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May-June 2009
National Immigrant Solidarity Network Monthly News Digest
National
Immigrant Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support
Immigrant Rights!
URL: http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail: Info@ImmigrantSolidarity.org
Information about the Network: FLYER
Washington D.C.: (202)595-8990
New York: (212)330-8172
Los Angeles: (213)403-0131
Chicago: (773)942-2268
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May-June 2009 U.S.
Immigrant Alert! Newsletter Published
by National Immigrant Solidarity Network
Please read the Newsletter:
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/May-June09.pdf
[Requires Adobe Acrobat, to
download, go: http://www.adobe.com]
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Latest
Immigration News
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Reports | Useful
Immigrant Resources | Subscribe
to Newsletter | Please
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Donate to Us!
May Day 2009: Over Hundred Cities
Across The U.S. with Hundreds of Thousands of People March for Justice!
In This Issue:
1) May
Day 2009
2) 4/10-12
NISN Nat’l Conf Report
3) Immigration
Policy Update
4) Who's
approving wiretap?
5) Anger
at Obama Gitmo ruling
6) Troop
deployment to border
7) 30
arrested in CD at ICE Hqts
8) Please
Support NISN! Subscribe
the Newsletter!
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Please print edition of the Newsletter: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/May-June09.pdf
May
Day 2009 National Immigrant Workers Mobilization
Over Hundred Cities Across The U.S. with Hundreds of Thousands
of People March for Justice!
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/MayDay2009/
WE ARE ALL HUMANS! NO ONE IS ILLEGAL! There’s
at least hundred cities and communities across the U.S.
organized their May Day actions to support workers rights and
immigrant rights. Globally, there’s at least several hundred
cities had organized tens of millions of people for
march/protest/community events to celebrate the May Day 2009.
While the number of people participated in U.S. on May Day had
been declined due to weather, economic reason, factional fights
in some cities had created major confusion, and corporate
America/government continue their campaign to against
celebrating the May Day and exploiting H1N1 Influenza A virus
(aka swine flu) “crisis” to scare people participating this
year—none-the-less, the numbers of people participated at May
Day actions across the global still stay very strong, and at
some countries even grown bigger due to the working class angry
about the current economic crisis.
Download the PDF formatted Report: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/MayDay2009Report/MayDay2009Report.pdf
Photos & Essay Reports from around the World
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/MayDay2009Report/index.html
4/10-12,
2009 Chicago, IL National Immigrant Solidarity Network
4th National Grassroots Immigrant Strategy Conference
Successful Ending! Together We Build New Immigrant Workers
Rights & Justice Movements of 2009!
On April 10-12, 2009 on Chicago, IL; over 110
organizers, activists and community members from African
American, Native American, African immigrant, European
Immigrant, Asian American, Latino/Latina, Arab-Muslim-North
African, progressive labor, interfaith, LGBT, student,
anti-war/peace and global justice groups from across the
country. To meet face-to-face at to discuss how to build a new
national, broad-based, immigrant rights/civil rights movement,
and to set our 2009-2010 national grassroots immigrant campaign
strategy.
We welcome our new steering committee member
Alex Franco from Movement for Unconditional Amnesty,
Philadelphia, PA.
We acknowledges that different people from different
organizations, backgrounds have different believes on how to
achieve the justice and better future for the tens of millions
of immigrants across the country, and how immigrant rights
movements can link to the broader peace and justice movements.
We had agreements, we have difference and even heated debates;
after three days conference, at Sunday April 12th based on the
feedbacks and proposals submitted to the conference, we had
draft our new points of unity and strategic immigrant campaign
proposals.
Read the report: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/2009Conference/confreport.htm
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Latest Immigration News
5/26:
Schwarzenegger to reveal deeper budget cuts
By SAMANTHA YOUNG - Associated Press
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's takeaway message from last
week's defeat of the special election ballot measures was
"cuts, cuts, cuts."....
5/5:
Deported Activist Runs for Mexican Congress
By Compiled by Frontera NorteSur (FNS)
Among the better known candidates running for Mexican
Congress is Elvira Arellano, the deported activist from the
United States who came to symbolize the face of the new
immigrant movement. Taking refuge in a Chicago church in August
2006, Arellano defied a deportation order and US immigration
authorities for one year in an unsuccessful attempt to remain
with her young son. In August 2007, she was arrested and sent
back to Mexico after appearing at an immigrant rights rally in
Los Angeles....
5/20:
Another death in Georgia at a CCA-operated facility
By Travis Fain - macon.com
Few details released in death of Wheeler County inmate....
5/18:
Mentally ill detainees' treatment at hospitals worries advocates
By Greg Moran, San Diego Union-Tribune
Ann Menasche, a lawyer with the legal advocacy group
Disability Rights California, said she has been to API and has
spoken to detainees there. In an eight-page letter sent to
immigration officials April 24, Menasche said the conditions are
“excessive, unjustifiable and punitive.”....
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5/17:
Immigration - When Only 'Geniuses' Need Apply
By Moira Herbst - Business Week
Top artists, writers, and musicians are among those awarded
O-1 visas each year to add to U.S. culture and the economy....
5/16
Upland, CA: Upland restaurant clashes with Minuteman project
members
By Sandra Emerson - Whittier Daily News
A group of Minuteman Project members complained to city
officials after a recent argument with an Upland business owner
and police over a Cinco de Mayo celebration....
5/14
Postville, IA: 20 former Agriprocessors workers obtain visas
By Associated Press
Twenty former workers at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in
Postville have received visas under a law that protects crime
victims....
5/15:
Libya given migrant patrol boats
By BBC
The Italian government has given Libya three patrol boats as
part of a deal aimed at combating the flow of migrants making
the crossing to Italy....
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More
Recent Immigration News.. |
Special Reports:
The "Crimmigration" Crisis
Tom Barry- Border Lines
5/22/09
http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/crimmigration-crisis.html
(Third in Restoring Integrity to Immigration System series.)
In its study of the application of the “aggravated felony”
provision in immigration law, the Transactional Records
Clearinghouse (TRAC) at the University of Syracuse found that from
1992 to 2006 more than 300,000 immigrants were removed using this
provision and that the numbers steadily increased annually over this
period.[1]
Perhaps most striking about TRAC’s findings was that 55% of the
aggravated felony removals were by an ICE/INS administrative order
rather than a court order. In these administrative removals –
amounting to nearly 23,000 in 2006 -- the deported immigrants did
not have the benefit of any hearing or adjudication of their removal
orders. ICE agents alone were responsible, as the TRAC study noted,
for all steps in the process – from apprehension and detention to
issuing the order and deporting the individual. Administrative
orders for removal for immigrants charged with aggravated felonies
have steadily increased as a percentage of all such mandated
deportations.
Criminal aliens that have been detained and removed under the
aggravated felony statutes are oftentimes longtime U.S. residents
who have been in the country since their childhood and don’t even
know the language of their birth countries. On the average,
immigrants processed by EOIR from 1997 to 20006 for aggravated
felonies were in the U.S. for fifteen years before they were
deported. For 25%, the average time between their original date of
entry to this country and when deportation proceedings were started
in immigration court was 20 years or longer, and for 10 percent it
was more than 27 years.[2]
TRAC cited the case of Carlos Pacheco who entered the US with a
green card as a 6-year old child. He was judged an aggravated felon
based on his misdemeanor conviction for stealing some Tylenol and
cigarettes. An appeals court that heard the case agreed that he was
an aggravated felon and removable but expressed its “misgivings”
that Congress equated misdemeanors with felonies in its zeal to
deport criminal aliens. Pacheco’s case is now one of tens of
thousands in which the immigration consequences were much more
severe than the criminal consequences.
Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the United
States, a March 2009 report by Amnesty International USA,
observed: “Lawful permanent residents can be placed in
"mandatory detention" with no right to a bond hearing
before an immigration judge or judicial body. It is believed that
thousands of individuals are subject to mandatory detention every
year. The categories of crimes that trigger mandatory detention
include minor, non-violent crimes (such as receiving stolen
property) committed years ago, and are broad and difficult to
define.”[3]
Of those immigrants, legal and illegal, removed because of a prior
criminal charge other than “aggravated felony,” the most
frequent of the charges cited are those involving "moral
turpitude" and use of "controlled substance
violations." The new criminal context for immigration law means
that there are major “immigration consequences” of a criminal
plea. Most criminal defense lawyers advise their clients to enter
pleas that result in minimal or no jail time with little concern for
the nature of the crime for which they plead guilty.
As immigration law expert Ira Kurzban points out: “A plea to a
wrong charge could mean a long-term lawful permanent resident was
subject to mandatory detention and was deported without relief.”[4]
In other words, a legal immigrant might plead guilty to a crime for
which he spends no jail time but years later finds that he or she is
detained by ICE agents, spends months or years in an immigrant
prison, and then is deported and banished permanently from the
United States.
Zero Tolerance in Immigration Enforcement
Beginning in 2007 DHS embarked upon another paradigm shift in
immigration law. Not only would it continue to target noncitizens
that it categorized as “criminal aliens,” DHS also decided that
it was also necessary to criminalize the conduct of immigrants who
previously would not have been criminally charged. Borrowing a
phrase from law-and-order theory, DHS launched a “zero
tolerance” program called Operation Streamline.
Under this pilot program, which has since been expanded, illegal
border crossers picked up by the Border Patrol are not, as
traditionally been the case, turned over to ICE for detention but
rather to the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) for pre-trial custody.
Instead of being simply “illegal aliens” these immigrants become
“criminal aliens” under the new “zero tolerance” regimen.
Immigrants crossing illegally are now routinely being sentenced to
jail terms of fifteen days, while those who reenter after having
been deported now face ten to twenty years in prison.
DHS hasn’t limited its criminalization of immigrants to the
border. As part of the expansion of its “interior enforcement,”
ICE in 2007 also began treating falsely documented or undocumented
workers as criminal aliens. The mass arrest of mainly Guatemalan
workers at the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant
in Postville, Iowa on May 12, 2008 marked in tragic fashion the
extent to which DHS was willing to go to demonstrate its commitment
to enforce the rule of law – as DHS interpreted it. Of the 389
immigrants detained, 307 were criminally charged with using false
Social Security numbers and aggravated identity theft (which carries
a minimum two-year sentence). Offered a plea deal, most pled guilty
to the false social security charge and received a five-month
sentence.
Reflecting on the shifting paradigm in immigration law toward
“criminalizing civil conduct,” Kurzban observed that
“immigration lawyers must be educated in issues concerning
traditional criminal law questions, such as unlawful search and
seizure, rights against self-incrimination, plea bargaining, and
statutory and constitutional defenses for certain federal crimes.”[5]
Crime and Immigration
Juliet Stumpf of Lewis and Clark Law School points out in “The
Crimmigration Crisis: Immigration, Crime, and Sovereign Power”
that both criminal and immigration law primarily regulate the
relationship between the state and individual, the line separating
criminal and immigration law has blurred. Not only does the
substance of immigration and criminal law increasingly overlap, but
immigration enforcement by DHS and DOJ also increasingly resembles
criminal law enforcement as seen perhaps most clearly in massive
imprisonment of immigrants. “The rapid importation of criminal
grounds into immigration law,” notes Stumpf, “is consistent with
a shift in criminal penology from rehabilitation to retribution,
deterrence, incapacitation, and expressive powers of the state.” [6]
Stumpf makes the argument that the merger of the immigration and
criminal systems is, at least partly, the result of a newly
restrictive sense of the social contract in America. Like criminals,
immigrants are increasingly being treated as if they have few rights
and have no claim to government protection because they aren’t
members of our society. Not only has society since the 1970s adopted
an increasingly punitive rather than rehabilitative criminal system
that physically excludes them from society but in many cases also
denies them benefits such as social services and rights such as the
right to vote, serve in public office or serve on a jury.
Similarly, recent trends in immigration law and policy build on the
assumption that immigrants have little claim to membership in
society and can therefore can be excluded and denied basic rights.
“When membership theory is at play,” she writes, “whole
categories of constitutional rights depend on the decisionmaker’s
vision of who belongs.”
Aside from the resulting increase in the imprisonment and
deportation of noncitizens, a little considered result of this
so-called “crimmigration” is that criminal aliens in the
immigration system lack the constitutional protection of anyone in
the criminal justice system. Although treated as criminals they
don’t enjoy the protections of the Eighth Amendment against cruel
and unusual punishment.
While immigrants have the right to counsel in immigration court,
they don’t have the right to a government-provided attorney if
they can’t afford to hire an attorney. When in the immigration
system, criminal aliens are protected by the Fifth Amendment’s due
process clause, but they aren’t protected by the criminal process
rights in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.[7]
[1]
TRAC, “New Data on Processing of Aggravated Felons,” 2007,
online at: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/175/
[2]
TRAC, “How Often is the Aggravated Felony Statute Used?” 2006,
online at: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/158/
[3]
Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the United States,
Amnesty International USA, March 26, 2009, online at: http://www.amnestyusa.org/uploads/JailedWithoutJustice.pdf
[4]
Ira J. Kurzban, “Criminalizing Immigration Law,” Presented at
2008 Immigration Law Conference, San Antonio, Texas, Oct. 23-24,
2008, p. 2, online at: http://www.utcle.org/eLibrary/preview.php?asset_file_id=17604
[5]
Kurzban, “Criminalizing Immigration Law,” p. 3.
[6]
Juliet Stumpf, “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigration, Crime, and
Sovereign Power,” Bepress Legal Series, Paper 1635, 2006, p. 31.,
online at: http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7625&context=expresso
[7]
Stumpf, “The Crimmigration Crisis,” p. 21.
(Next in Restoring Integrity Series: Expanding Immigration
Enforcement Appartus)
Photo: Border Port of Entry at El Paso/Juarez
Useful Immigrant
Resources on Detention and Deportation
Face Sheet: Immigration
Detention--Questions and Answers (Dec, 2008) by: http://www.thepoliticsofimmigration.org
Thanks for GREAT works from Detention
Watch Network (DWN) to compiled the following information, please visit
DWN website: http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org
Tracking
ICE's Enforcement Agenda
Real
Deal fact sheet on detention
Real
Deal fact sheet on border
- From
Raids to Deportation-A Community Resource Kit
- Know Your Rights in the Community (English,
Spanish)
- Know
Your Rights in Detention
- Pre-Raid
Community Safety Plan
- Raids
to Deportation Map
- Raids
to Deportation Policy Map
More on Immigration Resource Page
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/resource.htm
Useful Handouts and Know Your Immigrant
Rights When Marches
Immigrant Marches / Marchas de los Inmigrantes
(By ACLU)
EN ESPAÑOL
Acerca
de la Union Americana de Libertades Civiles |
Immigrants and their supporters are participating in marches all
over the country to protest proposed national legislation and to seek
justice for immigrants. The materials available here provide important
information about the rights and risks involved for anyone who is
planning to participate in the ongoing marches.
If government agents question you, it is important to understand
your rights. You should be careful in the way you speak when
approached by the police, FBI, or INS. If you give answers, they can
be used against you in a criminal, immigration, or civil case.
The ACLU's publications below provide effective and useful guidance
in several languages for many situations. The brochures apprise you of
your legal rights, recommend how to preserve those rights, and provide
guidance on how to interact with officials.
IMMIGRATION
Know
Your Rights When Encountering Law Enforcement
| Conozca
Sus Derechos Frente A Los Agentes Del Orden Público
ACLU of Massachusetts - Your Rights And Responsibilities If You Are
Contacted By The Authorities English
| Spanish
| Chinese
ACLU of Massachusetts - What
to do if stopped and questioned about your immigration status on the
street, the subway, or the bus
| Que
hacer si Usted es interrogado en el tren o autobus acerca de su
estatus inmigratorio
ACLU of South Carolina - How
To Deal With A 287(g)
| Como
Lidiar Con Una 287(g)
ACLU of Southern California - What
to Do If Immigration Agents or Police Stop You While on Foot, in Your
Car, or Come to Your Home
| Qué
Hacer Si Agentes de Inmigración o la Policía lo Paran Mientras Va
Caminando, lo Detienen en su Auto o Vienen a su Hogar
ACLU of Washington - Brochure for Iraqis: What to Do If the FBI or
Police Contact You for Questioning English
| Arabic
ACLU of Washington - Your
Rights at Checkpoints at Ferry Terminals
| Sus
Derechos en Puestos de Control en las Terminales de Transbordadores
LABOR / FREE SPEECH
Immigrant
Protests - What Every Worker Should Know:
| Manifestaciones
de los Inmigrantes - Lo Que Todo Trabajador Debe Saber
PROTESTERS
ACLU of Florida Brochure - The
Rights of Protesters
| Los
Derechos de los Manifestantes
STUDENTS
Washington State - Student
Walkouts and Political Speech at School
| Huelgas
Estudiantiles y Expresión Política en las Escuelas
California
Students: Public School Walk-outs and Free Speech
| Estudiantes
de California: Marchas o Huelgas y La Libertad de Expresión en las
Escuelas Públicas
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