On the twenty-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, and in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Williams, the country is revisiting its familiar demons of racial violence and police abuse of power. Now it’s time to broaden the dialogue on law enforcement and racial oppression to the border. Please view this video appeal from Presente.org, featuring footage from PBS Need to Know, and support the campaign calling for justice for Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas.
From Maria Puga, widow of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas:
In 2010 near San Diego, Border Patrol beat and tasered my husband Anastasio while he was hogtied and face down on the pavement. They tortured him to death, despite his repeated pleas for help.
Over the last two years, Border Patrol has refused to release the names of the agents responsible or to reveal whether those involved have been disciplined. Anastasio was not their only victim. Since the year Anastasio was killed, Border Patrol agents have killed or seriously injured at least 9 people from San Diego to Texas.
My family is demanding that the Department of Justice conduct an open and thorough investigation of all the killings committed by the Border Patrol since 2010. Will you join me in bringing justice to my family and the other families that have been victimized?
The Supreme Court is reviewing one of the most important cases on U.S. immigration policy in years. And immigrant communities across the country are bracing for a ruling that could determine the fate of countless families living in fear of both federal and state immigration authorities. Sadly, while the lawmakers behind Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law SB1070 are getting their day in court, justice continues to elude those most affected by the crackdown.
Author and activist Jeff Biggers speaks to Carlos Garcia of Puente Arizona about what the regime of anti-immigrant hate looks like on the ground, impossibly far from the corridors of the highest court in the land.
While Gov. Jan Brewer unceremoniously dumped her disgraced SB 1070 partner Russell Pearce from Arizona’s front seats at the historic Supreme Court hearing on the state’s controversial immigration law, the seminal voices of those most affected by Arizona’s punitive measures will remain in the shadows — and unheard, even in the landslide of media and political forums sure to follow.
In effect, as legal experts battle over the ramifications of states’ rights and immigration jurisdiction, and political pundits range the arpeggio of opinions on racial profiling, criminalization of immigration without proper papers, and SB 1070′s “attrition by enforcement” approach that has struck a nerve with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the legions of undocumented laborers propping up Arizona’s fragile economic recovery in tourism, construction and agriculture have largely been cut out of the national discussion on the state’s landmark immigration showdown.
Are immigrants, in the words of Puente Arizona director Carlos Garcia, “political footballs that politicians on both sides kick around to score points for their own reelection?”
At a Democratic-controlled congressional hearing, for example, New York Sen. Charles Schumer railed on Arizona’s rogue ways, while entertaining the anti-federal testimony of Pearce — the self-proclaimed architect of SB 1070, who became the first senate president in US history to be recalled last fall — along with former US Sen. Dennis DeConcini, a political relic who serves on the board of the Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison firm that stands to gain at the explosion of incarceration among undocumented entries, and Todd Landfried, executive director of Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, and state Sen. Steve Gallardo, a rising Latino political star.
Even with undocumented immigration plummeting, Arizona’s draconian law, if upheld, jeopardizes an estimated $48.8 billion in economic power, according to a study by the Center for American Progress last year.
For immigrant rights advocates like Carlos Garcia, director of the Phoenix-based Puente human rights organization that advocates for migrant justice, something even more is at risk: the core values of our American constitution and ways.
A couple of thousands of miles away from the Supreme Court chambers, Puente will lead protests tomorrow in Phoenix, along with other national efforts in support of immigrant rights.
I caught up with Garcia by email and asked him a few questions on how he views the proceedings in Washington, D.C., and back at home on Arizona’s immigration frontlines.
Jeff Biggers: At a Ccngressional hearing on SB 1070 today, former Sen. Russell Pearce addressed Arizona’s legislation, along with former US Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., Arizona state Sen. Steve Gallardo, and Todd Landfried, executive director of Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform. How do you think a testimony from an undocumented day laborer would have added to the hearing, in terms of daily realities and impacts of SB 1070?
Carlos Garcia: The voices that need to be heard in the SB 1070 debate are those of the people directly placed in the bill’s crosshairs. Our community is tired of being a political football that politicians on both sides kick around to score points for their own reelection. In the neighborhoods of Phoenix and across the state, immigrant communities are organizing to defend and advance their rights in ways that will benefit the entire country. When you defend the rights of those at the bottom, you lift everyone with you. When you defend the rights of anyone else, you leave someone behind. Immigrants are not valuable simply because we grow the crops in this country. Hearing from those on the front line would add the value of recognizing immigrants’ humanity and our capacity of visionaries who under the hardest of circumstances are rescuing democracy and justice from agents of intolerance in the state.
JB: Last week, AZ Dream Act leader Dulce Matuz nudged Gov. Jan Brewer off Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People. While SB 1070 arguably galvanized several copycat bills in other state legislatures like Alabama, how do you think Puente’s and NDLON’s work — and others on immigrant rights, such as the AZ Dreamers — have inspired and influenced more equitable human rights and immigration approaches in other communities and states?
CG: What happens in Arizona spreads. The state is both a laboratory for the far-right as well as an incubator of this generation’s vibrant human rights movement. The states who considered and turned away from copying SB 1070 did so because they saw the toll our boycotts and mobilizations have had on the state and they didn’t want to invite the same embarrassment. Two years ago, we said ‘the best way to support Arizona is to fight the places where police are being enlisted as immigration officers in your own towns.’ Since that call, hundreds of campaigns have been born challenging Arizonification and turning the tide from hate to human rights.
JB: If a jornalero — day worker — had her or his day in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, as opening statements are heard from Arizona representatives on SB 1070, what would she or he tell Chief Justice John Roberts about the law’s impact on racial profiling?
CG: SB 1070 creates a moral dilemma for all of us. On an individual and institutional level, we cannot comply with the hate that the bill represents. If they come for day laborers in the morning, they will come for the judges in the evening. This country has accepted the erosion of its own rights in the name of anti-immigrant causes. As a result, the very people who are being told we are not welcome in the US are those who are defending its core values and constitutional rights.
In Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio has used federal immigration programs to carry out the “worst racial profiling” that Department of Justice investigators have ever personally witnessed. We have come too far to allow Sheriffs or state laws judge people by the color of their skin. It’s the Supreme Court’s duty to keep our hard-fought rights from being turned backwards. But if the court fails its responsibility, it will be the day laborers and humble people of the state of Arizona who will ensure Arizona sees a better day. For us, the jury is already in. SB 1070 and similar federal programs need to be struck down.
JB: Last year, when Angelica Hernandez graduated from ASU as valedictorian of her mechanical engineering school as an undocumented youth, Matuz asked national leaders: “Do we want an engineering leader to leave this country? Do we want that innovator to solve the energy crisis in China.” If the Supreme Court upholds Arizona’s immigration law and “attrition through enforcement” approach, what do you think Arizona the US will lose in terms of immigrant innovators and workforce, and our overall economy?
CG: Attrition through enforcement is by definition a politics of misery. It’s impact is to make conditions so miserable that people will laughably ‘self-deport.’ Besides being ‘nazi-like,’ as Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles described SB 1070, there is another problem with the authors’ strategy. As prejudiced as Russell Pearce and other champions of SB 1070 may be, the misery they wish to inflict doesn’t discriminate. It impacts everyone and drags the country in the wrong direction.
JB: The national media is finally focusing on the punitive elements of border and immigration security measures, as witnessed with the tragic death of Anastasio Rojas at the hands of the US Border Patrol. How do you see the punitive measures of SB 1070 adding to such a human rights crisis?
CG: When they passed SB 1070, its authors declared a war of attrition on immigrants where “undocumented people are treated as criminals and Latinos are treated as suspects.” But as the Department of Justice concluded in their investigation into Arpaio, that was already the reality we lived in the state. Not one person has been deported as a result of SB 1070. The bill amplifies and normalizes a climate of hate generated from the federal government’s collaboration with Sheriffs like Arpaio through the Administrations deportation programs.
The Department of Homeland Security keeps setting fires that the Department of Justice repeatedly gets called to put out. Arizona’s human rights crisis could be solved by the president with a stroke of a pen. Instead the administration sues states like Arizona for passing immigration policies, and then replicates the state’s model through its own programs like Secure Communities.
You cannot legalize immigrants while criminalizing the immigrant community. Until the federal government abandons the failed experiment of enlisting police as ‘force multipliers’ in immigration and begins earnest efforts to provide legalization, the human rights crisis in the state and across the country is bound to deepen.
JB: According to the latest Department of Homeland Security data, undocumented entry into Arizona has dropped dramatically in the last two years. How would you describe daily life for undocumented immigrants in Arizona’s post-SB 1070 period since 2010?
CG: Life in Arizona for undocumented immigrants since SB 1070 passed is a combination of basic survival under a climate of hate and inspiring organizing that will one day turn hate to love.
JB: With nearly 50,000 Latinos reaching voting age every month in the US, and Arizona in particular undergoing a demographic shift among an aging Anglo population and a fast growing Latino youth population, do you think we’ll see a Latino governor in Arizona in the next decade? Can you imagine SB 1070 being overturned by a different AZ governor and state legislature in the near future?
CG: We’re ready for a new day in Arizona. Governor Brewer, Russell Pearce, and Sheriff Arpaio will be shamed by history — whether it is by the Supreme Court’s decision or through our mobilizing. The children of immigrants persecuted today will grow up to be tomorrow’s voters and they will remember how their parents were treated and will not look lightly on these times. The arc of history bends towards justice and we will bring dignity back to this state.
In light of the recent controversy over the New York City Police Department’s rampant, intrusive surveillance of Muslim communities, and the growing campaign against racial profiling in law enforcement, it’s worth stepping back and examining the elements of popular culture that shape our definitions of Otherness, and the legal and moral boundaries mainstream society draws between foreigner and citizen. In this essay, Daniel Tutt at altmuslim looks at the specter of “terror” through the lens of television.
When television portrays the war on terrorism, more than 67 percent of the time, the enemy is white, according to a recent study by the Norman Lear Center at USC. At first glance this seems odd. Isn’t the war on terror a war against extremist Muslims? Aren’t Muslims mostly brown-skinned?
The war on terrorism, both on television, and in real life, defies our immediate assumptions. The Washington Post recently revealed that a Muslim convert is heading up the CIA’s counter terrorism unit and that this person (his identity is anonymous) was instrumental in hunting down Osama bin-Laden.
But, in our popular imagination, we don’t like our enemies to be complex, and the genre of terrorism television knows this all too well.
The grandiose black-and-white good vs. evil plot lines seem to hit a more visceral tone. But the latest hit TV series on terrorism, Showtime’s Homeland, presents a picture of terrorism and the role of Islam within the war on terror that not only feels like it’s lifting from the daily news feed, but it taps into the complexity of our present moment, urging us to look deeply at who our enemy really is.
At first glance, the show’s story line seems difficult to base an entire series around: A Marine returns home, traumatized after being held captive for eight years in Iraq by an Al Qaeda cell, only to be faced with the pressure of serving as the poster boy for military heroism. Sargent Nick Brody (played by Damian Lewis) is deeply conflicted about his time in Iraq, and for half the first season he is surveilled by CIA Agent Carrie Matheson (played by Claire Danes) and her mentor at the CIA, Saul Berenson, played by Mandy Patinkin. Following an insider tip and a whole lot of intuition, Mattheson goes to any length to prove that Brody is not the war hero celebrity the media is making him out to be, but has actually been secretly turned to Al Qaeda’s ideology while in captivity in Iraq.
Mattheson suffers from a mental disorder, which she keeps secret to the CIA, and blames herself for 9/11. Since returning from Iraq, where she was also traumatized, her singular obsession is to take down Abu Nazir, Al Qaeda’s most elusive international terrorist. Like her television predecessor Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in 24, Mattheson is forced to cross ethical lines frequently. But her superiors support her cowboy ways, earning her the ability to almost mystically predict Abu Nazir’s next move. The implicit message of both Homeland and 24 (which earned its stripes as the quintessential post-9/11 terrorism fighting show) is thus similar: Only through transgressing the institutional inertia of the status quo and going above the law, can the bad guys be brought to justice in the war on terror.
The creators and co-producers of Homeland, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, have based the show off of an Israeli series Hatufim (English translation: Abducted), created by Gideon Raff. Gordon also produced “24.” But of course, the genre that Homeland taps into goes back much farther than 24. The real origin of Homeland is in the Cold War era film, The Manchurian Candidate, where an American veteran of the Korean War returns home having been brainwashed and subconsciously lured into serving as a secret puppet of the Communists.
Although, as Lewis points out in a recent interview, Homeland is different than The Manchurian Candidate in one primary way: Sargent Brody is not “brainwashed” by the enemy and is in continuously conflicted and ambivalent about his allegiance to Abu Nazir and Al Qaeda.
Homeland revolves around two points of tension: Has Abu Nazir really turned Brody to his cause while he was in captivity, or are Mattheson’s premonitions totally off base?
The second point of tension revolves around Brody’s conversion to Islam. Lewis claims that Brody’s conversion to Islam serves as the most important detail of the show. In the same interview as cited above, Lewis commented: “In a time of need, I had actually chosen to be a Muslim. We did discuss the immediate assumptions about that: ‘Oh my God, this guy wants to blow us up. Why else would a Marine have converted?’”
Yet Homeland mostly separates Brody’s conversion to Islam from Abu Nazir’s wicked Al Qaeda ideology. By presenting another religious minority through the lapsed Jewish character of Saul Berenson, the show throws even more grey matter into the religious dimension to terrorism. When Brody admits to Carrie that he has converted to Islam, he says, “Well, they didn’t have many Bibles over there. Don’t you think you’d turn to religion if you had to face what I faced?”
All of this goes to imply that the writers desired to make a clear point: Islam is not necessarily synonymous with terrorism. This nuance defies counter terrorism theories such as the conveyor belt theory of radicalization that argues identification with Islam solidifies ones commitment to the radical cause.
Another major facet of our conventional understanding of the war on terrorism is challenged in Homeland, and this point may be the most significant and radical of all. The ideology of the enemy is not a monochrome, black-and-white view of the world. Abu Nazir is almost made into a human at times. Like bin Laden, Nazir favors large scale attacks and dramatic acts of terror, yet by the end of season one, we are left to assume that part of his strategy with Brody (we learn that Brody is indeed working for Nazir by the end of season one) is to infiltrate the inner halls of power by propping Brody up to serve as a congressman. This represents not simply a desire to extinguish all Americans wherever you find them, but a long term strategy.
Nazir’s character represents a post Osama bin Laden Al Qaeda. He is one part Anwar Awlaki, in his understanding of American culture, and one part Osama bin Laden in his grandiosity of acts and smooth operational leadership. We see him largely through the gaze of Sargent Brody, and we find that Brody’s primary motivation for following Nazir is because he witnessed the murder of Nazir’s son, Iesa (Arabic for Jesus). Iesa’s murder by secret drone strike serves as the primary motivation for Brody’s allegiance to Nazir. This sounds all too familiar, think the Times Square bomber, Faizal Shahazad, who admitted to being radicalized in large part out of anger and frustration over drone strikes that were killing Muslims in South Asia.
Brody cites the strike on Iesa’s school, which he witnessed, as the primary motivation for his failed suicide mission in the last episode of season one. His horror over the memory of the attack recurs in nightmares, and Nazir exploits Brody’s anger over the cover up of the attack that killed his son Iesa. No one knows about the attack, and somehow Nazir and Brody know that the vice president is responsible for keeping it secret, which is why he becomes their primary target.
Brody is thus painted more as a political radical than a religious zealot. With this crucial nuance, the writers of Homeland have hit on one of the more neglected truths of radicalization in the name of Islam — that is most often looks more like a political movement than a religious movement. This is a change in the framing of the enemy that challenges us to re-conceptualize the nature of this enemy and the deep internal motivations behind terrorism.
Beyond Brody’s temptation with the cause of Nazir and the pain over Iesa’s death, we discover an even deeper driver to his radical cause in the second to last episode. In prep for a major act that is revealed in the last episode, Brody brings the family to Gettysburg, where he recounts in passionate detail the heroism of an everyday high school teacher who led his men into a suicide charge on the enemy, which turned the favor of the Union forces in the larger battle. Channeling such an iconic American battle as Gettysburg for the cause of Al Qaeda seems far-fetched, but the writers are up to something more than that.
The implicit message presented is that the modern warrior lacks access to an authentic cause that he can attach his desire for something greater than himself to. Critics might call this relativistic, as in, how can one ever find the cause of Al Qaeda just, but I think that misses a more complex point. Brody’s battle is also within. Homeland resonates with all of us because Brody is a lot like all of us, searching for something bigger than ourselves.
Like Plato reminds us, we must be careful out there, because everyone we meet is fighting a hard battle.
Daniel Tutt is an activist, writer, and Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and communication at the European Graduate School. His research and activism concentrates on Muslims in America, Islamophobia, and inter-religious dialogue. In philosophy, he works in the continental and psychoanalytic traditions where his work looks at ethics and political theory.
Trying to please all at once and disappointing everyone, the White House has long played a game of good-cop-bad-cop on immigration, promising reforms while clinging to some of the cruelest deportation policies.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s delicate waltz around immigration highlights complex frictions within the labor movement on immigration policy—revealing contrasts between immigration enforcement employees and the AFL-CIO leadership.
Though the mainstream labor movement has not always placed itself at the forefront of immigrants’ struggles for equality, the AFL-CIO has recently spoken out in defense of undocumented workers and their communities. The AFl-CIO Executive Council has joined a chorus of groups opposing Secure Communities, a notorious Homeland Security program that promotes the sharing of information between local and federal law enforcement authorities about the legal status of immigrants arrested by local police.
The AFL-CIO stated that the program encourages racial profiling, and demanded that the White House “Immediately terminate the operation of Secure Communities” and bar it from jurisdictions known to practice “discriminatory policing.” The statement, signed by the AFL-CIO and National Immigration Forum, specifically cited Alabama’s brutal new anti-immigrant law, which is currently being challenged in court.
In the background lies the basic contradiction in Obama’s posturing on immigration. On one hand, the White House professes to be easing its approach, supposedly by focusing on deporting immigrants with criminal convictions. Recently the administration attempted to rein in the more extreme elements unleashed under its “enforcement-only” strategy. Responding to overwhelming evidence of discrimination and abuse, Washington recently cut off ties to the infamous Sherriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, whose virulent “lock’em up” campaigns against Latino immigrants were fed by Secure Communities and its sister enforcement program, 287(g), which encourages local-federal collaboration.
But Secure Communities remains a pillar of the immigration regime. Freshly leaked documents indicate that the administration considers S-Comm to be essentially “mandatory” in nature, despite widespread criticism from state and local governments as well as advocacy groups. There’s still controversy around whether localities can opt out of the program.
But labor is by no means of one mind on immigration policy. A recent New York Times article by Julia Preston suggests conflict inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as the National ICE Council, a union representing thousands of officers, has resisted participating in training for the reformed deportation policies:
in a new sign of the deep dissension over immigration, the union… has so far not allowed its members to participate in the training. Without the formal assent of the union, the administration’s strategy could be significantly slowed for months in labor negotiations.
Preston cites earlier congressional testimony by National ICE Council president Chris Crane, who bristled at the idea of softening deportation policies. Pivoting to anti-immigrant sentiments, Crane has also appeared on Fox News and the Lou Dobbs Show to contend that the administration’s policy shifts could prevent effective enforcement of the law.
Though the Council is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, it can take independent political positions, hence the contrast with the AFL-CIO’s stance on S-Comm.
However, Crane told In These Times in an email correspondence that the NYT’s report of “dissension” was inaccurate. The delay was not caused by the union and has nothing to do with the policy, Crane said, but rather, with inadequate transparency and cooperation:
There is no standoff. DHS and ICE spent an extended period of time unilaterally developing both the Prosecutorial Discretion Memorandum and the associated training instead of working in partnership with the Union to jointly create a training program that would now be ready for implementation. Ultimately it is the Agency’s right to take that approach but it does dramatically slow down the process and forces the parties to follow the timelines of the negotiated agreement.
Crane acknowledged the union’s earlier criticisms of the administration’s deportation policies as poorly conceived and aimed at “satisfy[ing] immigrant advocacy groups.” But, he stressed, the current qualms were about the development process and quality of the training, not ideology.
Nonetheless, Crane argued, “Most of the policies put out by this Administration really are bad,” citing a lack of clarity around how much discretion agents could exercise when dealing with immigrants “in the field.” Although union members would seek to work with the administration to improve these practices, in Crane’s view, “ICE lacks effective leadership” under an “anti-union manager,” Director John Morton.
But from the perspective of immigrant rights’ advocates, the controversy around the training completely misses the point: the union conflict doesn’t really hinder a better deportation policy, and the supposed reforms do not truly improve the status quo. While ICE may be split internally on some issues, grassroots advocates for immigrant workers demand nothing short of a complete overhaul of the bureaucracy.
While we understand the concerns of job security and having clarity of what the rules are, the bigger picture that we see is, here you have an entire sector, which they’re a part of, whose job security relies on the mass and unjust incarceration and deportation of innocent people, of people who have longstanding ties in the U.S., and who have been criminalized for the past [twenty-five] years now under really, really outdated policies. That’s really what’s happening here.
While NNIRR has partnered with unions on some immigant-justice campaigns, Rivas said the politics of coalition-building are generally driven by the perceived interests of union members.
Throughout American labor’s history, attitudes toward immigration have fractured and wavered according to political and economic trends and organizing strategy. The political evolution of labor movements have often reflected the massive presence of immigrants in the workforce and by extension unions. Foreign-born workers have been alternately embraced as fellow workers and demonized as job-stealers–and sometimes, when it comes to the law-enforcement business, treated as problems to be fixed.
Today, immigration enforcement supports a major industry and government sector. The bureaucracy in turn serves the larger enterprise of simultaneously excluding and exploiting undocumented workers. Similarly, the prison industry employs legions of working-class people, many with robust labor unions, yet feeds off the systematic incarceration of the poor and disenfranchised.
As long as the 99-percent are divided among the people doing the enforcing and the people getting getting enforced upon, this awkward balance will stay in place, teetering on the wall between those who comply and those who don’t.
It’s not often that human rights and business profits line up on the same side of a political debate, but Alabama is a special place. The Cotton State was not only ground zero for some of the worst abuses under Jim Crow; it was also the flashpoint for early struggles that fused economic empowerment with civil rights, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Today, Alabama is once again a focal point for racial and class struggles, ignited by an anti-immigrant law that tests our definitions of economic citizenship in a world of fluid borders.
The law, HB 56, mirrors many of the “copycat” anti-immigrant bills that have gone viral in state legislatures from Arizona to Indiana. It would impose onerous identification requirements that encourage police to arrest and detain anyone who couldn’t present the right papers. Although some of the harsher provisions were blocked by a federal court earlier this year, the legislation (signed into law in June) still threatens to further demonize immigrants and to crystallize the racist ideology driving a two-tier economy, where the privileges of the elite are subsidized by the vicious exploitation of the 99 percent.
Sadly, if the law were only a matter of shamelessly scapegoating a group of vulnerable newcomers, the law might face considerably less opposition. But the debate reveals a convoluted class-based political calculus: employers contend that draconian anti-immigrant policies could cripple the economy.
$40 million—A conservative estimate of how much Alabama’s economy would contract if only 10,000 undocumented immigrants stopped working in the state as a result of H.B. 56.
$130 million—The amount Alabama’s undocumented immigrants paid in taxes in 2010. These include state and local, income, property, and consumption taxes. This revenue would be lost if H.B. 56 were to do its job and drive all unauthorized immigrants from the state.
$300,000—The amount one farmer, Chad Smith of Smith Farms, estimates he has lost because of labor shortages in the wake of H.B. 56. Another farmer, Brian Cash of K&B Farm, estimates that he lost $100,000 in one single month because of the law.
This projected economic consequences (not to mention the cost of implementing and enforcing the law) would only exacerbate the state’s economic turmoil: nearly one in five in Alabama live in poverty and unemployment hovers well above the nationwide rate.
The impacts of HB 56 could span across immigrants’ communities, disrupting the education of their children and subjecting even workers with papers to mistreatement and discrimination by police as well as neighbors.
Even though economic anxieties are fueling the anti-immigrant crackdown, economic concerns also inform the widening opposition. Some pro-business advocates complain that the loss of migrant labor hurts their bottom line, often because others don’t step up to fill backbreaking jobs like tomato picking.
But here’s where the political landscape may slip dangerously in a direction that counters the very principles on which activists are fighting the law. Suddenly the case for a more lenient policy toward “illegal aliens” is not that they’re vital members of their families, communities, unions and workplaces, or that immigration agents shouldn’t be campaigning to tear apart families, or that everyone has a right to due process, or that democracy in a pluralistic society hinges on equality before the law. If you listen to the bosses with whom civil rights groups have formed an uneasy alliance, HB 56 is bad for Alabama not so much because it criminalizes people who want nothing more than to make a living for themselves, free of the oppression of an arbitrary and dysfunctional legal regime.
Instead, it’s harmful because it’s bad for business.
But while the strange-bedfellows strategy may be politically expedient, the opposition to Alabama’s anti-immigrant law can’t be centered on a narrow calculus that elevates capital above human rights. The Obama administration, too, has challenged immigration policies in Alabama and Arizona on anti-discrimination grounds, but overall, the White House has perpetuated the rampant abuses that plague the federal detention and deportation system.
And the deeper labor issues manifested by the immigration crisis wouldn’t go away if the law were defeated: there would still be no national discussion on combating wage theft, human trafficking, and restrictions on the right to organize–problems that affect native-born and immigrants alike.
Workers are increasingly facing situations where their bosses and even customers or clients feel the authority to threaten and harass with little recourse of justice. When local police take a mandate to enforce federal immigration laws, employers have a powerful tool to undermine hard won labor protections. Its a threat to all workers and the fundamental right to organize.
The only way to reorient the dialogue toward rights and away from profits is to help workers and organized labor understand that the zero-sum game of “competition” for the most degrading jobs keeps the economically disenfranchised divided along false lines of “legal” versus “illegal.”
For now, activists may form strategic alliances to fight anti-immigrant bills like Alabama’s. But if they let bosses and big business frame the debate going forward, they’ll lose the real battle—for economic justice for all.
In the wake of a scathing federal report on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Democracy Now! interviews Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona, and Stephen Lemons, a Phoenix New Times reporter who has helped expose Arpaio’s abuses and antics. The recent Department of Justice report has highlighted many of the most egregious aspects of Sheriff Joe’s reign of terror, but, as Lemons points out, this is hardly news to people who have had to live under Maricopa’s twisted anti-immigrant tyranny for years.
Parraz tied together the various abuses of power that stem from Arpaio’s focus on humiliating and oppressing the Latino community. Not only did he turn his immigrant-bashing into a vehicle for absorbing federal money into his district; his fixation on enforcing immigration law came at the expense of other police work, including a massive accumulation of neglected sex crime cases.
These were victims as young as two years old, to young women and girls, were violated, were raped or molested, and those cases were not followed up. In some instances, they even had the name of the perpetrator. They just—cases were just not—were actually said to be cleared or were closed. And so, this was done. And then this is the type of—just of lack of accountability, lack of concern Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies have to those instances. One of the reasons we believe is that most of those victims were either undocumented or were for children of undocumented parents, so it was not a priority on there, in terms of the sheriff’s office. So, again, this is about misplaced priorities.
He said that while the Justice Department’s findings validate the evidence that many have observed for years, the actual impact of Washington’s position boils down to federal and local politics, where, unfortunately, xenophobia plays well:
[A]s far as the fallout from the Justice Department’s report… It validates a lot of what’s been said and already been reported. They use a lot of information that has already been in the press, that is familiar to people in Maricopa County, but perhaps not out of Maricopa County….
Arpaio loves this sort of thing. He loves going up against the Obama administration. He loves going up against the federal government. He uses these sorts of conflicts with the federal government to raise money for his campaign kitty, which at last count was about $3 million. He boasts he has over $6 million now in his campaign re-election fund. And as you’ve noted, he’s going to be running for re-election in 2012. This is also, unfortunately, very popular in Maricopa County, at least with a majority of the population who, you know, may have problems with some of what Arpaio does, his misspending of funds and so forth, but when it comes to discriminating against brown people, unfortunately, that is popular with some segments of Maricopa County.
Sadly, that attitude may also pervade many segments of the country as a whole, and the debate will only get uglier as the 2012 election approaches--thanks in no small part to President Obama’s utter failure to comprehensively address immigration reform. Despite the good-cop-bad-cop game that the feds are playing with Arpaio, Sheriff Joe is a mere caricature of a much larger monster, a phalanx of anti-immigrant hate that is of the White House’s own making.
The clock struck at 1,095 days and 11 hours today for Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz. — or, at least according to the ticking icon on the Phoenix New Times home page that had asked readers for years: “How long has Sheriff Joe been under investigation by the feds?”
That investigation culminated Thursday when the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released its long-awaited report, which found a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” in Arpaio’s office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and over 400 interviews with sheriff’s department personnel, inmates and experts, the report documented “a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,” resulting in gross violations of constitutional rights.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday’s press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012, to accept DOJ’s measures to take “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit. Perez expressed DOJ’s willingness ”to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO,” adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.
That’s a big if. Now a real clock may be finally ticking for the countdown of the nearly 20-year reign of America’s self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff.”
One federal department is not even waiting: Within hours of the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program.
The announcement comes amid growing calls for Arpaio’s resignation, in the aftermath of allegations that his department mishandled hundreds of sex crime reports in the Phoenix area township of El Mirage.
Rep. Raul Grijalva was the first to call for Arpaio to step down.
“Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances,” the Tucson Democrat said last week, “but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago.”
A few days later Rep. Ed Pastor, who represents Maricopa County in Congress, endorsed a call for Arpaio’s resignation. So did nine state legislators. Even Cafe Con Leche Republicans, a national organization, released a statement this week that “Arpaio has disgraced his office and the Republican Party.”
On Monday, religious leaders from 14 mainline denominations called on the attorney general to release its findings and take “immediate action to quell the growing human rights crisis in Arizona,” a reference to Arpaio’s law enforcement regime.
Citizens for a Better Arizona, a new group, which organized the successful recall of Tea Party leader and former state Senate president Russell Pearce in November, organized a major turnout at the Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting on Wednesday to call for Arpaio’s resignation.
“This is a very important day for Maricopa County,” County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a critic of Arpaio, told supporters following the release of the report. “It’s a day many of us have been awaiting. Let this be the end of Arpaio. Give us a better criminal justice system.”
The 79-year-old sheriff has rarely failed to express disdain for federal oversight, especially from the Obama administration. Last week, Arpaio couldn’t resist tweeting his glee about a dubious report in the Globe tabloid newspaper that his “Cold Case posse” investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate had the first lady “in a panic.”
Two years ago, after Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano had also announced her intentions to terminate the DHS cooperation with Arpaio’s office, Sheriff Arpaio appeared on the Glenn Beck show and openly mocked federal authority. Arpaio claimed that local and state laws allow him to target “some people who have an erratic, scared … whatever … if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”
The DOJ report concluded that Arpaio engaged in racial profiling.
“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of the kind identified by the Supreme Court in Arlington Heights,” the report noted, “showing that Sheriff Arpaio has intentionally decided to implement his immigration program in a manner that discriminates against Latinos.”
The report added a telling detail about Arpaio’s effectiveness as a law enforcement officer. While his operations involved “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” according to one expert, “enforcement actions rarely result in human smuggling arrests.”
Another law enforcement officer last week levied a similar charge against Arpaio on the botched sex crimes investigations. Bill Louis, former assistant police chief in El Mirage, wrote an Op-Ed in the Arizona Republic declaring that ”Sheriff Joe Arpaio failed these victims. At this point there is little that can be done to undo the harm they have endured.”
Not that criticism or outrage has ever moved Arpaio to veer from the style that has made him a hero to some conservatives: his high-profile immigrant sweeps, his order that prisoners had to wear pink underwear, or his reality TV exploits. Last spring, he simply shrugged off calls for his resignation over allegations of his department’s misuse of $100 million.
Will Arpaio comply with the Justice Department’s demands?
“I’ve seen police chiefs, DAs and others who have been able to reform the system,” Perez said at his press conference today.
But “reform” and “Arpaio” are two words rarely seen together.
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(Update: At a Thursday afternoon press conference, a perturbed but defiant Sheriff Arpaio bristled at the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation of its immigration data agreement with his department. He warned such a move would allow undocumented criminal offenders to go undetected and be “dumped back onto a street near you.” Arpaio suggested that “President Obama might as well erect a sign on our border, [saying] ‘Our home is your home.’” He did not address any of the allegations of racial profiling and civil rights violations in the DOJ’s report.
Nonetheless, Arpaio said that his office will cooperate with the Department of Justice, “to the best we can,” and he thanked the President for injecting immigration into the national presidential debate. ”But don’t come here using me as a whipping boy for a national and international problem,” he said, adding “I will continue to enforce all of the laws.”
Less than two weeks after Citizens for a Better Arizona announced their intent to form the nation’s first ever “Citizens Posse” to hold infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio accountable for gross abuses of power and civil rights violations, an alarming new investigation just released by the Associated Press has found that hundreds of reported sex crimes, including child molestation, have fallen through the cracks of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio may have found time to set up a new posse to check President Obama’s birth certificate, launch an armed “air posse” to hunt down migrants from the sky, and stroll the New Hampshire streets with failing Republican presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry last week, but the sheriff’s office “failed to follow through,” according to the AP, on at least “32 reported child molestations — with victims as young as 2 years old.”
In truth, reports on Arpaio’s extraordinary incompetence and oversight on sexual abuse cases have been well-documented for months — an ABC15 investigation earlier in the spring noted that “children who had the courage to come forward and say they were molested, raped or abused were simply ignored by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office detectives.”
As part of a groundswell of outrage, U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) called for Arpaio’s immediate resignation in a released statement today:
“This nothing-to-see-here attitude is the worst kind of unaccountable arrogance, and Mr. Arpaio needs to step down before any more damage is done to public confidence in our law enforcement and justice system,” Grijalva said. “The picture emerging — no follow-up, no investigation, no prosecution, no justice and a shield of silence after the fact — is not how we conduct law enforcement in this country. Enforcing laws against violent crime, whatever a victim’s legal status, is mandatory and not something we leave to individual communities as an open question. Selective enforcement undermines respect for our brave legal officers and is rightly not tolerated by the public.
“Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances, but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago. He should give the affected families a sense that justice is finally being done by taking the honorable route and resigning now.”
As Phoenix New Times reporter Stephen Lemons noted last week, Arpaio is also facing an upcoming federal court hearing on racial profiling and civil rights violations.
Even right-wing newscaster Glenn Beck openly mocked Arpaio for his blatant racist profiling tactics in 2009, when the sheriff was dropped from the federal 287 (g) enforcement program. Defiant of federal authority, Arpaio told Beck he had the right to “enforce” certain laws, when “some people who have an erratic, scared…whatever…if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”
Earlier this fall, the Citizens for a Better Arizona organized the extraordinary recall and election defeat of former state senate President Russell Pearce, an anti-immigrant extremist supported by Arpaio.
In a special press conference on Nov. 21 in front of the Arizona State Capitol, Citizens co-founder Randy Parraz and other supporters warned Arpaio of their intent to serve as a “Citizen’s Posse” and watchdog of the sheriff’s long-time alleged misuse of county funds, civil rights violations and reality-TV antics. In 2009, reporters from the East Valley Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for their series, “Reasonable Doubt,” on the human and economic costs of Arpaio’s reckless operations.
As part of an upcoming January convention, Parraz said the Citizens group would focus on four areas:
1 Asked that Gov. Brewer apologize for intervening in the redistricting process2. Asked the Gov. to call a special session to extend unemployment benefits to Arizonans out of work
3. Announced the formation of a Citizens Posse to take on the work of holding Sheriff Arpaio accountable over the next 12 months
4. Announced the recruitment of 5,000 volunteers to commit to gathering 100 signatures to determine if support exists to recall Gov. Brewer; until 5,000 volunteers sign up and make the pledge there will be no recall.
Another key human rights organization in Phoenix, Puente, has also launched a new watchdog campaign against Arpaio.
Last Sunday, during a speech made at the dedication of the monument honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King, President Obama declared, in King-like cadences, that the slain civil rights leader “stirred our conscience.”
The president, who is desperately trying to win back Latino votes lost since 2008, went on in the speech to say that King reminds us “to show compassion to the immigrant family, with the knowledge that most of are just a few generations removed from similar hardships.” He has also taken to engaging in high-profile appointments and meetings with Latino media executives, like Univision’s president, César Conde, and Latino superstars like Shakira.
While Obama’s meetings and his words of compassion for immigrant families are most welcome, the president’s deeds – and their effects on immigrant families – provide a stunning and tragic contrast.
As documented in Tuesday’s broadcast of PBS Frontline’s ‘Lost in Detention’ documentary, President Obama’s policies have led to the record and heart-breaking deportation of more than 1 million immigrants, the separation of thousands of families, and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands forced to live in subhuman conditions in what some of us are calling “Obama’s Immigrant Gulag.” Detainees fall victim to rape and sexual abuse, racism, having to eat worm-infested and rotten food, physical and psychological abuse, the denial of basic rights and other humiliating conditions.
At the heart of this immigrant tragedy is a radical racial profiling program known as “Secure Communities,” or S-COMM, which turns local and state law enforcement officers into immigration officers who are beginning to ask everyone – citizen and non-citizen – for their papers simply because they look a certain way.
By the tens of thousands, Latinos, one of the groups most profiled under S-COMM, will watch the documentary, which will speak to the concerns about the president’s immigration policies and about which an increasing numbers of us are growing angry and impatient.
Polls, like the Latino Decisions-ImpreMedia, conducted in August 2011, tell us definitively that most Latino voters know one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Presente.org and its allies in 10 cities will call on the Obama Administration to do away with the rotten fruits of S-COMM and other immigration policies he promised to either alter or abolish altogether. The absolute failure and damage of these immigration policies have been thoroughly documented by lawyers, immigrant rights groups and, increasingly, journalists like those responsible for tonight’s unprecedented documentary.
Trying to cover up and divert the attention of the public, especially the now very fed up Latino voter public, will not work. Trying to blame the failure of S-COMM, a program of the executive branch of government, by handing over responsibility to Congress, the legislative branch, as Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top advisor on immigration, has done repeatedly, will not work.
Latinos are not stupid. We will not accept the false statements and diversionary tactics of apologists for the abominable immigration policies of the administration.
To (re)gain trust of Latino voters, Obama must make fundamental changes to the immigration laws he can change at will, as he proved on August 18, when he announced slight changes to immigration policy after groups across the country protested his campaign offices, including his campaign headquarters.
Until President Obama makes more fundamental changes to his dangerous immigration policies, we will take back the slogan that Obama the candidate borrowed from Latinos – “Sí Se Puede/Yes We Can” – and use it for our efforts to both stop S-COMM and abolish Obama’s Immigrant Gulag.
In Maria Hinojosa’s documentary, “Lost in Detention,” which will air tonight on PBS’ “Frontline,” a father of three sits down with the journalist who asks him how he has handled his wife’s deportation. She was removed from the U.S. after she was pulled over for a traffic violation.
“I haven’t handled it,” he said. “It handled me.”
In many ways the immigration enforcement system is so overwhelming and so rogue that it handles all it touches. Making sense of what’s happening, and of the damage the system inflicts, is no easy task.
Hinojosa’s film uncovers some of the most troubling sides of that system, from local police involvement in deportation to abuses in detention centers. The film is perhaps the first time a full narrative about the failures of Obama’s immigration policy has been articulated to a mainstream public audience.
“I would just hope that maybe this documentary helps people engage with their neighbors and their friends,” Hinojosa told me. “Maybe we can just have this conversation.”
The last time I talked to Hinojosa, we had both recently returned from reporting inside immigration detention centers. And at the time, we were both still reeling from the experience. When we spoke again yesterday, I asked her about the detention centers.
In your film, you spend a lot of time on Willacy Detention Center, which you entered and filmed. When I went there, I most remember scenes of detainees marched up and down the hallways in silence, except for the sounds of guards yelling and metal doors slamming. I remember walking by a small holding cell where recently detained people were jailed after being loaded off the buses and paddy wagons. One woman was called out and a guard pointed her over to sit down at a table to conduct intake, handing her a face mask to wear before she spoke to the detention center worker. The women looked like they were coming into a prison camp, which is exactly where they were. The place was unreal. It’s not.
When I think back about what I saw in these detention centers, to be honest with you, everything that I saw was shocking. I heard stories of people who were detained who said things to me like, “I was fed food with maggots;” “I was fed raw chicken;” “I was fed spoiled food;” “I had no one to talk to and so, you know, we gave rats names;” “We could not see the sunlight;” “I was held for 10 days and nobody once told me why I was held, I never got a phone call out, I never got to see a judge, I never got to see a lawyer.” All of these things are shocking because they are happening in our country, on our watch.
Here in this office today, there was someone who I was talking to who looks like you—a woman with fair skin—but she has a green card, she’s from France. I just told her, “You have to become a citizen, you have to become a citizen now, you are not safe.”
People don’t realize that, you know, people think, oh Maria you’re being a little bit extreme. But the truth is that there are people who are being held in these places who have been living in our country with legal permits, with green cards and now they are being rounded up and detained and deported.
Willacy is a notorious place and you’ve done a lot of work in “Lost In Detention” to substantiate why: rampant sexual abuse, physical violence and blatant racism by guards. I know that you also visited two other detention enters while reporting. Is it your sense that immigration detention in the United States suffers from these kinds of abuses generally?
The problem with the immigration detention reality is that nobody at a very senior level has really spent any time understanding the fact that we now have the largest civil detention system in the world. So from the beginning, you have a huge population that’s being held, but there is no real government policy that is applied to civil detention. If you’re housed in a prison, you fall under the legal structure of the Bureau of Prison. If there’s abuse in that prison, there’s a legal path for you to make a complaint. If you are an immigrant and you are detained in an immigrant detention facility, you do not have the same rights to challenge the conditions under which you are being held.
So, what does that mean for our country? That you have thousands of people that are being held, but it’s unclear whether or not they have any legal recourse if anything happens to them while they’re being detained?
As a journalist, I’m concerned about this. As an American, I’m concerned about this. Because we believe that there’s some kind of legal recourse that we all have, because we have basic rights in our country. Now all of a sudden, you’re encountering a population that’s being told, “Actually you don’t have any legal recourse.” If abuses happen, well, if the abused is an immigrant then they just deport that person and the abuse case goes away.
Your documentary focuses in significant part on Secure Communities. You tell stories about that program, which checks the immigration status of anyone booked into a local jail, tearing families apart when a mother is stopped for a traffic violation. You interviewed Cecilia Munoz, the Obama administration’s top person on immigration. She told you that as long as long as Congress funds ICE to deport 400,000 people a year, the administration will continue to uphold the law of the land and these kinds of “collateral” consequences are inevitable. Resistance against Secure Communities is huge. I wonder how long you think the administration can keep this up?
I think that right now this is a system that the wheels are turning and it’s going to be very difficult to stop. You know, one of our whistle blowers, a former ICE employee, basically said, this is a machine that is starting and it’s being funded by Congress and so you’re not going to go back to Congress if you’re ICE and say, “Oh we couldn’t reach the 400,000 number that you funded us to meet.” No, if you’re ICE, you’re going to find 400,000 to deport.
You hear something like this coming from Cecilia Munoz, who was given a MacArthur Genius Award for her work on immigration and being an immigrant advocate… I’m sure this is very difficult for her; she didn’t say that it was in her interview. What she did say is that there will be 400,000 deportations a year.
The Obama administration, when it was running for office, was saying, we hear your pain to Latinos and to other immigrant constituencies. Now it is essentially saying, we feel your pain but we’re going to cause it, too.
You’ve said this is getting worse. What do you mean?
Well, we didn’t have hundreds of detention centers housing immigrant detainees. We didn’t have that. If you were here and you were a refugee and you were applying for political asylum, you were not going to be housed in a detention center while that was happening…. I think that it’s not just individual stories of families being separated, it’s the fact that this is happening every hour in our country, somewhere a process is being made to figure out which immigrant where is going to be detained.
As a woman in particular, this was a difficult story to report, because I met two women personally who were sexually assaulted while they were detained. One of them ends up in our documentary, basically telling us that she had been told that if she talked about the fact that she had been sexually assaulted by a male guard, that it would go worse for her. That she could be killed; that she could be deported. This to me is so distressing….
I think of one story that resonated that did not end up in the documentary. One of the young women we met, she was raised in Austin, she speaks perfect English, your typical American girl—except she wasn’t, she didn’t have a working green card. She was telling this story about what they would do at Willacy when they would find a bed bug or a flea or lice. She said that they would take all of the women, they would undress them, they would strip them, they would have them strip all the beds, all the sheets, put this all into one big pile, that they’d go wash or destroy it. And then all the women had to stand in line for the showers, which are open, no privacy. And she said, “So there we were all standing in a line naked to go to the showers, and you know there’s this movie I remember seeing as a younger person, and I felt like I was in it. The movie was called ‘Schindler’s list.’ ”
To me, that just sent shudders through my spine. Maybe she did not quite understand what the comparison was that she was making, I don’t know. To me, just hearing her say this was so shocking that I almost did not have a follow-up question. This is important for all of us living in the country to know and see. We have to see it in order for it to change.
