America's Voice Blog

Posted 08/18/10 at 10:39am By Jackie Mahendra

NYT: As it Stands, “Secure Communities Won’t Make The Country More Secure”

For all the talk that the Obama Administration is changing immigration enforcement priorities to focus on the “worst of the worst,” a new report editorialized in the New York Times today shows that for one flagship program called "Secure Communities," there’s a very long road ahead:

Secure Communities won’t make the country more secure, not the way it is working. Police departments that don’t want to participate should be able to opt out. The Obama administration needs to fix it or jettison it.

The Times paints a pretty damning picture of how the program’s been run:

Secure Communities, an immigration enforcement program created under President George W. Bush and now being greatly expanded by President Obama, is billed as an effort to catch and deport “the worst of the worst,” the violent criminals, drug and gun smugglers, gang members and other dangerous aliens. That would be excellent, if true. It doesn’t seem to be.

According to the data, the Secure Communities program has been in the business of rounding up a majority of non-criminal immigrants; a whopping 79 percent of those deported under Secure Communities have no criminal records “or had been picked up for low-level offenses, like traffic violations and juvenile mischief.”

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Posted 05/19/10 at 12:57pm By Frank Sharry

First Lady Michelle Obama Questioned by Second-Grader Worried About Her Mom’s Immigration Status

A second-grader stole the show today, even as U.S. President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon held a press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House. 

While the two Presidents spoke about the need for immigration reform and about concerns over Arizona's harsh new law – without saying anything new or different – down the road in Silver Spring, Maryland, First Lady Michele Obama and Mexico’s First Lady Margarita Zavala visited an elementary school to speak with a class of second graders. 

ABC News’ Karen Travers reports what happened when a young girl spoke up:

The student shyly raised her hand and said, "My mom ... she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn't have papers."

Mrs. Obama replied: "Yeah, well that's something that we have to work on, right? To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right? That's exactly right."

The girl then said quietly, "But my mom doesn't have any ..." and trailed off.

Mrs. Obama replied: "Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that, and everybody's got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens. That's right."

Watch the video of the exchange (UPDATED):

Sadly, this brief exchange says more about the current state of the immigration debate than the remarks of the two Presidents in the Rose Garden today. 

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Posted 04/26/10 at 03:46pm By Mahwish Khan

Mayors Bloomberg and Gordon Condemn Arizona Bill—Plus, New York Will Welcome AZ’s Business!

Phoenix Mayor, Phil Gordon, and Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, are condemning Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s move on Friday to sign the controversial SB 1070 into law.

Gordon’s primary focus is on the adverse implications this bill will have on community safety. By diverting police attention from dangerous criminals to harmless undocumented immigrants, this bill has the alarming ability to alienate a population that would otherwise be helpful in reporting and reducing real crime. Watch his interview on Fox News:

 

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Posted 04/23/10 at 04:51pm By Jackie Mahendra

BREAKING: Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) doesn’t know what an “illegal immigrant” looks like

But she did sign Arizon'a harshest profiling bill yet, S.B. 1070, into law today. So, why is she telling cops to profile people based on "reasonable suspicion" they could be undocumented, if she doesn't know what that looks like?

Watch it:

Posted 04/14/10 at 04:53pm By Adam Luna

Do I Look Undocumented To You?

Cross-Posted at Jack and Jill Politics:

Imagine every cop in your state was forced to do their job like that controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio or risk getting sued?

That’s what a new bill in Arizona, which could be signed into law by the Governor in a matter of days, would do! It would force cops to interrogate — even jail — people, based on whether or not people “look” like they have their papers in order.

Really, who judges what an undocumented immigrant looks like? Do I look undocumented, just because I have brown skin, eat guacamole, and listen to Carlos Santana? Do you?

I’m sorry, but that’s called racial profiling. That’s discrimination, period. We have a chance to stop it, but only if we raise our voices now.

This bill would push undocumented immigrants deeper into the shadows and make our communities less safe as victims and community members become more unwilling to report crime.  Today, too many Arizonans are afraid to call 911 because of the tactics of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and others like him.  S.B. 1070 would make this problem even worse.

The L.A. Times reported yesterday  that the Arizona ACLU fears this could easily be used to racially profile U.S. citizens who simply “have an accent” and “leave their wallet at home.”

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Posted 04/09/10 at 01:21pm By Patty Kupfer

What Happened to the Worst of the Worst?: NYT Says “Pull the Plug on 287(g)”

An editorial in today’s New York Times adds to a week of attacks on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), since last Friday’s release of a new report by the agency’s Inspector General that slams the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

According to the Times’ analysis of the OIG report:

The [287(g)] program lacks basic safeguards like data collection and reporting requirements to ensure that deputies don’t violate civil rights. The report also found that fewer than 10 percent of its sample of captured offenders had committed serious “Level 1” crimes, and almost half had no connection at all to violence, drugs or property crimes.

The report reinforces what a leading police association and police chiefs, including William Bratton of Los Angeles, have argued strenuously — that 287(g) undermines public safety. Police officers can’t fight crimes when communities they serve fear and avoid them.

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Posted 04/02/10 at 12:26pm By Dara Lind

Colorado Police: “We Are Attempting to Find Local Solutions to Nationwide Problems”

On Tuesday, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) convened about 40 state and local police officers from across Colorado to discuss immigration enforcement. The attendees reached the same conclusion as law enforcement professionals at previous PERF events in Phoenix, AZ and Raleigh, NC: the incoherence of federal immigration policy causes unnecessary difficulties for local police.

As Colorado Springs Police Chief Richard Myers told local TV station KRDO:

"Most of the attendees, if not all, felt that we do need to see more leadership coming out of Washington DC. We are attempting to find local solutions to nationwide problems."

In particular (as quoted in the Colorado Springs Gazette), Myers said, local police need to be able to make

"some differentiation between criminal aliens and those who are here undocumented with no other criminal offense."

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Posted 02/26/10 at 12:40pm By Dara Lind

Police to Congress: We Can’t Clean Up Your Mess. “Step Up” and Pass Immigration Reform

When the federal government doesn't act on immigration, local communities feel the pain. Cops, in particular, have come forward to acknowledge that the strain of the broken system is making it harder for them to do their crucial jobs -- to fight crime, day in and day out.

So it makes sense that, this week, police chiefs across the country have been sending Congress a simple message (though they're too polite to put it this way): grow up, take some responsibility, and pass immigration reform that makes all of us safer.

That was the prevailing sentiment from Chief Lisa Womack of Elgin, IL; Sheriff Richard Wiles of El Paso, TX; and Chief Sam Granato of Yakima, WA, when they participated in a telephonic press conference yesterday sponsored by the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative (LEEI). They called on President Obama and Congress to (in Chief Granato's words) "step up to the plate" on reform. Meanwhile, Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran told the Chicago Tribune that he supports comprehensive immigration reform, calling it "morally the right thing to do." The Tribune writes:

Curran argued that legalization would make it easier for potential witnesses to come forward during police investigations. "They're going to be patriotic Americans," he said.

Undocumented residents' reluctance to notify police when they are witnesses or victims of crime has been a constant frustration of the law enforcement community as they call on Congress to clean up its mess, and it was a theme of yesterday's LEEI call as well.

"What we see is people afraid to step out of the shadows to report a crime or be a witness," Chief Granato said, as reported in the Yakima Herald Republic.

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Posted 12/22/09 at 11:46am By Dara Lind

Disturbing Immigration Enforcement Tactics Underscore Need for Real Reform

A pair of stories published last week reveal disturbing new frontiers in immigration enforcement and underscore the urgent need for real reform.

An article by Jacqueline Stevens in the Nation uncovers several "ruse operations," in which federal immigration (ICE) agents posed as insurance agents, couriers, and even Mormon missionaries in order to collect information on undocumented immigrants or lure them somewhere to be arrested. Here's one representative example:

"A ruse operation about five years ago still rankles Kentucky attorney Julia Thorne. Thorne received a phone call from a man saying he was with a courier service, wanting to confirm her address. Shortly after that, one of her clients, a Polish horse teaser living in the area since 1993, received a call from a man who identified himself as 'Bill, the new guy in Julia's office' and asked the client to stop by Thorne's office and sign some papers--despite the fact that Thorne works alone. Two ICE agents were waiting and arrested him in the lobby. Thorne, eight floors above, had no idea until she received a call from her client in ICE custody.

"When Thorne complained to the Louisville ICE office, she was told, 'No, your client's making that up. We said we were a courier service." When she asked, "How did he happen to show up in my lobby when you were there?' they said it didn't happen."

While most of the operations Stevens recounts took place under the Bush administration, she warns that ICE's current focus on "targeted stealth operations" instead of the highly-criticized workplace raids could make these tactics more common. One researcher quoted in the piece observes that the effect of the ruses is to "send a shudder through the immigrant community, but without the dominant community finding out."

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Posted 11/10/09 at 02:36pm By Dara Lind

ICE Firing of 1200 Janitors Likened by SEIU to “Redecorating When the House is on Fire”

badgeThis morning, the Associated Press and Minnesota Public Radio reported that 1,200 undocumented janitors had been fired from Twin Cities company ABM under pressure from the Department of Homeland Security.

ICE worked with ABM, giving employees a few months to produce documentation and then firing those who couldn’t in four waves throughout October. None of the janitors were arrested, and ICE hasn’t yet fined the company.

This "silent firing" is the same process we saw earlier this fall, when L.A.-based American Apparel was forced to fire a quarter of its employees in September. It’s clear that the Obama administration favors these immigration enforcement tactics to the showy, headline-grabbing workplace raids ICE conducted in the Bush era, most notoriously in Postville, Iowa, in 2008.

But just because the ABM janitors weren’t arrested by ICE, unlike workers in Postville and other raid victims, doesn’t mean mass firings cause less trauma to communities. In fact, in some regards they’re even more disruptive. Three times as many people lost their jobs in the ABM firings as in Postville, after all.

Click here to read more.

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