Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
immigrationenforcement
How States Broke the Record on Immigration Bills in 2011
05 months ago
Earlier this month, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Alabama’s H.B. 56, which is considered the nation’s most harsh state-level immigration-enforcement law. It grants police broad powers to detain people they suspect are undocumented, makes it a crime to aide undocumented persons, bars sanctuary policies, and forces school to check students’ immigration status among other things.
But Alabama’s immigration law is only one of hundreds enacted this year by state legislatures. With the immigration reform debate stalled in Washington, state lawmakers–particularly those on the right–have moved aggressively to fill the void.
Lawmakers from all 50 states introduced a recording-breaking 1,592 bills and resolutions dealing with immigration in the first half of 2011, according to a new report from the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. Of the bills introduced, 151 laws and 95 resolutions passed in 40 state legislatures and Puerto Rico. An additional 10 bills were waiting to be signed off by state governors as of June 30.
New identification and driver’s licenses rules, employment restrictions, and expansion of law enforcement powers have been the leading issues in legislation. Nines states enacted E-Verify requirements and several state bills included a citizenship check for sex offender registries. Meanwhile, Maryland and Connecticut passed laws that made undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition. And five states have passed laws similar to Arizona’s SB1070 in the first half of 2011–Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah–several of which have already been challenged in court.
Justice Dept Sues Alabama Over Nation’s Harshest Anti-Immigrant Law
06 months ago
The Obama administration is stepping in yet again to challenge a state immigration law, this time for the most far-reaching anti-immigrant state law yet, Alabama’s HB 56.
In its highly anticipated lawsuit filed late Monday, the Department of Justice said that Alabama’s recently passed HB 56, which is set to go into effect on Sept. 1, is in violation of the Constitution.
“[T]he United States Constitution forbids Alabama from supplanting the federal government’s immigration regime with its own state specific immigration policy–a policy that, in purpose and effect, interferes with the numerous interests the federal government must balance when enforcing and administering the immigration laws and disrupts the balance already established by the federal government,” read the complaint.
“Today’s action makes clear that setting immigration policy and enforcing immigration laws is a national responsibility that cannot be addressed through a patchwork of state immigration laws,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.
“The department is committed to evaluating each state immigration law and making decisions based on the facts and the law. To the extent we find state laws that interfere with the federal government’s enforcement of immigration law, we are prepared to bring suit, as we did in Arizona.”
HB 56 is the latest in a series of anti-immigrant laws that have been modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070 and passed by state legislatures. Utah, Indiana, Georgia and South Carolina have all passed versions of Arizona-inspired laws that have been challenged by civil and immigrant rights groups in the courts. So far, judges have uniformly blocked the most controversial provision–one that gives law enforcement officers the right to investigate a person’s immigration status if they have “reasonable suspicion” to believe the person is undocumented–pending resolution on the constitutionality of the provision.
Yet, Alabama’s HB 56 was the harshest law of them all. Not only did it expand law enforcement officers’ powers to enforce immigration law, it seemed to bring together every restrictionist provision that states and localities had considered or attempted to pass in recent memory. HB 56 barred undocumented immigrant children from attending K-12 schools by forcing schools to record and verify the immigration status of anyone who wants to enroll in Alabama public schools, in what seems a clear violation of the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Constitution. The law also made it a crime to rent property to, employ or even give a ride to an undocumented immigrant. Under HB 56, no undocumented immigrant could enroll in any of Alabama’s public colleges or universities. Because of the harsh and potentially illegal education provisions, the Department of Education has joined the Department of Justice in challenging parts of the law.
“All we’re doing is increasing the enforcement of the federal laws that they’re not doing,” said Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley in response to the DOJ’s lawsuit, Alabama’s WKRG reported.
“We’re certainly thrilled that the DOJ has also filed suit,” said Caitlin Sandley, the lead organizer with the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, an immigrant advocacy and social service organization. “We’re not surprised though, in part because Alabama’s law is so much further reaching than any of the other state level immigration laws so far.”
In its complaint, the DOJ argues that even though the federal government “welcomes cooperative efforts by states and localities to aid in the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws,” creating and enforcing immigration law is the sole responsibility of the federal government. The DOJ also argues that Alabama’s attempts to step in and manage the flow of traffic in and out of its own state interferes with the federal government’s own enforcement priorities.
The harsh anti-immigrant state laws the DOJ has challenged may violate the Constitution, but many of the federal government’s own programs have had a similar impact on immigrant communities. And states that have taken the lead in passing anti-immigrant laws have been enabled by the federal government.
While HB 56 is tangled up in the courts–the federal government’s challenge marks the fourth lawsuit against the bill, for those keeping count–immigrant communities in Alabama are preparing for the worst.
“It’s already changed the climate on the ground. The immigrant community both documented and not is anxious about whether all of this goes into effect, or parts of it do, or even none,” said Sandley. “The thing is, HB 56 affects such a broad swath of people. Public schools are anxious about the new mandates, business is worried, so are landlords and law enforcement.”
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuits, if lawmakers’ intent was to terrorize immigrants, HB 56′s already been successful.
Sandley said that since the passage of HB 56, HICA has seen an overwhelming number of clients coming in to prepare an emergency plan, designating other guardians for their U.S.-born children in the case of their deportation, granting powers of attorney, applying for passports for their kids–”all the things people do if they’re preparing for deportation or preparing to return to their home country.”
The Legal Case Against Alabama’s Worst-in-the-Country Immigration Law
07 months ago
When Alabama’s HB 56 was signed into law it was universally condemned by immigrant and civil rights groups as the harshest anti-immigrant state law to be passed. And as the lawsuits pile up–legal challenges to Arizona’s SB 1070 have been followed by lawsuits against the Utah Compact, Indiana’s SB 590 and most recently, Georgia’s HB 87–immigrant rights groups have vowed to file suit against Alabama’s, too.
“It’s a wish list of restrictionist immigration provisions at the state law level,” said Kevin Johnson, dean of the law school at the University of California, Davis. Alabama’s HB 56 combines the harshest provisions of anti-immigrant ordinances and state laws that have been passed in recent years.
Alabama attempts to criminalize every aspect of life for immigrants by making it illegal for undocumented immigrants to work, rent housing, go to school and get a ride in the state. Like its predecessor, Arizona’s SB 1070, the Alabama law also makes it a criminal offense to be in the state. Under the new law, contracts that undocumented immigrants enter into will not be enforceable. It also includes an anti-immigrant iteration of another popular GOP policy point: a voter ID provision that requires all voters supply proof of their citizenship.
The question on everybody’s minds is whether the Department of Justice will go after Alabama, and the other states that are passing their own immigration laws, the same way it has gone after Arizona. The DOJ has thus far withheld comment on potential litigation against these other states.
With or without the feds, immigrant and civil rights groups have vowed to challenge Alabama. I spoke with Johnson and Vivek Malhotra, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, about some of the law’s provisions. The ACLU, together with a coalition of other groups, including the National Immigration Law Center, has joined suits challenging the laws in Alabama, Indiana, Georgia, Utah and, of course, Arizona. Here are a few of their core arguments:
The Alabama law requires public schools to ask students who try to enroll in K-12 classes about their immigration status, and to track and report data to the state board of education and the state legislature. Schools will have the right to report students and their parents who are undocumented. ”This flies in the face of the Supreme Court decision in 1982, Plyer v. Doe, which upheld the right of every child to access public education regardless of their immigration status,” Malhotra said.
Malhotra added that the Department of Justice and the Department of Education have recently issued a joint guidance to remind states about that 1982 decision, after reports of school districts trying to collect information surfaced. The guidance told states that when schools ask students about their immigration status, it tends to have, Malhotra said, “a chilling effect,” which discourages students from enrolling in public school, which is a violation of all students’ equal protection rights.
Johnson noted that the law’s K-12 ban was slightly different from the law that Plyer v. Doe struck down. “I haven’t seen this kind of approach taken, where schools will begin the collection of information,” Johnson said. “I think that’s open to litigation.”
The Alabama law bans undocumented immigrant students from enrolling in any state college or university. “I’m not aware of any state that has a similar statewide ban,” said Johnson. The Plyer v. Doe ruling didn’t extend to higher education, though. The arguments against the higher education ban are more moral and economic, Malhotra said.
“Our view is that blocking access of promising undocumented students to public colleges is just mean-spirited, and doesn’t make much economic sense for a state when they’ve invested so much in these children in the K-12 education,” he said. Immigrant rights groups have also warned that Alabama’s higher education ban could harm students who are not undocumented.
The law makes it illegal to rent housing to undocumented immigrants. Hazleton, Penn., became famous for pioneering restrictive housing ordinances targeting undocumented immigrants, and the ACLU and other groups successfully challenged the town on a similar law. Two weeks ago though, the Supreme Court asked the Third Circuit to reconsider that ruling in light of its recent ruling on an Arizona employer-sanctions law, because both the Hazleton and the Arizona case dealt with employer sanctions.
“I don’t think it has any bearing on the larger issues in Hazleton, especially on the question of whether rental housing is preempted by federal law,” Malhotra said.
Like Arizona’s SB 1070, Alabama’s HB 56 turned police officers into federal immigration authorities by requiring them to investigate immigration status if they pull someone over and have “reasonable suspicion” to believe a person is undocumented. Immigrant rights groups warn that this provision makes racial profiling far too easy for law enforcement officers. The law also allows Alabama to hold people in custody while authorities determine their immigration status.
Immigration rights advocates have challenged similar provisions in Arizona and Utah’s laws by arguing that states do not have the right to make and enforce their own immigration laws under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which says that immigration enforcement falls under the purview of the federal government.
The Alabama law makes certain contracts that undocumented immigrants sign unenforceable. Johnson said this is likely aimed at diluting the legal rights of undocumented immigrants who want to file suit if, say, they’re denied wages that they’ve been promised or payment for goods and services they’ve sold and want to bring a lawsuit against someone else.
“The aim is to make it economically not viable for immigrants to do anything,” Johnson said. Both he and Malhotra said there were possible preemption issues with this provision.
Republicans Bash Immigrant Workers and Call It a Jobs Bill
07 months ago
Republican lawmakers Rep. Lamar Smith and Sen. Chuck Grassley made good on promises to target undocumented immigrant workers when they filed twin bills in Congress this week that would create a federal mandate forcing virtually all employers to use the database E-Verify to establish their workers’ immigration status. Smith has pitched his Legal Workforce Act as an immigration enforcement bill with a twist; he imagines it also as a job creation bill that would protect U.S. jobs from undocumented workers in an aching economy.
Immigrant rights groups have rejected that claim, calling the bill a bald attack on immigrant communities that would instead hurt the economy and make mandatory a deeply flawed immigration enforcement tool.
“This legislation is another example of putting cheap political maneuvers ahead of the interests of American workers,” said Clarissa Martínez De Castro, the director of immigration and national campaigns for the National Council of La Raza. “It will do nothing to create jobs, it will place a burden on all job-seeking U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, and it will not fix our broken immigration system.”
Smith’s bill, HR 2164, calls for nearly every employer with one or more worker to use E-Verify to check the work eligibility of both prospective and new hires. Current law calls for employers to use the system after workers are hired. HR 2164 would also decrease the number of acceptable documents that workers can use to prove their immigration status and work eligibility and would make it a felony to use a false Social Security number. The bill would be phased in over the course of the next three years.
“There is no other legislation that can be enacted that will create more jobs–maybe millions more–for American workers,” Smith wrote in an op-ed published in The Hill on Tuesday. “The ‘E’ in E-Verify could just as well stand for ‘easy’ and ‘effective,’” he said when he introduced the bill. “It takes just a few minutes to use and easily confirms 99.5 percent of work-eligible employees.”
That assertion isn’t supported by government tests of the system. Critics of E-Verify cite U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ own commissioned report from 2009 that showed that 54 percent of undocumented immigrants fall through the cracks when employers check their workers in the system. Workers who are legal residents and citizens are also frequently wrongly identified as ineligible to work.
E-Verify is currently optional. It was introduced in 1996 by Congress and has been reauthorized in 2002, 2008 and 2010. Over the years, E-Verify has captured the interests of immigration restrictionists with cyclical regularity. It is again enjoying a vogue, which immigration advocates say is a result of anti-immigrant backlash in the depressed economy.
“Now that [immigration into the U.S.] is down because of the economy, people are saying, ‘Well, what can we say about American jobs,’” said Mary Giovagnoli, the director of the Immigration Policy Center. “We’ve seen this as a pattern for the last 112th Congress, with the hearings that have been conducted that have almost exclusively been about trying to pit immigrant and native-born workers against each other.”
“The underlying assumption that Smith seems to be working on is that if we do something that forces illegal immigrants out of the country then all of the jobs that those people do will be jobs that American workers can take, or that the jobs will even exist,” Giovagnoli said. “But it’s not a one to one substitution.”
Giovagnoli said that the types of jobs that undocumented people fill are, for many reasons–because of location or skill level or work conditions–not jobs that out-of-work U.S. citizens would be up to or able to fill. “The basic assumption that anything we do to stop illegal immigration is suddenly going to open up new jobs is just faulty.”
SEIU also decried the “error-ridden” E-Verify in a statement this week and called Smith’s bill a job killer. “[The bill] would kill hundreds of thousands of jobs, drive up business costs, cripple the agriculture, restaurant and other industries that rely on immigrant workers, and drain the federal treasury of $17 billion over 10 years when disqualified workers go off the tax rolls and into the cash economy,” the statement argued.
A new report out this month from the bipartisan business and political group Renew Our Economy says that, in fact, undocumented immigrants help stimulate their local economies and are helping drive the largest U.S. companies and the American economy.
Still, Smith and his Republican colleagues continue to insist that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs that U.S. workers ought to have first.
“While 26 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, 7 million individuals work illegally in the United States,” Smith and his E-Verify mandate ally Rep. Elton Gallegly wrote in a separate op-ed that ran in the Los Angeles Times. “On top of all the challenges Americans face today, it is inexcusable that Americans and legal workers have to compete with illegal immigrants for scarce jobs.”
Immigrant rights groups say Smith’s concern for American workers is bogus.
“Smith, whose real agenda is to place as many immigrants as possible into the deportation pipeline, is disguising this proposal as a means of stimulating the economy,” said Tyler Moran, policy director of the National Immigration Law Center. Moran testified at a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday on HR 2164, warning about E-Verify’s structural flaws. “According to the most conservative estimates, Smith’s bill would push hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and other lawfully authorized workers, many of them breadwinners for their families, out of their jobs and into unemployment lines.”
Meanwhile, actual job creation proposals languish in obscurity in Congress.
Some Democrats have indicated that they won’t support the bill. California Rep. Judy Chu this week said the bill would disproportionately harm small mom and pop businesses and U.S. citizen workers. Yet the Obama administration has said it supports a nationwide electronic verification system, and back in May, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated that he’d be open to attaching an E-Verify bill to the DREAM Act.
HR 2164 is scheduled for a markup in the full House Committee on the Judiciary in the next few weeks.
Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Labor Law, But It’s No Model for SB 1070
08 months ago
Today the Supreme Court ruled to uphold an Arizona law that punishes businesses for hiring undocumented workers. Yet while the ruling on the four-year-old law is considered by some to be a test run for Arizona’s much-maligned SB 1070, immigrant rights advocates are careful to point out that today’s ruling should not be used as a barometer for the impending federal battle over one of the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant laws.
“Today’s decision is a narrow one that only upholds Arizona’s specific law on employment verification,” the ACLU said in a press release. “The decision has nothing to do with SB 1070 or any other state or local immigration laws. We are disappointed with today’s decision, and believe it does not reflect what Congress intended.”
The state passed the Legal Arizona Workers Act in 2007. The law allows Arizona to suspend the licenses of businesses that “intentionally or knowingly” violate work-eligibility verification requirement, reports CNN. It also requires businesses to use E-Verify, federal database that’s been the subject of recent controversy. Julianne Hing wrote in February that critics of the program contend that E-verify suffers from serious flaws. A report released by USCIS showed that the system commonly flags workers who later turn out to be authorized to work in the country.
Thursday’s 5-3 ruling is, for now, good news for Governor Jan Brewer and right wing immigration advocates who’ve been aggressively pushing policies that criminalize undocumented immigrants across the country. Meanwhile, the Obama administration argued that the Arizona employer law infringes on federal oversight of immigration issues.
The Supreme Court, however, disagreed. “Arizona has taken the route least likely to cause tension with the federal law,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. “It relies solely on the federal government’s own determination of who is an unauthorized alien, and it requires Arizona employers to use the federal government’s own system to for checking employee status.”
Still, attorneys involved in the legal challenge to Arizona’s SB 1070 argue that when it comes to the battle over that state’s infamous immigration law, a different set of legal cards are at play,
“It’s inaccurate to say that this is a litmus test for SB 1070,” says Karen Tumlin of the National Immigration Law Center, who added that both the majority and dissenting opinions say that regulating immigration is a federal issue. “The question at the heart of Arizona’s SB 1070 is whether local cops can enforce immigration law, and courts that have considered that to date have said, ‘hold on a minute.’ There’s nothing in today’s Supreme Court decision that would change the fundamental principles of that.”
Tulin added: “It would be a mistake for states to take today’s decision as a green light to enact SB 1070 copycats. It’s not a green light to regulate immigration or target immigrants.”
The Daily Show Hires ‘Señor Latino Correspondent’
08 months ago
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Aliens vs President – Immigration Reform | ||||
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On Tuesday, the Daily Show was being its usual witty, zinger-filled self in this bit announcing the arrival of its new “Senior Latino Correspondent,” comedian Al Madrigal. The writers threw in smart self-effacing jokes and I liked that shot of Jon Stewart sipping innocently on a big cup of what looked like horchata. But then things got weird!
Not only did the bit quickly become less and less funny (the largest offense, in my opinion), but then Stewart parroted President Obama’s lines on immigration reform: “Obama’s plan out does sound though pretty reasonable. You get caught here illegally, you pay a fine, you learn English, you head to the back of the line for citizenship. That’s just, uh…”
And then they cut to a montage of right-wing elected officials and newscasters labeling any attempt at legalization “amnesty.” The criticism of the far-right is spot on, but Obama’s plan only appears “reasonable” in a xenophobic political climate that’s swung so far to the right that Obama’s insistent criminalization of undocumented immigrants comes out sounding rather compassionate. It’s a shame that–and this may be more about my misplaced anger with the immigration debate in this country than the fault of the Daily Show–those are the parameters of the debate now. With Obama on one side and the right wing on the other, reason left the building a long time ago.
But still, where’s the funny! I can’t wait for Al Madrigal to bring the funny.
Who’s Profiting More Than $5 Billion Off Of Immigrant Detentions?
08 months ago
Immigrant advocacy group Cuentame recently shared a startling new video that maps out how corporations are pocketing more than $5 billion a year from the detention of migrants. Colorlines has been covering Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070 for the past year, and Cuentame argues that there’s a clear connection between those types of repressive measures that are sweeping the country and the country’s expansive prison system. Who are the key players? At least one is called out: the American Legislative Exchange Council, a collaboration of state legislators and powerful corporations who, thanks to state Senate president Russel Pearce, have managed to successfully push their doctrine in Arizona.
Lawsuit: The Utah Compact Is Unconstitutional, Just Like SB 1070
09 months ago
On Tuesday, immigrant and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the state of Utah over its controversial, and admittedly confusing, new immigration enforcement law, HB 497.
When Utah’s immigration package became law in March, it was initially difficult to know what to make of it. The bill combined a harsh enforcement scheme with a novel guest worker program the state plans to attempt to set up with Mexico. The state also intends to ask for a so-called “waiver” from the federal government to run its own guest worker program. Utah was hailed by groups as a bellwether for a humane approach to state immigration bills.
Utah’s softer rhetorical stance–the bill affirms the importance of immigrant communities and condemns racial profiling–gave state lawmakers the political cover to shove in SB 1070-like enforcement provisions to a suite of bills, and allowed Utah to escape much of the heat that Arizona caught (and is still trying to manage) after it passed SB 1070 last year. But on Tuesday, they decided to call Utah out.
“This law has been wildly misrepresented as a kinder, gentler version of
Arizona’s discriminating law,” said Karen McCreary, executive director
of the ACLU of Utah. “But the truth is, this ill-conceived law is just
as harsh, turning Utah into a police state where everyone is required to
carry their papers to prove they are lawfully present.”
A set of seven organizations and six individual plaintiffs led by the National Immigration Law Center and the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and the attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, charging that HB 497, the enforcement side of the Utah Compact, reeks of SB 1070, and violates the Constitution.
HB 497, which is set to go into effect on May 10, requires police officers to ask for one of four state-approved forms of identification during the course of a lawful stop for a felony or a class A misdemeanor. Police officers who stop a person for a class B or C misdemeanor will also be required to verify a person’s immigration status if a citation is issued, according to Andre Segura, with the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project. The law mandates that people be held in police custody while police determine their immigration status.
HB 497 also empowers police to discredit, and investigate, a person if they choose not to believe that the identification they’ve been presented with it legitimate.
“By turning law enforcement officers into immigration agents, and requiring them to demand papers demonstrating immigration status, HB 497 promotes racial profiling, and ensures that immigrant communities will no longer feel safe going to the authorities as victims of or witnesses to crime,” said Linton Joaquin, general counsel of the National
Immigration Law Center. “This undermines the public safety of everyone.”
“HB 497 puts the good police officers of Utah in an impossible situation, and asks them to determine a person’s immigration status, when that is not something that can be observed in the field,” said Cecilia Wang, the managing attorney of the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights’ Project. “[Officers] will be left to work on stereotypes that certain people may be unauthorized based on how they speak or the color of their skin.”
The groups have argued that HB 497 and SB 1070 violate the Constitution
similarly. According to Joaquin, the lawsuit charges that Utah’s HB 497
violates the preemption clause of the Constitution, which says that
immigration enforcement is “the exclusive province of the federal
government.”
Elsewhere, the law assures churches that they can continue to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. HB 497 also reinforces that all Utah residents, regardless of immigration status, have basic civil rights. Critics say they won’t be fooled.
“Federal immigration law leaves no room for this kind of intrusive state legislation,” Joaquin said.
And now Utah, like Arizona, is being taken to court for it.
Obama, in Re-election Mode, Promises Immigration Reform Again
09 months ago
As President Obama winds into re-election mode, it’s time for him to remind immigrant communities that got him into office that he hasn’t forgotten about immigration reform.
Before President Obama hit the road for his quick sweep through the West Coast this week, he gathered dozens of folks from a broad swath from the faith, labor, business and political worlds to talk immigration on Tuesday. At the meeting, according to the White House, Obama repeated his commitment to working for immigration reform, but only through congressional legislative action. He also reiterated his deep disappointment in the federal DREAM Act’s failure to pass the Senate in December, and urged the people in the room to keep pushing their constituencies to demand immigration reform.
Such are the political promises that immigrant communities are by now well familiar with from President Obama while they wait for the unlikely event that Congress might take up comprehensive immigration reform. Immigrant rights groups expressed concerned, too, that Obama’s done more than enough on immigration since he’s been in office, and very little of it has been to the benefit of immigrant communities and the rest of the country.
“While we appreciate the President’s effort to keep immigration reform on the national agenda, his actions belie his intent,” said Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “If the President genuinely wanted to fix the broken immigration system, he would respond to the growing chorus of voices calling for the suspension of the Secure Communities program and move to legalize instead of further criminalize our immigrant communities.”
Others were more encouraged.
“The President made it clear he is willing to use whatever political capital he has to make the case for immigration reform that can fix our nation’s dysfunctional immigration system in a way that ends illegal immigration,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the D.C. immigration reform advocacy group America’s Voice.
“It was gratifying to hear the President reaffirm his commitment to immigration reform. It shows that he is raising the stakes on the issue and underscores the fact that doing nothing is not an option.”
Except that by refusing to exercise the administrative powers he has to stop deporting undocumented immigrants while rapidly expanding enforcement programs like Secure Communities, Obama has actually done quite a bit as president. He currently holds the record for overseeing the most deportations of undocumented immigrants in a single year.
Back in 2008 Obama positioned himself as an ally to immigrant communities with campaign words so affecting that he may have convinced immigrant communities that he understood how persecuted they felt by Bush-era immigration enforcement.
“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, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working and we need to change it,” Obama said in 2008, at a National Council of La Raza conference.
Three years later it turns out that all that is still happening. The workplace raids that President Bush was so fond of have been replaced by “silent raids” in the form of immigration audits of 1,000 businesses, and counting, across the country. Under 287(g) agreements, which empower local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents, and Secure Communities, which allows law enforcement to cross-check anyone who’s booked in local and county jails with federal law enforcement databases, hundreds of thousands of families have been torn apart. Even though the stated intent of such programs has been to crack down on hardened criminals, the majority of people who’ve been deported under Secure Communities had no criminal record at all, or had been convicted of infractions like traffic offenses.
Members of Congress who themselves recognize that immediate relief must start somewhere else, have begun letting the President know that he has much more power than he’s been willing to exercise.
“He has a great amount of leeway and prosecutorial discretion in how deportation policy is meted out and how resources are targeted in the government he runs,” said Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who has been on a multi-city tour around the country to use his administrative power to stop deporting specific sets of immigrants.
“So we are asking the President to act at least to stop the deportations of the families of U.S. citizens, young people who should have been legalized via the DREAM Act, and stop the expansion of programs that weaken public safety and serve as a dragnet for law-abiding immigrants by enlisting state and local police in federal enforcement.”
Earlier this month 22 Democratic senators also sent a letter to Obama asking him to halt the deportations of undocumented immigrant youth who would be eligible for the federal DREAM Act. The senators’ letter echoed calls that immigrant youth have been calling for since the DREAM Act’s failure in December.
The Obama administration continues to refuse these options.
“At end of day we feel the answer to this problem is a legislative answer and we are working every day to reach the day when the president can sign an immigration reform that can fix this problem,” said Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Munoz in March, the AP reported.
Undocumented Man in Coma After Taser Incident With Border Patrol
010 months ago
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Arizona tased an undocumented man into a coma, and two ICE officers are currently guarding his hospital room 24 hours a day, ready to re-deport him should he recover, the LA Weekly blog reports.
Jose Gutierrez was a longtime L.A. resident and film engineer, married to U.S. citizen Shena Wilson, with whom he had two children. He was brought to the U.S. as a child and has never returned to Mexico since. On March 21, he was deported by the L.A. Immigration Court, and on March 30, his wife received a call from the Mexican consulate in Yuma, Arizona, saying that there had been an incident at the San Luis point of entry in Arizona.
When Wilson went to see her husband at the St. Joseph’s hospital in Phoenix, he was in a coma and had taser marks all over his chest and arms, two black eyes (supposedly from a head injury) and a tooth was out of place. Part of his skull has been removed to relieve pressure.
CBP claims that while at the second inspection at San Luis, Gutierrez “got scared and tried to run back” to Mexico, and became combative with CBP officers, who then attempted to subdue him with a taser. They have refused to provide any additional information or allow access to a surveillance video.
Wilson is skeptical of the account, saying that her husband had no history of violence and she expected him to try and return to see their five-month-old daughter, who was in the hospital.
“They tell me, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll move him back home,” Wilson told the LA Weekly blog. “But he’s lived here all his life. I’m like, ‘Stop calling it his home.’”
Under President Obama’s health-care bill, Gutierrez is ineligible for medical care in the U.S. because of his undocumented status.
Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles said that Gutierrez remained undocumented after marriage and the birth of this two U.S. citizen children because citizenship is increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain, and many are frightened to apply in Arizona, amid the state’s extreme immigration policies. Cabrera’s organization is calling for CBP to cover the medical bills associated with Gutierrez’s coma and injuries.
Guiterrez and his family’s shocking ordeal follows other media reports in recent weeks of transgressions by federal immigration agencies. CBP wrongfully deported four-year-old Emily Ruiz, who was fortunately reunited with her family last month. ICE agents in Detroit surrounded an elementary school in order to target undocumented parents dropping off their children. Deportations, especially those of non-criminals like Guiterrez, have surged to record numbers since Obama took office, part of a failing strategy by the Democrats to embolden enforcement in order to make space for broader immigration reforms.
Interestingly, Guiterrez wrote a song with his band FZ10 called “ICE” about the criminalization of immigration America.