With President Obama in office, racial profiling of Red-Brown people was supposed to change. Instead, we continue to move towards a Lou Dobbs vision of the world or the Arpaio-ization of the nation – a nation free of red-brown peoples.
By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez Upon arrival recently from Mexico City, after inspecting my passport, a U.S. immigration official at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport instructed me to “Please go to door number 2.”
When the same thing first happened to me at DFW several years ago, I replied: “Did I win a prize?”
This time, it was on the same day that Bollywood Superstar, Shah Rukh Khan was detained at Newark’s Liberty International Airport. Officially, Kahn was “not detained” for 66 minutes. His papers were simply checked and luggage misplaced.
Using that criteria, I have been further screened, but “not detained” more than a dozen times since 9-11 of 2001.
Both times that I was “not detained” at DFW – the wait at the secondary inspection lasted a half hour. The officials were not rude, though I almost missed my flights home.
Might these be incidents of racial profiling?
Admittedly, I am a brown man – who knows first hand the meaning of driving while brown (My encounters with law enforcement as a youngster and a young adult number in the many dozens). People of color have always known this reality. Red-Brown people in particular also have known the meaning of this when encountering immigration authorities not just at ports of entry, but also at internal checkpoints. I’ve long dubbed the work of the migra as “Indian Removal” – because that’s precisely who they profile – not people who look “Hispanic,” but rather, people who are red-brown. However, since 9-11 – the entire nation has gone wild[er], thus the fear-inspired: Department of Homeland Security. It is this same fear that prevents president Obama from defanging Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio – the face of racial profiling. That same fear permits programs such as Operation Streamline – a Federal Kangaroo Court in Tucson in which 70-80 Mexican or Central American people are tried, convicted and sentenced in court daily – all in one hour. Either they are instantly deported or sent to a private detention center.
Yet, what is happening at airports nowadays continues to be equally ominous. In my case, someone with my name is on a watch list. After the first time this happened, I was told that the person they are looking for is from South America – and about 20 years younger. After they ascertained that I was not him, they released me.
On at least several other occasions at DFW, without sending me to secondary, U.S. officials have raised the issue of me being on their lists. Once it was a rude encounter, treating me as though I should be thankful that I am permitted to fly U.S. skies.
What’s disconcerting is that despite U.S. officials knowing full well that I am not the person they are looking for – I remain on their watch list – or treated as such. This time, the official told me: “You’ve gone through this before, haven’t you?”
“Yes. This happened to me here at DFW several years ago.”
If they know this, not explained is why they continue with their intrusive behavior. Outdated computers? At the same time, what do South American countries have to do with America’s “War on Terror” and how did someone with a name like Rodriguez get on that list? The myth continues to be perpetrated – by the likes of CNN’s Lou Dobbs — that peoples from the south have something to do with this so-called war.
The vast majority of Arabs, South Asians and Muslims don’t have anything to do with this war either, but that seems to matter little for media types and government officials who apparently believe that all these mostly red-brown peoples “fit the profile.”
By the way, if you would like to know what’s behind door number 2, you guessed it: people of color.
It is clear that we now have a big brother apparatus unable and unwilling to purge its massive lists of innocent individuals.
Truthfully, it’s the whole notion of a Homeland – conjured up by the Bush-Cheney administration, which has permitted these violating intrusions to be viewed as routine. It is this environment, since 9-11, where and when I have found myself constantly “not detained” at airports nationwide. One time, I unnecessarily missed a flight. Other times – even before 9-11 – I was detained at the Hollywood-Burbank airport (while picking up a passenger), while another time my car was dismantled at an internal checkpoint in New Mexico.
With President Obama in office, this was supposed to change. Instead, we continue to move towards a Lou Dobbs vision of the world or the Arpaio-ization of the nation – a nation free of red-brown peoples.
————————————————————————————————————————————————– Reference:Indian Removal Act — The Removal Act paved the way for the reluctant–and often forcible–emigration of tens of thousands of American Indians to the West, away from the rabidly racist south.
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• Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com or PO BOX 85476 – Tucson, AZ 85754
An official Immigration and Customs Enforcement database, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, showed a U.S. detainee population of exactly 32,000 on the evening of Jan. 25. The data show that 18,690 immigrants had no criminal conviction, not even for illegal entry or low-level crimes like trespassing. More than 400 of those with no criminal record had been incarcerated for at least a year. A dozen had been held for three years or more; one man from China had been locked up for more than five years.
Immigrants face detention, few rights
By MICHELLE ROBERTS
America’s detention system for immigrants has mushroomed in the last decade, a costly building boom that was supposed to sweep up criminals and ensure that undocumented immigrants were quickly shown the door.
Instead, an Associated Press computer analysis of every person being held on a recent Sunday night shows that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country — voluntarily or via deportation.
An official Immigration and Customs Enforcement database, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, showed a U.S. detainee population of exactly 32,000 on the evening of Jan. 25.
The data show that 18,690 immigrants had no criminal conviction, not even for illegal entry or low-level crimes like trespassing. More than 400 of those with no criminal record had been incarcerated for at least a year. A dozen had been held for three years or more; one man from China had been locked up for more than five years.
Nearly 10,000 had been in custody longer than 31 days — the average detention stay that ICE cites as evidence of its effective detention management.
Raymond Soeoth stands outside the federal government compound in Los Angeles’ San Pedro district, where he was held for over two years at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
Especially tough bail conditions are exacerbated by disregard or bending of the rules regarding how long immigrants can be detained.
Based on a 2001 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, ICE has about six months to deport or release immigrants after their case is decided. But immigration lawyers say that deadline is routinely missed. In the system snapshot provided to the AP, 950 people were in that category.
The detainee buildup began in the mid 1990s, long before the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Since 2003, though, Congress has doubled to $1.7 billion the amount dedicated to imprisoning immigrants, as furor over “criminal aliens” intertwined with post-9/11 fears and anti-immigrant political rhetoric.
But the dragnet has come to include not only terrorism suspects and cop killers, but an honors student who was raised in Orlando, Fla.; a convenience store clerk who begged to go back to Canada; and a Pentecostal minister who was forcibly drugged by ICE agents after he asked to contact his wife, according to court records.
Immigration lawyers note that substantial numbers of detainees, from 177 countries in the data provided, are not illegal immigrants at all. Many of the longest-term non-criminal detainees are asylum seekers fighting to stay here because they fear being killed in their home country. Others are longtime residents who may be eligible to stay under other criteria, or whose applications for permanent residency were lost or mishandled, the lawyers say.
Still other long-term detainees include people who can’t be deported because their home country won’t accept them or people who seemingly have been forgotten in the behemoth system, where 58 percent have no lawyers or anyone else advocating on their behalf.
ICE says detention is the best way to guarantee that immigrants attend court hearings and leave the country when ordered.
“It’s ensuring compliance, and if you look at the stats, for folks who are in detention, the stats are pretty darn high,” said ICE spokeswoman Cori Bassett.
By comparison though, most criminal suspects, even sometimes those accused of heinous offenses, are entitled to bail.
“We’re immigrants, and it makes it seem like it’s worse than a criminal,” said Sarjina Emy, a 20-year-old former honors student who spent nearly two years in a Florida lockup because her parents’ asylum claim was denied when she was a child. “I always thought America does so much for justice. I really thought you get a fair trial. You actually go to court. (U.S. authorities) know what they are doing. Now, I figured out that it only works for criminal citizens.”
The use of detention to ensure immigrants show up for immigration court comes at a high cost compared to alternatives like electronic ankle monitoring, which can track people for considerably less money per day.
Based on the amount budgeted for this fiscal year, U.S. taxpayers will pay about $141 a night — the equivalent of a decent hotel room — for each immigrant detained, even though paroling them on ankle monitors — at a budgeted average daily cost of $13 — has an almost perfect compliance rate, according to ICE’s own stats.
For years, ICE and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had the power to detain immigrants. With little bed space or public clamor to lock people up, though, millions of foreigners quietly went about life in the United States.
In 1996, Congress passed a pair of laws requiring that immigrants who committed crimes be locked up for deportation, beginning a dramatic run-up in incarcerations. So-called “criminal aliens” — immigrants convicted of a crime, including some misdemeanors like low-level drug crimes — became mandatory detainees even if their original crime brought no prison time.
A system that housed 6,785 immigrants in 1994 now holds nearly five times that amount in 260 facilities across the country, most under contract with local governments or private companies. For this fiscal year, ICE has enough money budgeted for 33,400 people on any given night.
Emy, who was raised in Orlando, Fla., spent 20 months in a detention center even though she had no criminal record. She traded her Baby Phat clothes for a gray uniform and window-shopping at the mall for a law library behind razor wire.
Her only crime? Her parents, who feared her father’s political affiliations endangered the family, brought her and two brothers to the United States from Bangladesh when she was 5, according to court documents.
She doesn’t speak Bangla and never imagined a future without college. No one in her family realized her father’s work certificate from the Labor Department didn’t equate to legal immigration status.
Family members were rounded up in July 2007, treated as fugitives on a dated but active deportation order.
Her parents were deported first. Emy languished in custody while continuing her fight to stay.
But because the asylum application had been filed on behalf of the entire family, only the parents got a hearing. Emy never saw a judge, according to Emy and her attorney.
“Justice is not being served,” she said from a prison pay phone.
In January, a federal appeals court denied her petition to stay in the U.S. Fearing she’d celebrate another birthday behind bars, Emy agreed to be deported and left the country Feb. 18.
Immigration law “is the only United States law where we punish the children for the actions of their parents,” said Emy’s attorney, Petia Vimitrova Knowles.
Immigration violations are considered civil, something akin to a moving violation in a car, so the government can imprison immigrants without many of the rights criminals receive: No court-appointed attorney for indigent defendants, no standard habeas corpus, no protection from double jeopardy, no guarantee of a speedy trial.
“You’re locking up people without even a hearing,” said Judy Rabinovitz of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants Rights Project. “That, to me, is the outrage: basic due process. Since when do we allow the government to lock up people without even giving them a bond hearing?”
Most immigrants are navigating a complex legal system without an attorney. Fifty-eight percent went through immigration proceedings without an attorney in fiscal year 2007, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the U.S. Justice Department.
But, ICE officials often argue, immigrants largely hold the keys to their own freedom. If they simply agree to return to their home country, they can go, Bassett said.
“They’re making a choice (that) they’re going to appeal, which is their right,” she said.
But even giving up, or winning a claim, doesn’t always spell freedom because ICE acts as police officer, arraignment judge, jailer and prosecutor. It has sole jurisdiction over when a detained immigrant is sent back after a deportation order is issued, and can continue to hold immigrants while it appeals a decision that didn’t go its way.
In another telling case, Ahmad Al-Shrmany, a 34-year-old Iraqi with no appeal pending, begged for a year to be deported and yet remained in detention. He wanted to be allowed to go to his native Iraq or his adopted Canada, where he had been granted asylum a decade ago. A lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition in December that went unanswered.
“Just deport me. That’s your job,” he said in a late January interview with the AP that ICE officials tried to block minutes before it was scheduled at a Houston lockup.
Less than a week after the interview, Al-Shrmany was deported to Canada, said his lawyer, Afreen Ahmed.
Immigrant advocates say ICE prefers incarceration for non-criminal immigrants, even though alternatives are available, for one major reason: to strong-arm people.
“When you’re there for weeks and weeks or months or months, your determination to fight your charges is reduced,” said Judy Green, a policy analyst with Justice Strategies, a nonpartisan think tank on incarceration issues. The goal is “to keep intense pressure on detainees to agree to removal and not to fight on whatever grounds they have for relief.”
The Rev. Raymond Soeoth, a Pentecostal minister from Indonesia who had never been imprisoned, said his lengthy incarceration — and the uncertainty of how long it would last — wore on him as he fought his immigration case and pursued a lawsuit accusing ICE officials of forcibly drugging him and other detainees.
“We just wait. We cannot do anything,” said Soeoth, who was released after more than two years, given a special visa as part of the government’s settlement of the drugging lawsuit.
Immigrants are, literally, dying for decent care, according to two new reports that portray the medical care system for U.S. immigration detainees as dangerously inadequate.
The reports, from the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center and Human Rights Watch, call on the federal government to stop locking up immigrants who are not considered dangerous; improve medical care for those jailed; and increase oversight of all detention centers.
The groups’ research indicates Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) systematically denied, delayed, and denigrated medical care, causing unnecessary suffering and even death, according to Meghan Rhoad, a Human Rights Watch researcher.
“The detention system routinely subjects women to suffering and humiliation. It is a system that needlessly shackles pregnant women with no criminal background, that ignores requests for care, and does all of this with impunity.”
Immigrant detainees are the fastest-growing jail population, adds Cheryl Little, founder of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, although most have committed no crime.
“These are people who have lived here for years – worked hard, paid taxes, have U.S. citizen children, in some cases, have U.S. citizen spouses – and the vast majority have broken no criminal law.”
After living and working legally in the United States for 27 years, most recently at Florida Atlantic University, Marlene Jaggernauth was arrested by ICE. Held for more than a year, she was separated from her four young children. The conditions she saw in detention were deplorable, she says – and when she complained, she was placed in solitary confinement.
“We felt truly helpless and frightened. Our requests for care would just be ignored. I saw a great deal of suffering and it was very heartbreaking.”
In response to the reports, an ICE spokesperson says the agency is committed to humane and safe treatment of detainees, and spends nearly $100 million annually to achieve those goals. But more than 400,000 immigrants were detained in 2008, and Rhoad says this year’s estimate is 440,000, at a total cost to taxpayers of almost $1.7 billion per year.
UGLY Anti-Immigrant Bigot Lou Dobbs: Dobbs falsely claimed Pelosi said “immigration law enforcement is, quote-unquote, ‘un-American.”
On his radio show, Lou Dobbs asked his guest for his “reaction” to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “saying last week that enforcement in the workplace, immigration law enforcement is, quote-unquote, ‘un-American.’ ”
In fact, Pelosi criticized as “un-American” immigration raids that separate undocumented parents from their documented children, not “immigration law enforcement.”
Neo-NAZI Klansman Sean Hannity: Obama administration is pushing “the single biggest power grab and move towards socialism in the history of the country“
During last nights Hannity Show, Juan correctly rebuked Sean Hannity’s Xenophobic Anti-Immigrant statements, while he[Hannity] was challenging comments made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
Said Williams: “[I]t’s her responsibility to challenge unjust laws, and when you’re taking little babies away from their mothers, I say that’s an unjust law.”
As is customary, the racist, syphilitic, anti-immigrant bigot, Sean Hannity — sought to hide behind THE LAW, to demonize immigrants, who are being incarcerated in large numbers, and herded into American Gulags and “For Profit” Concentration Camps.
It’s The Law!!…It’s The Law!!….We Are A Nation of Laws!! ….Screamed Sean KLANNITY.
Yeah, asshole — the same kind of UNJUST law(s) that you used to shackle, lynch and rape Indians, Blacks, the Japanese, and everybody else who stood in your way, while you were stealing America and huge chunks of Mexico.
You Sean Hannity, are no different than the “Straight-Talk” Neo-KLAN Lynch Mobs, that you, Palin and McCain call the BASE. A breed of ANIMALS ….sick to the bone!
Most of these RACIST LAWS have since been repealed, and so will the UNJUST immigration laws in the books, that provide cover for people like YOU, Sean Hannity. You are not interested in anything JUST for immigrants. If given the opportunity, you would gleefully roast every single person of color in a NAZI Oven.
You are a despicable racist who uses the LAW as a “vehicle” with which to transport and proliferate RACISM in this country, ….a dying breed — hopefully!
Upon arrival recently from Mexico City, after inspecting my passport, a U.S. immigration official at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport instructed me to “Please go to door number 2.”
Yet, what is happening at airports nowadays continues to be equally ominous. In my case, someone with my name is on a watch list. After the first time this happened, I was told that the person they are looking for is from South America – and about 20 years younger. After they ascertained that I was not him, they released me.
