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Tomorrow, Harvard Law School's Latino Law and Policy Conference will hold a panel on "The Future of Immigration Reform" that will address the role of guest worker programs. Listed as one of the speakers is Mark Krikorian, head of Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group with strong ties to hate groups.
Krikorian is an odd choice for as respected an institution as HLS. The group he heads was established by the racist founder of the modern nativist movement, John Tanton, who has worried about the "educability" of Latinos. "I've come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that," Tanton wrote in 1993.
Since I work as an immigration attorney at a nonprofit, it is only natural that ICE is not my favorite government agency. Regular readers of the blog probably know that by now. If I worked at the Public Defender's Office, I would regularly (as opposed to occasionally) blog about the perfidy of the Assistant District Attorneys. If I were a cop, I would blog about those weaselly public defenders or the DFHs at the ACLU.
But once in a while I read a story about ICE that surprises me, and I'd like to think I've developed a thick skin about these things over the last few years.
Helen O'Neill writes for the AP about a brother and sister who became confidential informants (CIs) for ICE. Emilio and Analia Maya were introduced to ICE by a friend of Analia's, a police officer named Sydney Mills.
According to Mills, the deal was straightforward: In exchange for working as informants, ICE would help the brother and sister get coveted S visas, which, in rare instances, are awarded to immigrants who help law enforcement.
After working for ICE without pay from 2005 to 2009, sometimes in dangerous undercover situations, ICE turned on the Mayas, arresting and detaining Emilio and putting both siblings into removal proceedings. Officer Mills doesn't know what to make of this:
A 10-year veteran of the police department, Mills had long worked undercover narcotics operations, sometimes with the FBI. He knows how deals are stuck with informants. And though he had never dealt with ICE before, "I assumed it was just another law enforcement agency and the rules would be the same."The golden rule: "You protect your sources, and you never renege on a deal."
At first, I concluded from this story that ICE is just not very good at law enforcement. ICE's stated mission is to "protect the security of the American people and homeland by vigilantly enforcing the nation's immigration and customs laws." Wouldn't that goal be better served by cultivating trustworthy CIs to help ICE target violent offenders, human traffickers, and transnational crime syndicates?
Then I remembered what I've learned from my daily experience dealing with ICE and the immigration bureaucracy: preventing crime is hard, deporting the nearest undocumented gardener, cook, or nanny is easy. When politicians and the press give DHS a free pass, the stated goal of protecting the security of the American people often takes a back seat to the unstated goal of deporting as many brown people as possible.
ICE spokespersons talk up its Criminal Alien Program and Fugitive Operations teams, but don't mention the fact that 73% of people apprehended by the Fugitive Ops teams in recent years had no criminal records, or that the Criminal Alien Program targets people after an arrest, not a conviction, leading to racial profiling by local police who know an arrest on any pretext may lead to deportation.
ICE's shameful treatment of its CIs sends a clear message about its true priorities: Deport the easiest targets first, then combat crime if we get around to it. That's not something I'm happy about supporting with my earnings this tax season, and I won't be voting this fall for any politician who shovels money at ICE's "law enforcement" operations without asking what the agency is doing with it.
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Dear Mr. Santa Claus,
This is an open letter from William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, Jim Gilchrist founder of The Minuteman Project, Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, the members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, and most Republicans, along with some Democrats, in the U.S. Senate.
We have just received word from the North Pole that you have been delivering presents to the United States all of these years without adhering to the proper legal immigration procedures. We ask you, Mr. Claus, the same question we ask of all illegal aliens in America, "What part of ILLEGAL don't you understand?" We ask that you cease and desist delivering presents to Americans this very Christmas Eve, or we will be forced to report you to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You are infringing upon America's sovereignty and encouraging law-breaking by flouting a complex immigration system that few people understand.
It does not matter to us that there is, in actuality, no legal way for anyone to migrate to America from the North Pole. There is no way for most illegal aliens to migrate to America. That is the way we like it and we call any attempt to change it: AMNESTY. Yes, we enjoy writing both the words, AMNESTY, and ILLEGAL, in capital letters. They make more sense when we write them that way. We also believe it is important to tell you on this Christian holiday, Mr. Claus, that we do not believe in the Christian values of forgiveness, compassion, and mercy.
More importantly, though, drop us a line at Citizen Orange if you're interested in getting more involved in migrant rights, or subscribe to the Citizen Orange feed to stay connected to the online pro-migrant movement.
Andrea Nill over at Think Progress' Wonk Room picked up one of the most entertaining developments in the U.S. migration policy debate that I've had the pleasure of coming across in some time. Chuck Norris is pro-migrant!
Just in case you haven't been on the planet Earth in the last five years, Chuck Norris has become an Internet phenomenon for satirical "facts" invoking his name. Chuck Norris himself seems to have an ambivalent relationship with these "facts", but there is one new "fact" Chuck Norris might be proud to claim. Taking Rachel LaBruyere's lead at the Standing FIRM Blog, here is a new "Chuck Norris fact": Chuck Norris can fix the broken U.S. migration system in 1 minute on Fox News.
This new "Chuck Norris fact" got me thinking. What kind of Chuck Norris facts could folks come up with in the U.S. migration policy debate? Even better, what if Chuck Norris were a migrant? Here's what I came up with.
It's almost as though this strain of conservatism doesn't want to see any nonwhites in the GOP, or anyone who thinks racism has no place in political discourse.
We're two months away from a new decade (the "teens") and people are still saying this crap? And believing it?
I hope that these people are not the reason Schumer and Obama keep delaying introduction of immigration legislation, or the reason Janet Napolitano keeps locking up Dream Act-eligible students and splitting up families. Because no one should be taking these racists seriously.
Nearly one year ago, on November 8, 2008, Long Island resident Marcelo Lucero was beaten and stabbed to death by a group of local teens who had decided to go "beaner hopping." They had already assaulted other Latinos earlier that day. The group appears to me to have viewed racial attacks as a way to stave off boredom, regularly going after those they viewed as the most vulnerable and despised in their community: Latino immigrants.
Long Island Wins is sponsoring a campaign to remember Marcelo. Remembering Marcelo's life and his death is important to me because there have been too many racial attacks in Philadelphia as well. Some incidents date back years, like the attack against Julio Maldonado and Denis Calderon in 1996, where law enforcement sided with the persecutors instead of the victims. Immigrants are still being attacked today in our community, and for the same reasons that Marcelo was killed: they are viewed as enemies or threats by many in the community and also seen as easy targets. Local law enforcement here facilitates those kinds of crimes by targeting immigrants themselves, usually for minor traffic violations, and turning them over to ICE, ensuring that immigrant victims of crimes will be less willing to call the police for protection. This problem is not limited to Philly--Luis Ramirez was killed in Pottsville, PA, just months before Marcelo's death.
Long Island Wins and Marcelo's family have very effectively pushed back against the hate in their community, and I hope that other communities around the country can follow their example.
And as Ted Hesson of Long Island Wins pointed out, Congress could do a lot to solve the problem of hate crimes by passing immigration reform to bring people out of the shadows and into the scope of the protections that others in the community enjoy. Right now, too many people are invisible to all but those who wish them harm.
Cross-posted at Young Philly Politics.
Julio Maldonado was deported to Peru on Thursday, October 22, 2009, after arriving in the U.S. 38 years ago at the age of 3.
He and his cousin, Denis Calderon, had been victims of an attack based on their ethnicity in 1996. Julio was wrongfully convicted of aggravated assault, incarcerated for a total of 8 years, and then deported.
His family's pleas for justice were ignored by local, state, and federal decisionmakers--except for the convicting judge, Judge Gregory Smith, who actually vacated his own verdict after an evidentiary rehearing. That decision was appealed by the District Attorney's office and overturned. A jury of Julio's peers also found him not guilty of the murder of one of his attackers. So how then was Julio locked up for so long and deported, when the convicting judge (in the aggravated assault trial) and the jury (in the murder trial) both decided he was not culpable?
When it came to wrongfully convicting, imprisoning, and deporting Julio, prosecutors and the Department of Homeland Security zealously worked to prevent a just result. When it came to acknowledging that a mistake had been made and families would be torn apart, everyone's hands were tied, from prosecutor Seth Williams to Governor Rendell (mayor of Philadelphia in 1996, now with the power to pardon an egregious error that occurred on his watch) to Thomas Decker, director of Immigration Customs and Enforcement in Philadelphia, to Janet Napolitano, head of DHS.
The case has broader significance, as Seth Williams will likely be Philadelphia's new District Attorney. He will have to decide, along with the mayor and police commissioner, whether to continue along Philadelphia's current track of close cooperation with ICE to target immigrant communities. Currently, Philly PD is routinely arresting Latin@ immigrants for minor traffic stops and turning them directly over to ICE, or actually joining ICE on home raids. This is in direct contravention of Mayor Nutter's expressed desire to make Philly an immigrant-friendly city. It is hard to be friendly when the immigrant community is terrified of the police, which is working hand in glove with the local ICE contingent to deport every last one of them.
Seth Williams didn't lift a finger to undo the damage he had done to Julio Maldonado and his family, despite repeated promises to the family. At least, we have no evidence he took any favorable action.
Will Philadelphia's elected officials side with the immigrant community, or with Lou Dobbs and others who want to see immigrants chased out of the U.S.? Right now, they are saying one thing and doing another.
[Image: Democratic candidate for District Attorney of Philadelphia, Seth Williams.]
The movement to ban Gilchrist from the conference was largely initiated by Kyle A. de Beausset '11, who in early October began using different university mailing lists to build support for uninviting Gilchrist due to his involvement in the Minuteman Project, which organizes civilians to patrol the border for illegal immigrants and to report crossings to the Border Patrol.
"It might be an interesting intellectual exercise for Harvard students to hear extremist views," de Beausset wrote in one of these e-mails, but he added that the "broader implications of legitimizing these extremist views with the Harvard name" were more important.
I am one of the "unnamed anarchist radicals" who helped cancel Jim Gilchrist's invitation to Harvard
Kyle de Beausset, an undergraduate student and migrant advocate, who was one of the original Harvard protesters, said yesterday that Gilchrist's removal will allow discussions to move toward policy, rather than animosity.Jim Gilchrist's organization, in characteristic fashion, has responded with hyperbole and falsehoods.
"It's a victory for people who are trying to get hate out of the immigration debate,'' he said. "There's a difference between having views, and hate speech.''
Beausset said more students have been alerted to the group's stance since the arrest in June of a woman with ties to the Minuteman Project.
Shawna Ford and two others allegedly shot and killed a father and son, and wounded the mother in a robbery that Beausset said was to "finance her nativist activism.''
He said the episode showed the extremes to which some members of the movement will go.
"I'm concerned about the broader national implications of legitimizing these extremist views with the Harvard name,'' he said in a letter to fellow students.Milton Valencia - Boston Globe (16 October 2009)
The award winning filmmaker Arturo Perez, Jr., just released the this powerful video in tandem with Presente.org's announcement that their Basta Dobbs campaign has signed up 50,000 people in support of their demand that CNN get rid of anti-migrant commentator Lou Dobbs. I'm happy to use this opportunity to announce that Citizen Orange has officially endorsed the Basta Dobbs campaign as evidenced by the "Who We Are" page.
Part of the reason I have been dutifully quantifying the number of pro-migrant blogs in the sanctuarysphere is so that I can encourage the sanctuarysphere to throw its full weight behind bastadobbs.com.
