By Rebekah L. Cowell
Facing South
March 21, 2011
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced last week that all 100 counties in North Carolina have been connected to the Secure Communities program. That makes North Carolina the 10th state to implement the program statewide, along with the border states of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, California and Florida. The Obama administration has said its goal is to have every state enrolled in the program within the next two years.
While supporters of the program say it's needed to identify and target criminal aliens, immigrant rights advocates raise concerns that it creates distrust between the immigrant community and local police.
Under Secure Communities, individuals arrested by local law enforcement officers are supposed to be fingerprinted and their prints are run through two separate databases -- the FBI's criminal database and ICE's IDENT database. Immigration status is confirmed by "hits" that indicate whether the individual has papers or is undocumented. ICE detains undocumented individuals and takes steps to deport them. ICE says the program "improves and modernizes the identification and removal of criminal aliens from the United States."
Early supporters of Secure Communities in Congress including Rep. David Price (D-N.C.) had hoped that the program would alleviate some of the racial profiling concerns connected to the controversial 287(g) program, which deputized local law enforcement officers as immigration officers and gave them authority to initiate immigration deportation proceedings. During his tenure as chairman of the House Homeland Security Appropriation Committee in the past two congressional sessions, Price said he pressured ICE to adhere to the stated goals of Secure Communities.
"The expansion of Secure Communities is largely responsible for the fact that for the first time in the agency's history, ICE is now removing more criminals than non-criminals from this country," said Price. "Still, there is no question that ICE must continue to sharpen the program's focus on serious criminal offenders, and I will continue to push for that objective as I help oversee the budget for ICE."
Other proponents of the Secure Communities program include the North Carolina Sheriff's Association, whose executive vice president, Edmond Caldwell Jr., does not believe the program present challenges for local law enforcement officers. "The program is important in North Carolina and across America because it provides important information to law enforcement officers about persons who have violated the law and been arrested," Caldwell said.
Price and other supporters of Secure Communities argue that the program represents an improvement over 287(g) because the decision of whether to put someone into deportation proceedings rests with ICE and not local law enforcement. But others wonder whether that distinction will be clear to immigrants.
"I am sure that those who advocate for Secure Communities are sincere when they say that it disengages local law enforcement from immigration enforcement, but all my clients know is that their wife or sister or son were deported after being arrested by a local cop for driving without a license," said Marty Rosenbluth executive director of the N.C. Immigrant Rights Project. "This links local police to ICE and creates fear of the police in the eyes of the community."
There are also questions about whether the program effectively targets criminal aliens, since statistics released by ICE show the majority of immigrants deported through the Secure Communities program were either never convicted of any offense or were convicted of low-level crimes. Consider the experience of Wake County, which became the first North Carolina county to enroll in the program in November 2008: Data released by ICE last month showed that 64 percent of all Secure Communities deportees from Wake County were non-criminal.
"The Secure Communities program was designed to catch convicted felons, but in actuality the program is making a broad sweep across the non-criminal immigrant population," said Rosenbluth.
Despite these concerns, Rep. Price believes that if the Secure Communities program is used as ICE intended then the program is "far more efficient, just, and better for our communities than the system of work-site raids emphasized during the Bush Administration, when we were deporting hundreds of thousands more non-criminals than criminals."
But immigrant rights advocates say this argument misses the point.
"The question that needs to be asked is whether immigrants are being arrested and fingerprinted for offenses where non-immigrants would only receive a citation," Rosenbluth said. "I doubt very much I would be handcuffed and fingerprinted if I left my wallet and license at home and were ticketed for driving without a license."
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/03/controversial-immigration-enforcement-program-goes-statewide-in-north-carolina.html
Showing posts with label bush Administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bush Administration. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2011
Monday, October 18, 2010
Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants
By PETER CERVANTES-GAUTSCHI
Counterpunch
Weekend Edition, October 15-17, 2010
Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.
These facilities are run by two Wall Street-backed companies that actively promote the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants in the United States -the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group.
The T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas provides a now well-known example of the abuses that take place within private prisons for immigrants. Beginning in May 2006,the Don Hutto prison was used to house children and their parents who were on a path to deportation. Reports began to surface of widespread abusive treatment of immigrant children by staff of Corrections Corporation of America. An ACLU lawsuit filed on the basis of documented cases of abuse finally led to the closing of the Don Hutto facility for housing families in 2008. After the children were excluded, the Don Hutto only held women detainees. But the abuses continued. Evidence has surfaced that a number of women were sexually abused over the past two years in Don Hutto by CCA staff. Sexual abuse, including rape, has been documented in several detention centers.
The other large private prison corporation contracted by the federal government to run immigrant prisons is the GEO Group. The GEO detention facilities have also racked up many reports and complaints of abusive treatment of immigrant detainees and corrupt staff practices that violate the basic human rights of prisoners. Last month we spoke with the sibling of a detainee in a GEO-run facility who was denied basic medical attention for lack of funds to pay. The detainee’s family had to raise funds to get their relative medical attention in the facility from GEO. Other GEO detainees have died from a lack of medical attention.
Another relative of a GEO detainee told us that prisoners who avoid getting on the wrong side of GEO guards could aspire, at most, to a job in the prison that pays 17 cents an hour for doing office work.
GEO recently agreed to pay restitution for its employees’ physical abuse of prisoners who were strip searched in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, and New Mexico. In another case, GEO was ordered to pay $40 million in the wrongful death of a prisoner in its custody in Raymondville, Texas. GEO has also been sued by seven children who were sexually assaulted by a guard while being held in a GEO facility.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the GEO Group, a global corporation based in Boca Raton, Florida are the nation’s two largest prison companies. They run highly integrated operations to design, build, finance and operate prisons. GEO rakes in $1.17 billion in annual revenue, and CCA tops that at $1.69 billion. Together these companies are principal moving forces in the behind-the-scenes organization of the current wave of anti-immigrant legislative efforts, which, if successful, would dramatically increase the number of immigrant prisoners in over 20 states.
Following the Money
GEO CEO, George Zoley, was a Bush “Pioneer” who bundled more than $100,000 in contributions for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in 2000 and 2004. In October 2003, GEO was successful in securing the contract to run the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
GEO hired the services of lobbyists who had held influential positions in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Prisons, Office of the Attorney General, and the office of then-Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, to lobby their former employers and Congress. Throughout 2005 and leading up to the largest immigration raid in U.S. history in December 2006, GEO and CCA spent a combined total of over $6 million on lobbying efforts.
On May 1, 2006, while millions of people marched in favor of immigrant rights in 102 cities across the country, GEO and CCA were lobbying the federal government for more business. The marchers, despite their historic turnout and broad citizen base, could not block the growing wave of government support of GEO’s and CCA’s business plans.
The December 2006 raid, in which over a thousand men and women employed at Swift meat-packing plants in several states were detained, marked a change in the federal government’s enforcement of the 1995 immigration law. For the first time, many of those picked up were charged with crimes such as falsifying identity documents or identity theft that carry long prison sentences, rather than misuse of a social security number, a misdemeanor.
This single change in enforcement of existing law created a potential “market” of over 10 million new felons almost overnight, multiplying the lucrative incarceration market for the private prison industry and sending a shock wave through immigrant-related communities across the country. At the time of the Swift raid, USA Today quoted the Reverend Clarence Sandoval of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Logan, Utah, as saying, “They are taking mothers and fathers and we’re really concerned about the children. I’m getting calls from mothers saying they don’t know where their husband was taken.”
Through this change in how federal law is enforced, CCA and GEO suddenly had a huge pool of captive clients, and began to rake in millions of dollars in public funds to house, transport, feed and control immigrants.
Predictably, costs to taxpayers skyrocketed. From 2006 to the present, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) budget for the identification, custody, transportation, detention and removal of immigrants has increased 51%. The U.S. Marshall budget for the custody and transportation of immigrants over the same period has increased 15%, and the Bureau of Prisons budget for detention of immigrants over the same period has gone up 9%. The billions of dollars in increased expenditures have provided the primary source for the billions in increased revenue for CCA and GEO.
In addition, currently 625 state, county and municipality law enforcement agencies are providing identification, custody, transportation and detention of immigrants through agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
According to a federal Government Accounting Office study conducted last year the cost of this program to local taxpayers is unknown because 60% of state and local governments do not keep data on their personnel, equipment, supplies and other costs related to these agreements, and therefore are not reimbursed for those costs. Whatever the exact cost, local taxpayers will feel the pinch as this program is expected to expand to all 3,100 state, county and municipal detention jurisdictions in the nation by the end of 2011. Consequently CCA and GEO can expect to increase their revenues as states and counties increasingly subcontract incarceration responsibilities to these companies.
Last year Seeking Alpha, a website of actionable stock market opinion and analysis popular on Wall Street, reported that GEO’s income from prison health care services ending in March of 2009 topped $1.0 billion, a 5.8% profit. Seeking Alpha also stated that CCA’s profit for the same period in 19 states was over $1.6 billion, with a profit margin of 9.4%. In an article entitled “Where Delinquencies Make for Good Business” the same publication noted, “Crime, unfortunately, is a growth industry and GEO Group has proven to be a successful player in the outsourcing trend for governments at many levels.” Pushing criminalization of immigrants to cast a wider net in society has been a key part of that “success.”
Soon after the Bush Administration implemented the change in law enforcement affecting immigrants, Wall Street advisors publically recommended buying stock in private prison companies like CCA and GEO. At the time, Vice President Dick Cheney was heavily invested in Vanguard, one of a handful of major shareholders in GEO.
The lobbying paid off for both companies, in huge revenue increases from government contracts to incarcerate immigrants. From 2005 through 2009, for every dollar that GEO spent lobbying the government, the company received a $662 return in taxpayer-funded contracts, for a total of $996.7 million. CCA received a $34 return in taxpayer-funded contracts for every dollar spent on lobbying the federal government, for a total of $330.4 million. In addition, both companies increased revenues over the same period from detention facility contracts with a number of states.
In 2007, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) conducted 30,407 immigration raids in workplaces, neighborhoods, and public gathering sites such as bus stops and commuter train platforms. The number of raids conducted that year was double the 2006 total. The number of immigrants placed behind bars, for what amounts to the crime of having been born in the wrong place, increased from 256,842 in 2006 to 311,169 in 2007.
As a result of fear induced by the raids and other factors, pro-immigrant May Day marches in 2007 were much smaller than those of the previous year. In mid-2007, while many activists and organizers were focused on legislative reform, public protests, eliminating the raids, and trying to help families and friends of those who had been taken away by ICE and other enforcement agencies, GEO and CCA shareholders reaped a huge profit. Both companies issued 2-for-1 stock splits that roughly doubled the value of their shareholders’ stake.
Although stockholders profited handsomely as revenues from prison contracts rose for both companies, the increase wasn’t large enough to satisfy some of their respective major shareholders. J.P. Morgan Chase, a major owner of GEO, dumped most of its stock and relinquished its leadership position in the company.
One problem for major investors seeking huge gains from the for-profit prison business was that revenue rates couldn’t keep rising because federal agencies didn’t have enough personnel to arrest and process more immigrants than the expanded number they were now handling. It became apparent that the only way to significantly raise revenue through increasing the numbers of people picked up, detained and incarcerated was to hire more law enforcement personnel.
The private prison industry now needed a new source of low-cost licensed law enforcement personnel. CCA and GEO then turned to state governments as the focus of business expansion. Both companies stepped up efforts to acquire contracts with state and local governments that were entering into lucrative agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants in state and local detention and correctional facilities.
The result of this shift in business focus is exemplified by CCA’s role in Arizona’s SB 1070 and both CCA’s and GEO’s roles in other legislative efforts aimed at dramatically increased numbers arrests of undocumented immigrants in over 20 states. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer, who received substantial campaign financing from top CCA executives in Tennessee and employs two former CCA lobbyists Chuck Coughlin and Paul Sensman, as top aides, signed SB 1070 into law on April 23.
On Friday, July 30, 2010 the Republican Governors Association, which so far this year has received over $160,000 in contributions from CCA and GEO, and their respective lobbyists, sent out a nationwide solicitation written by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer requesting contributions to fund an appeal of the partial injunction issued by a judge against SB 1070.
In addition to funds raised by the partisan appeal, Brewer’s legal effort has been bolstered by supporting briefs filed with the appeals court by three states– Florida, Texas and Virginia–that have contracts with GEO or with both GEO and CCA. The two prison companies are currently ramping up their political involvement in these states and in several others that have anti-immigrant bills moving through their respective legislatures. In all, twenty states are considering SB 1070-inspired bills, which have been endorsed by their respective Republican gubernatorial candidates, financed in large part by the Republican Governor’s Association.
Last November, CCA’s top management in Tennessee contributed the largest block of out-of-state campaign contributions received by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.[1] CCA, which already has several detention facilities in Arizona and hopes of expanding its immigrant prison business in that state, is expected to gain a huge increase in revenues with the implementation of SB 1070. Currently, Latinos driving out of the city of Tucson in any direction are being stopped at checkpoints, where they are asked to show their papers.
GEO and CCA are now heavily involved in the governor and state legislative races in states where they plan to expand their respective shares of the prison and incarceration market. GEO, for example, backed first-term Republican Governor, Bob McDonnell, in Virginia last year, and has contributed heavily to the Republican Governor’s Association and to the Florida Republican Party. In addition to Jan Brewer in Arizona, CCA is contributing to the campaigns of both, Republican Meg Whitman, and Democrat Jerry Brown, for governor in California. CCA is also giving money to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, even though Jindal isn’t currently facing an election, and to the Republican Governors Association, which has contributed over $1.5 million to state races this year.[2]
Since the change of administration in Washington D.C., GEO has expanded its presence there by adding the services of lobbyists who formerly served in high positions in the Obama presidential campaign, the Clinton White House, and the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Currently, GEO retains the services of three Washington D.C. lobbyists who also work for Wells Fargo, GEO’s top shareholder. One of GEO’s Washington D.C. lobbyists, Barbara Comstock, is also a member of the Virginia state legislature. CCA relies on its officers to do its lobbying in Washington DC,[3] where some board members, such as former Arizona U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini, are well-connected.
CCA’s and GEO’s share of the taxpayer-funded immigrant incarceration business has grown substantially since 2006. Today, for example, in California, anyone picked up by ICE in Los Angeles is sent to a CCA facility in San Diego, while those picked up by ICE in Seattle or Portland, OR, are sent to a GEO facility in Tacoma, Washington, because detention facilities owned and operated by the federal government are at 137% capacity, with no room to house more prisoners.
Wall Street’s Role
CCA and GEO are owned by major Wall Street institutions, which profit from the immigrant incarceration business as major shareholders.
The most influential investor in CCA is a hedge fund, Pershing Square, which is run by Wall Street investment guru activist investor, Bill Ackman. Ackman also plays a powerful role in Target Corporation and Kraft Foods. Wells Fargo is the most powerful investor in GEO.
Other major investors with the power to influence management in one or the other of the two companies are Vanguard, Lazard, Scopia, Wellington Management, FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock and Bank of America. Each of these major owners is sensitive to public opinion in one way or another. These major investors do not need to rely on either CCA or GEO to make money, since most of their money is invested in enterprises unrelated to private prisons.
By almost any measure, the increased number of deportations of immigrants has not had the desired effects on anyone other than the private prison industry. Unemployment among native-born citizens in the U.S. has skyrocketed as the number of immigrants being deported has risen to over 400,000 a year.
The United States now has more people in prison than any other country on earth. At over 2 million, the U.S. has a half million more people behind bars than China, which has the second highest number of prisoners.
One would like to think that bringing this information to Congress’s attention would be enough to compel them to abandon policies that criminalize immigrants. However, that is not likely to happen soon.
This probable reluctance on the part of Congress to act isn’t merely because of the substantial campaign contributions that Senators and members of Congress receive from the private prison industry. Most members of Congress have personal investments in one or more of CCA’s or GEO’s major shareholders.
While it is true that many people are invested in CCA or GEO through their pensions without knowing it, reports on the personal finances of some key members of Congress suggest some of them have more than a casual interest in the fortunes of CCA or GEO.
One example of a Washington DC powerhouse with a substantial financial interest in CCA is Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, one of a small group of investors in Pershing Square, a hedge fund that holds the most stock in CCA of any of the company’s shareholders. Senator Enzi, a senior Republican who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, was awarded a 100% approval rating by U.S. Border Control (USBC), which describes itself as “a non-profit, tax-exempt, citizen’s lobby. USBC is dedicated to ending illegal immigration by securing our nation’s borders and reforming our immigration policies.”
As Congress is currently tasked with finding ways to reduce the burgeoning deficit and alleviate the suffering caused by the economic crisis, shifting priorities from programs that benefit prison companies to much-needed programs that benefit taxpayers only makes sense. Compelling Congress to abandon immigrant criminalization policies is probably going to require, among other things, that citizens convince some combination of our pension funds, Wells Fargo, and a key hedge fund or two, to pull out of the private prison industry and to go elsewhere to make money.
We should be able accomplish this. IBM and Ford, when challenged, found themselves unable to justify their investments in apartheid in South Africa. As a result of a swelling movement of students, faith-based organizations, unions and shareholders, these companies divested in 1986, contributing to the fall of the racist apartheid system and a transition to democracy.
Similarly, Wells Fargo, Pershing Square, and other financial giants shall be hard-pressed to justify investments in the massive suffering caused by the criminalization of immigrants, as a movement comes together to expose the harm done to the public good by their current investments in the immigrant prison industry.
Who knows? Some of these financial institutions might even see the wisdom in investing in companies that produce family-wage jobs.
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi is the Director of Enlace, a Portland, OR based organization focused on strategic organizing, campaigns, and training in organizational development around workers’ struggles, and the impacts of multinational corporations in the lives of people in all sectors of society. Peter has been a labor activist since 1965, starting as a young farm worker in Southern California. He is a frequent contributor to the Americas Program www.cipamericas.org.
Counterpunch
Weekend Edition, October 15-17, 2010
Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.
These facilities are run by two Wall Street-backed companies that actively promote the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants in the United States -the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group.
The T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas provides a now well-known example of the abuses that take place within private prisons for immigrants. Beginning in May 2006,the Don Hutto prison was used to house children and their parents who were on a path to deportation. Reports began to surface of widespread abusive treatment of immigrant children by staff of Corrections Corporation of America. An ACLU lawsuit filed on the basis of documented cases of abuse finally led to the closing of the Don Hutto facility for housing families in 2008. After the children were excluded, the Don Hutto only held women detainees. But the abuses continued. Evidence has surfaced that a number of women were sexually abused over the past two years in Don Hutto by CCA staff. Sexual abuse, including rape, has been documented in several detention centers.
The other large private prison corporation contracted by the federal government to run immigrant prisons is the GEO Group. The GEO detention facilities have also racked up many reports and complaints of abusive treatment of immigrant detainees and corrupt staff practices that violate the basic human rights of prisoners. Last month we spoke with the sibling of a detainee in a GEO-run facility who was denied basic medical attention for lack of funds to pay. The detainee’s family had to raise funds to get their relative medical attention in the facility from GEO. Other GEO detainees have died from a lack of medical attention.
Another relative of a GEO detainee told us that prisoners who avoid getting on the wrong side of GEO guards could aspire, at most, to a job in the prison that pays 17 cents an hour for doing office work.
GEO recently agreed to pay restitution for its employees’ physical abuse of prisoners who were strip searched in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, and New Mexico. In another case, GEO was ordered to pay $40 million in the wrongful death of a prisoner in its custody in Raymondville, Texas. GEO has also been sued by seven children who were sexually assaulted by a guard while being held in a GEO facility.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the GEO Group, a global corporation based in Boca Raton, Florida are the nation’s two largest prison companies. They run highly integrated operations to design, build, finance and operate prisons. GEO rakes in $1.17 billion in annual revenue, and CCA tops that at $1.69 billion. Together these companies are principal moving forces in the behind-the-scenes organization of the current wave of anti-immigrant legislative efforts, which, if successful, would dramatically increase the number of immigrant prisoners in over 20 states.
Following the Money
GEO CEO, George Zoley, was a Bush “Pioneer” who bundled more than $100,000 in contributions for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in 2000 and 2004. In October 2003, GEO was successful in securing the contract to run the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
GEO hired the services of lobbyists who had held influential positions in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Prisons, Office of the Attorney General, and the office of then-Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, to lobby their former employers and Congress. Throughout 2005 and leading up to the largest immigration raid in U.S. history in December 2006, GEO and CCA spent a combined total of over $6 million on lobbying efforts.
On May 1, 2006, while millions of people marched in favor of immigrant rights in 102 cities across the country, GEO and CCA were lobbying the federal government for more business. The marchers, despite their historic turnout and broad citizen base, could not block the growing wave of government support of GEO’s and CCA’s business plans.
The December 2006 raid, in which over a thousand men and women employed at Swift meat-packing plants in several states were detained, marked a change in the federal government’s enforcement of the 1995 immigration law. For the first time, many of those picked up were charged with crimes such as falsifying identity documents or identity theft that carry long prison sentences, rather than misuse of a social security number, a misdemeanor.
This single change in enforcement of existing law created a potential “market” of over 10 million new felons almost overnight, multiplying the lucrative incarceration market for the private prison industry and sending a shock wave through immigrant-related communities across the country. At the time of the Swift raid, USA Today quoted the Reverend Clarence Sandoval of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Logan, Utah, as saying, “They are taking mothers and fathers and we’re really concerned about the children. I’m getting calls from mothers saying they don’t know where their husband was taken.”
Through this change in how federal law is enforced, CCA and GEO suddenly had a huge pool of captive clients, and began to rake in millions of dollars in public funds to house, transport, feed and control immigrants.
Predictably, costs to taxpayers skyrocketed. From 2006 to the present, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) budget for the identification, custody, transportation, detention and removal of immigrants has increased 51%. The U.S. Marshall budget for the custody and transportation of immigrants over the same period has increased 15%, and the Bureau of Prisons budget for detention of immigrants over the same period has gone up 9%. The billions of dollars in increased expenditures have provided the primary source for the billions in increased revenue for CCA and GEO.
In addition, currently 625 state, county and municipality law enforcement agencies are providing identification, custody, transportation and detention of immigrants through agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
According to a federal Government Accounting Office study conducted last year the cost of this program to local taxpayers is unknown because 60% of state and local governments do not keep data on their personnel, equipment, supplies and other costs related to these agreements, and therefore are not reimbursed for those costs. Whatever the exact cost, local taxpayers will feel the pinch as this program is expected to expand to all 3,100 state, county and municipal detention jurisdictions in the nation by the end of 2011. Consequently CCA and GEO can expect to increase their revenues as states and counties increasingly subcontract incarceration responsibilities to these companies.
Last year Seeking Alpha, a website of actionable stock market opinion and analysis popular on Wall Street, reported that GEO’s income from prison health care services ending in March of 2009 topped $1.0 billion, a 5.8% profit. Seeking Alpha also stated that CCA’s profit for the same period in 19 states was over $1.6 billion, with a profit margin of 9.4%. In an article entitled “Where Delinquencies Make for Good Business” the same publication noted, “Crime, unfortunately, is a growth industry and GEO Group has proven to be a successful player in the outsourcing trend for governments at many levels.” Pushing criminalization of immigrants to cast a wider net in society has been a key part of that “success.”
Soon after the Bush Administration implemented the change in law enforcement affecting immigrants, Wall Street advisors publically recommended buying stock in private prison companies like CCA and GEO. At the time, Vice President Dick Cheney was heavily invested in Vanguard, one of a handful of major shareholders in GEO.
The lobbying paid off for both companies, in huge revenue increases from government contracts to incarcerate immigrants. From 2005 through 2009, for every dollar that GEO spent lobbying the government, the company received a $662 return in taxpayer-funded contracts, for a total of $996.7 million. CCA received a $34 return in taxpayer-funded contracts for every dollar spent on lobbying the federal government, for a total of $330.4 million. In addition, both companies increased revenues over the same period from detention facility contracts with a number of states.
In 2007, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) conducted 30,407 immigration raids in workplaces, neighborhoods, and public gathering sites such as bus stops and commuter train platforms. The number of raids conducted that year was double the 2006 total. The number of immigrants placed behind bars, for what amounts to the crime of having been born in the wrong place, increased from 256,842 in 2006 to 311,169 in 2007.
As a result of fear induced by the raids and other factors, pro-immigrant May Day marches in 2007 were much smaller than those of the previous year. In mid-2007, while many activists and organizers were focused on legislative reform, public protests, eliminating the raids, and trying to help families and friends of those who had been taken away by ICE and other enforcement agencies, GEO and CCA shareholders reaped a huge profit. Both companies issued 2-for-1 stock splits that roughly doubled the value of their shareholders’ stake.
Although stockholders profited handsomely as revenues from prison contracts rose for both companies, the increase wasn’t large enough to satisfy some of their respective major shareholders. J.P. Morgan Chase, a major owner of GEO, dumped most of its stock and relinquished its leadership position in the company.
One problem for major investors seeking huge gains from the for-profit prison business was that revenue rates couldn’t keep rising because federal agencies didn’t have enough personnel to arrest and process more immigrants than the expanded number they were now handling. It became apparent that the only way to significantly raise revenue through increasing the numbers of people picked up, detained and incarcerated was to hire more law enforcement personnel.
The private prison industry now needed a new source of low-cost licensed law enforcement personnel. CCA and GEO then turned to state governments as the focus of business expansion. Both companies stepped up efforts to acquire contracts with state and local governments that were entering into lucrative agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants in state and local detention and correctional facilities.
The result of this shift in business focus is exemplified by CCA’s role in Arizona’s SB 1070 and both CCA’s and GEO’s roles in other legislative efforts aimed at dramatically increased numbers arrests of undocumented immigrants in over 20 states. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer, who received substantial campaign financing from top CCA executives in Tennessee and employs two former CCA lobbyists Chuck Coughlin and Paul Sensman, as top aides, signed SB 1070 into law on April 23.
On Friday, July 30, 2010 the Republican Governors Association, which so far this year has received over $160,000 in contributions from CCA and GEO, and their respective lobbyists, sent out a nationwide solicitation written by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer requesting contributions to fund an appeal of the partial injunction issued by a judge against SB 1070.
In addition to funds raised by the partisan appeal, Brewer’s legal effort has been bolstered by supporting briefs filed with the appeals court by three states– Florida, Texas and Virginia–that have contracts with GEO or with both GEO and CCA. The two prison companies are currently ramping up their political involvement in these states and in several others that have anti-immigrant bills moving through their respective legislatures. In all, twenty states are considering SB 1070-inspired bills, which have been endorsed by their respective Republican gubernatorial candidates, financed in large part by the Republican Governor’s Association.
Last November, CCA’s top management in Tennessee contributed the largest block of out-of-state campaign contributions received by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.[1] CCA, which already has several detention facilities in Arizona and hopes of expanding its immigrant prison business in that state, is expected to gain a huge increase in revenues with the implementation of SB 1070. Currently, Latinos driving out of the city of Tucson in any direction are being stopped at checkpoints, where they are asked to show their papers.
GEO and CCA are now heavily involved in the governor and state legislative races in states where they plan to expand their respective shares of the prison and incarceration market. GEO, for example, backed first-term Republican Governor, Bob McDonnell, in Virginia last year, and has contributed heavily to the Republican Governor’s Association and to the Florida Republican Party. In addition to Jan Brewer in Arizona, CCA is contributing to the campaigns of both, Republican Meg Whitman, and Democrat Jerry Brown, for governor in California. CCA is also giving money to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, even though Jindal isn’t currently facing an election, and to the Republican Governors Association, which has contributed over $1.5 million to state races this year.[2]
Since the change of administration in Washington D.C., GEO has expanded its presence there by adding the services of lobbyists who formerly served in high positions in the Obama presidential campaign, the Clinton White House, and the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Currently, GEO retains the services of three Washington D.C. lobbyists who also work for Wells Fargo, GEO’s top shareholder. One of GEO’s Washington D.C. lobbyists, Barbara Comstock, is also a member of the Virginia state legislature. CCA relies on its officers to do its lobbying in Washington DC,[3] where some board members, such as former Arizona U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini, are well-connected.
CCA’s and GEO’s share of the taxpayer-funded immigrant incarceration business has grown substantially since 2006. Today, for example, in California, anyone picked up by ICE in Los Angeles is sent to a CCA facility in San Diego, while those picked up by ICE in Seattle or Portland, OR, are sent to a GEO facility in Tacoma, Washington, because detention facilities owned and operated by the federal government are at 137% capacity, with no room to house more prisoners.
Wall Street’s Role
CCA and GEO are owned by major Wall Street institutions, which profit from the immigrant incarceration business as major shareholders.
The most influential investor in CCA is a hedge fund, Pershing Square, which is run by Wall Street investment guru activist investor, Bill Ackman. Ackman also plays a powerful role in Target Corporation and Kraft Foods. Wells Fargo is the most powerful investor in GEO.
Other major investors with the power to influence management in one or the other of the two companies are Vanguard, Lazard, Scopia, Wellington Management, FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock and Bank of America. Each of these major owners is sensitive to public opinion in one way or another. These major investors do not need to rely on either CCA or GEO to make money, since most of their money is invested in enterprises unrelated to private prisons.
By almost any measure, the increased number of deportations of immigrants has not had the desired effects on anyone other than the private prison industry. Unemployment among native-born citizens in the U.S. has skyrocketed as the number of immigrants being deported has risen to over 400,000 a year.
The United States now has more people in prison than any other country on earth. At over 2 million, the U.S. has a half million more people behind bars than China, which has the second highest number of prisoners.
One would like to think that bringing this information to Congress’s attention would be enough to compel them to abandon policies that criminalize immigrants. However, that is not likely to happen soon.
This probable reluctance on the part of Congress to act isn’t merely because of the substantial campaign contributions that Senators and members of Congress receive from the private prison industry. Most members of Congress have personal investments in one or more of CCA’s or GEO’s major shareholders.
While it is true that many people are invested in CCA or GEO through their pensions without knowing it, reports on the personal finances of some key members of Congress suggest some of them have more than a casual interest in the fortunes of CCA or GEO.
One example of a Washington DC powerhouse with a substantial financial interest in CCA is Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, one of a small group of investors in Pershing Square, a hedge fund that holds the most stock in CCA of any of the company’s shareholders. Senator Enzi, a senior Republican who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, was awarded a 100% approval rating by U.S. Border Control (USBC), which describes itself as “a non-profit, tax-exempt, citizen’s lobby. USBC is dedicated to ending illegal immigration by securing our nation’s borders and reforming our immigration policies.”
As Congress is currently tasked with finding ways to reduce the burgeoning deficit and alleviate the suffering caused by the economic crisis, shifting priorities from programs that benefit prison companies to much-needed programs that benefit taxpayers only makes sense. Compelling Congress to abandon immigrant criminalization policies is probably going to require, among other things, that citizens convince some combination of our pension funds, Wells Fargo, and a key hedge fund or two, to pull out of the private prison industry and to go elsewhere to make money.
We should be able accomplish this. IBM and Ford, when challenged, found themselves unable to justify their investments in apartheid in South Africa. As a result of a swelling movement of students, faith-based organizations, unions and shareholders, these companies divested in 1986, contributing to the fall of the racist apartheid system and a transition to democracy.
Similarly, Wells Fargo, Pershing Square, and other financial giants shall be hard-pressed to justify investments in the massive suffering caused by the criminalization of immigrants, as a movement comes together to expose the harm done to the public good by their current investments in the immigrant prison industry.
Who knows? Some of these financial institutions might even see the wisdom in investing in companies that produce family-wage jobs.
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi is the Director of Enlace, a Portland, OR based organization focused on strategic organizing, campaigns, and training in organizational development around workers’ struggles, and the impacts of multinational corporations in the lives of people in all sectors of society. Peter has been a labor activist since 1965, starting as a young farm worker in Southern California. He is a frequent contributor to the Americas Program www.cipamericas.org.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Deportation of illegal immigrants increases under Obama administration
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 26, 2010; A01
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 26, 2010; A01
In a bid to remake the enforcement of federal immigration laws, the Obama administration is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants and auditing hundreds of businesses that blithely hire undocumented workers.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration's 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007. The pace of company audits has roughly quadrupled since President George W. Bush's final year in office.
The effort is part of President Obama's larger project "to make our national laws actually work," as he put it in a speech this month at American University. Partly designed to entice Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, the mission is proving difficult and politically perilous.
Obama is drawing flak from those who contend the administration is weak on border security and from those who are disappointed he has not done more to fulfill his campaign promise to help the country's estimated 11 million illegal residents. Trying to thread a needle, the president contends enforcement -- including the deployment of fresh troops to the Mexico border -- is a necessary but insufficient solution.
A June 30 memorandum from ICE director John Morton instructed officers to focus their "principal attention" on felons and repeat lawbreakers. The policy, influenced by a series of sometimes-heated White House meetings, also targets repeat border crossers and declares that parents caring for children or the infirm should be detained only in unusual cases.
"We're trying to put our money where our mouth is," Morton said in an interview, describing the goal as a "rational" immigration policy. "You've got to have aggressive enforcement against criminal offenders. You have to have a secure border. You have to have some integrity in the system."
Morton said the 400,000 people expected to be deported this year -- either physically removed or allowed to leave on their own power -- represent the maximum the overburdened processing, detention and immigration court system can handle.
The Obama administration has been moving away from using work-site raids to target employers. Just 765 undocumented workers have been arrested at their jobs this fiscal year, compared with 5,100 in 2008, according to Department of Homeland Security figures. Instead, officers have increased employer audits, studying the employee documentation of 2,875 companies suspected of hiring illegal workers and assessing $6.4 million in fines.
On the ground, a program known as Secure Communities uses the fingerprints of people in custody for other reasons to identify deportable immigrants. Morton predicts it will "overhaul the face of immigration." The administration has expanded the system to 437 jails and prisons from 14 and aims to extend it to "every law enforcement jurisdiction" by 2013.
The Secure Communities project has identified 240,000 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, according to DHS figures. Of those, about 30,000 have been deported, including 8,600 convicted of what the agency calls "the most egregious offenses."
Neither side satisfiedCriticism has been swift and sure.
While the administration focuses on some illegal immigrants with criminal records, others are allowed to remain free, creating a "sense of impunity. As long as they keep their heads down, they're in the clear. That's no way of enforcing immigration law," said Mark Krikorian, a supporter of stricter policies with the Center for Immigration Studies.
"Even the ones who haven't committed murder or rape or drug offenses, all of them have committed federal felonies," Krikorian said. He favors employer audits, but also the roundups that Obama has largely abandoned.
Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) similarly believes the administration is showing "apathy toward robust immigration enforcement." He said at a House hearing in March that the approach is nothing more than "selective amnesty."
Others, meanwhile, complain that enforcers continue to target otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants, splitting families and harming businesses.
"They've done a lot to start turning the ship in a more strategic and rational direction. It's hard to say how successful they've been," said Marshall Fitz, a specialist at the Center for American Progress. "Just because you change policies at the top or reprioritize your enforcement agenda doesn't mean that on the ground things have changed very much."
Obama heard that message in a closed-door White House meeting with immigration advocates in March and was taken aback, according to participants. They said he was surprised by evidence that thousands of ordinary illegal immigrants continue to be targeted and deported, often for minor violations, despite the official focus on criminals.
The discussion was "vigorous," said a White House official who was present. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "What he said was: 'We will look at what we are doing. And where we can make changes, we will make them.' The intensity of the conversation, which was already underway, increased as a result of that meeting."
The National Council of La Raza's Clarissa Martinez, who attended the meeting, said: "The gap between the intent and the reality is very, very wide. The president had thought more progress had been made."
Martinez said the federal government is "outsourcing" enforcement to local police, state troopers and deputy sheriffs, opening the way to abuses.
Sarahi Uribe agrees. A National Day Laborer Organizing Network staffer, she contends federal policy has created "a huge dragnet, and it's structural. Basically, it's anyone they can get their hands on."
Focus on crimeNearly 50 percent of the people who have been deported from the United States this budget year have a criminal conviction, from driving without a license and DUI to major felonies, ICE's Morton said. That represents an increase of more than 36,000 over the same period in 2009, which showed a rise of 22,000 over 2008. "Occasionally, you will hear criticism that our criminal alien efforts are focused around people with cracked tailpipes and speeding tickets. That's simply false," Morton said.
A DHS spokesman said, however, that the agency has no breakdown of the crimes, which makes advocates suspicious.
"It has been a very frustrating experience working with ICE in terms of getting any data on the breakdown," said American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Joanne Lin, who has participated in what she called "heated" White House meetings on enforcement. While the government pledges to focus on criminal immigrants, Lin said, the question is this: Which ones?
Morton's June 30 memorandum set priorities for the capture, detention and removal of illegal immigrants. With the federal system facing a limit on how many people it can deport each year, he wrote, "principal attention" must go to people convicted of felonies or at least three misdemeanors punishable by jail time.
In descending order of importance, the memo cites people convicted of a misdemeanor, those caught near the border and those who have failed to obey deportation orders.
"Nothing in this memorandum should be construed to prohibit or discourage the apprehension, detention or removal of other aliens unlawfully in the United States," Morton wrote, but such efforts should not "displace or disrupt" the pursuit of bigger targets.
In an underlined section, Morton listed illegal immigrants who should not be placed in detention except in "extraordinary circumstances." They include people who are pregnant, nursing or seriously ill. Also included are primary caretakers of children or the infirm and people "whose detention is otherwise not in the public interest."
"We're very upfront about what our priorities are," Morton said. "We make no bones about it."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/25/AR2010072501790.html?sid%3DST2010072503046
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Obama Administration Immigration Deportations Exceed Bush’s Record
Second Grader’s Comments Shine Light on Underreported Fact – Deportations are Increasing & 70% are Non-Criminal Deportees
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 20, 2010
America's Voice
WASHINGTON - May 20 - Yesterday's heartbreaking conversation between a second-grade student and First Lady Michelle Obama highlighted the fear and deportation rampant under the broken immigration system. The conversation also drew attention to an underreported fact - that the Obama administration is deporting more immigrants than the Bush administration.
According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America's Voice, "As the chart shows, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 people in 2010, 70% of whom are non-criminal undocumented immigrants who have been caught up in an aggressive dragnet of local, state and federal raids and enforcement actions. As shocking as these numbers are, they are proof that Republican calls for increased immigration enforcement as a pretext to comprehensive immigration reform are just hollow political pot shots."
Deportations more than doubled in the Bush years and are increasing even more in the Obama administration. And even among those considered "criminal" deportees, immigrants could be classified as such for infractions as minor as selling an unauthorized phone cards. In conjunction with the fact that border security spending and personnel have also increased in recent years, the deportation numbers show that ramped-up, enforcement-only immigration policy already is the status quo. As a result, Republican calls for increased immigration enforcement as a necessity before moving forward on comprehensive immigration reform do not ring true in light of these numbers and this reality.
Said Sharry, "Every day, bad actor employers exploit immigrant workers, undercut American workers and undermine honest competitors. Every day, Americans become more frustrated and more polarized as Washington dithers. Unfortunately, the vacuum created by the lack of action on comprehensive immigration reform has been filled by ramped up federal enforcement and discriminatory laws like Arizona's. It's time to deliver on the change that Obama promised on immigration, such as when he spoke eloquently to the National Council of La Raza and said, "The system isn't working when 12 million people live in hiding, and hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids - when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel."
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/05/20-11
Monday, July 21, 2008
In Immigration Cases, Employers Feel the Pressure, But Critics Fault Laws as Ineffective
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 21, 2008
A three-year-old enforcement campaign against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants is increasingly resulting in arrests and criminal convictions, using evidence gathered by phone taps, undercover agents and prisoners who agree to serve as government witnesses.
But the crackdown's relatively high costs and limited results are also fueling criticism. In an economy with more than 6 million companies and 8 million unauthorized workers, the corporate enforcement effort is still dwarfed by the high-profile raids that have sentenced thousands of illegal immigrants to prison time and deportation.
Stewart A. Baker, assistant secretary for policy at the Homeland Security Department, recently told immigration experts the disparity can be traced to ineffective policies that need to be addressed by Congress.
"Companies tell me, 'We have an immigration system that allows us to hire illegal workers, legally,' " Baker said. Asked to defend President Bush's track record, he said, "Why are employers not punished more often? Because the laws we have don't really authorize that."
In the first nine months of this fiscal year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 937 criminal arrests at U.S. workplaces, more than 10 times as many as the 72 it arrested five years ago. Of those arrested this year, 99 were company supervisors, compared with 93 in 2007.
The arrests have led to several convictions, including a union official at a Swift meatpacking plant; three executives of a Florida janitorial services company; a temporary-staffing agency manager for a Del Monte Fresh Produce plant in Oregon; two supervisors of a Cargill pork plant cleaning contractor in Illinois; and seven managers of IFCO Systems North America, a pallet services company, among others.
But Baker's comments acknowledged criticism by labor union leaders, immigrant rights' groups and Democrats about the limits of employer enforcement. His remarks also illuminate why the White House, Congress and some states have scrambled recently to adopt new steps to compel companies to identify illegal workers, and why such efforts will probably remain ineffective.
Political opposition from big business, labor and immigrant and civil rights interests has diluted immigration law for two decades, according to analysts in both parties.
"If you want law enforcement, you have to have laws that are enforceable," said Doris M. Meissner, who headed the former Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Clinton administration. The 1986 law banning the hiring of illegal immigrants, she said, "has just been chronically flawed from the time it was passed."
Raids against Swift packinghouses in six states in December 2006 highlight the administration's strategy to seek criminal indictments and felony convictions against corporate violators. An earlier approach that relied on administrative fines and forfeitures was increasingly dismissed by executives as a cost of doing business.
The tactics used now are similar to law enforcement techniques honed in developing cases against mobsters and drug lords. In June 2007, federal agents wired a Mexican slaughterhouse worker who had been arrested on immigration charges and sent him to call at the home of his former boss at a meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa.
The informant, nicknamed "Memo," carried a false ID. He told Christopher Lamb, now the plant's human resources manager, that he was free pending a hearing and wanted to return to work.
Lamb, 38, coached Memo but seemed to realize he was walking into a trap, court records show. "Where's the migra?" he asked later, using the Spanish term for immigration agents.
The informant's tapes led Lamb to plead guilty in March to one charge of harboring an illegal immigrant. In a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to serve a year's probation, pay $300 in fines and cooperate against others targeted after immigration raids in 2006 against meatpacker Swift, now JBS Swift.
An undercover agent taped union official Braulio Pereyra advising new employees at an orientation speech on how to protect false identities.
"You can lie to your boss or whomever, but not to the police," Pereyra was recorded as saying. "That's a federal offense."
He was convicted in May on one charge of harboring illegal immigrants, and faces as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Pereyra's lawyer, Keith Rigg, said his client committed no crime and had a First Amendment right to give the speech. He is seeking a retrial.
Enforcement disparities were displayed vividly May 12 when ICE agents swept into an Agriprocessors Inc. kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. They arrested 389 illegal workers; 270 were convicted within days in expedited court proceedings at a cattle fairgrounds; and many were sentenced to five months in prison, mostly on criminal document-fraud charges.
By contrast, ICE agents arrested two supervisors and issued an arrest warrant for a third man on July 3. The firm remains in operation.
Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a newly formed group that promotes citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, said the raid shows the misdirected policy of criminalizing illegal immigration for workers while not shutting down the jobs "magnet" that lures them. Several critics, including a federal court interpreter who participated in the Agriprocessors hearings, said the government's legal tactics are coercive and threaten defendants' due process rights.
"There's no question this administration is coddling unscrupulous employers while arresting undocumented immigrants in order to make their statistics look good," Sharry said.
But he echoed Baker's frustration at politicians who seek to look tough on immigration and yet do not provide effective law enforcement tools or address the nation's labor needs and underground population. "The dysfunctional immigration system really is the fault of Congress, for failing to lead," Sharry said.
Piecemeal measures to combat illegal hiring are under way this year, but the moves remain controversial and their effects uncertain.
In March, the White House attempted to jump-start a campaign to notify 140,000 employers about workers' use of suspicious Social Security numbers, seeking to force businesses to resolve questions or fire workers within 90 days.
If companies do not respond to "no-match" letters, ICE could use that failure as evidence of illegal hiring. But the plan remains stalled by a federal lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union, which allege that it will disrupt businesses and discriminate against legal U.S. workers.
Also in dispute is another effort to expand use of a voluntary online system that checks whether new hires are eligible to work in the United States. The Bush administration on June 9 ordered 60,000 federal contractors to use the government's E-Verify system, which checks workers' information against Social Security and immigration-status databases.
Still, 12 years after Congress mandated that such a tool be piloted in 1996, the change will enroll about 2 percent of U.S. companies.
Critics warn that the system has a high error rate that will exclude legal workers, cannot detect the fraudulent use of stolen Social Security numbers, and will permit some employers to harass workers.
Frustrated by the stalemate, Arizona, Missouri and South Carolina since January have passed laws or have begun requiring businesses to use E-Verify under certain conditions. But Illinois has gone the opposite direction, barring companies from participating until the government proves that E-Verify is 99 percent error-free.
The conflicting moves show how opposition has frustrated enforcement of the ban on hiring illegal immigrants. In 1986, Congress required law enforcement agencies to show that an employer knowingly violated the law, but provided few tools, agents or dollars to do so.
Under the law, employers need only to verify that a new hire present at least one "facially valid" form of identification. The overhaul simply created a huge fake-ID industry, while granting unscrupulous employers a ready defense since the government had no system to validate a document's authenticity. At the same time, employers face discrimination complaints if they unduly scrutinize new hires.
Few expect the situation to change soon with this fall's elections looming. Some GOP congressional campaigns are talking tough, but the party is wary of further alienating its traditional business base. Democrats in turn rely on labor and immigrant support, leading the House to propose a $40 billion DHS budget bill that would require ICE to prioritize $800 million in enforcement funding next year to deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records, not workers.
At a Georgetown Law School conference in May, Baker of DHS described a sense among voters that "both parties owed their base a kind of collusion of pretend enforcement of the immigration laws." He added, "I can't say that was completely misplaced skepticism."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/20/AR2008072002293.html
MAYORS TO BUSH: STOP THE RAIDS AND PUSH THROUGH IMMIGRATION REFORM
The U.S. Conference of Mayors
76th Annual Meeting
June 20-24, 2008
Miami, Florida
2008 ADOPTED RESOLUTIONS
CALLING FOR COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM WHICH PROMOTES THE REUNIFICATION OF FAMILIES, PROVIDES LEGAL STATUS WITH A PATH TO EARNED CITIZENSHIP, AND A PLAN FOR CURRENT AND FUTURE IMMIGRANT WORKERS
WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors recognizes the economic, social and cultural contributions immigrants bring to their communities; and
WHEREAS, the responsibility of municipal leaders is to protect the wellbeing and safety of all the people residing in their cities; and
WHEREAS, many local governments have passed resolutions, ordinances and policy directives reaffirming non-participation in the enforcement of civil immigration law by city officials and agencies to promote immigrant trust in its police and avert racial profiling and civil rights violations; and
WHEREAS, The International Association of Chiefs of Police Guide to Immigration Issues concludes that local police leaders face a growing set of immigration related duties in the face of scarce and narrowing resources; and
WHEREAS, raids and deportations are increasing in scope and number in recent weeks and months, separating families and spreading terror in our communities; and
WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors opposes the separation of families by the enforcement of our current immigration laws and supports the reunification of families that have been so separated, especially those “mixed status” families with U.S. citizen children of which there are an estimated four million children currently in this country; and
WHEREAS, the national political debate on immigration reform has tended to polarize our communities; and
WHEREAS, it is the duty of local governments to respect the rights of and provide equal services to all individuals regardless of national origin or immigration status,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by The U.S. Conference of Mayors acting on behalf of its constituents to call on the President of the United States to issue an executive order to cease and desist in the execution of all raids and deportations that do not relate to our national security or to criminal activity until comprehensive immigration reform is completed and to suspend immediately all deportations of parents with U.S. citizen children; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the U.S. Conference of Mayors supports comprehensive immigration reform which promotes the reunification of families, provides legal status with a path to earned citizenship to the estimated 12 million undocumented workers and designs a plan for current and future immigrant workers.
http://www.usmayors.org/resolutions/76th_conference/csj_14.asp
76th Annual Meeting
June 20-24, 2008
Miami, Florida
2008 ADOPTED RESOLUTIONS
CALLING FOR COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM WHICH PROMOTES THE REUNIFICATION OF FAMILIES, PROVIDES LEGAL STATUS WITH A PATH TO EARNED CITIZENSHIP, AND A PLAN FOR CURRENT AND FUTURE IMMIGRANT WORKERS
WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors recognizes the economic, social and cultural contributions immigrants bring to their communities; and
WHEREAS, the responsibility of municipal leaders is to protect the wellbeing and safety of all the people residing in their cities; and
WHEREAS, many local governments have passed resolutions, ordinances and policy directives reaffirming non-participation in the enforcement of civil immigration law by city officials and agencies to promote immigrant trust in its police and avert racial profiling and civil rights violations; and
WHEREAS, The International Association of Chiefs of Police Guide to Immigration Issues concludes that local police leaders face a growing set of immigration related duties in the face of scarce and narrowing resources; and
WHEREAS, raids and deportations are increasing in scope and number in recent weeks and months, separating families and spreading terror in our communities; and
WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors opposes the separation of families by the enforcement of our current immigration laws and supports the reunification of families that have been so separated, especially those “mixed status” families with U.S. citizen children of which there are an estimated four million children currently in this country; and
WHEREAS, the national political debate on immigration reform has tended to polarize our communities; and
WHEREAS, it is the duty of local governments to respect the rights of and provide equal services to all individuals regardless of national origin or immigration status,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by The U.S. Conference of Mayors acting on behalf of its constituents to call on the President of the United States to issue an executive order to cease and desist in the execution of all raids and deportations that do not relate to our national security or to criminal activity until comprehensive immigration reform is completed and to suspend immediately all deportations of parents with U.S. citizen children; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the U.S. Conference of Mayors supports comprehensive immigration reform which promotes the reunification of families, provides legal status with a path to earned citizenship to the estimated 12 million undocumented workers and designs a plan for current and future immigrant workers.
http://www.usmayors.org/resolutions/76th_conference/csj_14.asp
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Tactics questioned in immigrant raids; Doors were kicked in, guns brandished
By ELISABETH HULETTE, Staff Writer
The Capitol (Annapolis)
Published July 09, 2008
A week ago, David Espana walked out of the shower and found his living room full of police officers.
They broke a bathroom mirror - shards are still caught in the rug - and took him to Baltimore in handcuffs.
He was scared. He wasn't alone.
Doors were smashed in, glass was shattered and guns were thrust in the faces of whole families last Monday when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents backed by county police officers raided at least 15 Annapolis-area homes, arresting 46 undocumented immigrants. The homes belonged to employees of Annapolis Painting Services, which has been under investigation for 18 months for hiring illegal immigrants.
A week later, many of the homes remain as broken as the families.
ICE, which sent 75 agents on the raids, justifies the tactics used in the raids. Breaking down doors, carrying guns and using handcuffs is necessary to protect police and the community, said Scot R. Rittenberg, an assistant special agent for ICE.
"We never know what's behind that door," he said. "Often (in immigrant raids) we've opened the door and found guns pointed at us. We never know if it's MS-13 gang members or just illegal immigrants."
County police, who sent 50 officers to the raids, wouldn't comment on the tactics used. "We were just the support role," said Lt. Thomas Kohlmann.
County Executive John R. Leopold said cracking down on undocumented immigrants is necessary to keep the employers who hire them - like Annapolis Painting Services - from un-dercutting legitimate businesses. He would not comment on the methods used in the raids.
Audra Harrison, a spokesman for his office, said: "The county executive is not an expert on these sorts of investigations, and therefore he leaves it to the experts to determine the tactics."
But the people whose doors were forced open - and their families - think differently. Their only crime is working without papers, yet they were served with violence, they say.
Take Eduardo Delgado. His front door was smashed down by police before he was taken into custody.
"They are no criminals," said Nico Ramos, Mr. Delgado's cousin. "They are hard-working people."
Eric Daniels watched one raid on his way into work.
Across the street from his family's business, The Palate Pleasers catering company, police climbed out of at least three marked and unmarked police cars and suited up in bulletproof vests.
"They're not dangerous," he said. "They're the opposite of dangerous. They're not intending to be sneaky, they just want to work."
Marlin Velasquez, a legal immigrant who works in the kitchen at The Palate Pleasers, said she's been hearing about the raids from friends. In one house, she said, police slashed mattresses looking for documents; in another they cuffed a man's hands and feet.
Ingrid Munoz, an American citizen married to a legal resident who worked for Annapolis Painting Services, said she woke up when agents pounded on her door. They wouldn't let her or her husband get dressed, so she answered their questions wearing a tank top, her underwear and a towel.
ICE didn't even have a warrant to search her home.
Mr. Rittenberg said ICE did a "knock-and-talk search" on two or three houses. That's when agents approach a house they believe, based on investigation, is hiding immigrants, and ask for permission to search.
"You feel safe in your home, you never think that's going to happen to you," Ms. Munoz said. "I've never been in trouble."
The white wooden door frame on Jaclyn Munoz's house off Forest Drive was splintered when agents broke into her home. She's not even an illegal immigrant, she said.
Shannon Brown, an American citizen, said when her boyfriend opened their door, the house was surrounded by at least 20 agents. One pointed a gun at him, yelling in Spanish.
"He doesn't even speak Spanish," she said.
They searched the apartment while she got her two daughters, ages 4 and 7, out. She didn't want them to see the raid.
"They had one man handcuffed to a chair. He was shaking like a leaf," she said of one man who worked with her boyfriend at Annapolis Painting Services.
Ms. Brown spent the day after the raids fixing one family's house, where the doors all had been beaten down. That family's in a quandary, she said. The father was taken in the raids, but the mother is a citizen. The mother went to Mexico so she can meet up with him after he's deported.
"I can't imagine trying to raise a family there," Ms. Brown said. "They don't speak Spanish. They're Americans."
One woman, an immigrant who declined to give her name, said police broke through a glass door and hit her boyfriend in the chest with the handle of a gun. She doesn't know where he was taken.
Mr. Rittenburg said no one was hit like that.
Mario Quiroz-Servellon, a spokesman for CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy organization, said treating undocumented immigrants like criminals, particularly in front of their children, will hurt police and the community in the long run.
"Immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal offense," he said. "So when they act like this, what they're doing is scaring people and breaking the trust that people have in law enforcement."
For the families of people taken in raids, it always happens the same way, said David Perechocky of the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition. A child doesn't get picked up from school, someone disappears, and no one knows why. Family members begin to panic. They get very little information, and what they do hear is in English, so they don't understand.
"It's a lot of confusion, and it's a scary situation," Mr. Perechocky said.
Liz Alex of CASA de Maryland, has been helping the families. At first, calls came from people trying to find the immigrants who were taken, she said.
"Now we're getting the second wave, of families who are homeless or have lost their breadwinner," she said.
Rev. John Lavin of St. Mary's Parish in Annapolis has seen firsthand the poverty that immigrants from El Salvador faced before they came to America. Seventeen people lived in one house he visited; one woman earned just $6 a day.
"The reason they come here and do these kinds of jobs is that they come from poverty," he said. "They're here trying to help their families. They are family people."
Jonathan Greene, an attorney and a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says the nation's immigration system is broken. America needs immigrant workers just as much as they need to work here. But not nearly enough visas are available - just 5,000 permanent visas are given out each year for low-skilled "essential" workers when there's enough demand for a million.
Congress could change the laws and issue more visas, creating an easier path to legal immigration and taking pressure off the border with Mexico, but hasn't yet, he said.
"If you do that, then the people who are protecting the border can focus on real threats to America - drugs, gangs and real terrorists - instead of chasing people who risk dying across the desert to simply work," he said.
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/07_09-31/TOP
The Capitol (Annapolis)
Published July 09, 2008
A week ago, David Espana walked out of the shower and found his living room full of police officers.
They broke a bathroom mirror - shards are still caught in the rug - and took him to Baltimore in handcuffs.
He was scared. He wasn't alone.
Doors were smashed in, glass was shattered and guns were thrust in the faces of whole families last Monday when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents backed by county police officers raided at least 15 Annapolis-area homes, arresting 46 undocumented immigrants. The homes belonged to employees of Annapolis Painting Services, which has been under investigation for 18 months for hiring illegal immigrants.
A week later, many of the homes remain as broken as the families.
ICE, which sent 75 agents on the raids, justifies the tactics used in the raids. Breaking down doors, carrying guns and using handcuffs is necessary to protect police and the community, said Scot R. Rittenberg, an assistant special agent for ICE.
"We never know what's behind that door," he said. "Often (in immigrant raids) we've opened the door and found guns pointed at us. We never know if it's MS-13 gang members or just illegal immigrants."
County police, who sent 50 officers to the raids, wouldn't comment on the tactics used. "We were just the support role," said Lt. Thomas Kohlmann.
County Executive John R. Leopold said cracking down on undocumented immigrants is necessary to keep the employers who hire them - like Annapolis Painting Services - from un-dercutting legitimate businesses. He would not comment on the methods used in the raids.
Audra Harrison, a spokesman for his office, said: "The county executive is not an expert on these sorts of investigations, and therefore he leaves it to the experts to determine the tactics."
But the people whose doors were forced open - and their families - think differently. Their only crime is working without papers, yet they were served with violence, they say.
Take Eduardo Delgado. His front door was smashed down by police before he was taken into custody.
"They are no criminals," said Nico Ramos, Mr. Delgado's cousin. "They are hard-working people."
Eric Daniels watched one raid on his way into work.
Across the street from his family's business, The Palate Pleasers catering company, police climbed out of at least three marked and unmarked police cars and suited up in bulletproof vests.
"They're not dangerous," he said. "They're the opposite of dangerous. They're not intending to be sneaky, they just want to work."
Marlin Velasquez, a legal immigrant who works in the kitchen at The Palate Pleasers, said she's been hearing about the raids from friends. In one house, she said, police slashed mattresses looking for documents; in another they cuffed a man's hands and feet.
Ingrid Munoz, an American citizen married to a legal resident who worked for Annapolis Painting Services, said she woke up when agents pounded on her door. They wouldn't let her or her husband get dressed, so she answered their questions wearing a tank top, her underwear and a towel.
ICE didn't even have a warrant to search her home.
Mr. Rittenberg said ICE did a "knock-and-talk search" on two or three houses. That's when agents approach a house they believe, based on investigation, is hiding immigrants, and ask for permission to search.
"You feel safe in your home, you never think that's going to happen to you," Ms. Munoz said. "I've never been in trouble."
The white wooden door frame on Jaclyn Munoz's house off Forest Drive was splintered when agents broke into her home. She's not even an illegal immigrant, she said.
Shannon Brown, an American citizen, said when her boyfriend opened their door, the house was surrounded by at least 20 agents. One pointed a gun at him, yelling in Spanish.
"He doesn't even speak Spanish," she said.
They searched the apartment while she got her two daughters, ages 4 and 7, out. She didn't want them to see the raid.
"They had one man handcuffed to a chair. He was shaking like a leaf," she said of one man who worked with her boyfriend at Annapolis Painting Services.
Ms. Brown spent the day after the raids fixing one family's house, where the doors all had been beaten down. That family's in a quandary, she said. The father was taken in the raids, but the mother is a citizen. The mother went to Mexico so she can meet up with him after he's deported.
"I can't imagine trying to raise a family there," Ms. Brown said. "They don't speak Spanish. They're Americans."
One woman, an immigrant who declined to give her name, said police broke through a glass door and hit her boyfriend in the chest with the handle of a gun. She doesn't know where he was taken.
Mr. Rittenburg said no one was hit like that.
Mario Quiroz-Servellon, a spokesman for CASA de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy organization, said treating undocumented immigrants like criminals, particularly in front of their children, will hurt police and the community in the long run.
"Immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal offense," he said. "So when they act like this, what they're doing is scaring people and breaking the trust that people have in law enforcement."
For the families of people taken in raids, it always happens the same way, said David Perechocky of the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition. A child doesn't get picked up from school, someone disappears, and no one knows why. Family members begin to panic. They get very little information, and what they do hear is in English, so they don't understand.
"It's a lot of confusion, and it's a scary situation," Mr. Perechocky said.
Liz Alex of CASA de Maryland, has been helping the families. At first, calls came from people trying to find the immigrants who were taken, she said.
"Now we're getting the second wave, of families who are homeless or have lost their breadwinner," she said.
Rev. John Lavin of St. Mary's Parish in Annapolis has seen firsthand the poverty that immigrants from El Salvador faced before they came to America. Seventeen people lived in one house he visited; one woman earned just $6 a day.
"The reason they come here and do these kinds of jobs is that they come from poverty," he said. "They're here trying to help their families. They are family people."
Jonathan Greene, an attorney and a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says the nation's immigration system is broken. America needs immigrant workers just as much as they need to work here. But not nearly enough visas are available - just 5,000 permanent visas are given out each year for low-skilled "essential" workers when there's enough demand for a million.
Congress could change the laws and issue more visas, creating an easier path to legal immigration and taking pressure off the border with Mexico, but hasn't yet, he said.
"If you do that, then the people who are protecting the border can focus on real threats to America - drugs, gangs and real terrorists - instead of chasing people who risk dying across the desert to simply work," he said.
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/07_09-31/TOP
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