Barrio Defense: How Arizona’s Immigrants are Standing Up to SB 1070

Shortly after the 2010 passage ofSB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration bill, 20,000 people gathered in Phoenix for a May Day march to protest the new law. Instead of ending with speakers or a formal program, as political marches often do, organizers broke the crowd into small groups and asked them two questions:

How will the new law impact you and your neighbors? What can you do about it?

And with that, a new phase of the migrant rights movement, based on an age-old model of community organizing, was born.

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California’s TRUST Act: Countering Arizona

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 New York Times Editorial: June 21, 2012.

A bill moving through the California Legislature, aptly named the Trust Act, seeks to counter the damage done to community policing and public safety by the Obama administration’s Se Communities program. The program conducts mandatory immigration checks of everyone booked into local jails and has led to the deportations of many thousands of people with no criminal records, while impeding law enforcement.

Once the program identifies immigration violators, federal officials can issue “detainers,” or requests that people be held so they can be picked up for deportation. Local departments usually comply, even though police officials complain that doing so clogs their cells with traffic violators and other very minor offenders, including — because of database foul-ups — wrongfully detained citizens and legal residents.