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Modifying ICE does not Work, ICE Needs to be Eliminated
PHOENIX (By
Jon
Garrido, The Jon Garrido News
Network & New Services) March 16, 2009
D้jเ vu
is the experience of feeling sure
one has witnessed or experienced a
new situation previously, although
the exact circumstances of the
previous encounter are uncertain.
The experience of d้jเ vu is usually
accompanied by a compelling sense of
familiarity, and also a sense of
"eeriness," "strangeness," or
"weirdness."
The deportations
happened once
in the 1930s and it is
happening again all over the United States. It is
d้jเ vu all over again.
Ignacio Pi๑a's father and oldest sister were farming sugar
beets in 1931 in the fields of Hamilton, Mont., and his mother was cooking
tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Pi๑a saw plainclothes authorities
burst into his home.
"They came in with guns and told us to get
out," recalls Pi๑a, 81, a retired railroad worker in Bakersfield, Calif., of
the 1931 raid. "They didn't let us take anything," not even a trunk that
held birth certificates proving he and his five siblings were U.S.-born
citizens.
The family was thrown into a jail for 10
days before being sent by train to Mexico. Pi๑a says he spent 16 years of
"pure hell" there before acquiring papers of his Utah birth and returning to
the USA.
The deportation of Pi๑a's family tells an
almost-forgotten story of a 1930s anti-immigrant campaign. Tens of
thousands, and possibly more than 400,000, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans
were pressured through raids and job denials to leave the USA during the
Depression. Many, mostly children, were U.S. citizens.
If their tales seem incredible, a newspaper
analysis of the history textbooks used most in U.S. middle and high schools
may explain why: Little has been written about the exodus, often called "the
repatriation."
That may soon change. As the U.S. Congress
prepares to vote on bills that would help undocumented workers become
legal residents and boost enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, an effort to
address deportations that happened 70 years ago has gained traction:
Former Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif. introduced a bill
in the last session of the U.S. House that called for a commission to
study the "deportation and coerced emigration" of U.S. citizens and legal
residents. The panel would have also recommend remedies that could have included
reparations. "An apology should be made," now Secretary of Labor
Solis says.
Co-sponsor Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.,
says history may repeat itself. He says a new House bill that makes being an
undocumented immigrant a felony could prompt a "massive deportation of U.S.
citizens," many of them U.S.-born children leaving with their parents.
In January 2007, California became the first
state to enact a bill that apologizes to Hispanic families for the 1930s civil
rights violations. It declined to approve the sort of reparations the U.S.
Congress provided in 1988 for Japanese-Americans interned during World War
II.
Democratic state Sen. Joe Dunn, a
self-described "Irish white guy from Minnesota" who sponsored the state
bill, pushed a measure to require students be taught about the 1930s
emigration. He says as many as 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were
coerced into leaving, 60% of them U.S. citizens.
No precise figures exist on how many of
those deported in the 1930s were undocumented immigrants. Since many of those
harassed left on their own, and their journeys were not officially recorded,
there are also no exact figures on the total number who departed.
At least 345,839 people went to Mexico from
1930 to 1935, with 1931 as the peak year, says a 1936 dispatch from the U.S.
Consulate General in Mexico City.
"It was a racial removal program," says Mae
Ngai, an immigration history expert at the University of Chicago, adding
people of Mexican ancestry were targeted.
A pressure campaign
In the early 1900s, Mexicans poured into
the USA, welcomed by U.S. factory and farm owners who needed their labor.
Until entry rules tightened in 1924, they simply paid a nickel to cross the
border and get visas for legal residency.
"The vast majority were here legally,
because it was so easy to enter legally," says Kevin Johnson, a law
professor at the University of California, Davis.
They spread out across the nation. They
sharecropped in California, Texas and Louisiana, harvested sugar beets in
Montana and Minnesota, laid railroad tracks in Kansas, mined coal in Utah
and Oklahoma, mined copper in Arizona, packed meat in Chicago and assembled cars in Detroit.
By 1930, the U.S. Census counted 1.42
million people of Mexican ancestry, and 805,535 of them were U.S. born, up
from 700,541 in 1919.
Change came in 1929, as the stock market
and U.S. economy crashed. That year, U.S. officials tightened visa rules,
reducing legal immigration from Mexico to a trickle. They also discussed
what to do with those already in the USA.
"The government undertook a program that
coerced people to leave," says Layla Razavi, policy analyst for the Mexican
American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). "It was really a hostile
environment." She says federal officials in the Hoover administration, like
local-level officials, made no distinction between people of Mexican
ancestry who were in the USA legally and those who weren't.
"The document trail is shocking," says
Dunn, whose staff spent two years researching the topic after he read the
1995 book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, by
Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez.
On r eview
of hundreds of pages of
documents, some provided by Dunn and MALDEF and others found at the National
Archives, they cite officials saying the deportations lawfully focused on
undocumented immigrants while the exodus of legal residents was voluntary. Yet
they suggest people of Mexican ancestry faced varying forms of harassment
and intimidation:
Raids
Officials staged well-publicized
raids in public places. On Feb. 26, 1931, immigration officials suddenly
closed off La Placita, a square in Los Angeles, and questioned the roughly
400 people there about their legal status.
The raids "created a climate of fear and
anxiety" and prompted many Mexicans to leave voluntarily, says Balderrama,
professor of Chicano studies and history at California State University, Los
Angeles.
In a June 1931 memo to superiors, Walter
Carr, Los Angeles district director of immigration, said "thousands upon
thousands of Mexican aliens" have been "literally scared out of Southern
California."
Some of them came from hospitals and needed
medical care en route to Mexico, immigrant inspector Harry Yeager wrote in a
November 1932 letter.
The Wickersham Commission, an 11-member
panel created by President Hoover, said in a May 1931 report
immigration inspectors made "checkups" of boarding houses, restaurants and
pool rooms without "warrants of any kind." Labor Secretary William Doak
responded the "checkups" occurred very rarely.
Jobs withheld
Prodded by labor unions,
states and private companies barred non-citizens from some jobs, Balderrama
says.
"We need their jobs for needy citizens,"
C.P. Visel of the Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Coordination of
Unemployment Relief wrote in a 1931 telegram. In a March 1931 letter to Doak,
Visel applauded U.S. officials for the "exodus of aliens deportable and
otherwise who have been scared out of the community."
Emilia Castenada, 79, recalls coming home
from school in 1935 in Los Angeles and hearing her father say he was being
deported because "there was no work for Mexicans." She says her father, a
stonemason, was a legal resident who owned property. A U.S. citizen who
spoke little Spanish, she left the USA with her brother and father, who was
never allowed back.
"The jobs were given to the white
Americans, not the Mexicans," says Carlos DeAnda Guerra, 77, a retired
furniture upholsterer in Carpinteria, Calif. He says his parents entered the
USA legally in 1917 but were denied jobs. He, his mother and five U.S.-born
siblings were deported in 1931, while his father, who then went into hiding,
stayed to pick oranges.
"The slogan has gone out over the Los
Angeles and is being adhered to 'Employ no Mexican while a white man is
unemployed,' " wrote George Clements, manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce's agriculture department, in a memo to his boss Arthur Arnoll. He
said the Mexicans' legal status was not a factor: "It is a question of
pigment, not a question of citizenship or right."
Public aid threatened
County welfare
offices threatened to withhold the public aid of many Mexican-Americans, Ngai says. Memos show they also offered to pay for trips to Mexico but
sometimes failed to provide adequate food. An immigration inspector reported
in a November 1932 memo that no provisions were made for 78 children on a
train. Their only sustenance: a few ounces of milk daily.
Most of those leaving were told they could
return to the USA whenever they wanted, wrote Clements in an August 1931
letter. "This is a grave mistake, because it is not the truth." He reported
each was given a card that made their return impossible, because it showed
they were "county charities." Even those born in the USA, he wrote, wouldn't
be able to return unless they had a birth certificate or similar proof.
Forced departures
Some of the deportees
who were moved by train or car had guards to ensure they left the USA and
others were sent south on a "closed-body school bus" or "Mexican gun boat,"
memos show.
"Those who tried to say 'no' ended up in
the physical deportation category," Dunn says, adding they were taken in
squad cars to train stations.
Mexican-Americans recall other pressure
tactics. Arthur Herrada, 81, a retired Ford engineer in Huron, Ohio, says
his father, who was a legal U.S. resident, was threatened with deportation
if he didn't join the U.S. Army. His father enlisted.
'We weren't welcome'
"It was an injustice that shouldn't have
happened," says Jose Lopez, 79, a retired Ford worker in Detroit. He says
his father came to the USA legally but couldn't find his papers in 1931 and
was deported. To keep the family together, his mother took her six U.S.-born
children to Mexico, where they often survived on one meal a day. Lopez
welcomes a U.S. apology.
So does Guerra, the retired upholsterer,
whose voice still cracks with emotion when he talks about how deportation
tore his family apart. "I'm very resentful. I don't trust the government at
all," says Guerra, who later served in the U.S. military.
Pi๑a says his entire family got typhoid
fever in Mexico and his father, who had worked in Utah coal mines, died of
black lung disease in 1935. "My mother was left destitute, with six of us,
in a country we knew nothing about," he says. They lived in the slums of
Mexico City, where his formal education ended in sixth grade. "We were
misfits there. We weren't welcome."
"The Depression was very bad here. You can imagine how hard it was in
Mexico," says Pi๑a, who proudly notes the advanced college degrees of each
of his four U.S.-raised sons. "You can't put 16 years of pure hell out of
your mind."
Inhumane raids are happening all
over again
in a ICE strategy called ENDGAME
On March 26,
2007, Carol Rose and
Christopher Ott wrote, "If the
chaotic immigration raid in New
Bedford earlier this month
troubled you, we have news:
Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, also known as ICE,
is just getting warmed up."
We know this because the New
Bedford raid was part of a
frighteningly ambitious plan
laid out by the Department of
Homeland Security in 2003 and
it hasn't received nearly enough
scrutiny.
The plan is called
Endgame. It's a 10-year
campaign to track down and
deport all the immigrants to the
United States who are living and
working here without proper
documentation, by the year 2012.
Let's be clear: This means
expelling roughly 12 million
people.
We've seen Endgame at work
already in other parts of the
country, with ICE conducting
more and bigger raids. In
December, for example, the
agency raided Swift & Company
slaughterhouses in six states,
arresting about 1,300 workers
and deporting roughly half of
them.
Already, on any given day, ICE
holds approximately 26,000
people in detention. And on
March 6,
Endgame was at work on a large scale
in Massachusetts. We saw
the human cost of an operation
directed at 361 people.
The pace of raids will need to
accelerate, however, in order to
meet Endgame's aggressive
deportation goals over the next
five years. We'll see more of
the surreal New Bedford-style
tactics: arrest first, ask
questions later. We'll hear more
stories of the human suffering
that results from such tactics:
of nursing babies who become
dehydrated when separated from
their mothers, of 7-year-olds
frantically looking for their
missing mothers, and of minors
being flown to distant states
without adequate protection.
We'll see more people's rights
trampled, and more families torn
apart by ICE's race to deport in
order to meet Endgame's
staggering goal.
Obviously, the United States has
the right to control who enters
our country, as well as the
right to deport those who are
not authorized to be here. But
the US Constitution also says
everyone's fundamental
rights must be respected while
it is being determined whether
or not they have a right to be
here.
Even most US citizens could not
prove their citizenship on
demand. If ICE raided your
workplace, could you? If you're
like most people, you don't
carry documents such as your
passport or birth certificate
with you at all times. And in a
free society, you shouldn't have
to.
That's why those detained by ICE
need protections such as the
right to a hearing before an
immigration judge, legal
representation, and, when
necessary, interpretive
services. They need time and a
fair chance to prove their case.
It's also critical to make
provisions for the children and
other dependents of those
arrested.
Some of those dependents are US
citizens, even if the detainees
themselves are not and all of
them are human beings.
The pandemonium of the raid in
New Bedford was deeply troubling
in this regard. If ICE couldn't
handle 361 detainees without
violating people's rights and
tearing families apart, how will
they cope with millions?
The simple answer is they can't.
There is no way to expel 12
million people without
terrorizing and compromising the
civil liberties of anyone who
"looks foreign." Even US
citizens, as well as immigrants
who are here legally, will live
with the fear of arrest.
Secretary Seeks Review of Immigration
Raid
On
February 26, 2009,
Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano ordered a review of a raid at an engine
plant in Washington State that resulted in the arrests of 28 people
suspected of being undocumented immigrants.
A high-level official in the
Department of Homeland Security said Ms. Napolitano had not been
informed about the raid on Tuesday before it happened, and that she was
seeking details about its planning and scope.
She was not happy about it because its inconsistent with her position,
and the presidents position on these matters, said the official, who
agreed to discuss the matter on condition of anonymity because the secretary
had not authorized the conversation.
President Obama has promised
immigration enforcement would focus less on undocumented workers and
more on the employers who rely on them.
At a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee,
legislators questioned Ms. Napolitano about the raid, at Yamato Engine
Specialists, which rebuilds faulty car engines. It was the first work-site
action since Ms. Napolitano took charge of the department. Advocates for the immigrants said most were awaiting deportation hearings
at a Tacoma detention center. Three were freed.
Workplace raids involving the arrests of hundreds of
undocumented
immigrants at a time became almost routine in the last years of the
Bush administration, but Napolitano's response to the raid at
a Bellingham, Wash., manufacturing plant highlighted the Obama
administration's much different approach to a hot-button issue.
Napolitano told lawmakers during a hearing in Washington, D.C.,
she did not know about the raid before it happened
and was briefed on the raid the next morning. She has asked U.S
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which arrested 28 undocumented
immigrants in the raid, for answers.
"I want to get to the bottom of this as well," she said. She said
work-site enforcement needs to be focused on the employers.
The raid at the Yamato Engine Specialists was the first work-site
action ICE has taken since Obama took office, said Sean Smith, a
spokesman at Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.
In a statement, an ICE official said the agency conducted the
raid after information from two "gang members" led agents to start
an investigation at the company.
"Follow-up investigation uncovered a potentially large number of
undocumented employed workers. ICE conducted the operation in order to
identify and, if appropriate, apprehend any unauthorized workers and
to further determine potential criminal activity," ICE spokeswoman
Kelly Nantel said in an e-mail from Washington, D.C.
Obama, who appointed Napolitano, has signaled a shift in
immigration policy that would rely less on work-site enforcement,
focusing instead on employers who hire undocumented immigrants and
overall immigration reform.
ICE agents rounded up 25 men and three women at the engine shop,
all Mexicans except for a Honduran, a Salvadoran and a Guatemalan.
Except for three people freed on humanitarian grounds, those
arrested are at a detention center in Tacoma, awaiting deportation
proceedings.
In a statement Tuesday, ICE officials said many of the people
obtained the jobs using fake Social Security numbers and other
counterfeit documents.
Shirin Dhanani Makalai, whose family owns the business, said the
raid came after months of cooperating with ICE on an audit, which
included providing employee rosters to federal authorities. She said
the business does not advocate hiring undocumented immigrants.
"We try to stay within the guidelines, within the law," Makalai
said Tuesday.
Makalai added that the company did not knowingly hire
undocumented
immigrants, and employers have no clear way of checking an
employee's legal status.
Marissa Graciosa of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a
Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, said it was deeply
disappointing that ICE has executed a raid since Obama took office.
She called the raids destructive and ineffective.
"We urge President Obama to deliver on his promise of change by
stopping the raids, and signing just and humane immigration reform
into law," Graciosa said.
Napolitano
shows few signs of reining in the immigrant crackdown
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano shows few signs
of reining in the immigrant crackdown launched by her predecessor
Michael Chertoff. She recently called for "more boots on the ground"
along the border and touted her determination to promote the "rule
of law" in immigration enforcement.
The "rule of
law" framing of immigration policy copies the language of the
Bush administration and the agenda of the immigration
restrictionists. The apparent continuity between the enforcement
agenda of Chertoff and Napolitano alarms advocates of comprehensive
immigration reform (CIR).
But Napolitano's tough talk on immigration enforcement reflects
key components of the new messaging of the leading CIR advocates in
Washington. As the immigration debate has shifted to the right,
liberal groups like the National Immigration Forum, America's Voice,
and Center for American Progress, NDN,
have also been calling for an immigration reform that "secures the
border" and "restores the rule of law."
As a strategy to build center-right support for comprehensive
immigration reform, including legalization, the Washington, DC-based
liberal immigration lobby has advocated the Democratic Party
and all immigrant-rights advocates adopt a "rule of law" framework
that includes more border security and employment verification while
placing the onus on immigrants themselves to "get right with the
law."
The concept behind this strategic maneuvering is Americans
will support a legalization provision for undocumented immigrants if the
proposal is couched in tough "rule of law" language. In other words,
by moving to the right immigration advocates would be better
positioned to advance a liberal immigration reform.
Thus far, however, this pro-immigration strategy of talking tough
to advance CIR has fallen flat. The Bush administration used the
"rule of law" position on immigration to rationalize the immigrant
crackdown. The Obama administration to date has shown few signs of
backing away from the Bush administration's enforcement-first
regimen. The "rule of law" logic of border control and immigration
enforcement continues to dominate the immigration debate in America.
Like Chertoff, who frequently explained the Bush administration's
"enforcement-first" regime as an effort to "restore integrity" to
immigration law and border control and thereby create a foundation
for immigration reform, Napolitano sees enforcement and border
control as laying the groundwork for immigration reform.
In her
Jan. 30 departmental directive, Napolitano stated: "Smart,
resolute enforcement by the department can keep Americans safe,
foster legal immigration to America, protect legitimate commerce,
and lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive reform."
With respect to border security, she has adopted militaristic
terminology and a posture that dials up the enforcement-first
rhetoric of her predecessor. "You've got to have boots on the
ground," says Napolitano. "You've got to have technology. You've got
to have interior enforcement of our workplace laws. Some fencing in
some places may make sense, but only if it's part of an overall
system." That system has little to do with protecting the nation
from terrorists, the central mission of her department, and is all
about cracking down on undocumented immigrants.
The "rule of law" and "get right with the law" now reverberates
among the circle of Washington organizations that are leading the
charge for a new CIR bill in the Obama administration. As if to
declare their law-and-order credentials, the National Immigration
Forum, America's Voice, Center for Community Change, NDN, and others
routinely insert rule of law language in all their communications.
In an article shortly after Obama's inauguration,
Ali Noorani, director of the National Immigration Forum,
observed Obama realized "reforming our immigration system
includes encouraging undocumented immigrants to come out of the
shadows and get into the system and right with the law."
Napolitano's avid commitment to secure the border, uphold
immigration law, and generally promote the "rule of law" in her
position as Homeland Security chief is an echo of the very language
immigration reform advocates use in their own statements. In
its agenda for immigration policy, America's Voice stipulates "Smart
and Professional Law Enforcement" as a central policy guideline, and
calls for a policy that " restores the rule of law both to our
borders and our workplaces."
In their new strategy for liberal immigration reform, these
immigrant-rights advocates haven't been entirely clear about their
priorities. While advancing the tough "rule of law" enforcement and
"get right with the law" language, they haven't explicitly rejected
the "enforcement-first" approach.
Rather than forthrightly saying it is impossible to restore
the "rule of law" or promote "smart law enforcement" when the laws
are inadequate and unjust, they have incorporated the law-and-order
language to widen their political reach.
With the hope of winning center-right support for liberal
immigration reform, America's Voice, Center for American Progress,
and others have retooled their own messaging. But in the process
they have lent moral support to the law-and-order regimen while
burying their message.
It shouldn't be surprising, then, the Democratic Party
leadership, like the Republicans, have interpreted the apparent
political consensus around a "rule of law" immigration and border
policy as a political mandate to continue along the "enforcement
first" path set by the Bush administration. Napolitano is doing just
that, and it may be time for liberal immigration reform advocates to
revisit their opportunistic "rule of law" messaging and center-right
framing of the immigration crisis.
We must end ICE and ENDGAME
The removal and deportation of
Hispanics that were non U.S.
Citizens
began in the 1930s but increased
a thousand fold with
Bush/Cheney under cover of
Federal law when ICE was created
to be used similar to the NAZI
Gestapo rounding up Jews to be
sent to extermination camps in
Germany.
A chilling indictment similar to
the Nazi plan to exterminate the
Jews in WWII.
To systematically deport 12
million undocumented Hispanics,
the Bush/Cheney Administration
established ENDGAME a plan to
terminate the residency of
undocumented and hold them in
prisons built specifically for
them without regard to
safeguards to protect all
persons in the United States as
guaranteed in the United States
Constitution.
Bush/Cheney utilized ICE to
created and implemented tactics
similar to sinister human rights
abuses in Kosovo and from other
parts of the world. The United States went to war to
stop Slobodan Milosevic's
attempt to "ethnically cleanse"
Kosovo in 1999.
We should ask
ourselves how, just eight years
later, we came to be carrying
out a policy that involves
similar tactics lightning
raids, mass arrests, packed
detention centers, and mass
deportations.
It is not enough to modify ICE guidelines
to assure proper procedures and
safeguard American liberties as
stated in the U.S. Constitution.
It's time to
bring an end to operation Endgame. We need an
immigration policy that balances
the right to control our borders
with civil liberties we must
preserve in order to remain
free.
We must end ICE and ENDGAME. The
only way to do this is with
new Federal legislation
eliminating both.
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