Yearly Archives: 2010

DHS Report Criticizes 287(g) Immigration Program/Informe del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional critica programa de inmigración 287(g)

Democracy Now! | Headlines for April 05, for 2010 (English followed by Spanish Text)

A new federal report has criticized the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, treat which gives state and local law enforcement agencies authority to enforce immigration laws. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found the program does not have adequate safeguards against racial profiling and other civil rights abuses. In addition, the report said local police officers have misused the program by targeting undocumented immigrants who have been arrested for minor offenses. The report states, “g) program is meeting its intended purpose, or that resources are being appropriately targeted toward aliens who pose the greatest risk to public safety and the community.” Critics of the program say many immigrants will no longer call the local police for help out of fear they could be arrested and deported. Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union said, “The 287(g) program, as this latest report confirms, all but abandons the constitutional guarantees of fair and due process, and encourages racial and ethnic profiling.”

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Un nuevo informe federal critica el programa 287(g) del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por su sigla en inglés), que le otorga facultades a las agencias de seguridad estatales y locales para hacer cumplir las leyes de inmigración. La Oficina del Inspector General del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional descubrió que el programa no prevé protecciones adecuadas contra la discriminación racial y otros abusos de los derechos civiles. Además, este informe indicó que los oficiales de la policía local hicieron un mal uso de este programa contra los inmigrantes indocumentados que fueron arrestados por delitos de menor cuantía. El informe dice: “la ICE no puede garantizar que el programa 287(g) esté cumpliendo con el objetivo deseado o que los recursos se estén utilizando adecuadamente contra los extranjeros que representan grandes peligros para la seguridad pública y la comunidad”. Quienes critican este programa dicen que muchos inmigrantes no acudirán a la policía local en busca de ayuda por temor a ser arrestados y deportados. Laura Murphy, de la Unión Estadounidense por las Libertades Civiles (ACLU, por su sigla en inglés), dijo: “El programa 287(g), como lo confirma el más reciente informe, prácticamente abandona las garantías constitucionales de trato justo y debido proceso y fomenta la discriminación racial y étnica”.

Source: Democracy Now! Headlines (English, Spanish)

Federal government to day laborers: We’re here to help

By Matt O’Brien
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 04/01/2010 02:13:52 PM PDT
Updated: 04/01/2010 02:13:54 PM PDT

CONCORD — A crew of federal officials wandering into a day labor hiring zone used to mean one thing: It’s time to leave.

This wasn’t the case Thursday morning on Monument Boulevard. Armed with coffee, not handcuffs, investigators from the U.S. Department of Labor chatted warmly with Latino immigrant workers about how to find jobs without being exploited.

“We’re the feds, but the good ones,” said Paul Ramirez, speaking in Spanish inside the Michael Chavez Center, a gathering spot for day laborers. “We’re here to help workers.”

The unprecedented visit was part of a campaign to bring long-established workplace protections to the nation’s most vulnerable and underpaid workers, including those who have no legal right to be living in the United States.

“Documented or not, the law is: If you work certain hours, you are owed certain money,” Ramirez told the small crowd. Met at first with apprehension, the Brentwood native captivated his audience of men from Mexico and Central America as he told of tending tomatoes, onions, asparagus and cucumbers as a young California field hand. Now an enforcer of workplace rules, he advised what to do when contractors skirt the law.

“We already knew some of these things, but now we feel more comfortable, more support,” said laborer Gilberto Villanueva, who came to the East Bay eight years ago from southern Mexico. “It’s good that they came.”

There was nothing new about the standards Ramirez mentioned: minimum wage, overtime, sick leave. But none of the workers had heard this before from a federal agent. “We’ve always been very active in the community, but now we’re becoming more vocal, more transparent,” said Susana Rincon, Bay Area director of the labor agency’s wage and hour division. “Other than that, the message is the same.”Ramirez made the same speech recently to workers who gather outside a Home Depot in Pittsburg. And it’s not only a message for day laborers; it was delivered Thursday at the Chinese Newcomers Service Center in San Francisco.

The awareness campaign, called “We Can Help,” is being led by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, a former Southern California congresswoman who joined the Obama administration early last year.

Solis inaugurated the campaign Thursday in Chicago with a speech at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, a 19th century landmark of labor reform and social welfare movements. She said she has added more than 250 field investigators, bringing the total to nearly 1,000 nationwide, about the same as at the beginning of the Bush administration.

The investigators have no jurisdiction over homeowners who hire day laborers for temporary landscaping, moving and domestic work, but they do have authority over contractors who make at least a half-million dollars, Rincon said. If workers with a problem call investigators, usually the issues are resolved by phone within 24 hours, Rincon said. In rare cases, the investigators will visit work sites or take employers to court.

Day laborers “know laws are out there to protect them, but they don’t always believe it, or know that it can be enforced,” said Mike Van Hofwegen, director of the Concord work center. Van Hofwegen was as surprised as his clients when the labor department team called to say they wanted to visit.

“This is the first time we’ve had this kind of connection,” he said. “Someone asked me, ‘Is this an April Fools’ thing?’”

Such a discussion between federal employees and workers who are, for the most part, illegal immigrants, is likely to engender controversy, but could also do everyone some good, he argued.

“It helps U.S. citizens because they’re not being undermined by abusive labor practices in the community, because things are more competitive,” Van Hofwegen said.

Source: Contra Costa Times

El pueblo se desborda – March for legalization

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NDLON Presenta: El pueblo se desborda, Washington, DC. 21 de Marzo, 2010.

No Free Speech for Cops

By ADAM KLASFELD, Thursday, April 1, 2010

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (CN) – A police lieutenant claims Suffolk County forced him to retire early after 27 years on the force because he told Newsday about a racist policy in which unlicensed drivers were arrested, rather than merely cited, only “in areas with large populations of Hispanic day laborers.”

In his federal complaint, Lt. Raymond Smith says he was disciplined, transferred and eventually forced to retire on charges of “improperly communicating with the media” on this and another case.

The other case involved a man who was convicted of killing his parents in 1990. Smith says he his superiors retaliated against him after he speculated to other officers that there may have been a police conspiracy to convict an innocent man in that case.

Smith says that after reading news accounts of the trial of Martin Tankleff, a Long Island resident convicted of murdering his wealthy parents, he became convinced that there was credible evidence of a conspiracy that “challenged the integrity of a broad cross-section of Suffolk County’s legal community, from the Department’s Homicide Squad, to a County Judge, to the District Attorney.”

Tankleff’s conviction was overturned in December 2007.

“At the time Mr. Smith was corresponding with others about the Tankleff case, the official position of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office and the Suffolk County Police Department was that it was a ‘closed case’ that would not be re-opened,” Smith says.

Smith says he drew heat from his bosses again by speaking against the policy of targeting unlicensed drivers in Latino neighborhoods, which local press and legislators also had denounced “as a hateful and intolerant plan to eradicate immigrants from Suffolk County.”

After initially withdrawing the policy, Suffolk County Police told Newsday that the police would be reinstated because the American Automobile Association reported that unlicensed drivers were more dangerous than licensed ones, Smith says.

When Smith downloaded that AAA report, he says, he found that the police department had misrepresented its findings and Newsday had printed the distortions. Smith says he emailed Newsday reporter Christine Armario twice to seek a correction.

Months later, in late 2007, Smith says, the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau began investigating him, transferred him to another department, disciplined him for “improperly communicating with the media,” and eventually forced him to retire. He says the pretext he was given was unauthorized use of the Internet – a restriction that is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

He seeks reinstatement and punitive damages for retaliation and constitutional violations from Suffolk County and its Police Commissioner Richard Dormer.

He is represented by Steven Morelli of Carle Place, N.Y.

Source: Courthouse News Service

Jornaleros presentes en la marcha

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José Ronstadt (Telemundo 52) tuvo la oportunidad de entrevistar al grupo de jornaleros que participó en la marcha en Washington.

Tom Saenz (MALDEF) in support of the DREAM ACT

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Remarks of Tom Saenz, search President and General Counsel of MALDEF at AFL-CIO Headquarters during United States Student Association’s March 22, 2010 press conference in support of the DREAM ACT.

Church garden offers a hand to day laborers

By MARTIN ESPINOZA
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

The Struggle of the Global Placeless

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, Published: March 26, order 2010

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — On a deck in Boston, seven friends recently gathered for dinner. At the table was a white American man; his wife, an Italian woman he met in Switzerland; a Swiss citizen raised in Kenya; a German of Korean origin; a woman with Haitian, Chinese and European ancestry; the son of a black American and a German Jew; and an American with Indian blood.

It took a while to get through the where-are-you-fromming, as it often can these days.

There is a modern myth that globalization is new. But the world has integrated before, disintegrated in war, and integrated fitfully again. Goods and people have swirled for a long time, and in the 17th, 18th or 19th century you might have found on any ship a crew and passengers made up of slaves, traders, cooks, officers, colonizers and pilgrims more diverse than our dinner table.

What is arguably new is the influence of the placeless and the elevation of placelessness, in some quarters at least, to a virtue.

The placeless are no longer just the flotsam and jetsam of empires and colonies. They are the president of the United States now; they are among our leading thinkers and bankers, philanthropists and public servants.

Placelessness — variously defined, at varying levels of privilege — might even be seen as becoming the center of gravity of the human condition. Millions now live in one country and work in another, some crossing a border on foot each day, others putting on fake accents and telemarketers’ headsets, migrating by pretense. Millions are pouring out of their villages and into deracinating cities, with human civilization recently becoming urban in majority for the first time. Millions are being raised in a language their ancestors never spoke.

And yet the placeless still find themselves colliding with a place-bound world.

For the placeless person of privilege, it may be no worse than wrestling with the question “Where are you from?” You wonder every time: Do they want the five-second pick-one-identity answer, or the 30-second geography-biography, or the five-minute story?

But for the more vulnerable, the stakes are higher. Mexican laborers are encouraged to work in the United States but chased away by armed vigilantes. In India, northern migrants to coastal, cosmopolitan Mumbai are beaten by armed cadres of a sons-of-the-soil political movement. In China, untold millions of rural dwellers have been drawn to the city to make the roads and buildings to fuel the country’s boom. But, under the reigning hukou system of residency permits, they find themselves without the rights of locals in the big city, without guaranteed access to education and medical care, vulnerable at any time to being sent back to the village.

Officialdom struggles to process people without a place. Census forms don’t understand them. Commercial television and cinema create few characters in their image. Tax collectors insist that they choose one of their many countries as the real one. Politicians represent particular places, not ideas or industries or genders, and so if you are a Somalian-born American working in Paris for Nissan, you live in a democracy but without meaningful representation, with no public servants driven to take up your battles.

But the problem is not just external. The placeless often also suffer a gnawing tension within, a love-hate relationship with roots.

They find that their connections can run worldwide but only an inch deep. They may find it easier to ask friends in five countries for a favor than to ask a neighbor for sugar. They may know something of the foods of every continent but be unable to cook expertly in any one cuisine. They may have visited a greater fraction of the 10 largest cities in the world than of the neighborhoods of their own city.

Placeless souls of means have a way out. They find ways of splitting the difference, living rootlessly and yet making space for roots. They travel far from home to study, but then major in the study of their own race or culture or language. Or, in the case of someone like the artist Youngjoo Cho, a native of South Korea who studied in Paris and divides her time between Berlin and Seoul, they use art to soothe the unease of not belonging.

In a mixed-media piece of hers called “Motherland Visiting,” the detritus of a visit to her native country is springing out of a suitcase after the trip. The work is meant to suggest “the relationship of the placeless to localness,” her Web site says, “a relationship that is becoming more complex in an increasingly mobile world.”

Barack Obama, that politician of so many places, has shown a similar interest in roots. A child of many homes, with parents from different races and continents, he has built an adult life more rooted. He traveled in search of his African roots, wrote a book about his quest, worked at the grass roots of community organizing in Chicago, married a woman long rooted there, and built the kind of grounded family that his own childhood had lacked. Indeed, for many placeless people, it is romantic partnership more than a specific patch of earth that gives roots.

These days, it is often placeless people who flock to restaurants peddling their rootedness in place: restaurants like Blue Hill in New York, whose Web site talks of “local food” and “nearby farms” and “producers who respect artisanal techniques.” It is the placeless who seem most to loathe the McDonald’s vision of food that scholars have called the “placeless foodscape.”

In a recent lecture at Princeton University, Sudhir Kakar, a prominent Indian psychoanalyst and cultural writer, suggested that this longing for place can be buried or denied or suppressed in the placeless, but that it will never truly go away.

The postmodern notion of “multiple identities” has become fashionable, he said, with its notion that “migration is an opportunity to reinvent one’s identity.” But this vision, though liberating, denies the role of place in forming consciousness, particularly in childhood, he argued.

The placeless dream has the “danger of underplaying if not denying the psychic pain of the migration process and the persistence of the past in the present,” said Mr. Kakar. “The emphasis on multiplicity can divert attention from what is enduring in the person.”

Source: New York Times