More on our own concentration camps

Private prisons run for profit and taking all comers. Locking up innocents with no access to lawyers or hearings. What country does this sound like?:

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.

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.

Stop the immigration raids

In 2008, thousands of workers were arrested in workplace raids, an eight-fold increase since 2002. Many of the workers were deported leaving behind children without parents, spouses (some of whom were U.S. citizens) without partners, and broken communities. The raids of businesses and homes occur at any time of the day or night, creating an atmosphere of terror in immigrant communities.

On February 24th the first immigration raid of the Obama Administration took place in Bellingham, Washington. Some 28 workers in an engine manufacturing plant were arrested. The raid violates President Obama’s vision of a united America full of hope, opportunity, and equal rights for all.

Indiscriminate raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) target people solely for being undocumented. They arrest contributing members of our society. They hurt workers, businesses, and communities, and aggravate current economic hardships. Raids are not having any significant impact on the number of unauthorized workers. They are not raising wages in low-wage jobs. They seldom penalize employers who abuse workers. But fear about raids is crippling immigrant communities.

The raids must stop. Comprehensive reform of U.S. immigration policy to provide for family reunification and a path to citizenship must be enacted by Congress and signed by the President.

Tell President Obama to stop the raids.

Our own concentration camps

Outed.

"You can't work, you can't leave and you can't stay"

Bush's illegal immigration policy in action: (my bold)

The town of Postville, Iowa, population 2,000, has been turned into an open-air prison. Jerry Johnson, who works at nearby Luther College, called it something out of a bad science-fiction movie or the kind of thing a 1930s totalitarian regime might have cooked up.

"This was not only a grievous injustice but a shame on the state of Iowa and the federal government," said Mr. Johnson. "These were good, decent people who were also the most defenseless."

On May 12, immigration officials swooped in to arrest 400 undocumented workers from Mexico and Guatemala at the local meat-packing plant, a raid described as the biggest such action at a single site in U.S. history. The raid left 43 women, wives of the men who were taken away, and their 150 children without status or a means of support. The women cannot leave the town, and to make sure they do not they have been outfitted with leg monitoring bracelets.

"The women are effectively prisoners," said Father Paul Ouderkirk at St. Bridget's Roman Catholic Church. "The difference between them and anybody who is in jail is that in jail the government pays for them, but if they're on the streets we pay for them.

"What kind of a government makes prisoners of 43 mothers who all have children and then says, ‘You can't work, you can't leave and can't stay?' That boggles the imagination."

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the law does not provide for work authorization for illegals.

Update: Wanted to include this post about illegal immigration/ undocumented workers. Read the comments for more facts.

Yes. Actually we do because you wanted it, Georgie.

Something you really like to do. Makes you feel manly, does it?

Read about Hiu Lui Ng and feel ashamed of what America has become after eight years of the Bush administration:

He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

We want names. We want to know who it was who ignored this man's pleas. Who it was in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement who thought this was how people should be treated.

We want to know who it is who is responsible for this horror.

And we want him or them to be accountable.

Who takes care of the jailed immigrants' children?

Born in America, they are Americans. They are often separated from nursing mothers, left wandering the streets, stuck at daycare, abandoned to strangers, lost in the Child Services system.

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Oh, good for you, Mr. Dummermuth. The article continues: (my bold)

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

Why is there such frantic haste? Why are they pushing these raids just before a presidential election? ... oh.

Remember what has happened to other immigrants who were swept up into the private prison system



(which is doing a very nice business at the moment), do we know what is happening to them? Do they have access to their families?

The article points out the evilness of these aliens:

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

And clearly, the businesses who hired these evil illegal aliens have been jailed or at least fined, right? The article continues:

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Ah. The corporations actually are pissed because lack of exploitable workers raises prices. They've even tried treating workers from India as they do the Mexicans, but it didn't go very well.

Note this amazingly unacknowledged fact:

"In 2001, the Social Security Administration concluded that undocumented immigrants "account for a major portion of the billions of dollars paid into social security that don’t match SSA records," which payees, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, can never draw upon. As of July 2003, these payments totaled $421 billion."

How about we spend the money intended for the border wall to start businesses in Mexico and Guatemala so these desperate families stay home?



Making these undocumented workers the scapegoat for our economic ills has been a traditional ploy in our political theater. It also brings out the truly ugly part of our society.

Is this the America we want to be?

crossposted at SteveAudio

So... what would you do if you were caught up in a sweep

By ICE and not allowed to provide proof you were an American citizen?

It's happening now. Here. In the United States.

Officials with ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations, maintain that such cases are isolated because agents are required to obtain sufficient evidence that someone is an illegal immigrant before making an arrest. However, they don't track the number of U.S. citizens who are detained or deported.

"We don't want to detain or deport U.S. citizens," said Ernestine Fobbs, an ICE spokeswoman. "It's just not something we do."

While immigration advocates agree that the agents generally release detainees before deportation in clear-cut cases, they said that ICE sometimes ignores valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to ship out more illegal immigrants.

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

[snip]

The number of U.S. citizens who are swept up in the immigration system is a small fraction of the number of illegal immigrants who are deported, but in the last several years immigration lawyers report seeing more detainees who turn out to be U.S. citizens.

The attorneys said the chances of mistakes are growing as immigration agents step up sweeps in the country and state and local prisons with less experience in immigration matters screen more criminals on behalf of ICE.

ICE's Fobbs said agents move as quickly as possible to check stories of people who claim they're American citizens. But she said that many of the cases involve complex legal arguments, such as whether U.S. citizenship is derived from parents, which an immigration judge has to sort out.

And just where are these people being held as the immigration agents slowly plod through the bureaucracy? Where are these people's small children when both parents are swept up? What are they doing to these people when there is no oversight and no legal remedy?



WTF.

Update 1/26: Distributorcap in comments noted this sounds like the Nuremberg 1935 law. Googling Wikipedia gave me this:

The Nuremberg Laws (German: Nürnberger Gesetze) of 1935 were denaturalization laws passed in Nazi Germany. They used a pseudoscientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews. People with 4 German grandparents (white circles on the chart) were of "German blood", while people were classified as Jews if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents (black circles in top row right). A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of "mixed blood".

Exactly.

Ripping nursing babies from breasts

All because our immigration laws allow us to do so without caring:

Ms. Nantel, the immigration agency spokeswoman, said the primary responsibility for the plight of the American children of illegal immigrants rests with parents who violated the law. “It’s a challenging situation” for the agency, Ms. Nantel said. “It’s unfortunate that children are impacted negatively by the decisions of their parents.”

Here's what happened:

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

The case exposes a recurring quandary for immigration authorities as an increasing number of American-born children of illegal immigrants become caught up in deportation operations. With the Bush administration stepping up enforcement, the immigration agency has been left scrambling to devise procedures to deal with children who, by law, do not fall under its jurisdiction because they are citizens.

“We are faced with these sorts of situations frequently, where a large number of individuals come illegally or overstay and have children in the United States,” said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Unfortunately, the parents are putting their children in these difficult situations.”

Yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new written guidelines for agents, establishing how they should treat single parents, pregnant women, nursing mothers and other immigrants with special child or family care responsibilities who are arrested in raids.

The guidelines, which codify practices in use for several months and apply mainly to larger raids, instruct agents to coordinate with federal and local health service agencies to screen immigrants who are arrested to determine if they are caring for young children or other dependents who may be at risk. The agents must consider recommendations from social workers who interview detained immigrants about whether they should be released to their families while awaiting deportation.

Where are these people being taken? How long are they held in detention? Who is in charge? Does the Red Cross get to check up on them? Who is representing them? When a child is an American, aren't the parents allowed to stay in the U.S.?

Being disappeared right off the streets of America

Where are these people?:

Paxpdx of Street Prophets:

Back in early June, I posted about a raid on a North Portland produce plant that resulted in the arrest of 167 workers. Many were parents of young children, and indeed, up to fifty kids at a local elementary school were stranded at the end of the day, with no one coming to pick them up. A few toddlers were stranded with their caregivers as well, and when the caregivers called to find out more about the parents' fates, state workers offered to come and pick up the children. Fearing for the kids' safety and not knowing whether the state workers could be trusted, the caregivers refused to give their addresses and held onto the kids until other arrangements could be made.

That was the first few days. Even here in the neighborhoods most directly affected, it's hard to come by news of what's happening with these families, with these workers, with the US citizen children who were left in the lurch. If you don't have contacts within the community, it's almost as if it never happened.

Except over 100 people have disappeared.

As we lurched toward the summer Friday afternoon news dead zone, President Bush slipped out a bit of news - there's more where that came from, and it may be headed your way.

So since it may be your neighbors and their families who are picked up next, I thought I'd share a little about where things stand now, and offer a couple of suggestions, too.

Paxpdx numbers the steps, cautions what it will entail, how to help, what to expect from this government.

And again. WHERE ARE THESE PEOPLE?



And just what is the Bush administration doing with them?

Separating mothers from children

The end result of the immigration raids. We should be so proud of ourselves: (my bold)

HOUSTON (AP) -- They are the hidden side of the government's stepped-up efforts to track down and deport illegal immigrants: Toddlers stranded at day care centers or handed over to ill-equipped relatives. Siblings suddenly left in charge of younger brothers and sisters.

When illegal-immigrant parents are swept up in raids on homes and workplaces, the children are sometimes left behind - a complication that underscores the difficulty in enforcing immigration laws against people who have put down roots and begun raising families in the U.S.

Three million American-born children have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant; one in 10 American families has mixed immigration status, meaning at least one member is an immigrant here illegally, according to the Pew Center for Hispanic Research and the office of U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano. Children born in the U.S. are automatically American citizens and are not subject to deportation.

Why was the DHS standing by and letting people get murdered?

Via Whig at Cannablog, Glenn Greenwald:
"I really recommend reading the Observer article in its entirety, although though I will summarize the basic facts. In 2000, agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (ICE) -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- recruited Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as "Lalo," to work as an informant for ICE as part of its investigation into a Mexican drug cartel which operated close to the Texas border. ICE was intent on gathering enough information to indict high-level Mexican drug traffickers, and they paid "Lalo" more than $220,000 to work as a spy for them, including the wearing of a wire.

In August, 2003, Lalo's cartel boss ordered him to participate in the murder of a Mexican lawyer. Lalo participated in the murder -- which was extremely brutal -- while wearing the wire supplied to him by ICE. The ICE agents thus became aware that the cartel they were investigating was murdering people and that their own informant was participating in those murders -- even as he wore their wire.

After the initial murder, the ICE agents sought permission to continue using Lalo as their informant. Permission was given by high-level Justice Department officials in both Texas and Washington, including several Texans who are very close associates of both George Bush and Alberto Gonzales.."


Glenn Greenwald's second article:
"I want to follow-up on the post from yesterday regarding the complicity of Homeland Security and Justice Department officials -- including several very high level administration officials -- in the multiple murders committed by one of their paid informants.
[snip]
This case goes far beyond that. Agents of our government worked with, paid and recorded a serial murderer who repeatedly tortured and slaughtered people with the knowledge of high-level DOJ and DHS officials. The 30-year DEA agent in charge of the El Paso office who complained about this and brought it to light was threatened and then fired. The independent reporter who reported on it was harassed, intimidated and threatened by agents who, with pure malice, went to his boss in an unrelated job in order to disclose information about him that they thought would be damaging, if not get him fired -- all done to force the reporter to disclose his sources."