer one humiliation after another?
But, there are so few trained writers, scholars with doctoral degrees or educational activists who have actually experienced life in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Is it not my responsibility to represent?
The dirty little secret is that regardless of all the credentials I have accumulated, of all the books on law and argumentation that I’ve read, of all the impassioned speeches I have recorded and reviewed, talking about or writing stories about my undocumented immigrant past has not gotten easier.
In truth, it’s only been a few years since I gave in and started calling myself a writer. Even now, I writhe in my seat whenever I have to confess to an old friend or new acquaintance that I’ve yet to publish something more than the poetry and critical essays I produced decades ago. Yes, I have a lot of material that I've sketched out in journals. What I lack is the courage to follow through, to finish editing my work so publishers seriously consider it.
Because I’m that afraid.
So I recognize the fear that compelled Jim’s comments—a fear that, like mine, probably comes from shame. A fear that, similar to mine, is likely born out of the pain of being associated with what society tells us is repugnant. A fear that reminds us that others, particularly those who possess power over our lives, will see us solely as illegal and nothing else.
* * *
Maybe it was the lateness of the day. Maybe it was the thought that unless I spoke up I could never honestly belong to this or any community of writers. The fact is that there, in that tiny hotel bar in Albuquerque, I heard myself verbalizing a sequence of words with a speed, precision and volume I had never experienced before.
“I don’t understand how you can say these things when you are attending a Latino writers’ conference. Do you seriously think that Mexican immigrant experiences have no business being included in this conference?”
The fire that had lighted Jim’s eyes seemed to cool. He sat back, his glasses now perched near the tip of his nose. He held the padded armrests of his chair tightly, as if at any moment he would need to jump to his feet and walk away. Now, the lines across his forehead grew deeper, and tiny beads of sweat condensed everywhere on his brown skin, reflecting the bar’s green-hued lamp lights in a nervous glow.
“It, it, it’s just that where I grew up near Waco...well, you know, everybody’s a redneck, and illegals are really screwing things up.”
The more he leaned back, the more I leaned forward. The fainter his voice became, the more I felt my nostrils flaring and my top lip quivering. And the fainter his voice became, the louder my words sounded in the empty bar, until all that I could hear was the echo of an unknown voice emanating from my lips.
“But why do you even call the undocumented illegals?” I heard myself asking. “Are you an immigration judge? How many deportation trials have you adjudicated to determine if any of these immigrants is worthy of residency? Aren’t people in the United States supposed to be innocent until proven guilty? If there is even one person who can convince a judge that she should not be deported, how can you deny any undocumented immigrant the opportunity to appeal their status?”
He said nothing. He looked at me as if he were the illegal and I the agent deporting him. Rafael and Andrew said nothing.
The bartender walked to our table to tell us he was closing for the night. In unison, we turned to look up at him. In turn, he focused on Jim and me, apparently disgusted with one or both of us.
That night, as we walked across the pastel pink and turquoise carpet of the empty hotel lobby and headed towards the elevators, I realized Jim wasn’t the person with whom I had been arguing most. It had been towards myself that I felt the most anger.
I thought back to a summer morning in 1974, when I was 8, in our little blue house in East Oakland. It was a few weeks after papá had arranged for mamá, me and the rest of our family to be smuggled across the border at Tijuana. It was early—maybe six or so—and my parents were sitting at the kitchen table sharing a cup of coffee. That’s when I overheard papá asking mamá why I was so miedoso.
“He’s not scared,” mamá had answered matter-of-factly. “It’s just that this place is too new for him.”
But I had been scared. Very scared. And because of it I grew up to become a man who was overly cautious, nauseatingly polite, always worried about offending others. I was the perpetually smiling, self-effacing immigrant Cantinflas, who deflected insults as if they were the most natural and innocent wisps of autumn air.
But that fear, that approach had failed me. Silence would not protect me from being caught.
Oddly enough, Jim stayed close to me that night. We waited several minutes for the elevator to come down, all of us staring at the flashing lights above the elevator doors until one of us remembered that no one had pushed the button. It was then that Jim pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned to me.
“Look man, maybe I was wrong to have said that stuff. It’s just that when you said you wrote stories about undocumented immigrants, well, I just snapped.”
Earlier that night, long before Jim had blurted his comment, Andrew had asked me about my work. I had told him what I do, that I write stories about how a family of undocumented immigrants struggles to adjust to life in East Oakland and ends up having all of the kids graduating from UC Berkeley, two of them with doctorates.
It’s my family’s story.
When Rafael had asked if the agents at the conference had been interested in my work, I’d told him they had, especially if I wrote the work as non-fiction.
“So, are you?” he asked. I didn’t respond.
* * *
Psychologists say that fear is an emotional response to real or imagined dangers. Humans react to threats by confronting, evading or becoming paralyzed by them. The truth is that I don’t really know what will happen to my family or me if I publish the details of my undocumented immigrant past.
What my confrontation with Jim made clear is that unless Americans of undocumented immigrant heritage break our silence about what it feels like to live undocumented, unless I publish this and other work, the notion that undocumented immigrants are brain-dead parasites incapable of intellectual and ethical reflections regarding their social, political, and historical condition in American society will persist. And, unless these ideas are challenged, undocumented immigrants will continue to be regarded solely as cheap rental equipment, machinery devoid of spiritual or intellectual worth.
But I know what I am worth. I am more than a label or my citizenship status. My parents are more than their third-grade education. And my Berkeley Ph.D. means nothing if I remain quiet in the face of anti-immigrant attacks.
* * *
The day I confessed to my parents my intention of attending college they were rightfully afraid, especially my dad, concerned that such an action would reveal my status to school officials and jeopardize any chance our family would have at legalization under the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill. That bill became The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and with it my family and I gained amnesty and I a legitimated role as a college student.
In an effort to do the right thing, to make sure we all kept clean, my parents were willing to see me reject the acceptance letter Berkeley had sent me.
It was only when I argued that I would enroll in the Army if I was not permitted to attend college that mamá and papá agreed to let me go to Cal. In all likelihood, I wouldn’t have been able to volunteer for military service without also revealing my undocumented status. That did not stop me from thinking about it, from hoping that such a gesture would earn me points as a potential patriot that I could use if I were ever caught.
“I’ll help you as much as I can, but you have to pay for most of your education yourself,” papá said the morning my confirmation of acceptance letter was due. As I sped through the rain-slicked streets of East Oakland up 82nd Avenue and down East 14th to the post office on 90th Avenue, I played George Benson’s “On Broadway” on my father’s car stereo at least five times. And yet, the terror I saw in mamá’s and papá’s eyes as I left, and every day that I attended Berkeley after that, told me that boot camp might have been an easier road to take.
I saw that same terror in mamá’s eyes 15 years later when I told her I was leaving my academic position to pursue the life of a writer. She looked at me from where she had been standing in front of the kitchen sink. She turned off the faucet, straightened up after wringing her towel and wiped her hands on her apron.
“Pero mi’jo, why would anyone ever want to read stories about our lives? We are little people just struggling to make it from one day to the next.” She smiled when she sat on the chair next to mine.
We spoke for almost an hour; she asked questions and nodded as I tried to explain. She never asked me not to write about what we had been through—the dozens of times we had almost gotten caught—she didn’t have to. I could see it on her face, in the subtlety of her frown and the way she crossed her arms, as if that self-embrace was the only thing keeping her from collapsing mere inches in front of her first-born son. She seemed anxious about what I had in mind, worried about the kinds of secrets I might expose in my stories. Still, she said nothing and merely sat tense, quiet, looking at me as if I were a puzzle she would never learn how to solve.
It reminded me of the way she had sat in the passenger seat of papá’s green station wagon in the summer of 1976 as we rode home after a hot day at the San Jose Flea Market. Papá had bought a box full of strawberries—big, luscious, perfectly ripe fruit. On the way home, as we moved slowly through the Sunday afternoon traffic on the Nimitz Freeway, papá, really all of us, had one of those moments where we forgot about our status. A coworker had told him about a park not far from the highway we were now stuck on. It had a lake, dozens of pine trees and a picnic area where we could enjoy our strawberries. As soon as he saw an off-ramp, papá exited the freeway and headed towards the area his friend had told him about. As we looked for a place to park, papá found himself driving the opposite way into the City of Fremont Police Department’s parking lot, just as a police cruiser was exiting.
“It is a common mistake,” the officer said to my sister Silvia as he pointed towards the right entrance to the park. Mamá remained quiet in the passenger seat, her eyes towards the front, a subtle frown on her face and her arms wound tightly across her torso. That’s the way she stayed all the way home. And, that’s the way she sat as I told her I would no longer be a college professor, that I would instead write our family stories.
Maybe I learned my own fear from mamá. More precisely, the main lesson I learned from her was to protect family at all costs, that the needs of the many must always outweigh the wishes of the few. This, after all, is the way she has always led her life, the reason that she ventured to the United States with her children in tow to find her husband. This also seemed to be the reason for her concern about my writing and why she silenced her terror so many years ago in that Fremont Police Department parking lot.
Today, the family needs have changed. I am no longer hunted. Today, I am a Mexican American citizen of the United States. Safety is no longer contingent on remaining silent and invisible. And every endangered community eventually learns that silence equals death. If I want my citizenship to matter I must learn how to speak to the Jim Garcias of the world. If I want my people to know their worth, I must learn how to speak for the immigrants in the United States who cannot yet speak for themselves.
Alberto Ledesma is a writer in Northern California. The author can be contacted at albertoledesma@comcast.net.
http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=682&p=4
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Obama's Message to Undocumented Immigrants: No Se Puede
By Will Perez, PhD
The Huffington Post
February 5, 2010
It's quite possible that President Obama's omission of a comprehensive immigration reform agenda in his State of the Union address is exactly the spark that immigration reform proponents needed to reinvigorate their efforts. Activist groups are drawing on their frustrations to develop new campaigns to bring immigration reform back to the forefront, as illustrated by Illlinois Representaive Luis Gutierrez's visit to Olvera Street in Los Angeles.
This single event brought together representatives from a broad array of immigration reform supporters, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, labor unions, immigrant advocacy organizations and student activist groups. A similar trend seems to be occurring in other places, such as Illinois, where a student group, the Immigrant Youth Justice League, raised $243,000 on Saturday to bring 10,000 marchers to Washington, DC next month to lobby for immigration reform.
Perhaps neglecting to lay out an immigration reform agenda in his State of the Union address was the best thing president Obama could have done for immigration reform. The pressure on the president and on Congress will certainly continue to increase as a result.
When presidential candidate Barack Obama began his surge in the polls over a year ago, he captured the imagination of an entire nation with the phrase, "Yes we can," or "Si se Puede." Many across the country were energized. Few, however, recognized its origins and the significance it holds for immigrant Latinos. As I listened to Obama's State of the Union speech last week, it dawned on me that when it came to immigration reform, President Obama's message had changed from "Yes we can," to "No se puede," or "It can't be done."
Possibly in an effort to invigorate the Latino vote, Obama's campaign crafted a slogan inspired by the rally cry of immigrant agricultural workers fighting for labor rights. United Farm Workers (UFW) co-founders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta adopted the motto Si se Puede, or "Yes we can," in the 1970s for their labor rights campaigns to demand fair wages and better working conditions for agricultural workers. In the Latino community the term has come to symbolize the struggle against all forms of exploitation. Today it is a phrase that has reemerged to galvanize undocumented students across the country in their fight for access to citizenship and higher education.
It is precisely for that reason that many immigrant rights advocates were deeply disappointed by the near absence of an immigration reform agenda in the state of the union address. Understandably, the central theme of the speech was economic growth. In line with this goal, recent studies released by UCLA, USC, and the Public Policy Institute of California demonstrate the economic benefits of providing a path to legalization to undocumented immigrants. Current national polls as of November 2009 indicate that two-thirds of Americans favor providing a path to legalization to undocumented immigrants, yet Obama's and Congress' position remains the same: "No se puede."
The continuing neglect of immigration reform not only ignores countless studies about the economic benefits, it also ignores the hardship endured by millions who live in American society as de facto second-class citizens, and the ongoing intellectual loss of thousands of talented college-going undocumented students. Often referred to as DREAMERs, whose hopes and aspirations are tied to the passing of the Dream Act, they have been waiting for almost ten years for the opportunity to gain legalization and contribute to the economic vitality of American society. As chronicled in my recent book, We ARE Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream, many DREAMERs exhibit the same drive and determination that led recent famous immigrants to this country -- people such as Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, or Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google -- to create Fortune 500 companies that employ thousands of American workers and donate millions of dollars to social causes. In light of overwhelming research evidence and public support for providing a path to legalization to the undocumented, I remind Congress and President Obama: Yes we can, Si se Puede!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-perez-phd/obamas-message-to-undocum_b_451257.html
The Huffington Post
February 5, 2010
It's quite possible that President Obama's omission of a comprehensive immigration reform agenda in his State of the Union address is exactly the spark that immigration reform proponents needed to reinvigorate their efforts. Activist groups are drawing on their frustrations to develop new campaigns to bring immigration reform back to the forefront, as illustrated by Illlinois Representaive Luis Gutierrez's visit to Olvera Street in Los Angeles.
This single event brought together representatives from a broad array of immigration reform supporters, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, labor unions, immigrant advocacy organizations and student activist groups. A similar trend seems to be occurring in other places, such as Illinois, where a student group, the Immigrant Youth Justice League, raised $243,000 on Saturday to bring 10,000 marchers to Washington, DC next month to lobby for immigration reform.
Perhaps neglecting to lay out an immigration reform agenda in his State of the Union address was the best thing president Obama could have done for immigration reform. The pressure on the president and on Congress will certainly continue to increase as a result.
When presidential candidate Barack Obama began his surge in the polls over a year ago, he captured the imagination of an entire nation with the phrase, "Yes we can," or "Si se Puede." Many across the country were energized. Few, however, recognized its origins and the significance it holds for immigrant Latinos. As I listened to Obama's State of the Union speech last week, it dawned on me that when it came to immigration reform, President Obama's message had changed from "Yes we can," to "No se puede," or "It can't be done."
Possibly in an effort to invigorate the Latino vote, Obama's campaign crafted a slogan inspired by the rally cry of immigrant agricultural workers fighting for labor rights. United Farm Workers (UFW) co-founders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta adopted the motto Si se Puede, or "Yes we can," in the 1970s for their labor rights campaigns to demand fair wages and better working conditions for agricultural workers. In the Latino community the term has come to symbolize the struggle against all forms of exploitation. Today it is a phrase that has reemerged to galvanize undocumented students across the country in their fight for access to citizenship and higher education.
It is precisely for that reason that many immigrant rights advocates were deeply disappointed by the near absence of an immigration reform agenda in the state of the union address. Understandably, the central theme of the speech was economic growth. In line with this goal, recent studies released by UCLA, USC, and the Public Policy Institute of California demonstrate the economic benefits of providing a path to legalization to undocumented immigrants. Current national polls as of November 2009 indicate that two-thirds of Americans favor providing a path to legalization to undocumented immigrants, yet Obama's and Congress' position remains the same: "No se puede."
The continuing neglect of immigration reform not only ignores countless studies about the economic benefits, it also ignores the hardship endured by millions who live in American society as de facto second-class citizens, and the ongoing intellectual loss of thousands of talented college-going undocumented students. Often referred to as DREAMERs, whose hopes and aspirations are tied to the passing of the Dream Act, they have been waiting for almost ten years for the opportunity to gain legalization and contribute to the economic vitality of American society. As chronicled in my recent book, We ARE Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream, many DREAMERs exhibit the same drive and determination that led recent famous immigrants to this country -- people such as Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, or Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google -- to create Fortune 500 companies that employ thousands of American workers and donate millions of dollars to social causes. In light of overwhelming research evidence and public support for providing a path to legalization to the undocumented, I remind Congress and President Obama: Yes we can, Si se Puede!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-perez-phd/obamas-message-to-undocum_b_451257.html
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Gathering hopes for Latino immigration reform
Friday, April 24, 2009
By CARMEN JURI
THE STAR-LEDGER (New Jersey)
Since January, when immigration officials banged on her Union City apartment door and arrested her, Paola Leiva has worn an electronic ankle bracelet that monitors her movements.
She was placed on a 7 p.m.-to-7 a.m. home curfew and every day, for three hours, she sits connected to a power outlet while the monitoring device recharges.
Leiva, 32, who crossed the border to the United States from Honduras in 2004, said she was nearly deported this month, but authorities have agreed to reopen her case after an advocacy group came to her defense. She said she does not want to return home to San Pedro and said her two children are American-born and deserve protection under the Constitution.
"What future can my kids have there (in Honduras)?" asked Leiva.
Tomorrow, Leiva and others hope to speak to members of Congress at a community gathering to promote immigration reform in Elizabeth.
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, U.S. Rep Albio Sires, D-Hudson, and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, say they plan to attend the event, which is co-sponsored by the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey and the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders.
The gathering, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Iglesia Jesucristo es el Senor church, is part of a national effort to bring attention to the importance of immigration reform and highlight some of the hardships brought about by what they call a broken system, organizers said.
It involves prayer vigils and town-hall meetings in cities across America. At each event, U.S. citizens share testimony as to how their families have been or risk being torn apart by a broken immigration system, they said.
"We want the public to hear testimonials from American citizens whose lives have been ripped apart by the raids and deportations that have been a cornerstone of federal immigration policy for the last few years," said Martin Perez, president of the alliance.
http://www.nj.com/news/jjournal/index.ssf?/base/news-3/124055435171780.xml&coll=3
By CARMEN JURI
THE STAR-LEDGER (New Jersey)
Since January, when immigration officials banged on her Union City apartment door and arrested her, Paola Leiva has worn an electronic ankle bracelet that monitors her movements.
She was placed on a 7 p.m.-to-7 a.m. home curfew and every day, for three hours, she sits connected to a power outlet while the monitoring device recharges.
Leiva, 32, who crossed the border to the United States from Honduras in 2004, said she was nearly deported this month, but authorities have agreed to reopen her case after an advocacy group came to her defense. She said she does not want to return home to San Pedro and said her two children are American-born and deserve protection under the Constitution.
"What future can my kids have there (in Honduras)?" asked Leiva.
Tomorrow, Leiva and others hope to speak to members of Congress at a community gathering to promote immigration reform in Elizabeth.
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, U.S. Rep Albio Sires, D-Hudson, and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, say they plan to attend the event, which is co-sponsored by the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey and the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders.
The gathering, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Iglesia Jesucristo es el Senor church, is part of a national effort to bring attention to the importance of immigration reform and highlight some of the hardships brought about by what they call a broken system, organizers said.
It involves prayer vigils and town-hall meetings in cities across America. At each event, U.S. citizens share testimony as to how their families have been or risk being torn apart by a broken immigration system, they said.
"We want the public to hear testimonials from American citizens whose lives have been ripped apart by the raids and deportations that have been a cornerstone of federal immigration policy for the last few years," said Martin Perez, president of the alliance.
http://www.nj.com/news/jjournal/index.ssf?/base/news-3/124055435171780.xml&coll=3
Sunday, March 1, 2009
In Providence, immigrants begin national rally for family unity
In Providence, immigrants begin national rally for family unity
February 28, 2009
By Karen Lee Ziner
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Close to a thousand people packed a Providence church last night to launch a national “family unity” campaign designed to draw attention to the disruptive effects of the country’s immigration policies. Organizers said their goal is President Obama’s signature on comprehensive immigration reform.
The 17-city “listening tour” is being led by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Conducted through faith-based organizations, the tour will gather “the human stories of the impact of immigration policies” on “mixed-status” families, including U.S. citizens, and bring them to Washington, D.C., in April.
“We have five million citizen children wondering whether their parents will be there when they get home from school” each day, Gutierrez told an overflow crowd at Trinity Methodist Church on Broad Street.
The congressman and other speakers said mass raids and deportations are tearing apart families whose members include a mix of citizens or legal residents, and undocumented immigrants. Gutierrez asked, “Which half [of the mixed family] are we going to deport? Which half isn’t really our concern? I think both are our responsibility.”
“We want President Obama to keep his promise … to bring people out of the shadows,” he said.
Eight-year-old Jeidi Par — one of three U.S. citizen children affected by parent deportations who spoke to the crowd last night — recounted how immigration agents “seized my father when he was taking out the trash” last September.
Her father, who had applied for asylum years ago but was rejected, has now been deported. The girl said she worries that her mother — who is also in the country illegally — could be deported.
“I beg that you ask President Obama to stop deportation of my mom, and bring my dad back,” Jeidi Par said.
Melissa Arias, 9, also spoke. Her father is facing orders to leave the country by June 12, after entering the country illegally years ago.
In a letter to Mr. Obama, Arias said, “We were a really happy family … why do they take him away if he is not a criminal? I am afraid immigration will go to his work and take him away. The only thing I wish is not to get separated from him.”
Gutierrez said he started the campaign in Rhode Island “because I kept getting told about the city’s large, faith-based immigrant community.”
The congressman said immigration reform should put people on a path to legality.
“That means if you are working hard and paying taxes, and have committed no crimes and you’ve never had any criminal contact with the law — other than your immigration status, we’re going to give you the opportunity to earn your legalization,” he said.
“We want people to take English classes, take civics lessons, get a good Social Security number and pay taxes. And after seven or eight years, if you do it right, then we will say, ‘Welcome.’ ”
The “family unity” campaign got under way amid national developments on the immigration front.
This week, Rep. Lucille Royball-Allard, D-Calif., introduced legislation to adopt “humane and legally enforceable standards” for immigration detention facilities. The American Civil Liberties Union cited the death of Hiu Lui Ng, a former immigration detainee at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, as one of three recent detainee deaths underscoring urgency for the bill
Gutierrez told the audience he spoke with new U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano after a raid in Bellingham, Wash., this week.
“She was a breath of fresh air,” Gutierrez said of Napolitano. “And you know what? She told me that raid was done with out her knowledge, and she was deeply disturbed because of that action. She’s going to take a complete review.” He said her response marked “a new time, and a new day.”
After last night’s program, volunteers took further “testimony” from families who may be at risk of deportation, and people signed a petition calling for comprehensive immigration reform.
“We are going to take these testimonies, and when they reach Washington, this is going to move a mountain,” said the Rev. Eliseo Nogueras, president of the Hispanic Ministerial Alliance of Rhode Island.
http://www.projo.com/news/content/IMMIGRATION_CAMPAIGN_02-28-09_TBDG198_v14.378892c.html
February 28, 2009
By Karen Lee Ziner
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Close to a thousand people packed a Providence church last night to launch a national “family unity” campaign designed to draw attention to the disruptive effects of the country’s immigration policies. Organizers said their goal is President Obama’s signature on comprehensive immigration reform.
The 17-city “listening tour” is being led by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Conducted through faith-based organizations, the tour will gather “the human stories of the impact of immigration policies” on “mixed-status” families, including U.S. citizens, and bring them to Washington, D.C., in April.
“We have five million citizen children wondering whether their parents will be there when they get home from school” each day, Gutierrez told an overflow crowd at Trinity Methodist Church on Broad Street.
The congressman and other speakers said mass raids and deportations are tearing apart families whose members include a mix of citizens or legal residents, and undocumented immigrants. Gutierrez asked, “Which half [of the mixed family] are we going to deport? Which half isn’t really our concern? I think both are our responsibility.”
“We want President Obama to keep his promise … to bring people out of the shadows,” he said.
Eight-year-old Jeidi Par — one of three U.S. citizen children affected by parent deportations who spoke to the crowd last night — recounted how immigration agents “seized my father when he was taking out the trash” last September.
Her father, who had applied for asylum years ago but was rejected, has now been deported. The girl said she worries that her mother — who is also in the country illegally — could be deported.
“I beg that you ask President Obama to stop deportation of my mom, and bring my dad back,” Jeidi Par said.
Melissa Arias, 9, also spoke. Her father is facing orders to leave the country by June 12, after entering the country illegally years ago.
In a letter to Mr. Obama, Arias said, “We were a really happy family … why do they take him away if he is not a criminal? I am afraid immigration will go to his work and take him away. The only thing I wish is not to get separated from him.”
Gutierrez said he started the campaign in Rhode Island “because I kept getting told about the city’s large, faith-based immigrant community.”
The congressman said immigration reform should put people on a path to legality.
“That means if you are working hard and paying taxes, and have committed no crimes and you’ve never had any criminal contact with the law — other than your immigration status, we’re going to give you the opportunity to earn your legalization,” he said.
“We want people to take English classes, take civics lessons, get a good Social Security number and pay taxes. And after seven or eight years, if you do it right, then we will say, ‘Welcome.’ ”
The “family unity” campaign got under way amid national developments on the immigration front.
This week, Rep. Lucille Royball-Allard, D-Calif., introduced legislation to adopt “humane and legally enforceable standards” for immigration detention facilities. The American Civil Liberties Union cited the death of Hiu Lui Ng, a former immigration detainee at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, as one of three recent detainee deaths underscoring urgency for the bill
Gutierrez told the audience he spoke with new U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano after a raid in Bellingham, Wash., this week.
“She was a breath of fresh air,” Gutierrez said of Napolitano. “And you know what? She told me that raid was done with out her knowledge, and she was deeply disturbed because of that action. She’s going to take a complete review.” He said her response marked “a new time, and a new day.”
After last night’s program, volunteers took further “testimony” from families who may be at risk of deportation, and people signed a petition calling for comprehensive immigration reform.
“We are going to take these testimonies, and when they reach Washington, this is going to move a mountain,” said the Rev. Eliseo Nogueras, president of the Hispanic Ministerial Alliance of Rhode Island.
http://www.projo.com/news/content/IMMIGRATION_CAMPAIGN_02-28-09_TBDG198_v14.378892c.html
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Speech on immigration raids wins college's annual peace oratorical contest
Speech on immigration raids wins college's annual peace oratorical contest
Monday, February 9, 2009
Goshen College Online
GOSHEN, Ind. – Analisa Gerig-Sickles, a Goshen College senior elementary education major from West Branch, Iowa, won first place with her speech "No Mas Redadas" during the college's annual C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest on Feb. 3. She was one of six Goshen College students from a variety of disciplines who spoke about peace and justice issues during the competition.
By winning the contest, Gerig-Sickles received $150 and the opportunity to compete in the U.S./Canada Mennonite Central Committee-sponsored C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. The runner-up was Isaac Yoder-Schrock, a first-year physics major from Moundridge, Kan., who received $100 for his speech "National Healthcare, Caring for Others."
In her speech, Gerig-Sickles talked about the impact of work raids on illegal immigrants. She used stories from her experience last summer working with St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa, the site of one of the largest work raids in U.S. history. About 400 workers from the Agriprocessors meat-packing factory were arrested by about 1,000 government agents. At St. Bridget's, she helped people affected by the raids with financial, physical, spiritual, legal and emotional support.
Gerig-Sickles told vivid stories that people affected had told her to convey the inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants by government officials. "During the raid many people were maltreated. One woman who was hiding under a pile of boxes was yanked out and slapped across the face," she said. "Hundreds of workers suspected to be illegal immigrants ... were loaded in vans and taken to the National Cattle Congress facility, a place normally used to exhibit cows."
By putting a face on the immigration issue, Gerig-Sickles hoped to encourage people to speak out against raids. "No matter how you feel about immigration and how our country deals with it politically or socially, I hope that you can feel compassion for the people and families affected by this raid," Gerig-Sickles said. "I encourage you to contact your senators and representatives and to spread the word that you do not support raids."
http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/02-09-09-smith-winner222.html
Monday, February 9, 2009
Goshen College Online
GOSHEN, Ind. – Analisa Gerig-Sickles, a Goshen College senior elementary education major from West Branch, Iowa, won first place with her speech "No Mas Redadas" during the college's annual C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest on Feb. 3. She was one of six Goshen College students from a variety of disciplines who spoke about peace and justice issues during the competition.
By winning the contest, Gerig-Sickles received $150 and the opportunity to compete in the U.S./Canada Mennonite Central Committee-sponsored C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. The runner-up was Isaac Yoder-Schrock, a first-year physics major from Moundridge, Kan., who received $100 for his speech "National Healthcare, Caring for Others."
In her speech, Gerig-Sickles talked about the impact of work raids on illegal immigrants. She used stories from her experience last summer working with St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa, the site of one of the largest work raids in U.S. history. About 400 workers from the Agriprocessors meat-packing factory were arrested by about 1,000 government agents. At St. Bridget's, she helped people affected by the raids with financial, physical, spiritual, legal and emotional support.
Gerig-Sickles told vivid stories that people affected had told her to convey the inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants by government officials. "During the raid many people were maltreated. One woman who was hiding under a pile of boxes was yanked out and slapped across the face," she said. "Hundreds of workers suspected to be illegal immigrants ... were loaded in vans and taken to the National Cattle Congress facility, a place normally used to exhibit cows."
By putting a face on the immigration issue, Gerig-Sickles hoped to encourage people to speak out against raids. "No matter how you feel about immigration and how our country deals with it politically or socially, I hope that you can feel compassion for the people and families affected by this raid," Gerig-Sickles said. "I encourage you to contact your senators and representatives and to spread the word that you do not support raids."
http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/02-09-09-smith-winner222.html
Sunday, February 1, 2009
"I'm Not Dangerous": Immigrants Treated Like Criminals
"I'm Not Dangerous": Immigrants Treated Like Criminals
By Danny Postel, Commonweal Magazine
February 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/123906/
The past few months have seen three of the largest workplace immigration raids in U.S. history. In May, the rural Iowa town of Postville was convulsed when 900 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stormed a kosher meatpacking plant and arrested 389 workers. In August, ICE agents descended on an electrical equipment factory near Laurel, Mississippi, detaining nearly 600 workers. And in October, the scene was repeated in Greenville, South Carolina, where 330 workers were swept up at a chicken-processing plant.
The humanitarian costs of the raids, according to a statement issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration, were "immeasurable and unacceptable in a civilized society." Children were separated from their parents for days. Those arrested were not immediately afforded the rights of due process. And local communities were, in the words of John C. Wester, bishop of Salt Lake City and chairman of the Committee on Migration, "disrupted and dislocated." These raids, he said, "strike immigrant communities unexpectedly, leaving the affected immigrant families to cope in the aftermath. Husbands are separated from their wives, and children are separated from their parents. Many families never recover; others never reunite."
The bishop called on the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is an agency, on President George W. Bush, and on then-candidates John McCain and Barack Obama to "reexamine the use of worksite enforcement raids" as an immigration-enforcement tool. He noted that immigrants "who are working to survive and support their families should not be treated like criminals."
Having visited Laurel after the ICE crackdown, I must report that is exactly how the workers there have been treated and made to feel. The majority of the immigrant workers caught up in the raid were taken immediately to a holding facility in Louisiana. ICE released a number of women, some of them pregnant, on "humanitarian" grounds. But many of them were shackled with ankle bands equipped with electronic monitoring devices (pictured above). Several expressed their humiliation and shame -- not to speak of their physical discomfort -- at having been branded this way. For days, one of them told me, she avoided going out in public or to the grocery store. "It makes me look like a criminal, like a dangerous person," she lamented. "I’m not dangerous."
This woman told me she had come to the United States out of sheer desperation. She said she was unable to feed her children in her home village in Mexico. Now, with deportation imminent and no means to pay her bills, she and her coworkers were facing a further harrowing fate.
Immigration raids, even large, media-covered ones, are selective and symbolic in nature. They are orchestrated to send a political message that the government is willing and able to enforce the law. But why penalize the least among us -- hardworking people who earn very little and endure some of the harshest conditions in the American workplace? The Postville and Laurel plants both have long histories of taking advantage of their workers. Iowa’s attorney general recently filed charges against the Postville meatpacking plant for more than nine thousand labor violations. In July, religious and labor leaders joined more than a thousand marchers in the town to show solidarity with those seized in the ICE raid.
Indeed, religious communities have been playing a pivotal role in the aftermath of these raids. Catholic parishes have been safe havens for families scrambling to feed their children amid the turmoil. Immaculate Conception Church in Laurel and Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Hattiesburg worked virtually round-the-clock to feed and provide for the affected families.
To remedy what the U.S. bishops call "the failure of a seriously flawed immigration system," they "urge our elected and appointed officials to turn away from enforcement-only methods and direct their energy toward the adoption of comprehensive immigration reform legislation." That is now up to the new administration and to Congress.
http://www.alternet.org/immigration/123906/%22i'm_not_dangerous%22:_immigrants_treated_like_criminals/
By Danny Postel, Commonweal Magazine
February 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/123906/
The past few months have seen three of the largest workplace immigration raids in U.S. history. In May, the rural Iowa town of Postville was convulsed when 900 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stormed a kosher meatpacking plant and arrested 389 workers. In August, ICE agents descended on an electrical equipment factory near Laurel, Mississippi, detaining nearly 600 workers. And in October, the scene was repeated in Greenville, South Carolina, where 330 workers were swept up at a chicken-processing plant.
The humanitarian costs of the raids, according to a statement issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration, were "immeasurable and unacceptable in a civilized society." Children were separated from their parents for days. Those arrested were not immediately afforded the rights of due process. And local communities were, in the words of John C. Wester, bishop of Salt Lake City and chairman of the Committee on Migration, "disrupted and dislocated." These raids, he said, "strike immigrant communities unexpectedly, leaving the affected immigrant families to cope in the aftermath. Husbands are separated from their wives, and children are separated from their parents. Many families never recover; others never reunite."
The bishop called on the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is an agency, on President George W. Bush, and on then-candidates John McCain and Barack Obama to "reexamine the use of worksite enforcement raids" as an immigration-enforcement tool. He noted that immigrants "who are working to survive and support their families should not be treated like criminals."
Having visited Laurel after the ICE crackdown, I must report that is exactly how the workers there have been treated and made to feel. The majority of the immigrant workers caught up in the raid were taken immediately to a holding facility in Louisiana. ICE released a number of women, some of them pregnant, on "humanitarian" grounds. But many of them were shackled with ankle bands equipped with electronic monitoring devices (pictured above). Several expressed their humiliation and shame -- not to speak of their physical discomfort -- at having been branded this way. For days, one of them told me, she avoided going out in public or to the grocery store. "It makes me look like a criminal, like a dangerous person," she lamented. "I’m not dangerous."
This woman told me she had come to the United States out of sheer desperation. She said she was unable to feed her children in her home village in Mexico. Now, with deportation imminent and no means to pay her bills, she and her coworkers were facing a further harrowing fate.
Immigration raids, even large, media-covered ones, are selective and symbolic in nature. They are orchestrated to send a political message that the government is willing and able to enforce the law. But why penalize the least among us -- hardworking people who earn very little and endure some of the harshest conditions in the American workplace? The Postville and Laurel plants both have long histories of taking advantage of their workers. Iowa’s attorney general recently filed charges against the Postville meatpacking plant for more than nine thousand labor violations. In July, religious and labor leaders joined more than a thousand marchers in the town to show solidarity with those seized in the ICE raid.
Indeed, religious communities have been playing a pivotal role in the aftermath of these raids. Catholic parishes have been safe havens for families scrambling to feed their children amid the turmoil. Immaculate Conception Church in Laurel and Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Hattiesburg worked virtually round-the-clock to feed and provide for the affected families.
To remedy what the U.S. bishops call "the failure of a seriously flawed immigration system," they "urge our elected and appointed officials to turn away from enforcement-only methods and direct their energy toward the adoption of comprehensive immigration reform legislation." That is now up to the new administration and to Congress.
http://www.alternet.org/immigration/123906/%22i'm_not_dangerous%22:_immigrants_treated_like_criminals/
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The rights of jailed immigrants
BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
The rights of jailed immigrants
January 12, 2009
THE UNITED STATES and its undocumented immigrants are caught in an abusive relationship. On calm days, the country tolerates these men and women who clean houses, process meat, and work construction. But on other days, anger surges as federal agents raid workplaces, rounding up scores of workers and putting them in detention facilities. It's in these facilities that a range of abuses can occur, from inadequate healthcare to excessively long detentions, according to a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Among the cases reported by the ACLU is that of Oscar, an undocumented immigrant with a kidney ailment who was detained at the Plymouth County jail in 2006. Because he was unable to take his medications, Oscar become severely bloated. Fellow cellmates helped him stand to use the bathroom and brought him food from the cafeteria. He finally began receiving medication six weeks into his detainment. But Oscar's medical care remained patchy, according to the report. Detained for about a year, he was eventually deported.
Other detainees were confined with criminal offenders, found it difficult to contact lawyers, and were held in rooms where human waste had not been cleared away. And the ACLU says that some detainees who complained about conditions were transferred to other facilities in what looks like an effort to silence them.
It's easy to blame the detainees: As lawbreakers, they're not entitled to kid-glove treatment. But in the United States, even prisoners must be treated with common decency. A country that has been built by and for immigrants shouldn't abuse them.
Federal officials say they are committed to providing detainees "with humane and safe detention environments," according to Michael Gilhooly, a spokesman for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And protective policies and procedures are in place. But the agency has yet to respond to the specific claims in the ACLU's report, something Gilhooly says will happen.
Clearing up these claims is important, and so is guarding against future abuses. To this end, Congress should pass comprehensive immigration reform that would rationalize national laws. Federal officials should reevaluate the use of workplace raids, and protections for detainees should be strengthened.
For its part, Massachusetts should relieve overcrowded conditions that undermine the rights of all detainees, whether immigrants or not.
After too many false starts, it's now up to the incoming Obama administration to develop more just and rational policies for treating undocumented immigrants.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/01/12/the_rights_of_jailed_immigrants/
The rights of jailed immigrants
January 12, 2009
THE UNITED STATES and its undocumented immigrants are caught in an abusive relationship. On calm days, the country tolerates these men and women who clean houses, process meat, and work construction. But on other days, anger surges as federal agents raid workplaces, rounding up scores of workers and putting them in detention facilities. It's in these facilities that a range of abuses can occur, from inadequate healthcare to excessively long detentions, according to a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Among the cases reported by the ACLU is that of Oscar, an undocumented immigrant with a kidney ailment who was detained at the Plymouth County jail in 2006. Because he was unable to take his medications, Oscar become severely bloated. Fellow cellmates helped him stand to use the bathroom and brought him food from the cafeteria. He finally began receiving medication six weeks into his detainment. But Oscar's medical care remained patchy, according to the report. Detained for about a year, he was eventually deported.
Other detainees were confined with criminal offenders, found it difficult to contact lawyers, and were held in rooms where human waste had not been cleared away. And the ACLU says that some detainees who complained about conditions were transferred to other facilities in what looks like an effort to silence them.
It's easy to blame the detainees: As lawbreakers, they're not entitled to kid-glove treatment. But in the United States, even prisoners must be treated with common decency. A country that has been built by and for immigrants shouldn't abuse them.
Federal officials say they are committed to providing detainees "with humane and safe detention environments," according to Michael Gilhooly, a spokesman for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And protective policies and procedures are in place. But the agency has yet to respond to the specific claims in the ACLU's report, something Gilhooly says will happen.
Clearing up these claims is important, and so is guarding against future abuses. To this end, Congress should pass comprehensive immigration reform that would rationalize national laws. Federal officials should reevaluate the use of workplace raids, and protections for detainees should be strengthened.
For its part, Massachusetts should relieve overcrowded conditions that undermine the rights of all detainees, whether immigrants or not.
After too many false starts, it's now up to the incoming Obama administration to develop more just and rational policies for treating undocumented immigrants.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/01/12/the_rights_of_jailed_immigrants/
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Group calls for halt on deportations
Group calls for halt on deportations
By Tara Lynn
Reporter, WCBD in South Carolina
Published: January 3, 2009
President elect Barack Obama has 17 more days until he’s officially in office, but that’s not keeping some from already calling on him to take action on immigration reform.
Maria Aguirre-Fuentes came to the United States 11 years ago following her American Dream of prosperity.
While her 3 children are in the states with her, her parents are not.
She came to volunteer at this Immigration Reform Forum in downtown Charleston to change that.
“We want there to be a solution so we can be like everybody else in this country and succeed with our dreams,” she told News 2 with the help of a translator.
More than 300 people like Aguirre-Fuentes came to add their name to a list to be presented to President Elect Barack Obama. Their goal: to persuade the president elect to place a moratorium on deportation until congress can reform immigration laws. Famlia Latina Unida Chicago Organizer Emma Lozano says the current laws are unjust.
http://www.counton2.com/cbd/news/local/article/group_calls_for_halt_on_deportations/18762/
By Tara Lynn
Reporter, WCBD in South Carolina
Published: January 3, 2009
President elect Barack Obama has 17 more days until he’s officially in office, but that’s not keeping some from already calling on him to take action on immigration reform.
Maria Aguirre-Fuentes came to the United States 11 years ago following her American Dream of prosperity.
While her 3 children are in the states with her, her parents are not.
She came to volunteer at this Immigration Reform Forum in downtown Charleston to change that.
“We want there to be a solution so we can be like everybody else in this country and succeed with our dreams,” she told News 2 with the help of a translator.
More than 300 people like Aguirre-Fuentes came to add their name to a list to be presented to President Elect Barack Obama. Their goal: to persuade the president elect to place a moratorium on deportation until congress can reform immigration laws. Famlia Latina Unida Chicago Organizer Emma Lozano says the current laws are unjust.
http://www.counton2.com/cbd/news/local/article/group_calls_for_halt_on_deportations/18762/
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Groups protest S. Idaho immigration raid
Groups protest S. Idaho immigration raid
December 08, 2008
The Olympian
The Idaho Community Action Network and Catholic Charities of Idaho held a candlelight vigil in protest of an immigration raid at a wood manufacturing company in Nampa.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 16 Mexican nationals employed by the Idaho Truss & Component Co. on Thursday. The raid was part of a one-year investigation that began when employment records showed some workers may have used fake documents to secure their jobs.
The workers will remain in federal custody until they appear before an immigration judge.
A group of about 80 people gathered in Boise on Sunday at the Anne Frank Memorial for a vigil in support of the workers and in protest of the arrests that separated the men from their families three weeks before the Christmas holiday.
The Rev. Thomas Faucher, of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Boise, and Amy Hertzfeld, executive director of the Idaho Human Rights Education Center, were among speakers at the event, which included family members of the workers.
Veronica Mason, 34, of Nampa, said her 36-year-old fiance was one of the men arrested during the raid. He was brought into the county as a minor and has lived in the United States for about 17 years, she said. Mason is expecting the couple's first child in June and if her fiance is deported, said she'll move to Mexico to keep the family together.
"It's been really hard for me to get to the concept that he won't be here for the birth of his only child," she told the Idaho Press-Tribune. "It's just really devastating for the whole family."
Idaho Truss President Kendall Hoyd said the 16 workers were carefully documented when they were hired and he was unaware the were suspected of working in the country illegally.
ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers confirmed that deportation proceedings for the workers have begun.
The names of those arrested will not be released, Dankers said. Three of the 16 men arrested have been previously deported, while three others have been convicted of crimes in the United States, according to ICE.
http://www.theolympian.com/130/story/691723.html
December 08, 2008
The Olympian
The Idaho Community Action Network and Catholic Charities of Idaho held a candlelight vigil in protest of an immigration raid at a wood manufacturing company in Nampa.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 16 Mexican nationals employed by the Idaho Truss & Component Co. on Thursday. The raid was part of a one-year investigation that began when employment records showed some workers may have used fake documents to secure their jobs.
The workers will remain in federal custody until they appear before an immigration judge.
A group of about 80 people gathered in Boise on Sunday at the Anne Frank Memorial for a vigil in support of the workers and in protest of the arrests that separated the men from their families three weeks before the Christmas holiday.
The Rev. Thomas Faucher, of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Boise, and Amy Hertzfeld, executive director of the Idaho Human Rights Education Center, were among speakers at the event, which included family members of the workers.
Veronica Mason, 34, of Nampa, said her 36-year-old fiance was one of the men arrested during the raid. He was brought into the county as a minor and has lived in the United States for about 17 years, she said. Mason is expecting the couple's first child in June and if her fiance is deported, said she'll move to Mexico to keep the family together.
"It's been really hard for me to get to the concept that he won't be here for the birth of his only child," she told the Idaho Press-Tribune. "It's just really devastating for the whole family."
Idaho Truss President Kendall Hoyd said the 16 workers were carefully documented when they were hired and he was unaware the were suspected of working in the country illegally.
ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers confirmed that deportation proceedings for the workers have begun.
The names of those arrested will not be released, Dankers said. Three of the 16 men arrested have been previously deported, while three others have been convicted of crimes in the United States, according to ICE.
http://www.theolympian.com/130/story/691723.html
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Nampa workplace raid in takes 16 into custody
Nampa workplace raid in takes 16 into custody
BY BETHANN STEWART AND PATRICK ORR
Idaho Statesman
12/05/08
Despite careful documentation by Idaho Truss, feds say the workers may have used fake IDs.
Idaho Truss & Component Co. President Kendall Hoyd said he was shocked to learn Thursday that 16 of his employees were suspected of working illegally.
"We carefully documented everyone when we hired them," Hoyd said. "We did all the reporting that is required by law."
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the 16 Mexican men after a raid at the Nampa-based wood framing company Thursday morning.
The Idaho Community Action Network denounced Thursday's raid.
"What a terrible time of year to be tearing families apart!" said Roxy Carr, ICAN leader from Twin Falls, in a statement. "I know we can do better than this. It's time our government got serious about fixing the system."
On Thursday, Catholic Charities of Idaho and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise issued a statement condemning recent immigration enforcement actions in Idaho and urging ICE to work more closely with community advocates to protect children and prevent the separation of families.
According to ICE, the 8:30 a.m. raid was part of a yearlong investigation, which began with a review of the employment records of workers who were building military housing at the Mountain Home Air Force Base earlier this year.
Idaho Truss had been providing information to ICE for the past several weeks, Hoyd said.
ICE investigators said there is evidence the workers may have used fake Social Security numbers and other counterfeit identification like fraudulent Green Cards to get their jobs, said ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers.
Deportation proceedings have begun for the men, who were all in custody Thursday night, Dankers said.
Three of the men have been previously deported, Dankers said, and three have criminal convictions in the United States.
None appear to qualify to be released for humanitarian reasons, Dankers said.
Being the primary caregiver for children would be a possible reason for release, Dankers said.
Even if released, those workers would still be deported but the process would likely take longer than for someone who remained in custody, Dankers said.
Idaho Truss has about a third of its truss builders remaining, Hoyd said. Those workers will pick up some extra hours temporarily.
"Operationally, it'll be about a day set back," Hoyd said. "We'll need to hire more truss builders."
No charges have been filed against the company yet, and the investigation is ongoing, Dankers said
ICE's investigation began with a tip from the public and information gathered over the last year led to the Nampa raid Thursday, Dankers said.
Idaho Truss & Component Co. has been in business for 30 years and produces wood framing components for buildings - including roof trusses, floor joists and panels, wall panels, and other structural supports - according to the company's Web site.
The company also has work crews who can assemble the construction materials in the field, company officials said Thursday.
Family members seeking information on any of the workers who have been detained should call ICE at (208) 685-6697.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/102/story/594009.html
BY BETHANN STEWART AND PATRICK ORR
Idaho Statesman
12/05/08
Despite careful documentation by Idaho Truss, feds say the workers may have used fake IDs.
Idaho Truss & Component Co. President Kendall Hoyd said he was shocked to learn Thursday that 16 of his employees were suspected of working illegally.
"We carefully documented everyone when we hired them," Hoyd said. "We did all the reporting that is required by law."
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the 16 Mexican men after a raid at the Nampa-based wood framing company Thursday morning.
The Idaho Community Action Network denounced Thursday's raid.
"What a terrible time of year to be tearing families apart!" said Roxy Carr, ICAN leader from Twin Falls, in a statement. "I know we can do better than this. It's time our government got serious about fixing the system."
On Thursday, Catholic Charities of Idaho and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise issued a statement condemning recent immigration enforcement actions in Idaho and urging ICE to work more closely with community advocates to protect children and prevent the separation of families.
According to ICE, the 8:30 a.m. raid was part of a yearlong investigation, which began with a review of the employment records of workers who were building military housing at the Mountain Home Air Force Base earlier this year.
Idaho Truss had been providing information to ICE for the past several weeks, Hoyd said.
ICE investigators said there is evidence the workers may have used fake Social Security numbers and other counterfeit identification like fraudulent Green Cards to get their jobs, said ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers.
Deportation proceedings have begun for the men, who were all in custody Thursday night, Dankers said.
Three of the men have been previously deported, Dankers said, and three have criminal convictions in the United States.
None appear to qualify to be released for humanitarian reasons, Dankers said.
Being the primary caregiver for children would be a possible reason for release, Dankers said.
Even if released, those workers would still be deported but the process would likely take longer than for someone who remained in custody, Dankers said.
Idaho Truss has about a third of its truss builders remaining, Hoyd said. Those workers will pick up some extra hours temporarily.
"Operationally, it'll be about a day set back," Hoyd said. "We'll need to hire more truss builders."
No charges have been filed against the company yet, and the investigation is ongoing, Dankers said
ICE's investigation began with a tip from the public and information gathered over the last year led to the Nampa raid Thursday, Dankers said.
Idaho Truss & Component Co. has been in business for 30 years and produces wood framing components for buildings - including roof trusses, floor joists and panels, wall panels, and other structural supports - according to the company's Web site.
The company also has work crews who can assemble the construction materials in the field, company officials said Thursday.
Family members seeking information on any of the workers who have been detained should call ICE at (208) 685-6697.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/102/story/594009.html
Saturday, November 15, 2008
California immigrant youths defend their families
California immigrant youths defend their families
By Judy Greenspan
San Francisco, Worker's World
Published Nov 14, 2008
Hundreds of progressive youth, predominantly Latin@, converged on the local offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to demand an end to the raids on the homes and workplaces of undocumented workers in this city. Young people from the East Bay risked arrest by jumping BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) turnstiles to attend the Oct. 31 protest.
The organizers of this protest chose Halloween to launch a broad and united youth-led campaign against the ICE raids and deportations. Demonstrators were urged to wear black and skull face paint or masks. The all-day event gathered at 10 a.m. at Ferry Park, marched to the ICE office at 11:30 and maintained a militant, energetic rally and protest until after 5 p.m.
At the ICE headquarters, young people blocked both entrances of the building and refused to let any ICE vehicles leave the area for several hours.
Young protesters from the East Bay who wanted to attend the rally jumped the turnstiles at several East Bay BART stations. The BART responded by closing several stations. However, the young people, who kept in contact with each other by cell phone and Internet, successfully held up the East Bay BART trains, demanding that the stations be reopened. There were several arrests of young people at the downtown Richmond BART stop.
“We want to make sure our families are safe and that our lives are not being threatened. It’s really unfair, trying to scare high school students. We want to make sure sanctuary cities are respecting immigrants,” said Aurora Castellanos, a first-year student at the University of California at Berkeley. Castellanos was one of the organizers of the rally.
ICE raids at schools and workplaces have increased dramatically over the past year. Several coalitions, including this newest one, have come together to demand amnesty for all undocumented workers and an end to the ICE raids.
Many cities in the Bay Area are “sanctuary cities” for undocumented workers. However the sanctuary status has not deterred ICE from its terrifying raids.
“We are humans, not illegals! Stop the raids!” the protesters chanted as they marched through this city’s business district. Hundreds of people came out of stores and offices to watch the march go by.
http://www.workers.org/2008/us/calif_1120/
By Judy Greenspan
San Francisco, Worker's World
Published Nov 14, 2008
Hundreds of progressive youth, predominantly Latin@, converged on the local offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to demand an end to the raids on the homes and workplaces of undocumented workers in this city. Young people from the East Bay risked arrest by jumping BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) turnstiles to attend the Oct. 31 protest.
The organizers of this protest chose Halloween to launch a broad and united youth-led campaign against the ICE raids and deportations. Demonstrators were urged to wear black and skull face paint or masks. The all-day event gathered at 10 a.m. at Ferry Park, marched to the ICE office at 11:30 and maintained a militant, energetic rally and protest until after 5 p.m.
At the ICE headquarters, young people blocked both entrances of the building and refused to let any ICE vehicles leave the area for several hours.
Young protesters from the East Bay who wanted to attend the rally jumped the turnstiles at several East Bay BART stations. The BART responded by closing several stations. However, the young people, who kept in contact with each other by cell phone and Internet, successfully held up the East Bay BART trains, demanding that the stations be reopened. There were several arrests of young people at the downtown Richmond BART stop.
“We want to make sure our families are safe and that our lives are not being threatened. It’s really unfair, trying to scare high school students. We want to make sure sanctuary cities are respecting immigrants,” said Aurora Castellanos, a first-year student at the University of California at Berkeley. Castellanos was one of the organizers of the rally.
ICE raids at schools and workplaces have increased dramatically over the past year. Several coalitions, including this newest one, have come together to demand amnesty for all undocumented workers and an end to the ICE raids.
Many cities in the Bay Area are “sanctuary cities” for undocumented workers. However the sanctuary status has not deterred ICE from its terrifying raids.
“We are humans, not illegals! Stop the raids!” the protesters chanted as they marched through this city’s business district. Hundreds of people came out of stores and offices to watch the march go by.
http://www.workers.org/2008/us/calif_1120/
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Wayne County activists protest federal raids on migrants
Wayne County activists protest federal raids on migrants
Stephanie Veale
November 6, 2008
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Some community activists in Wayne County believe that raids on local migrant worker families have become incessant and aggressive, but a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement says federal agents are just doing their job.
John and Nancy Ghetner of Sodus, who spoke Wednesday night at the monthly meeting of the Rochester Committee on Latin America, say methods used by immigration agents are dishonest and illegal.
They pointed to a Sept. 28 raid that led to the arrest of 14 people. Two had previous arrest warrants for failing to leave or stay out of the country after deportation, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and 12 were arrested and charged with being in the United States illegally.
John Ghetner criticized the methods he says were used in that raid, as did Sister Luci Romero and Padre Jesus Flores, who work closely with the migrant worker community. They said agents showed up to a mobile home park at 6 a.m. on Sunday dressed in civilian clothing. Sister Luci said the occupants of the homes were too scared not to open the door for the agents, since they were shining flashlights through the windows and pounding on the doors.
"The raids are destroying the community," she said through a translator. "Every (migrant worker) family is missing at least one person. ... They're either back in Mexico, in jail, or somewhere else."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Mike Gilhooly says no houses were broken into and no children were arrested during the Sept. 28 raid. Agents do not need search warrants when they carry out fugitive operations, because they are required to ask permission before entering any building, Gilhooly said.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
Stephanie Veale
November 6, 2008
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Some community activists in Wayne County believe that raids on local migrant worker families have become incessant and aggressive, but a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement says federal agents are just doing their job.
John and Nancy Ghetner of Sodus, who spoke Wednesday night at the monthly meeting of the Rochester Committee on Latin America, say methods used by immigration agents are dishonest and illegal.
They pointed to a Sept. 28 raid that led to the arrest of 14 people. Two had previous arrest warrants for failing to leave or stay out of the country after deportation, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and 12 were arrested and charged with being in the United States illegally.
John Ghetner criticized the methods he says were used in that raid, as did Sister Luci Romero and Padre Jesus Flores, who work closely with the migrant worker community. They said agents showed up to a mobile home park at 6 a.m. on Sunday dressed in civilian clothing. Sister Luci said the occupants of the homes were too scared not to open the door for the agents, since they were shining flashlights through the windows and pounding on the doors.
"The raids are destroying the community," she said through a translator. "Every (migrant worker) family is missing at least one person. ... They're either back in Mexico, in jail, or somewhere else."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Mike Gilhooly says no houses were broken into and no children were arrested during the Sept. 28 raid. Agents do not need search warrants when they carry out fugitive operations, because they are required to ask permission before entering any building, Gilhooly said.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Why We Shut ICE Down For A Day
Why We Shut ICE Down For A Day
Young Protesters See Activism Extending Past the Elections
Posted: Nov 04, 2008
New American Media
SAN FRANCISCO – Last week hundreds of youth, families and organizers from over 10 different cities in the Bay Area gathered at the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in San Francisco to demand an end to ICE raids, to demand that all detention centers be shut down and to demand real sanctuary cities.
For that day the community prevented ICE from breaking into our homes, and terrorizing our people. Crowds of young and old, black, white, Asian and Raza gathered around the police blockade chanting, speaking and singing in the rain.
We sent a clear message that immigrant communities are powerful and we are no longer willing to allow ICE agents, police agents, city officials or any laws to intimidate us.
The day began with young people walking out of their local high schools and heading to BART stations to get to Ferry Park in San Francisco, where people began preparing for the march to the ICE building. People dressed in black, with their faces painted as skulls, representing the many people who have fallen victim to the attacks on immigrants both here in the Bay Area as well as on the border.
Many carried signs, some with the same message that hung from placards on Treasure Island: "If Capital Can Cross Borders, So Can We!" At ICE headquarters, the crowd formed a huge circle with speakers highlighting the connection between the diverse communities that are affected by deportations and raids. It was an amazingly powerful day on which youth disrupted business as usual at the ICE building, preventing ICE from disrupting the lives of entire communities.
After Nov. 4th, this issue cannot be forgotten. Whether Obama or McCain win, there is no guarantee that the raids will stop.
No matter who comes into office there is still a huge border wall being built between the United States and Mexico. Corporations are still being allowed to take their business freely across the border, while forcing families to either work as cheap labor in their home countries or to cross the border in search of better jobs.
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=3719e389ebdef31db9d4961e19fc68cc
Young Protesters See Activism Extending Past the Elections
Posted: Nov 04, 2008
New American Media
SAN FRANCISCO – Last week hundreds of youth, families and organizers from over 10 different cities in the Bay Area gathered at the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in San Francisco to demand an end to ICE raids, to demand that all detention centers be shut down and to demand real sanctuary cities.
For that day the community prevented ICE from breaking into our homes, and terrorizing our people. Crowds of young and old, black, white, Asian and Raza gathered around the police blockade chanting, speaking and singing in the rain.
We sent a clear message that immigrant communities are powerful and we are no longer willing to allow ICE agents, police agents, city officials or any laws to intimidate us.
The day began with young people walking out of their local high schools and heading to BART stations to get to Ferry Park in San Francisco, where people began preparing for the march to the ICE building. People dressed in black, with their faces painted as skulls, representing the many people who have fallen victim to the attacks on immigrants both here in the Bay Area as well as on the border.
Many carried signs, some with the same message that hung from placards on Treasure Island: "If Capital Can Cross Borders, So Can We!" At ICE headquarters, the crowd formed a huge circle with speakers highlighting the connection between the diverse communities that are affected by deportations and raids. It was an amazingly powerful day on which youth disrupted business as usual at the ICE building, preventing ICE from disrupting the lives of entire communities.
After Nov. 4th, this issue cannot be forgotten. Whether Obama or McCain win, there is no guarantee that the raids will stop.
No matter who comes into office there is still a huge border wall being built between the United States and Mexico. Corporations are still being allowed to take their business freely across the border, while forcing families to either work as cheap labor in their home countries or to cross the border in search of better jobs.
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=3719e389ebdef31db9d4961e19fc68cc
Monday, November 3, 2008
Workers' arrests lead to tangle of challenges
Workers' arrests lead to tangle of challenges
Hearings set for Nov. 12, but family, property issues remain, say volunteers
By E. Richard Walton, STAFF WRITER
Greenville Online
November 2, 2008
Many of the undocumented workers caught in a federal raid in Greenville last month may be deported, leaving behind family members, homes, cars, clothes and other property which a network of local volunteers is trying to sort and manage.
Court hearings are set to begin Nov. 12, according to a local attorney who has been providing legal advice to workers accused of using fake or falsified paperwork to get jobs at House of Raeford Columbia Farms chicken-processing plant on Rutherford Road. About a dozen supervisors were also arrested prior to the raid.
Patricia Ravenhorst, a lawyer with the Wyche law firm, said some of the workers being held in Georgia jails aren't going to fight the charges. She said they have been transferred to jails in Alabama to be deported.
Ravenhorst said she knows very few instances when undocumented workers caught in a raid like this have been permitted to remain in the United States.
A number of area churches are providing emotional and financial support to the workers and their families in the meantime, said Bill Lancaster, a spokesman for Foothills Presbytery.
More than 230 of the workers, most of them Guatemalans, are being held in two jails in Georgia, according to Ravenhorst. At last count, federal officials have released about 58 workers.
Most of those released were women, primary caregivers or the family's major wage earner, according to a report by Ravenhorst. Those caregivers who were released agreed to wear electronic monitors on their ankles.
Ravenhorst said volunteers are still screening those with court dates and trying to get lawyers to represent them.
"We have 379 people in our database, from which 107 have been released and are still in Greenville," said Adela Mendoza, a member of the Alliance for Collaboration with the Hispanic Community, a nonprofit aided by volunteers.
Mendoza said there are other Hispanic workers who were asking for help, but volunteers wanted to focus solely on those caught in the raid and released from jail.
"We called folks who were wearing bracelets," she said.
Volunteers bought $500 worth of food which they sorted and packed in 100 boxes to distribute. About $10,000 has been donated to those families to pay rent or mortgages that might be due.
While the raid attacked one problem, others remain, Lancaster said. For example, couples from other countries who have lived and worked in the United States for years have children who are American-born.
"It makes things complicated," Lancaster said.
http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20081102/NEWS01/811020319/1001/NEWS01
Hearings set for Nov. 12, but family, property issues remain, say volunteers
By E. Richard Walton, STAFF WRITER
Greenville Online
November 2, 2008
Many of the undocumented workers caught in a federal raid in Greenville last month may be deported, leaving behind family members, homes, cars, clothes and other property which a network of local volunteers is trying to sort and manage.
Court hearings are set to begin Nov. 12, according to a local attorney who has been providing legal advice to workers accused of using fake or falsified paperwork to get jobs at House of Raeford Columbia Farms chicken-processing plant on Rutherford Road. About a dozen supervisors were also arrested prior to the raid.
Patricia Ravenhorst, a lawyer with the Wyche law firm, said some of the workers being held in Georgia jails aren't going to fight the charges. She said they have been transferred to jails in Alabama to be deported.
Ravenhorst said she knows very few instances when undocumented workers caught in a raid like this have been permitted to remain in the United States.
A number of area churches are providing emotional and financial support to the workers and their families in the meantime, said Bill Lancaster, a spokesman for Foothills Presbytery.
More than 230 of the workers, most of them Guatemalans, are being held in two jails in Georgia, according to Ravenhorst. At last count, federal officials have released about 58 workers.
Most of those released were women, primary caregivers or the family's major wage earner, according to a report by Ravenhorst. Those caregivers who were released agreed to wear electronic monitors on their ankles.
Ravenhorst said volunteers are still screening those with court dates and trying to get lawyers to represent them.
"We have 379 people in our database, from which 107 have been released and are still in Greenville," said Adela Mendoza, a member of the Alliance for Collaboration with the Hispanic Community, a nonprofit aided by volunteers.
Mendoza said there are other Hispanic workers who were asking for help, but volunteers wanted to focus solely on those caught in the raid and released from jail.
"We called folks who were wearing bracelets," she said.
Volunteers bought $500 worth of food which they sorted and packed in 100 boxes to distribute. About $10,000 has been donated to those families to pay rent or mortgages that might be due.
While the raid attacked one problem, others remain, Lancaster said. For example, couples from other countries who have lived and worked in the United States for years have children who are American-born.
"It makes things complicated," Lancaster said.
http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20081102/NEWS01/811020319/1001/NEWS01
Monday, October 27, 2008
Stop the Raids in the First 100 Days
Stop the Raids in the First 100 Days
Sunday 26 October 2008
David Bacon
Truthout Perspective
The first of the 388 workers arrested in the immigration raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, were deported last week, having spent five months in federal prison. Their crime? Giving a bad Social Security number to the company to get hired. Among them will be a young man who had his eyes covered with duct tape by a supervisor on the line, who then beat him with a meathook. The supervisor is still on the job.
Postville was one of the many recent immigration raids leading to criminal charges and deportations for thousands of people. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls this "closing the back door." Meanwhile, his department seeks to "open the front door" by establishing new guest worker programs called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Something is clearly wrong with the priorities of immigration enforcement. Hungry and desperate workers go to jail and get deported. The government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into their managed labor supply. Yet national political campaigns say less and less about it. Immigrant Latino and Asian communities feel increasingly afraid and frustrated. Politicians want their votes, but avoid talking about the rising wave of arrests, imprisonment and deportations.
This month, national demonstrations across the nation are protesting the silence, asking candidates to speak out. Immigrant communities expect a new deal from a new administration, especially from Democrats. They want a new president to take swift and decisive action to give human rights a priority over fear, and recognize immigrants as people, not just a source of cheap labor.
In its first 100 days, a new administration could take these simple steps to benefit immigrants and working families:
• Stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, for lacking papers or for bad Social Security numbers.
• Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants, to raise low wages.
• Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US wage and hour violations, and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
• Halt community sweeps, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government's campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances, and to drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
• Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into the system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose - paying retirement and disability benefits - not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.
• Reestablish worker protections ended under Bush on existing guest worker programs, force employers to hire domestically first, and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.
• Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.
After the first 100 days, Democrats will have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups will not sit on their hands. They have been pushing for years for big guest worker programs, more raids and enforcement, and a weak legalization program. Many immigrant and labor rights activists want an alternative, and advocate three steps toward a more progressive reform:
1. A moratorium on raids, while protecting human and labor rights, in the first 100 days.
2. Introduce a bill to give green card visas to the undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them. If more visas are more easily available abroad, people won't have to cross the border without them. That bill should also create jobs in unemployed communities, repeal employer sanctions laws that make work a crime for immigrants, and pass labor law reform to protect workers' rights. Guest worker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.
3. Change trade policy and renegotiate agreements like NAFTA, so they stop causing poverty and uprooting communities, making migration peoples' only alternative for survival. Defeat new trade agreements with countries like Colombia, which will cause job loss in the US and spread low wages, labor violations and displacement abroad. US tax dollars, instead of being spent on war in Iraq, could expand rural credit, education and healthcare in Mexico and other countries, easing the pressure behind migration.
There is a common ground between immigrants, African-Americans and other communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations and working families generally. Legalization and immigrant rights, tied to guaranteeing jobs for all working families, can bring people together. All workers, including immigrants, need the right to organize and enforce labor standards - the same goal sought by unions in the Employee Free Choice Act. Changing trade policy will benefit working class communities in the US, while helping the families of immigrants back home from Oaxaca to El Salvador.
The diverse communities who need these reforms can and will find ways to seek them together. In fact, if Barack Obama and a larger Democratic majority in Congress gain office in November, they will owe their victory to this coalition.
After the election, this same coalition will need jobs and rights. But immigrant workers are going to jail now. The wave of raids continues to divide families, even as candidates hold rallies and ask for votes. In Los Angeles' Placita Olvera, activists have begun a hunger strike to stop the deportations. Marches and demonstrations are making the same point from coast to coast.
Promises of change are not enough. For candidates who want working-class votes, the first step is to speak out.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Bacon is a California photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book "Communities Without Borders" was just published by Cornell University/ILR Press.
© 2008 truthout
http://www.truthout.org/102608B
Sunday 26 October 2008
David Bacon
Truthout Perspective
The first of the 388 workers arrested in the immigration raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, were deported last week, having spent five months in federal prison. Their crime? Giving a bad Social Security number to the company to get hired. Among them will be a young man who had his eyes covered with duct tape by a supervisor on the line, who then beat him with a meathook. The supervisor is still on the job.
Postville was one of the many recent immigration raids leading to criminal charges and deportations for thousands of people. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls this "closing the back door." Meanwhile, his department seeks to "open the front door" by establishing new guest worker programs called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Something is clearly wrong with the priorities of immigration enforcement. Hungry and desperate workers go to jail and get deported. The government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into their managed labor supply. Yet national political campaigns say less and less about it. Immigrant Latino and Asian communities feel increasingly afraid and frustrated. Politicians want their votes, but avoid talking about the rising wave of arrests, imprisonment and deportations.
This month, national demonstrations across the nation are protesting the silence, asking candidates to speak out. Immigrant communities expect a new deal from a new administration, especially from Democrats. They want a new president to take swift and decisive action to give human rights a priority over fear, and recognize immigrants as people, not just a source of cheap labor.
In its first 100 days, a new administration could take these simple steps to benefit immigrants and working families:
• Stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, for lacking papers or for bad Social Security numbers.
• Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants, to raise low wages.
• Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US wage and hour violations, and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
• Halt community sweeps, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government's campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances, and to drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
• Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into the system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose - paying retirement and disability benefits - not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.
• Reestablish worker protections ended under Bush on existing guest worker programs, force employers to hire domestically first, and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.
• Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.
After the first 100 days, Democrats will have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups will not sit on their hands. They have been pushing for years for big guest worker programs, more raids and enforcement, and a weak legalization program. Many immigrant and labor rights activists want an alternative, and advocate three steps toward a more progressive reform:
1. A moratorium on raids, while protecting human and labor rights, in the first 100 days.
2. Introduce a bill to give green card visas to the undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them. If more visas are more easily available abroad, people won't have to cross the border without them. That bill should also create jobs in unemployed communities, repeal employer sanctions laws that make work a crime for immigrants, and pass labor law reform to protect workers' rights. Guest worker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.
3. Change trade policy and renegotiate agreements like NAFTA, so they stop causing poverty and uprooting communities, making migration peoples' only alternative for survival. Defeat new trade agreements with countries like Colombia, which will cause job loss in the US and spread low wages, labor violations and displacement abroad. US tax dollars, instead of being spent on war in Iraq, could expand rural credit, education and healthcare in Mexico and other countries, easing the pressure behind migration.
There is a common ground between immigrants, African-Americans and other communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations and working families generally. Legalization and immigrant rights, tied to guaranteeing jobs for all working families, can bring people together. All workers, including immigrants, need the right to organize and enforce labor standards - the same goal sought by unions in the Employee Free Choice Act. Changing trade policy will benefit working class communities in the US, while helping the families of immigrants back home from Oaxaca to El Salvador.
The diverse communities who need these reforms can and will find ways to seek them together. In fact, if Barack Obama and a larger Democratic majority in Congress gain office in November, they will owe their victory to this coalition.
After the election, this same coalition will need jobs and rights. But immigrant workers are going to jail now. The wave of raids continues to divide families, even as candidates hold rallies and ask for votes. In Los Angeles' Placita Olvera, activists have begun a hunger strike to stop the deportations. Marches and demonstrations are making the same point from coast to coast.
Promises of change are not enough. For candidates who want working-class votes, the first step is to speak out.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Bacon is a California photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book "Communities Without Borders" was just published by Cornell University/ILR Press.
© 2008 truthout
http://www.truthout.org/102608B
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Vote for immigrants
Vote for immigrants
By Angelina Calderon and Elizabeth Gonzalez
Yale Daily News
Published: Thursday, October 23, 2008
Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos: Today we march, tomorrow we vote.
For the millions of Americans — documented and undocumented — who participated in the pro-immigrant rights marches of 2006, this refrain became the rallying cry against a broken immigration system that had claimed innumerable victims on either side of the border. The time has come to fulfill that promise.
Too many of us have suffered from the ongoing lack of responsible immigration reform, and we stand united when we declare that enough is enough. We denounce the discriminatory raids and heart-wrenching deportations that tear families of mixed citizenship apart and disrupt communities. These raids not only force thousands to retreat into the shadows of society; they also grant police officers the right to vilify whole Latino neighborhoods and subject them to unannounced raids.
A gross violation of civil liberties, these raids serve only to whet the appetites of anti-immigrant groups. They bring us no closer to solving the root causes of the immigration problem. Anti-immigrant sentiment takes for granted the invaluable contributions that immigrants make to this country daily. It is time for the government to take responsible action and finally address this issue, for millions continue to suffer as the current policies and attitudes remain. Immigrants have long been scapegoated and disregarded in the United States, and we refuse to remain ignored and powerless any longer.
We are asking the government to reform immigration policy — and we are asking voters to consider immigration policies when they go to vote soon. There must be legislation that makes attaining citizenship more efficient, that allows for fast and accurate FBI checks and for fair and affordable application fees. Arrests should not punish immigrants who have been subjected to illegal working conditions, but employers who would demean any human being in such a manner.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/25938
By Angelina Calderon and Elizabeth Gonzalez
Yale Daily News
Published: Thursday, October 23, 2008
Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos: Today we march, tomorrow we vote.
For the millions of Americans — documented and undocumented — who participated in the pro-immigrant rights marches of 2006, this refrain became the rallying cry against a broken immigration system that had claimed innumerable victims on either side of the border. The time has come to fulfill that promise.
Too many of us have suffered from the ongoing lack of responsible immigration reform, and we stand united when we declare that enough is enough. We denounce the discriminatory raids and heart-wrenching deportations that tear families of mixed citizenship apart and disrupt communities. These raids not only force thousands to retreat into the shadows of society; they also grant police officers the right to vilify whole Latino neighborhoods and subject them to unannounced raids.
A gross violation of civil liberties, these raids serve only to whet the appetites of anti-immigrant groups. They bring us no closer to solving the root causes of the immigration problem. Anti-immigrant sentiment takes for granted the invaluable contributions that immigrants make to this country daily. It is time for the government to take responsible action and finally address this issue, for millions continue to suffer as the current policies and attitudes remain. Immigrants have long been scapegoated and disregarded in the United States, and we refuse to remain ignored and powerless any longer.
We are asking the government to reform immigration policy — and we are asking voters to consider immigration policies when they go to vote soon. There must be legislation that makes attaining citizenship more efficient, that allows for fast and accurate FBI checks and for fair and affordable application fees. Arrests should not punish immigrants who have been subjected to illegal working conditions, but employers who would demean any human being in such a manner.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/25938
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Immigration raids impact local families
Immigration raids impact local families
Activists say ICE knocking on doors with deportation orders
by: Chiara Canzi
Charlotsville News and Arts
October 14, 2008
Maria’s husband worked two jobs to help pay rent, to buy food and other necessities. Maria, who prefers not to have her last name printed, says he was working one day in late September, when police approached him. Now, he’s being held at Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville. Maria and their 8-year-old-daughter have not seen him since.
Maria’s husband, like many other undocumented workers, was a target of recent efforts by the federal government to cut down on illegal immigration. Raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have increased in the Charlottesville area, says Linda Hemby, member of Creciendo Juntos, an inter-agency network focused on the Latino community in Charlottesville, Albemarle and surrounding counties.
Those targeted by the federal government are undocumented immigrants who either have already been ordered deported but are still in the country or have a deportation letter waiting for them. Some attribute the increase in deportations to local law enforcement checking workers’ immigration status during routine traffic stops. According to Weldon Cooper Center estimates, 3.3 percent of Charlottesville’s population is Hispanic.
On October 9, Hemby moderated a panel on the impact of immigration raids on Latino children, saying that there has been evidence that ICE agents are going into Southwood trailer park “knocking on doors with deportation orders,” she said.
Calls to ICE were not returned by press time. According to the 2007 ICE annual report, 276,912 illegal aliens were deported, including 40,534 who have done so voluntarily.
http://c-ville.com/index.php?cat=141404064431134&ShowArticle_ID=11801310084647942
Activists say ICE knocking on doors with deportation orders
by: Chiara Canzi
Charlotsville News and Arts
October 14, 2008
Maria’s husband worked two jobs to help pay rent, to buy food and other necessities. Maria, who prefers not to have her last name printed, says he was working one day in late September, when police approached him. Now, he’s being held at Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville. Maria and their 8-year-old-daughter have not seen him since.
Maria’s husband, like many other undocumented workers, was a target of recent efforts by the federal government to cut down on illegal immigration. Raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have increased in the Charlottesville area, says Linda Hemby, member of Creciendo Juntos, an inter-agency network focused on the Latino community in Charlottesville, Albemarle and surrounding counties.
Those targeted by the federal government are undocumented immigrants who either have already been ordered deported but are still in the country or have a deportation letter waiting for them. Some attribute the increase in deportations to local law enforcement checking workers’ immigration status during routine traffic stops. According to Weldon Cooper Center estimates, 3.3 percent of Charlottesville’s population is Hispanic.
On October 9, Hemby moderated a panel on the impact of immigration raids on Latino children, saying that there has been evidence that ICE agents are going into Southwood trailer park “knocking on doors with deportation orders,” she said.
Calls to ICE were not returned by press time. According to the 2007 ICE annual report, 276,912 illegal aliens were deported, including 40,534 who have done so voluntarily.
http://c-ville.com/index.php?cat=141404064431134&ShowArticle_ID=11801310084647942
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