Piecing Together an Immigrant’s Life the U.S. Refused to See
Shanise Farrar
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: July 5, 2009
When the 43-year-old man died in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2005, the very fact seemed to fall into a black hole. Although a fellow inmate scrawled a note telling immigrant advocates that the detainee’s symptoms of a heart attack had long gone unheeded, government officials would not even confirm that the dead man had existed.
In March, more than three years after the death, federal immigration authorities acknowledged that they had overlooked it, and added a name, “Ahmad, Tanveer,” to their list of fatalities in custody.
Even as the man’s death was retrieved from official oblivion, however, his life remained a mystery, The New York Times reported in an April article on the case that pointed up the secrecy and lack of accountability in the nation’s ballooning immigration detention system. Just who the man was and why he had been detained were unknown.
Yet at the end of a long trail of government documents and interviews with friends and relatives in New York, Texas and his native Pakistan, there was his name, “Ahmad, T.,” still listed last week on the tenants’ buzzer board at the Eldorado, an apartment building in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he had lived for years. And the tenant list itself — Jones, Nadler, Mahmud, Fong, Quinones — testified to the long history of American immigration that he had tried so hard to join.
Tanveer Ahmad, it turns out, was a longtime New York City cabdriver who had paid thousands of dollars in taxes and immigration application fees. Whether out of love, loneliness or the quest for a green card, he had twice married American women after entering the country on a visitor’s visa in 1993. His only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: While working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery.
It would come back to haunt him. For if Mr. Ahmad’s overlooked death showed how immigrants could vanish in detention, his overlooked American life shows how 9/11 changed the stakes for those caught in the nation’s tangle of immigration laws.
In the end, his body went back in a box to his native village, to be buried by his Pakistani widow and their two children, conceived on his only two trips home in a dozen years. He had always hoped to bring them all to the United States, his widow, Rafia Perveen, said in a tearful telephone interview through a translator.
“He said America is very good,” she recalled. “When it comes to the treatment of Muslims in the U.S., he had faith in the rule of law. He said, ‘In America, they don’t bother anyone just for no reason.’ ”
When immigration agents burst into Mr. Ahmad’s two-room Flatbush apartment on Aug. 2, 2005, they were looking for someone else, his friends say — a roommate suspected of violating his student visa by working. But they ordered Mr. Ahmad to report to immigration headquarters in Manhattan on Aug. 11.
He went, and was delivered in shackles to the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J. His Texas misdemeanor had popped up in the computer as an offense involving a deadly weapon — reason enough, after 9/11, for authorities to detain him pending deportation proceedings.
Like several million other residents of the United States, Mr. Ahmad occupied the complicated gray zone between illegal and legal immigration. Though he had overstayed his first visa, he had repeatedly been authorized to work while his applications for “adjustment of status” were pending. Twice before 9/11 he had been allowed back into the country after visits to Pakistan.
But the green card application sponsored by his Bronx-born wife, Shanise Farrar, had been officially denied in March 2005, leaving him without a valid visa. Although the couple could have reapplied, by the time he was arrested they had not spoken in more than a year, and Ms. Farrar, who had received a letter threatening a marriage fraud investigation, was unaware of his detention.
As she tells it, theirs was an intimate relationship ruined by 9/11. With regret, she recalled her reaction: “I was just cursing him. I was like, ‘You people come here and kill us and mess up our city.’ He was trying to convince me and prove to me that he’s a good man, not those people.”
“I loved him,” she added. “It was just, once the World Trade Center came down, I changed my mind.”
He was a natural immigrant, friends said, the fifth child in a poor but striving family, the captain of his village school’s victorious cricket team who grew into a funny and generous adult. After his family arranged his engagement to his cousin Rafia, he left to work in a brother’s store in Saudi Arabia. But once he visited New York, he had eyes only for the United States.
“His brother called him to come back,” recalled Mohammad S. Tariq, 58, a cabby whose Brooklyn apartment was Mr. Ahmad’s first home in the city. “But Tanveer did not want to go back.”
Instead he followed a job to Texas. He worked the night shift at a gas station that was robbed at gunpoint 7 times in 35 days, said the manager, Kathy Jean Lewis — who married him while she was battling thyroid cancer.
After her recovery, Mr. Ahmad made a three-month trip back to Pakistan, where he wed his cousin in 1998. His marriage to Ms. Lewis, now 53, was annulled by a Texas court in 1999.
She harbors no hard feelings. “He was emotionally supportive when I was sick,” she said, recalling how Mr. Ahmad took her to midnight dinners at her favorite restaurant when she was undergoing radiation treatment. “He just had a very big heart.”
His second American wife, Ms. Farrar, tells a similar story.
They wed at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan in July 2000, when Ms. Farrar was a single mother struggling to support her young son as a car service dispatcher, and they applied for a green card. She says she did not know he had a wife in Pakistan, and she denies that hers was “a paper marriage,” as Mr. Ahmad’s Pakistani widow put it. Ms. Farrar, 36, still speaks wistfully of family outings to Six Flags Great Adventure and the Bronx Zoo.
Then came 9/11. “Friends and family, ringing my phone — ‘You better watch it, you maybe married a terrorist,’ ” Ms. Farrar recalled, evoking a period when hundreds of Muslim immigrants in New York were swept up on the strength of vague suspicions. “I would bring it to him. He was scared anybody was going to hurt him.”
They patched things up before a November 2002 immigration interview, Ms. Farrar said. But they flunked it — the interviewing agent apparently doubted their marriage was genuine — and never appeared for the second-chance interview in 2003, Ms. Farrar said, because they had split up.
By the time Mr. Ahmad was taken in handcuffs to immigration court on Aug. 17, 2005, all he wanted was to return to Pakistan. He insisted on giving up his right to contest deportation, even though he faced a 10-year bar on returning, said Kenneth M. Schonfeld, an immigration lawyer hurriedly hired by Mr. Ahmad’s friends, all cabdrivers from Pakistan.
“He couldn’t stand the thought of having to stay in custody,” the lawyer said, and he seemed “really terrified” of the Monmouth jail. “It’s a place that would frighten or depress anyone.”
Three weeks later, Mr. Ahmad was dead. Since he had no known health problems, his friends were shocked and disbelieving. They were told that Mr. Ahmad had suffered a heart attack in the jail, and despite all efforts to revive him, had been pronounced dead in a hospital emergency room at 5:51 p.m. on Sept. 9. An autopsy cited “occlusive coronary atherosclerosis.”
His friends did not know that the jail had a history of detainee complaints of medical neglect and physical abuse, and did not allow guards to send detainees to the medical unit without prior approval. Similar complaints have been made about many detention centers, spurring the Obama administration to order a review of the system.
According to the jail’s internal investigation, Mr. Ahmad walked into the medical unit shortly after 3:50 p.m. on Sept. 9 and “was seen immediately.” But the letter scrawled by a fellow inmate contended that before he showed up there, Mr. Ahmad’s pleas for treatment had been rebuffed by a guard for an hour.
Complaints about his death were filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, documents show; the matter was passed for internal inquiry to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with the notation that it need not report back its findings.
By 2007, when the immigration agency compiled its first list of deaths in immigration detention, under pressure from Congress and the news media, Mr. Ahmad’s death was not on it.
Yet if his death was not counted, his arrest was — it had been added to the agency’s anti-terrorism statistics, according to government documents showing he was termed a “collateral” apprehension in Operation Secure Commute, raids seeking visa violators after the London transit bombings.
How his children will remember him is another matter. Without the money Mr. Ahmad used to send, they had to move in with relatives far from his grave in Pakistan. But his 10-year-old son clings to a souvenir, the widow said: “He keeps his father’s photograph in his pocket.”
Friday, July 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
shameless self promotion
Featured Indie Artist Interview with Camille of Camille Handcrafted
Posted by admin in artfire, indie, interview, tags: artfire, artists, handmade, indie, interview, jewelryI’m going to be out of town the rest of the week (without internet access…gasp), but didn’t want to miss my favorite part of the week….meeting our featured artist.
Let’s meet today’s featured indie artist, Camille of Camille Handcrafted.
SI: Please tell us a little about yourself.
Camille: My studio is in Tucson, Arizona, in a magnificent patch of desert. The light here is incredible, and the quiet is priceless. I first came here to be with my husband, Thomas. Thomas has since left the world but not before planting in me a deep respect for and absolute love for his precious desert. The only thing more beautiful than the Sonoran sunrise is the Sonoran sunset! This is where I first started making jewelry, having taken a few classes at a local bead shop. I didn’t really stick with that, though, and I was away from it for a long time. When I started up again I tried wrapping with wire and found that I truly enjoyed the freedoms that those techniques opened up.
SI: What is the name of your business? and what do you create?
Camille: My business is called Camille Handcrafted. This was suggested by my son in law who felt that “Camille” was a perfect name that could not be improved upon. Do you think perhaps he was sucking up to his mother in law? Very possible, in my estimation, but it was done with so much earnestness that I acceded. I’ve been experimenting with my art, crafting everything from sparkling strings of beads to hang from potted plants and wind chimes with beautiful musical bells to sterling wrapped gemstone necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.
 | SI: What inspires you? Camille: Tough question, that. My first instinct is to answer: “everything.” I’ve been spending more time walking in the desert here in Tucson and paying close attention to that natural landscape. I have several pieces now in process that are definitely directly influenced by those observations. I recently donated a piece for auction to the Seattle Midwifery School, a bracelet called “A Little Bit of Tucson” and it was exactly that. SI: What is the best thing about what you do? and the worst? |
| SI: When not creating, what do you like to do? Camille: I don’t know that there is a time when I am not creating. The process doesn’t have a discernible beginning or ending, so it’s all part of my life. I’m a musician as well as a jewelry artist. There are times that I feel that the jewelry I design is nothing more than an extension of my music; a song in three dimensions. SI: Any future plans you care to share with us? |  |
Many thanks to Camille for sharing so graciously of herself and her art. Please take a few minutes to visit Camille Handcrafted.
Friday, June 5, 2009
saving human lives = littering?
Tucson Region
Conviction has crossers' water supplier defiant
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.04.2009
A Tucson man convicted of littering on federal land said he will continue to leave out water for illegal immigrants walking through the desert, even if that means risking further citations.
"We're committed to our humanitarian efforts," said Walt Staton, 27, who was found guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court of knowingly littering on a national wildlife refuge.
"We're not asking permission from the United States to save people's lives. We never have, because we know they'd say no," Staton said.
Staton, a Web designer and volunteer with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, faces up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine when he is sentenced Aug. 11 by U.S. District Magistrate Judge Jennifer Guerin.
He was cited Dec. 4 for littering when U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted him placing unopened gallon containers of water in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge southwest of Tucson.
It was one of dozens of times in his five years of volunteering with the group that he had left out water, Staton said. This time, though, Staton said a Border Patrol agent stopped his pursuit of a group of illegal immigrants to seize the water.
"I was just trying to save lives," Staton said. "I was trying to end the death and suffering in the desert. The best we can understand, the United States wants to enforce the border by making the desert itself a deterrent."
Staton's attorney, William Walker, argued during the two-day trial that leaving full, unopened water jugs out didn't constitute littering just because someone else later disposed of the empty container elsewhere.
He told the jury of four men and eight women that, based on the prosecutor's theory, if they were given a meal in the jury room and then tossed an empty wrapper on the floor, it would mean the court was guilty of littering.
"Just because something can turn into litter from someone else doesn't make it litter," Walker said. "His intent and purpose was for them to drink the water, not to litter."
Prosecutors argued it shouldn't matter what Staton's intentions were, or a person's motives for committing a crime would matter in other cases.
"Every bank robber would come in here and say they did it to save their dying grandmother," Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Lee said.
The verdict shocked Walker, who said about one-third of the jury pool was disqualified because they'd acknowledged sympathy for Staton. He said he didn't think it would be possible for those chosen to find Staton guilty.
"What really surprised me, though, was . . . this trial must have cost the government more than $50,000," Walker said. "They say there aren't enough agents on the border, that they can't stop terrorists from coming into the country . . . and then they spend all of this time and money prosecuting a humanitarian who is putting out water to save lives."
Staton is the second No More Deaths volunteer to go to trial on a federal littering charge. Daniel Millis was found guilty at a bench trial in September, though Walker — who also handled that case — said he has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Walker said he also plans to appeal Staton's conviction, taking it to the U.S. Supreme Court if needed.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
CHENEY SETTING IT UP?
Dick Cheney's Cynical Bet
Posted May 12, 2009 | 02:44 PM (EST)by Taylor Marsh
What motivates Dick Cheney?
It's not what people think, though Mr. Cheney should be worried about his role in U.S. torture policy, even if he'll likely never be held to account. So, it's not that. Though we may get the "holy grail" evidence Cheney keeps talking about soon. What Cheney, Dick or Liz, won't talk about is the detainee who gave false information (under Egyptian torture) that sent us to war in Iraq, and disgraced Colin Powell. Because Al-Libi just committed suicide in a Libyan prison.
If we get hit again it's going to be blamed on torture, Rush said on his show yesterday.
So why is Dick Cheney on this media tour?
Mr. Cheney wants to draw a line in the sand where Pres. Obama began dismantling the torture policies of Bush-Cheney, which Cheney postulates is making us "less safe."
"That means, in the future, we will not have the same safeguards..." - Vice President Dick Cheney
Cheney knows that we will be hit at some moment in the future, something experts have said is inevitable, whether it's before Obama is out of office or not isn't the issue. Cheney's bet is that when this happens the legacy of Bush-Cheney must be solidified as the Administration who after 9/11 "kept us safe." He wants Americans to remember the moment those policies were dismantled. It happened on the Democrats' watch.
Mr. Cheney along with his fan club, headed by Rush Limbaugh, is betting that the American people need to be reminded of who kept us safe and when those safety policies were destroyed, believing that Americans won't care about torture anymore when the next attack lands.
Nothing Dick Cheney does is by accident. This is a calculated plan to weave a narrative before it happens into the political blood stream, with the attempt of casting blame in advance. Call it preemptive marketing.
It's the same tactic with a new twist, with Cheney finding a new line of attack on the old standard that Democrats are weak on national security. Considering what Bush-Cheney has cost us internationally this takes incredible gall. But when you think of how low Dick Cheney is thought of in this country, what has he got to lose? Since the Obama administration doesn't have the stomach to do anything about what has gone before, the answer is nothing. Considering the Cheneys are the strongest advocates on TV today for a policy that should have us all hanging our heads in shame, it makes you wonder who's really in power.
So, even as Cheney draws a line that he believes will eventually lead the Republicans back to power, Cheney's cynical bet that Obama and the Democrats will be blamed is one he's more than willing to let ride.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Doctors protest exclusion of single-payer at Senate Finance Committee
Doctors protest exclusion of single-payer at Senate Finance Committee
For Immediate Release
May 5, 2009
WASHINGTON - Doctors and other advocates of a national single-payer health system - also known as an improved Medicare for All - directly confronted senators at a Senate Finance Committee “roundtable” on health reform today.
One-by-one, eight single-payer advocates in the audience stood up during the opening comments of the hearing and asked why single-payer experts were being excluded from the proceedings. They each spoke out in turn until they were removed from the committee hearing room and arrested, one-by-one, by U.S. Capitol police.
The doctors and others said that a publicly funded, privately delivered single-payer system is the only solution to the crisis plaguing our nation’s non-system of health care, noting that single-payer national health insurance would guarantee coverage for everyone and contains costs.
Despite polling that shows a clear majority of public and physician support for a single-payer system, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has stated on multiple occasions that single payer is “off the table” of health reform.
Today’s round table, the second of three, consisted of 15 witnesses with no single-payer advocates among them. By contrast, several witnesses have direct ties to the for-profit, private health insurance industry.
The doctors and activists were dressed in black, which they said was in memory of the 22,000 people who die every year due to lack of health insurance. They represented a coalition of single-payer advocacy organizations including Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), Healthcare-NOW, Single Payer Action, Private Health Insurance Must Go, the Campaign for Fresh Air and Clean Politics, Prosperity Agenda, and Health Care for the Homeless.
“Health insurance administrators are practicing medicine without a medical license,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers, co-chair of Maryland chapter of PNHP. “The result is the suffering and death of thousands of patients for the sake of private profit. The private health insurance industry has a solid grip on patients, providers and legislators. It is time to stand up and declare that health care is a human right.”
Much to the frustration of Baucus, the multiple disruptions demanding single-payer be on the table set the tone for the second of three roundtables on Health Reform by the Senate Finance Committee.
Katie Robbins, assistant national coordinator of Healthcare-NOW, said: “The current discussion on health reform is political theater at its best. Our elected officials are hosting these events to go through the motions of what developing effective national health policy should look like. There is a big difference between getting health policy experts in the room and the witnesses here today who would profit the most from reform. That difference means our hard-earned dollars will go to further insurance industry profits, not to guarantee health care to the American people.”
“It’s a pretty spectacular display of raw political power,” said Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action. “The health insurance industry demands that not one of the 15 people who testified today shall be a single-payer advocate. And the industry gets what it wants. It’s time for the American people to storm the gates and demand - put single payer on the table.”
Single payer is successfully implemented in the United States’ own Medicare system providing comprehensive care to the elderly, as well as in many of the best health care systems in the world. A single-payer system, as embodied in legislation H.R. 676 and S. 703, would provide guaranteed, quality care to all Americans with no increase in U.S. health spending.
The single-payer advocates said they will continue to use direct actions and nonviolent civil disobedience to urge the inclusion of a publicly funded, privately delivered system.
Other methods of communication with elected officials have failed in delivering the demand for single-payer national health care as evidenced by the exclusion of single-payer advocates from official hearings on health reform.
###
Healthcare-NOW! is a national grassroots advocacy organization in support of single-payer national health care with a network of activists in 42 states. More information can be found at www.healthcare-now.org
Single Payer Action is a nonprofit activist fueled organization. Find out more at www.singlepayeraction.org
Maryland Chapter Physicians for a National Health Program is a chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org), a nonprofit research and education organization of 16,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance. More information can be found at www.md.pnhp.org
Prosperity Agenda includes single payer national health care as one of the policy changes needed to create an economy that benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest. www.prosperityagenda.us. Prosperity Agenda is an economic justice project associated with The Campaign for Fresh Air & Clean Politics (www.FreshAirCleanPolitics.net).
Contact:
Russell Mokhiber, Single Payer Action, (202) 468-8868, russellmokhiber@gmail.com
Katie Robbins, Healthcare-NOW! (330) 618-6379, healthcarenow08@gmail.com
Margaret Flowers, M.D., Physicians for a National Health Program - Maryland chapter, (410) 591-0892, nose1@aol.com
Kevin Zeese, ProsperityAgenda.us, (301) 996-6582, kzeese@earthlink.net
Mark Almberg, PNHP, (312) 782-6006, (312) 622-0996, mark@pnhp.org
VIDEO footage:
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) reacts to protesters,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKP05AyfRsI
Russell Mokhiber, Single Payer Action, speaks at hearing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5vhTtxad30
Margaret Flowers, MD & Katie Robbins, Healthcare-NOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zOShsL4UJo
Carol Paris, MD, PNHP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdIUcrVxGwA
Mark Dudzic, Labor Campaign for Single-Payer Healthcare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1nl32aAh7M
Adam Schneider, Health Care for the Homeless
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I26EkvnjZuQ
Pat Salomon, MD & Kevin Zeese
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDHJH7W-ZEo
Friday, May 1, 2009
MoveOn ONLINE BRIEFING 05/04/09
Urgent update on health care: Next week, Congress will begin making the actual decisions about what'll be in a health care reform bill.
Meanwhile, conservative groups have launched a new assault on the president's proposal, including a million-dollar ad campaign claiming that health care will be rationed and "bureaucrats" will "decide the treatments you receive."1
If real people like us don't get involved in this health care fight now, it could all fall apart. So we're holding an emergency online briefing on Monday night at 9 p.m. ET with Dr. Howard Dean to make sure we're all ready for the fight ahead, called "What we all need to know to win on health care this year."
If fixing our health care system is important to you, this is an event you shouldn't miss. All you need to join in is a computer with an internet connection. Can you join us?
Here are the details:
What: Emergency Online Briefing with Dr. Howard Dean (Organized by MoveOn and Democracy for America)
When: Monday, May 4, 9 p.m. ET/ 8 CT/ 7 MT/ 6 PT
Where: MoveOn.org's web site
http://democracyforamerica.com/
Thursday, April 30, 2009
just do it
Can the flu actually be "contained?"
A confirmed case can cause a school to be closed down for a week. All well and good, but now these children are at home - doing what? Mom or dad there with them - or at work? Ah, it's boring staying at home; let's go to the mall. Hmm. The pool of possible infection spread has just multiplied exponentially.
The entire life of this illness is about seven days, and begins [and possibly remains] with mild symptoms. How long are YOU usually sick before you see a doctor? Do YOU miss work for a cough?
Seems pretty reasonable to assume that infected persons will continue to infect other persons.
So what to do? Everybody walk around in hazmat suits?
The CDC advice is undramatic and eminently practical: WASH YOUR HANDS. STAY HOME IF YOU'RE SICK.
Since you can't know who is infected [it takes many hours for any symptoms to manifest], assume that everyone is infected.
If you are sick, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE to take measures to reduce your broadcasting of whatever it is you have to others. That means possibly wearing a mask if you're coughing/sneezing. It also means WASHING YOUR HANDS. If you use a tissue, flush it or carry a ziplock baggie to contain it. DON'T put it in your office or home wastebasket. Buy a canister of disinfectant wipes [or use 1 tablespoon of household bleach in a gallon of water in a spray bottle] and USE them on your telephone, keyboard, desk, television remote control - whatever you touch. Don't share shower poofs, towels or pillows, etc., and WASH the ones you do use frequently to reduce the population of your nasties. Keep your toothbrush separate from others. Make sure toothbrushes are COVERED in the bathroom [when you flush, particulates spray and roam - yuck!].
Easy, yes? Just do it.
A confirmed case can cause a school to be closed down for a week. All well and good, but now these children are at home - doing what? Mom or dad there with them - or at work? Ah, it's boring staying at home; let's go to the mall. Hmm. The pool of possible infection spread has just multiplied exponentially.
The entire life of this illness is about seven days, and begins [and possibly remains] with mild symptoms. How long are YOU usually sick before you see a doctor? Do YOU miss work for a cough?
Seems pretty reasonable to assume that infected persons will continue to infect other persons.
So what to do? Everybody walk around in hazmat suits?
The CDC advice is undramatic and eminently practical: WASH YOUR HANDS. STAY HOME IF YOU'RE SICK.
Since you can't know who is infected [it takes many hours for any symptoms to manifest], assume that everyone is infected.
If you are sick, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE to take measures to reduce your broadcasting of whatever it is you have to others. That means possibly wearing a mask if you're coughing/sneezing. It also means WASHING YOUR HANDS. If you use a tissue, flush it or carry a ziplock baggie to contain it. DON'T put it in your office or home wastebasket. Buy a canister of disinfectant wipes [or use 1 tablespoon of household bleach in a gallon of water in a spray bottle] and USE them on your telephone, keyboard, desk, television remote control - whatever you touch. Don't share shower poofs, towels or pillows, etc., and WASH the ones you do use frequently to reduce the population of your nasties. Keep your toothbrush separate from others. Make sure toothbrushes are COVERED in the bathroom [when you flush, particulates spray and roam - yuck!].
Easy, yes? Just do it.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Virus Brings Swine-Hearted Lobby Into Foreground
Virus Brings Swine-Hearted Lobby Into Foreground
by: nezua
Tue Apr 28, 2009 at 15:20:14 PM EDT
By The Sanctuary Founding Editors:
The moment that the news of the "Swine Flu" or "North American Influenza" hit the wires, it was easy to predict what the anti-immigrant faction would have to say about it. People like Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, and groups like CIS, FAIR, and NumbersUSA are so locked into their views that their voices are unnecessary in a dialogue that actually preferences truth-which by nature requires flexibility and bravery. The stances of those who most vocally oppose immigration today are so predictable that one could paint a face on a septic-tainted soccer ball and paste up word balloons and rest well, knowing that The Nativist Lobby point of view on any immigration-related topic will end in "deport them all" and "seal the borders" if not "round them up" and other tired ideas. And nobody reading now needs a reminder of how throughout time, both Latin America as well as all immigrants have been slurred and painted with the brush of disease by those resistant to changing demographics.
This reaction is nothing new. Xenophobic fearmongering has long masqueraded itself behind public health alarmism.
Fear of contagion was used to justify Chinese Exclusion laws in the 19th century, backed up by pseudo-academic papers such as "Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation" (1862) and "How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood" (1875). The Angel Island detention facility was set up specifically to quarantine immigrants from Asia, sometimes for months or even years, while European immigrants were processed at Ellis Island in a matter of hours. It is an especially cruel irony of history that it was the Europeans who were bringing to "the New World" the deadly diseases which would claim millions of indigenous lives.
There are of course legitimate public health concerns which deserve attention and precautions; but what's noteworthy is the manner in which these concerns are discussed and imagined, what's played up and played down, what's said and unsaid, and how a racial line is drawn between the clean and the unclean.
Moreover, when the border is lined with barbed wire as it is now, it actually keeps undocumented migrants in- this is another ever-repeating mistake made throughout history, including with Italians after 1924. Before that time, they were much more likely to return home because they knew they could come back if necessary. We have repeated this again with the US Southern borders, which has interrupted the age-old migratory patterns that have brought workers in and out of the US, depending on the seasonal need for more hands. Ironically, this has forced many undocumented to put down roots here. And then the predictable complaints arise from the Nativist Lobby-that we are being "invaded" and "overrun."
How sad for them. These people are unable to simply admit that they are seized with a mental illness that has frozen their mind into a shape echoed throughout time. It is a crooked, and ugly one.
This flu will pass. Meanwhile, people are dying and suffering in México and in the US. Is hatred and fear all these well-paid pundits have to dispense in trying times? Do they see themselves as embodying something...American? We at The Sanctuary have to wonder if people like Michael Savage might best be described as terrorists cells awakening. After all, they are shouting that we should not trust our government, not trust our Health Departments, not frequent businesses that employ brown people, and they incite violence. Would not such disruption of society and our collective emotional fabric, in fact, be terrorists' goals for us?
Let us be united, then. United against fear and hateful misinformation. Together we can keep our heads, our hearts, and our health-while the crazed voices of Yesterday and the zombie-like Nativist choruses of today twist around one other in the rotted mire of irrelevance.
by: nezua
Tue Apr 28, 2009 at 15:20:14 PM EDT
By The Sanctuary Founding Editors:
The moment that the news of the "Swine Flu" or "North American Influenza" hit the wires, it was easy to predict what the anti-immigrant faction would have to say about it. People like Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, and groups like CIS, FAIR, and NumbersUSA are so locked into their views that their voices are unnecessary in a dialogue that actually preferences truth-which by nature requires flexibility and bravery. The stances of those who most vocally oppose immigration today are so predictable that one could paint a face on a septic-tainted soccer ball and paste up word balloons and rest well, knowing that The Nativist Lobby point of view on any immigration-related topic will end in "deport them all" and "seal the borders" if not "round them up" and other tired ideas. And nobody reading now needs a reminder of how throughout time, both Latin America as well as all immigrants have been slurred and painted with the brush of disease by those resistant to changing demographics.
This reaction is nothing new. Xenophobic fearmongering has long masqueraded itself behind public health alarmism.
Fear of contagion was used to justify Chinese Exclusion laws in the 19th century, backed up by pseudo-academic papers such as "Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation" (1862) and "How the Chinese Women Are Infusing a Poison in the Anglo-Saxon Blood" (1875). The Angel Island detention facility was set up specifically to quarantine immigrants from Asia, sometimes for months or even years, while European immigrants were processed at Ellis Island in a matter of hours. It is an especially cruel irony of history that it was the Europeans who were bringing to "the New World" the deadly diseases which would claim millions of indigenous lives.
There are of course legitimate public health concerns which deserve attention and precautions; but what's noteworthy is the manner in which these concerns are discussed and imagined, what's played up and played down, what's said and unsaid, and how a racial line is drawn between the clean and the unclean.
Moreover, when the border is lined with barbed wire as it is now, it actually keeps undocumented migrants in- this is another ever-repeating mistake made throughout history, including with Italians after 1924. Before that time, they were much more likely to return home because they knew they could come back if necessary. We have repeated this again with the US Southern borders, which has interrupted the age-old migratory patterns that have brought workers in and out of the US, depending on the seasonal need for more hands. Ironically, this has forced many undocumented to put down roots here. And then the predictable complaints arise from the Nativist Lobby-that we are being "invaded" and "overrun."
How sad for them. These people are unable to simply admit that they are seized with a mental illness that has frozen their mind into a shape echoed throughout time. It is a crooked, and ugly one.
This flu will pass. Meanwhile, people are dying and suffering in México and in the US. Is hatred and fear all these well-paid pundits have to dispense in trying times? Do they see themselves as embodying something...American? We at The Sanctuary have to wonder if people like Michael Savage might best be described as terrorists cells awakening. After all, they are shouting that we should not trust our government, not trust our Health Departments, not frequent businesses that employ brown people, and they incite violence. Would not such disruption of society and our collective emotional fabric, in fact, be terrorists' goals for us?
Let us be united, then. United against fear and hateful misinformation. Together we can keep our heads, our hearts, and our health-while the crazed voices of Yesterday and the zombie-like Nativist choruses of today twist around one other in the rotted mire of irrelevance.
o what next?
ARIZONA DAILY STAR 04/28/09
Tucson Region
Sheriffs: Are you in school legally?
By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX — Some border county sheriffs want Arizona schools to start asking students whether they're in this country legally.
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik originated the idea and said millions of dollars in Arizona taxes go to teach English to children who have no legal right to be here. He also said there's a link involving illegal immigration, social problems and gangs.
Only thing is, a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision appears to make it illegal for school officials to ask. In a 5-4 decision, the justices overturned a Texas law that authorized school districts to refuse to enroll anyone who couldn't prove legal residence.
But Dupnik said it may be time for Arizona to have a test case to put the issue back before the high court — to see if the current justices agree.
Dupnik has the backing of Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden and Joe Arpaio, his Maricopa County counterpart. And Gov. Jan Brewer said she sees no reason why youngsters shouldn't be asked to prove they are U.S. citizens or legal residents.
"When I grew up, when I went to school, when I moved from Nevada to California, I had to bring my birth certificate to prove I was a citizen," she said.
But Attorney General Terry Goddard said he doesn't think schools have the expertise to determine legal status. And state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said he believes the federal government should just do a better job of protecting the border.
"But as long as kids are here, they should be in school," he said. "You don't want them on the street corner."
Dupnik, however, has an answer for that: Have schools report their findings to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"They would identify the people that are here illegally by the thousands and send them back, kids and parents," he said.
The issue has financial implications: The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 60,000 to 65,000 of the 1.2 million youngsters in Arizona schools are not in this country legally.
The Department of Education figures basic state aid for students is about $6,000 a year, not counting what the state pays for school construction. That puts the price tag near $390 million — minus, of course, any taxes from illegal residents that go toward education funding.
But that doesn't count the extra $360 per student Arizona now gives to schools to help English-language learners. Assuming two-thirds of these students fit that category, that adds $15 million to the tab.
In 1982, however, the Supreme Court voided a 1975 Texas law that denied state aid to districts for children not "legally admitted" into the United States. That law also allowed districts to deny admission to those students.
Attorneys for Texas argued that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which entitles every person to equal protection of law, doesn't apply to those not in the country legally.
"We reject this argument," Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority. "Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is surely a 'person' in any ordinary sense of the term." And Brennan said education is the only way people can advance themselves.
Tucson-area education leaders were hardly supportive of the sheriffs' idea.
"Our function is not immigration, but to provide a quality education to kids who live in our district or who come in under open enrollment," said Nicholas Clement, superintendent of the Flowing Wells Unified School District.
He said it could invite new problems for schools, envisioning the need to hire additional staffers, order additional training and make difficult decisions on what kinds of documentation would be acceptable.
Eva Dong, a Sunnyside Unified School District board member, agreed. "The federal law given to us by the U.S. Supreme Court states that we are not, as a school entity, to be out there asking the students if they are here legally or illegally," she said.
"Let's face it: The little ones, how are they going to answer that? Even the older students may not know the answer," she said. "The sheriffs want us to go up against the law so they can get their test case. I am surprised they are asking us to go up against the law."
Not all Arizona border sheriffs support the idea.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said schools shouldn't be in the business of asking students their immigration status. And he said he sees that as a first step toward having other state and local public employees also doing the same thing, including his own officers.
"We can't afford it," he said.
The Pew report estimates there are another 100,000 to 110,000 youngsters in Arizona schools who are the children of illegal immigrants but were born in this country. That makes them citizens who would be unaffected by any reversal of the 1982 Supreme Court ruling.
Even if Arizona is successful in persuading the high court to overturn its 1982 decision, that may not end the debate.
Four years earlier, state Attorney General Jack LaSota issued a formal legal opinion saying the only inquiry school officials can make of parents who want to enroll their children is whether they are Arizona residents.
Tucson Region
Sheriffs: Are you in school legally?
By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX — Some border county sheriffs want Arizona schools to start asking students whether they're in this country legally.
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik originated the idea and said millions of dollars in Arizona taxes go to teach English to children who have no legal right to be here. He also said there's a link involving illegal immigration, social problems and gangs.
Only thing is, a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision appears to make it illegal for school officials to ask. In a 5-4 decision, the justices overturned a Texas law that authorized school districts to refuse to enroll anyone who couldn't prove legal residence.
But Dupnik said it may be time for Arizona to have a test case to put the issue back before the high court — to see if the current justices agree.
Dupnik has the backing of Yuma County Sheriff Ralph Ogden and Joe Arpaio, his Maricopa County counterpart. And Gov. Jan Brewer said she sees no reason why youngsters shouldn't be asked to prove they are U.S. citizens or legal residents.
"When I grew up, when I went to school, when I moved from Nevada to California, I had to bring my birth certificate to prove I was a citizen," she said.
But Attorney General Terry Goddard said he doesn't think schools have the expertise to determine legal status. And state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said he believes the federal government should just do a better job of protecting the border.
"But as long as kids are here, they should be in school," he said. "You don't want them on the street corner."
Dupnik, however, has an answer for that: Have schools report their findings to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"They would identify the people that are here illegally by the thousands and send them back, kids and parents," he said.
The issue has financial implications: The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 60,000 to 65,000 of the 1.2 million youngsters in Arizona schools are not in this country legally.
The Department of Education figures basic state aid for students is about $6,000 a year, not counting what the state pays for school construction. That puts the price tag near $390 million — minus, of course, any taxes from illegal residents that go toward education funding.
But that doesn't count the extra $360 per student Arizona now gives to schools to help English-language learners. Assuming two-thirds of these students fit that category, that adds $15 million to the tab.
In 1982, however, the Supreme Court voided a 1975 Texas law that denied state aid to districts for children not "legally admitted" into the United States. That law also allowed districts to deny admission to those students.
Attorneys for Texas argued that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which entitles every person to equal protection of law, doesn't apply to those not in the country legally.
"We reject this argument," Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority. "Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is surely a 'person' in any ordinary sense of the term." And Brennan said education is the only way people can advance themselves.
Tucson-area education leaders were hardly supportive of the sheriffs' idea.
"Our function is not immigration, but to provide a quality education to kids who live in our district or who come in under open enrollment," said Nicholas Clement, superintendent of the Flowing Wells Unified School District.
He said it could invite new problems for schools, envisioning the need to hire additional staffers, order additional training and make difficult decisions on what kinds of documentation would be acceptable.
Eva Dong, a Sunnyside Unified School District board member, agreed. "The federal law given to us by the U.S. Supreme Court states that we are not, as a school entity, to be out there asking the students if they are here legally or illegally," she said.
"Let's face it: The little ones, how are they going to answer that? Even the older students may not know the answer," she said. "The sheriffs want us to go up against the law so they can get their test case. I am surprised they are asking us to go up against the law."
Not all Arizona border sheriffs support the idea.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said schools shouldn't be in the business of asking students their immigration status. And he said he sees that as a first step toward having other state and local public employees also doing the same thing, including his own officers.
"We can't afford it," he said.
The Pew report estimates there are another 100,000 to 110,000 youngsters in Arizona schools who are the children of illegal immigrants but were born in this country. That makes them citizens who would be unaffected by any reversal of the 1982 Supreme Court ruling.
Even if Arizona is successful in persuading the high court to overturn its 1982 decision, that may not end the debate.
Four years earlier, state Attorney General Jack LaSota issued a formal legal opinion saying the only inquiry school officials can make of parents who want to enroll their children is whether they are Arizona residents.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Naomi Wolf in The Huffington Post
Don't Prosecute -- and Scapegoat -- Torture Operatives; Go for the Top
Naomi WolfPosted April 22, 2009 | 06:26 PM (EST)
As citizens' outrage over the torture memos heats up, and Congress is barraged with calls to appoint a special prosecutor, we may be about to commit an egregious error.
Today Republicans accused Democrats in Congress of having "blood on your hands too" in relation to the escalating calls to investigate. I would like to say that this is exactly right.
I will go further: not only do Congressional Democrats have "blood on their hands" -- but so do we, the American people. And CIA agents may be about to be sacrificed to assuage their, and our, guilt.
Today's suddenly urgent calls by our Congressional Democratic leaders, and even by many of the American people, to prosecute CIA operatives, military men and women and contractors who were certainly involved with, colluded in or turned a blind eye to torture are not only the height of hypocrisy, they are a form of unconscionable scapegoating. The scapegoating is political on the part of Congressional leaders, and psychological on the part of many Americans who are now "shocked, shocked" at what was done in their name.
Hello, America? Hello? Were you asleep for the past seven years? The fact that the Bush administration used torture for the past seven years has been the furthest thing from a secret. When the political winds were with the last administration, which framed qualms about torture as being soft on "the war on terror," just about every Congressional Democrat fell right into line to accept it, if not cheer it on. Even Hillary Clinton supported torture, right up through her Presidential run. Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture in closed-door meetings. When activist groups and citizens called for a special prosecutor, all we heard from Congressional Democrats was that they did not wish to spend the political capital.
President Bush championed torture. Vice President Cheney gave such explicit interviews about his role in directing the policy of torture that in legal terms, were there a prosecution, they amount to a confession. Did the Congress that is now so piously calling for the investigation of rank-and-file agents and military express their horror and outrage then? With a very few exceptions, they did not. These leaders "had no idea"? Please.
Since 2003 it has been fully documented by rights organizations, and accessible to anyone listening, that direct US policy for prisoners in our custody included electrodes to genitals, suffocation, hanging prisoners from bars by the wrists, beatings, concealed murders, sexual assault threats, sexual humiliation and forced nudity, which is considered a sex crime in warfare international and domestic law. Many voices from Jane Mayer's to Michael Ratner's to Jameel Jaffer's to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch made similar documented charges. Did our leaders call for investigations? They barely even called for a moment's consideration of it. Tolerating torture ("tough tactics" or "enhanced interrogations") polled well; supporting it made them look tough in close elections. It was, overwhelmingly, okay with them.
And may we ourselves please look in the mirror, for the sake of our own moral health? How many Americans spoke up when it was chic to thrill to the sadistic soundbite of "take the gloves off"? How many watched 24 without a murmur when the mass consensus was that it was okay -- no, patriotic -- to waterboard a bit? How many of us -- as in civilized societies everywhere when a wind of barbarism is set free -- actually thrilled to the sadistic (and sometimes sexually sadistic) soundbites that came out of the Bush communications office of the "special sauce," the "belly slap," and the phrase "we have our methods"?
So now the political and cultural winds have shifted. Congress in their moral courage NOW are starting to call for investigations. Whom should they investigate? Well, in an ideal world, themselves: by knowing about and colluding with a declared and documented series of crimes, they are legally -- Pelosi especially -- accessories to those crimes. So there is an element of cover-your-blank in Congress finding its high dudgeon at last and pointing the accusing finger at subordinates in the CIA who obeyed orders that Congressional leaders themselves helped to sustain as a mockery of domestic and international law, and as daily, appalling practice.
Should we prosecute the agents who committed the torture? We should not. As a longtime advocate for prosecutions, that may sound surprising coming from me. But let us look at the Nuremberg Trials: the rank and file soldiers and operatives who committed torture and genocide were not tried -- the lawyers and political leaders who crafted and defended the policy of torture and genocide were tried (and many convicted). While I am not apologizing for the dozens or perhaps hundreds of CIA agents, military and contractors who, any investigation will show, were complicit, actively or passively, in the top-down policy of torture, I do know that these were people lower down the chain of command who have served their nation for many years -- and who were following directives declared not only legal by the President of the United States of America and the OLC, but were told they were "saving lives." To throw them into the fire for political cover is shameful.
Also, it would leave Obama with the problem from hell. So many people in the agency were involved in these practices that to prosecute them -- well, he would disembowel his own intelligence services.
So we should call for former chief judge of the army General James Cullen's solution. He has been at the forefront of calling for accountability -- but the right kind of accountability: Cullen urges us to indemnify those lower down the chain of command to get their testimonies. So they implicate the ringleaders, and then the only people who should be prosecuted are, as at Nuremberg, those who directed otherwise honorable men and women to commit crimes: the lawyers, and those who are on record having given the orders: Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush himself. The psychiatrist who reverse-engineered the SERE tactics should be prosecuted as well.
As for the dozens or hundreds of men and women who committed criminal assaults because their nation told them to -- at risk, if they refused to, of ending their careers? Protect them from prosecution. Many of them suffer trauma, nightmares -- and shame. That is more than burden enough.
Lay the guilt where it belongs: on Congress -- most particularly, legally, on the leadership that directed this policy -- and, emotionally and morally, on our complicit American selves.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
from NPR 04/17/09
CIA Officials Won't Face Charges For Waterboarding
Listen Now [4 min 17 sec] add to playlist
Read The Memos
- Aug. 1, 2002: from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA
- May 10, 2005: from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.
- May 10, 2005: from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.
- May 30, 2005: from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.
Morning Edition, April 17, 2009 · The Obama administration has released four Bush-era legal memos describing "enhanced interrogation techniques" CIA interrogators were allowed to use on some terrorism detainees. As the Justice Department released the documents, Attorney General Eric Holder told CIA officials that they would not be prosecuted for having followed the legal guidance in the memos.
The memos, from 2002 and 2005, document what President Obama called "a dark and painful chapter in our history."
The documents go into more detail than had been previously revealed about tactics the Justice Department approved for CIA use against so-called high value detainees. The list includes slapping, nudity, stress positions and slamming detainees into a wall. CIA officials were told they could put one detainee who was afraid of bugs in a small box with an insect.
The controlled drowning technique known as waterboarding was described as "the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques." One memo says waterboarding constitutes a threat of imminent death.
But in that same memo, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel concluded that because waterboarding does not cause severe pain or suffering, "the use of these procedures would not constitute torture."
Fred Hitz, who served as CIA inspector general in the 1990s, read the memos and said, "I just don't see how in the world that kind of advice can be given as a legal opinion as if you were advising on whether a deed of trust was properly executed." He added, "These are human beings we're talking about, and it's not something that the United States — much less the Central Intelligence Agency — should be involved in."
The Justice Department has withdrawn all of these memos. Holder sent a message to CIA officials Thursday saying they would not be prosecuted for following the memos' legal guidance.
"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," he said.
CIA Director Leon Panetta also sent a message to agency employees, saying that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "CIA responded, as duty requires."
In the past few weeks, top current and former CIA officials had pushed to keep the memos secret. After the Obama administration declassified the documents Thursday, former CIA Director Michael Hayden told The Associated Press that the United States is less safe now. He said agents will be more timid and foreign allies will be less likely to cooperate with American intelligence officials because "they can't keep anything secret."
Some human rights groups criticized the decision not to prosecute people for these actions. Amnesty International called it a "get out of jail free card" for people who committed torture. But Obama said in a statement, "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
The release of the memos ended a five-year court battle with the American Civil Liberties Union.
"It's legal reasoning that is ends-driven," said Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU's National Security Project. "It's legal reasoning that's meant to reach the result that the Bush administration wanted to reach."
Jaffer said he was surprised at the detail in the documents. They explain which abusive interrogation techniques can be combined, how many calories a detainee must be given when he's being deprived of food, and how many minutes detainees need to recover from being doused with cold water. The amount of time depends on the water's temperature.
One former CIA official speaking on background said that level of detail shows how carefully tailored the program was.
"I agree with that," said former CIA official Hitz, "but so were all of the experiments that were done by the Nazi doctors during the time of the Holocaust. They kept excellent records of the body temperature of the prisoner and all that stuff; it didn't make it any less torture."
Jaffer says there are more fights coming. Other documents remain classified because they refer to these memos. With these new declassifications, the ACLU plans to push for other dominoes to fall.
And, although the Obama administration has said it will not prosecute CIA officials who relied on the legal guidance in the memos, there is an ongoing investigation into the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the memos and whether they violated professional legal standards.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
okay, well, we can't have the president knowing classified information, right?
AMY GOODMAN: This last story, an unusual development in the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident recently released after seven years in US custody, where he claims he was repeatedly tortured, first in a secret CIA prison, later at Guantanamo. Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour, could face six months in a US prison, The Guardian newspaper revealed last week, because of a letter they sent to President Obama explaining their client’s allegations of torture by US agents.
Officials from the Department of Defense who monitor and censor communication between Guantanamo prisoners and their lawyers filed a complaint against Mohamed’s lawyers for “unprofessional conduct” and for revealing classified evidence to the President. The memo the lawyers sent to Obama was completely redacted except for the title. It had urged the President to release evidence of Mohamed’s alleged torture into the public domain. Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour have been summoned before a D.C. court on May 11th.
Officials from the Department of Defense who monitor and censor communication between Guantanamo prisoners and their lawyers filed a complaint against Mohamed’s lawyers for “unprofessional conduct” and for revealing classified evidence to the President. The memo the lawyers sent to Obama was completely redacted except for the title. It had urged the President to release evidence of Mohamed’s alleged torture into the public domain. Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour have been summoned before a D.C. court on May 11th.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
finally!
Tucson Region
US House panel to hold Arpaio hearing
The Associated Press Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.12.2009WASHINGTON — A House committee chairman said Wednesday that he'll hold a hearing next month on alleged civil-rights abuses by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said at a news conference that he will hold a hearing examining the conduct of Arpaio, who has been conducting sweeps in Hispanic neighborhoods in the Phoenix area that have resulted in the arrests of illegal immigrants.
A spokesman for Conyers, D-Mich., said the hearing is also expected to examine other examples from around the country of alleged abuses of a program that allows local police departments to enforce federal immigration laws.
"We're not trying to persecute or take advantage of anybody," Conyers said. "Law enforcement officers have a very important and valuable function. The problem is, they can't interpret the law their own way to harass or use racial strategies to determine who they arrest."
He was joined at the press conference by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the committee's civil rights subcommittee, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Mary Rose Wilcox, the lone Democrat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, as well as representatives from several civil-rights and Hispanic-advocacy organizations.
The Justice Department's civil-rights division said in a letter to Arpaio this week that he is under investigation for an alleged pattern of discriminatory police practices and of discrimination based on national origin.
The letter offers no specific allegations. But Arpaio said he believes the investigation was spurred by his department's often-controversial efforts to combat illegal immigration in Maricopa County.
The investigation and the congressional hearing are "saying to the country and the people of Arizona that no one is above the law," Grijalva said.
Arpaio's department has aggressively pursued investigations under Arizona's employer-sanctions law and a state anti-smuggling law.
The smuggling law was designed to help local police fight smugglers, but an interpretation by Maricopa County's top prosecutor opened the door for Arpaio's deputies to arrest people who pay smugglers and accuse them of being co-conspirators.
No other police agency or prosecutor's office in Arizona has used that legal approach in enforcing the smuggling law.
Arpaio recently began to separate illegal immigrants from other inmates in Tent City, a section of the county jail where all inmates are housed in tents.
His tactics have attracted national attention and have led some critics, including immigration activists, to accuse Arpaio's department of racial profiling.
The sheriff said he will cooperate with the Justice Department.
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, the prosecutor who for years has collaborated with Arpaio in cracking down on illegal immigration, said Wednesday that he wasn't aware of any racial profiling in Arpaio's crime and immigration sweeps.
"He has drawn a lot of criticism (for his immigration crackdowns) and a lot of protest because he is willing to be a leader in the fight against illegal immigration," Thomas said.
"I think that has to be recognized here."
Sunday, March 8, 2009
WORRY: With this economy, will they have jobs when they get home?
U.S. Withdrawing 12,000 Troops From Iraq
NPR.org, March 8, 2009 · The U.S. military in Baghdad has announced it will be withdrawing 12,000 American troops in the next six months.
In a statement, the U.S. military said that two brigade combat teams who were scheduled to redeploy in the next six months along with enabling forces such as logistics, engineers and intelligence, will not be replaced.
That would reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq — currently around 140,000 — by around 12,000. A U.S. combat brigade typically has 4,000-5,000 soldiers.
The announcement is an initial step in President Obama's plan to end combat operations in Iraq by Aug. 2010. Beyond this drawdown, U.S. troop strength is not expected to be significantly reduced this year.
Iraq still has to conduct crucial national elections at the end of the year. And while violence is dramatically down, there are still daily attacks — a suicide bomber today blew himself up outside Baghdad's main police academy, killing and wounding dozens.
Friday, March 6, 2009
THE DISAPPEARED
ICE Program Shifts Immigration Costs, Abuses
New America Media, Commentary, By Aarti Shahani and Judith Greene, Posted: Feb 26, 2009 Review it on NewsTrust
“We can make a person disappear,” a high-level ICE official told the audience at the 2008 Police Foundation conference. Jaws dropped. ICE is the Homeland Security agency in charge of deporting immigrants from the nation’s interior. The spokesman was alluding to ICE’s extraordinary powers under civil immigration law. Although “civil” sounds less serious than “criminal,” civil immigration law has fewer constitutional protections than criminal law. Civil immigration arrests can happen without probable cause of a crime; the arrestee faces trial without a public defender; and there’s no statute of limitations.
Through the 287(g) program, ICE is fusing civil immigration and criminal law. 287(g), a tiny law passed in 1996, enables any public servant to receive civil immigration powers. The work is purely voluntary. The statute forbids the feds to pay the locals. It also makes the feds responsible to “supervise and direct” all local activities.
In 2005, ICE began enlisting criminal law enforcement agents – from traffic cops to jail guards – into its frontlines. Early critics charged that turning police into deportation patrol would result in racial profiling, and make immigrant victims afraid to call 911. ICE justified 287(g) as an urgent public safety program. ICE is the largest investigative arm of Homeland Security. 287(g)-deputized officers would gain “necessary resources and authority to pursue investigations relating to violent crimes, human smuggling, gang/organized crime activity, sexual-related offenses, narcotics smuggling and money laundering.” ICE assured that, “The 287(g) program is not designed to allow state and local agencies to perform random street operations…It does not impact traffic offenses such as driving without a license unless the offense leads to an arrest.”
Reality tells a different story. Justice Strategies, a non-partisan criminal justice institute, investigated the 287(g) program. We found that ICE didn’t target crime hot spots. Of the 63 states and localities that ICE deputized by summer 2008, 61 percent had lower crime rates than the national average. Meanwhile 87 percent saw their Latino populations grow faster than the national average. The public safety program is more closely related to race than to crime.
The 287(g) program amounts to a state and local bailout of the federal government’s failed immigration enforcement business. This ICE program does not pay police salaries; it shifts civil detention costs to local governments. Prince William County, Virginia spent $5 million more in local tax monies than anticipated for the first year of its 287(g) program. The county had to raise property taxes and cut police and fire safety budgets to compensate. In Morris County, New Jersey, a Republican sheriff estimated that the program would cost $1.3 million and “ICE would not reimburse the county for any start up costs,” such as personnel and facility expenses. His county board rejected the program. Local officials nationwide have rejected 287(g) because it does not serve public safety or generate income, leaving the feds to partner with more zealous and politically-motivated officers.
ICE’s choice of partners is peculiar. The Missouri State Highway Patrol, deputized in 2008, is an agency whose core mandate is to enforce traffic laws. In Butler County, Ohio, ICE extended immigration arrest powers to the sheriff after he campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform.
The most famous 287(g) partner is Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE gave him the largest and most powerful agreement, after his office was ordered to pay $43 million in death and abuse lawsuits. He has been nationally criticized for street sweeps of day laborers and racial profiling. He told us about the added-value of 287(g): “When we stop a car for probable cause, we take the other passengers too.” Last week, Sheriff Joe marched his 287(g) arrestees into “Tent City,” a notoriously mismanaged jail under the blazing desert sun. Yet ICE, by law required to “supervise and direct” all 287(g) activity, maintains that the sheriff has not violated the contract.
Sheriff Arpaio is not a one-man show. 287(g) set off other efforts in Arizona to crackdown on immigrants. The state legislature renamed the anti-gang taskforce into the “gang and immigration” taskforce, and pumped tax monies into local immigration enforcement.
In Phoenix, the “fusion” of civil immigration and criminal law has wreaked havoc in the criminal justice system. Under a new state law that denies bail to immigrants for most crimes, judicial officers who are neutral arbiters in the court’s criminal process have become investigators of possible immigration violations. The first state-level trafficking law in U.S. history has been perverted, as prosecutors charge the victims of trafficking as co-conspirators in the act of smuggling. The overburdened courts and jails have swelled with immigrants who are in no sense a danger to public safety.
In this moment of economic crisis, we can’t afford to let this specious public safety program continue. In 2006, Congress gave the 287(g) program its first budget line of $5 million, and continued that level of funding through fiscal year 2008. Monies were intended for ICE expenses only. Yet through 2008, ICE overspent at least $50 million in program costs. Today 287(g) is the largest Homeland Security program for state and local law enforcement.
The Obama Administration should terminate the 287(g) program. 287(g) was destined to fail, and it has failed. It was created on the faulty assumption that civil and criminal law enforcement are compatible. But just imagine if the IRS, another federal civil agency, started deputizing police to check the tax returns of every driver, and arrest anyone with an imperfect 1040. Citizens would be furious at such waste of public safety resources. Yet under 287(g), people are jailed when their civil immigration status is in question. The General Accounting Office should investigate how the program operated nationwide. 287(g) is critical data in the project of reforming ICE.
Aarti Shahani is the lead author of the report Local Democracy on Ice. Judith Greene is Justice Strategies Director of Tides Center that produced the report.
THIS ARTICLE FROM http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=463c44a3a154dc703486f8b3d3afe168&from=rss
New America Media, Commentary, By Aarti Shahani and Judith Greene, Posted: Feb 26, 2009 Review it on NewsTrust
“We can make a person disappear,” a high-level ICE official told the audience at the 2008 Police Foundation conference. Jaws dropped. ICE is the Homeland Security agency in charge of deporting immigrants from the nation’s interior. The spokesman was alluding to ICE’s extraordinary powers under civil immigration law. Although “civil” sounds less serious than “criminal,” civil immigration law has fewer constitutional protections than criminal law. Civil immigration arrests can happen without probable cause of a crime; the arrestee faces trial without a public defender; and there’s no statute of limitations.
Through the 287(g) program, ICE is fusing civil immigration and criminal law. 287(g), a tiny law passed in 1996, enables any public servant to receive civil immigration powers. The work is purely voluntary. The statute forbids the feds to pay the locals. It also makes the feds responsible to “supervise and direct” all local activities.
In 2005, ICE began enlisting criminal law enforcement agents – from traffic cops to jail guards – into its frontlines. Early critics charged that turning police into deportation patrol would result in racial profiling, and make immigrant victims afraid to call 911. ICE justified 287(g) as an urgent public safety program. ICE is the largest investigative arm of Homeland Security. 287(g)-deputized officers would gain “necessary resources and authority to pursue investigations relating to violent crimes, human smuggling, gang/organized crime activity, sexual-related offenses, narcotics smuggling and money laundering.” ICE assured that, “The 287(g) program is not designed to allow state and local agencies to perform random street operations…It does not impact traffic offenses such as driving without a license unless the offense leads to an arrest.”
Reality tells a different story. Justice Strategies, a non-partisan criminal justice institute, investigated the 287(g) program. We found that ICE didn’t target crime hot spots. Of the 63 states and localities that ICE deputized by summer 2008, 61 percent had lower crime rates than the national average. Meanwhile 87 percent saw their Latino populations grow faster than the national average. The public safety program is more closely related to race than to crime.
The 287(g) program amounts to a state and local bailout of the federal government’s failed immigration enforcement business. This ICE program does not pay police salaries; it shifts civil detention costs to local governments. Prince William County, Virginia spent $5 million more in local tax monies than anticipated for the first year of its 287(g) program. The county had to raise property taxes and cut police and fire safety budgets to compensate. In Morris County, New Jersey, a Republican sheriff estimated that the program would cost $1.3 million and “ICE would not reimburse the county for any start up costs,” such as personnel and facility expenses. His county board rejected the program. Local officials nationwide have rejected 287(g) because it does not serve public safety or generate income, leaving the feds to partner with more zealous and politically-motivated officers.
ICE’s choice of partners is peculiar. The Missouri State Highway Patrol, deputized in 2008, is an agency whose core mandate is to enforce traffic laws. In Butler County, Ohio, ICE extended immigration arrest powers to the sheriff after he campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform.
The most famous 287(g) partner is Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE gave him the largest and most powerful agreement, after his office was ordered to pay $43 million in death and abuse lawsuits. He has been nationally criticized for street sweeps of day laborers and racial profiling. He told us about the added-value of 287(g): “When we stop a car for probable cause, we take the other passengers too.” Last week, Sheriff Joe marched his 287(g) arrestees into “Tent City,” a notoriously mismanaged jail under the blazing desert sun. Yet ICE, by law required to “supervise and direct” all 287(g) activity, maintains that the sheriff has not violated the contract.
Sheriff Arpaio is not a one-man show. 287(g) set off other efforts in Arizona to crackdown on immigrants. The state legislature renamed the anti-gang taskforce into the “gang and immigration” taskforce, and pumped tax monies into local immigration enforcement.
In Phoenix, the “fusion” of civil immigration and criminal law has wreaked havoc in the criminal justice system. Under a new state law that denies bail to immigrants for most crimes, judicial officers who are neutral arbiters in the court’s criminal process have become investigators of possible immigration violations. The first state-level trafficking law in U.S. history has been perverted, as prosecutors charge the victims of trafficking as co-conspirators in the act of smuggling. The overburdened courts and jails have swelled with immigrants who are in no sense a danger to public safety.
In this moment of economic crisis, we can’t afford to let this specious public safety program continue. In 2006, Congress gave the 287(g) program its first budget line of $5 million, and continued that level of funding through fiscal year 2008. Monies were intended for ICE expenses only. Yet through 2008, ICE overspent at least $50 million in program costs. Today 287(g) is the largest Homeland Security program for state and local law enforcement.
The Obama Administration should terminate the 287(g) program. 287(g) was destined to fail, and it has failed. It was created on the faulty assumption that civil and criminal law enforcement are compatible. But just imagine if the IRS, another federal civil agency, started deputizing police to check the tax returns of every driver, and arrest anyone with an imperfect 1040. Citizens would be furious at such waste of public safety resources. Yet under 287(g), people are jailed when their civil immigration status is in question. The General Accounting Office should investigate how the program operated nationwide. 287(g) is critical data in the project of reforming ICE.
Aarti Shahani is the lead author of the report Local Democracy on Ice. Judith Greene is Justice Strategies Director of Tides Center that produced the report.
THIS ARTICLE FROM http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=463c44a3a154dc703486f8b3d3afe168&from=rss
Monday, March 2, 2009
WHY WOULD YOU RECORD SOMETHING AND THEN DESTROY THE RECORD?
CIA Destroyed Nearly 100 Interrogation Videotapes
By DEVLIN BARRETT
The Associated Press
Monday, March 2, 2009; 4:26 PM
WASHINGTON -- The CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other U.S. treatment of terror suspects, far more than previously acknowledged, the Obama administration said Monday as it began disclosing details of post-Sept. 11 Bush-era actions.
THIS STORY
CIA Destroyed Nearly 100 Interrogation Videotapes
From FindLaw: Letter (ACLU, et al. v. Dept. of Defense)
The interrogations were a highly contentious issue during the administration of President George W. Bush, with many Democrats and other critics saying that some methods used amounted to torture _ a contention Bush and other officials rejected. A criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his investigation in the matter.
Monday's acknowledgment, however, involved a civil lawsuit filed in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking more details of the interrogation programs following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter submitted in that case by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."
It is not clear what exactly was on the recordings. The government's letter cites interrogation videos, but the lawsuit against the Defense Department also seeks records related to treatment of detainees, any deaths of detainees and the CIA's sending of suspects overseas, known as "extraordinary rendition."
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters he hadn't spoken to the president about the report, but called the news about the videotapes "sad," and said Obama was committed to ending torture while also protecting American values.
ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.
"The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court's order," Singh said.
CIA spokesman George Little said the agency "has certainly cooperated with the Department of Justice investigation. If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts."
The details of interrogations of terror suspects, and the existence of tapes documenting those sessions, have become the subject of long fights in a number of different court cases. In the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged after the trial was over that two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.
The Dassin letter, dated March 2 to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, says the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed.
But the lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel who viewed the tapes.
"The CIA intends to produce all of the information requested to the court and to produce as much information as possible on the public record to the plaintiffs," states the letter.
The separate criminal investigation includes interrogations of al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaydah and another top al-Qaida leader. Tapes of those interrogations were destroyed, in part, the Bush administration said, to protect the identities of the government questioners at a time the Justice Department was debating whether or not the tactics used during the interrogations were legal.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that waterboarding _ simulated drowning _ was used on three suspects, including two whose interrogations were recorded.
John Durham, a senior career prosecutor in Connecticut, is leading the criminal investigation, out of Virginia, and had asked that he be given until the end of February to wrap up his work before requests for information in the civil lawsuit were dealt with.
Durham's spokesman, Tom Carson, had no immediate comment.
___
Associated Press Writers Pamela Hess, Philip Elliott and Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.
By DEVLIN BARRETT
The Associated Press
Monday, March 2, 2009; 4:26 PM
WASHINGTON -- The CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other U.S. treatment of terror suspects, far more than previously acknowledged, the Obama administration said Monday as it began disclosing details of post-Sept. 11 Bush-era actions.
THIS STORY
CIA Destroyed Nearly 100 Interrogation Videotapes
From FindLaw: Letter (ACLU, et al. v. Dept. of Defense)
The interrogations were a highly contentious issue during the administration of President George W. Bush, with many Democrats and other critics saying that some methods used amounted to torture _ a contention Bush and other officials rejected. A criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his investigation in the matter.
Monday's acknowledgment, however, involved a civil lawsuit filed in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking more details of the interrogation programs following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter submitted in that case by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."
It is not clear what exactly was on the recordings. The government's letter cites interrogation videos, but the lawsuit against the Defense Department also seeks records related to treatment of detainees, any deaths of detainees and the CIA's sending of suspects overseas, known as "extraordinary rendition."
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters he hadn't spoken to the president about the report, but called the news about the videotapes "sad," and said Obama was committed to ending torture while also protecting American values.
ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.
"The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court's order," Singh said.
CIA spokesman George Little said the agency "has certainly cooperated with the Department of Justice investigation. If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts."
The details of interrogations of terror suspects, and the existence of tapes documenting those sessions, have become the subject of long fights in a number of different court cases. In the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged after the trial was over that two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.
The Dassin letter, dated March 2 to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, says the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed.
But the lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel who viewed the tapes.
"The CIA intends to produce all of the information requested to the court and to produce as much information as possible on the public record to the plaintiffs," states the letter.
The separate criminal investigation includes interrogations of al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaydah and another top al-Qaida leader. Tapes of those interrogations were destroyed, in part, the Bush administration said, to protect the identities of the government questioners at a time the Justice Department was debating whether or not the tactics used during the interrogations were legal.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that waterboarding _ simulated drowning _ was used on three suspects, including two whose interrogations were recorded.
John Durham, a senior career prosecutor in Connecticut, is leading the criminal investigation, out of Virginia, and had asked that he be given until the end of February to wrap up his work before requests for information in the civil lawsuit were dealt with.
Durham's spokesman, Tom Carson, had no immediate comment.
___
Associated Press Writers Pamela Hess, Philip Elliott and Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
DEATH BY DETENTION - IN THE HANDS OF ICE
Death by Detention
* Posted by: William Wheeler
* on February 23, 2009 at 10:01 am
When illegal immigrants waiting to be deported die in custody, who is to blame?
Guido Newbrough was “Raised American.” That is what the tattoo on his arm says. For most of his life—growing up in Virginia, attending its public schools, and serving time in its jails—he was treated like an American. Then, one day last winter, the police came looking for him.
When officers knocked on his door of his home in Manassas, a northern Virginia town with a swelling Hispanic population, early one morning in February of last year, Jack Newbrough told them his stepson was at work. “They said to call him and tell him to come home,” he recalls. “As soon as he came in the house they put the cuffs on him and took him away.” For Guido, a 48-year-old construction worker, it wasn’t his first time in handcuffs. Five years earlier, he had struck a plea bargain—admitting no guilt, but conceding that prosecutors had enough evidence to convince a jury—on charges of molesting his girlfriend’s daughter, which landed him four months in jail, a $2,100 fine, mandatory therapy sessions, and five years probation. He thought his legal troubles were behind him. “He had no idea what it was about or anything,” says Jack. “They just had him sign the arrest documents and took him away.” That was the last time he saw his stepson alive.
Contrary to what he believed, Guido was not an American citizen. He was born in Germany and left two years later, when his mother Heidi married Jack, a U.S. Air Force sergeant stationed overseas. After a three-year tour in London, the family moved back stateside. Heidi and Guido secured green cards, placed them in a safe upstairs in the four-bedroom colonial home they bought, and simply moved on with life. “I don’t think he ever thought twice about it,” says Jack. “He graduated from high school—he thought he was an American citizen.” But Guido’s immigration status, he would learn, had flagged him in a government operation that searches probation records to find deportable sex offenders.
Taken to Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, three hours away, Guido was one of the roughly 300 immigrants indefinitely detained there, without the rights or protections he had as a criminal inmate. Jack hired an attorney. “He told us right off this is a tough one. But we kept saying to ourselves it will work out. Because why wouldn’t it work out?” he says.
When a judge ruled that Guido should be deported to Germany, Jack was baffled. “I said to the judge, ‘You mean you would send somebody all the way back there when they don’t speak the language and they don’t have any relatives there?’ She told me, ‘We do it all the time.’” To fight the deportation, Jack says he paid a $360 application fee to appeal the case and wrote to his congressman.
After several months in the jail, Guido began to complain about pain in his stomach and back. His mother told him to tell the doctors. “Yeah, I told them,” he replied. “But they don’t care.”
Guido’s symptoms worsened dramatically. Subsequent reports from other detainees described him sobbing, his pleas for medical attention unanswered, as they made hot compresses for his back and took turns staying up with him through the night. Finally, say several detainees, after Guido turned to pounding on the door in desperation and shouting for help, guards accused him of faking his illness and dragged him, shouting, into an isolation cell. (An official at the jail disputes this version of events, saying that Guido was put under medical observation.)
On Thanksgiving evening, after several worried days without word from Guido, Jack got a call from the jail saying that his son was gravely ill and had been taken to hospital. By the time the Newbroughs arrived, they found Guido unconscious with a tube in his mouth, dying of a heart infection that can be routinely treated with antibiotics.
Without medical records from the jail, it’s hard to say what, if any, attention was given to Guido’s pleas for help. If the claims made by his family and some detainees are true, the failure to provide medical care, and his continued isolation, would be considered violations of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement protocol, according to Dr. Homer D. Venters, a New York University internist and a member of an ICE advisory group who reviewed the autopsy report. What is clear, Venter writes, is that “by the time Mr. Newbrough was transported to the hospital, his heart had begun to fail and he was likely suffering from multiple organ failure.”
Two hours after his family arrived, his mother sobbing beside him, Guido’s heart stopped. “There was an officer there with a gun waiting for him to expire,” says Jack. “He couldn’t leave there until he died.”
The emerging details of Newbrough’s death are the latest in a series of scandals over the immigrant detention system, a network of some 350 county jails, federal facilities, and private prisons where nearly half a million undocumented immigrants are detained each year while a judge rules whether they should be deported. Last May, the Washington Post published an investigation into a pattern of medical neglect in the detention system, describing it as “part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.” The investigation concluded that actions taken—or not taken—by medical staff contributed to as many as 30 deaths, out of the 83 deaths that had been reported in custody.
The swelling of the immigrant detention system, which held only a few thousand people 15 years ago, is a recent phenomenon. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, after which immigration officials were given expanded powers under the Department of Homeland Security, ICE has become the nation’s second largest enforcement agency with a $5 billion budget. A recent policy change now proscribes mandatory detention for all those picked up. Combined with highly publicized workplace raids, the effect is a larger enforcement net that is bringing an unprecedented number of people—no longer just the felons or those picked up along the border, but often people with longtime family and community ties—into the detention system. The agency now leases a fleet of 10 planes, which it uses to deport some 350,000 people a year.
The system is not without its defenders. “Without enforcement, the law is meaningless,” says Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates strict enforcement of immigration laws. “Of course, for enforcement to be effective there has to be a lot of detention that goes along with it.”
But, amid increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the media, a broad array of rights groups is calling for changes in a system that operates with little oversight and detains people indefinitely—often for months, sometimes for years— without entitlement to a lawyer, or the protections afforded criminal inmates.
Last spring, after being denied access three times to a private detention center, Jorge Bustamante, the U.N. special rapporteur on migrants’ rights, issued a stinging report that claimed the detention system violates international and human rights law. He called for an end to mandatory detention and for officials to issue codified regulations about how detainees are treated—a move long advocated by the American Bar Association. Immigration officials released a new set of “performance-based” standards that govern the conditions of detainees last fall, but have resisted the call for enforceable regulations.
“If they aren’t legally enforceable, they are not going to be initiated,” said Andrea Black of Detention Watch Network, a coalition of about 100 organizations working on immigrant detention and deportation issues. “We’ve seen that in the last ten years, which has led to inhumane conditions, abuse and the rising number of deaths.”
Cori Bassett, an ICE spokeswoman, says the agency requires all the contract facilities that hold ICE detainees to “to meet or exceed our standards,” and investigates all reports that detainees are not receiving the proper care. As an example, Bassett points to the investigation into the death of a 34-year-old Chinese computer engineer following his detention in the privately run Donald W. Wyatt detention center in Rhode Island. Hiu Lui Ng, who was picked up during his final interview for a green card, spent several months in detention while his complaints of excruciating back pain went unattended. He was eventually taken to a hospital and diagnosed with a fractured spine and late-stage cancer.
An ICE investigation found he was denied a wheelchair, as well as access to counsel and a medical appointment, says Bassett. After concluding that the facility’s staff “failed to adhere to the facility’s own use-of-force policy,” ICE canceled its contract and removed its detainees—an example, she says, of the way the agency’s standards are enforced.
But a recent revelation would seem to undermine the argument that ICE always takes the appropriate action when standards are not being met. It comes from one of the first cases that triggered calls for Congressional oversight—a death of another immigrant detainee held in the same jail, and under similar circumstances, as Guido Newbrough.
In September, 2006, a 50-year-old mechanic named Abdoulai Sall showed up for a green card interview in Fairfax, Virginia. Born in Guinea, Sall had spent the past 17 years working at Washington, D.C., taxi company, and his boss had agreed to sponsor his application. When he showed up at the interview, he was arrested on an outstanding deportation order and was transferred to the Piedmont Regional jail in Farmville.
Sall’s attorney, Paul S. Allen, wrote numerous letters to authorities warning them his client suffered a kidney disorder, that he was not getting the appropriate medication, and that his feet had begun to swell. “I don’t make assumptions that the government is going to do the right thing,” he said recently.
In December of that year, Allen learned his client was dead. Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, wrote to detainees at the Piedmont jail for information about Sall’s death and learned he had indeed been sick for a prolonged period and, in his final days, was seen shivering under a heater for warmth. “Everyone knew that he was requesting care,” said Jawetz. When Sall collapsed, the detainees took it upon themselves to call 911. Allen wrote the county sheriff saying the circumstances of his client’s death were “suspicious and suggested negligence,” and asking how he planned to investigate the matter.
While jails officials denied any wrongdoing and ICE defended the quality of care, an internal investigation actually concluded that “the facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervisions and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees.” That report, which was obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, was published last month in The New York Times.
Jawetz called the internal report “a very serious indictment” of the agency’s inability to provide oversight at its contract facilities. “There are clearly some parallels [between the deaths] that raise serious questions about what, if anything, ICE did to make sure those concerns about detainee health are mitigated.”
The issue isn’t about the debate over immigration, says California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren a co-sponsor of the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act, a bill that is under House consideration. “Wherever you stand on the issue of reforming immigration law, common decency and the Constitution require a provision of basic medical care to those in custody,” she says. “You have to feed them, supply them with water and a basic level of medical care. When you have someone in custody they can’t go down the street and get a burger at Burger King. They can’t go down the street and get their own physician. That’s true for every county jail and its true for ICE as well.”
Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer who chairs the House Subcommittee that heard inquiry on the detention system last spring, pointed to the case of Francisco Castaneda as an example of how some immigration authorities might be breaking the law. Castaneda was in a private detention center in San Diego when he developed a painful lesion on his penis. In spite of doctors’ recommendations, Castaneda’s pleas for medical attention went unanswered for 11 months. The 36-year-old man was eventually castrated and died last February of metastasized cancer. A federal court judge said the treatment Castaneda received “can be characterized by one word: nothing,” and called the case “one of the most, if not the most, egregious” violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment that “the court has ever encountered.”
But Lofgren and others have said that to fix some of the current problems in the detention system, administrative reforms—not legislation—would be the most efficient route. Some expect the Obama administration to make such policy reforms within the next few months. Immigration is one of seven priority issues to which the president assigned a study group, and his top domestic policy advisor recently committed not to forget its campaign promises to the immigrant community that proved decisive in his victories in several key states.
Since deaths in custody have become front-page news, said Jawetz, immigration officials have already taken some commendable actions themselves, removing detainees from several facilities. “What we need to do now is make sure they aren’t just removing detainees from a facility after they have died,” he said. “We need to make sure that the day-to-day oversight that they perform is sufficient to make sure that detainees don’t unnecessarily die in the first place.”
What that means for Farmville is unclear. A rural town in the rolling hills of central Virginia, it is home to 7,000 residents (with a median household income just over $26,000) and a withering manufacturing industry. In a clearing just off a main drag, construction is underway on a 1,040-bed facility that investors are hoping will become the largest immigrant detention facility in the mid-Atlantic. If ICE approves the site when it’s finished, the facility could generate millions of dollars in profit, as well as hundreds of thousands in taxes for city and county coffers, and new jobs for residents.
The project is not without opposition. Armed with research from Washington State University on the debilitating effects prison projects have on local economies, community organizer Jeff Winder has been speaking at town council meetings, distributing flyers at the town Christmas parade, and organizing protests, including a vigil for Abdoulai Sall and Guido Newbrough in early December.
Winder takes issue with the fact that the investors behind the new private detention facility have no experience in caring for detainees. They’ve promised to build a facility that benefits from economies of scale, offering better conditions for detainees at a lower cost to taxpayers. Neither argument has managed to dissuade Winder. “When we talk about turning over prisons to free market principles, you can see where that got Wall Street,” he said. “We’re going to have private shareholders making profit and lobbying for more criminal legislation and penalties. For them its just dollars and cents but the human cost is incredible.”
Jack Newbrough, who has filed a lawsuit for wrongful death, agrees. “That was my son. He didn’t deserve that,” he says. “Nobody in this country deserves that.”
After large-scale transfers in recent weeks, Piedmont is housing only around 60 immigrant detainees (down from 300). Immigration officials have denied that the transfers have anything to do with the investigation underway into Newbrough’s death.
I wrote ICE spokesperson Cori Bassett for an explanation as to why detainees were not removed from Piedmont jail after the investigation into Sall’s death determined that “the facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervisions and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees.”
She replied: “Among ICE’s highest priorities is to ensure safe, humane conditions of confinement for those in our custody. We make every effort to enforce all existing standards and, whenever possible, to improve upon them. When we find that standards are not being met, we take immediate action to correct deficiencies and when we believe that the deficiencies cannot be corrected, we take action to relocate our detainees to other facilities.”
In response to my question of whether ICE is in the process of removing all detainees or canceling its contract with the jail, she replied: “The investigation remains ongoing and it would not be appropriate to comment further until the investigation is completed.”
* Posted by: William Wheeler
* on February 23, 2009 at 10:01 am
When illegal immigrants waiting to be deported die in custody, who is to blame?
Guido Newbrough was “Raised American.” That is what the tattoo on his arm says. For most of his life—growing up in Virginia, attending its public schools, and serving time in its jails—he was treated like an American. Then, one day last winter, the police came looking for him.
When officers knocked on his door of his home in Manassas, a northern Virginia town with a swelling Hispanic population, early one morning in February of last year, Jack Newbrough told them his stepson was at work. “They said to call him and tell him to come home,” he recalls. “As soon as he came in the house they put the cuffs on him and took him away.” For Guido, a 48-year-old construction worker, it wasn’t his first time in handcuffs. Five years earlier, he had struck a plea bargain—admitting no guilt, but conceding that prosecutors had enough evidence to convince a jury—on charges of molesting his girlfriend’s daughter, which landed him four months in jail, a $2,100 fine, mandatory therapy sessions, and five years probation. He thought his legal troubles were behind him. “He had no idea what it was about or anything,” says Jack. “They just had him sign the arrest documents and took him away.” That was the last time he saw his stepson alive.
Contrary to what he believed, Guido was not an American citizen. He was born in Germany and left two years later, when his mother Heidi married Jack, a U.S. Air Force sergeant stationed overseas. After a three-year tour in London, the family moved back stateside. Heidi and Guido secured green cards, placed them in a safe upstairs in the four-bedroom colonial home they bought, and simply moved on with life. “I don’t think he ever thought twice about it,” says Jack. “He graduated from high school—he thought he was an American citizen.” But Guido’s immigration status, he would learn, had flagged him in a government operation that searches probation records to find deportable sex offenders.
Taken to Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, three hours away, Guido was one of the roughly 300 immigrants indefinitely detained there, without the rights or protections he had as a criminal inmate. Jack hired an attorney. “He told us right off this is a tough one. But we kept saying to ourselves it will work out. Because why wouldn’t it work out?” he says.
When a judge ruled that Guido should be deported to Germany, Jack was baffled. “I said to the judge, ‘You mean you would send somebody all the way back there when they don’t speak the language and they don’t have any relatives there?’ She told me, ‘We do it all the time.’” To fight the deportation, Jack says he paid a $360 application fee to appeal the case and wrote to his congressman.
After several months in the jail, Guido began to complain about pain in his stomach and back. His mother told him to tell the doctors. “Yeah, I told them,” he replied. “But they don’t care.”
Guido’s symptoms worsened dramatically. Subsequent reports from other detainees described him sobbing, his pleas for medical attention unanswered, as they made hot compresses for his back and took turns staying up with him through the night. Finally, say several detainees, after Guido turned to pounding on the door in desperation and shouting for help, guards accused him of faking his illness and dragged him, shouting, into an isolation cell. (An official at the jail disputes this version of events, saying that Guido was put under medical observation.)
On Thanksgiving evening, after several worried days without word from Guido, Jack got a call from the jail saying that his son was gravely ill and had been taken to hospital. By the time the Newbroughs arrived, they found Guido unconscious with a tube in his mouth, dying of a heart infection that can be routinely treated with antibiotics.
Without medical records from the jail, it’s hard to say what, if any, attention was given to Guido’s pleas for help. If the claims made by his family and some detainees are true, the failure to provide medical care, and his continued isolation, would be considered violations of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement protocol, according to Dr. Homer D. Venters, a New York University internist and a member of an ICE advisory group who reviewed the autopsy report. What is clear, Venter writes, is that “by the time Mr. Newbrough was transported to the hospital, his heart had begun to fail and he was likely suffering from multiple organ failure.”
Two hours after his family arrived, his mother sobbing beside him, Guido’s heart stopped. “There was an officer there with a gun waiting for him to expire,” says Jack. “He couldn’t leave there until he died.”
The emerging details of Newbrough’s death are the latest in a series of scandals over the immigrant detention system, a network of some 350 county jails, federal facilities, and private prisons where nearly half a million undocumented immigrants are detained each year while a judge rules whether they should be deported. Last May, the Washington Post published an investigation into a pattern of medical neglect in the detention system, describing it as “part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies. The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.” The investigation concluded that actions taken—or not taken—by medical staff contributed to as many as 30 deaths, out of the 83 deaths that had been reported in custody.
The swelling of the immigrant detention system, which held only a few thousand people 15 years ago, is a recent phenomenon. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, after which immigration officials were given expanded powers under the Department of Homeland Security, ICE has become the nation’s second largest enforcement agency with a $5 billion budget. A recent policy change now proscribes mandatory detention for all those picked up. Combined with highly publicized workplace raids, the effect is a larger enforcement net that is bringing an unprecedented number of people—no longer just the felons or those picked up along the border, but often people with longtime family and community ties—into the detention system. The agency now leases a fleet of 10 planes, which it uses to deport some 350,000 people a year.
The system is not without its defenders. “Without enforcement, the law is meaningless,” says Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates strict enforcement of immigration laws. “Of course, for enforcement to be effective there has to be a lot of detention that goes along with it.”
But, amid increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the media, a broad array of rights groups is calling for changes in a system that operates with little oversight and detains people indefinitely—often for months, sometimes for years— without entitlement to a lawyer, or the protections afforded criminal inmates.
Last spring, after being denied access three times to a private detention center, Jorge Bustamante, the U.N. special rapporteur on migrants’ rights, issued a stinging report that claimed the detention system violates international and human rights law. He called for an end to mandatory detention and for officials to issue codified regulations about how detainees are treated—a move long advocated by the American Bar Association. Immigration officials released a new set of “performance-based” standards that govern the conditions of detainees last fall, but have resisted the call for enforceable regulations.
“If they aren’t legally enforceable, they are not going to be initiated,” said Andrea Black of Detention Watch Network, a coalition of about 100 organizations working on immigrant detention and deportation issues. “We’ve seen that in the last ten years, which has led to inhumane conditions, abuse and the rising number of deaths.”
Cori Bassett, an ICE spokeswoman, says the agency requires all the contract facilities that hold ICE detainees to “to meet or exceed our standards,” and investigates all reports that detainees are not receiving the proper care. As an example, Bassett points to the investigation into the death of a 34-year-old Chinese computer engineer following his detention in the privately run Donald W. Wyatt detention center in Rhode Island. Hiu Lui Ng, who was picked up during his final interview for a green card, spent several months in detention while his complaints of excruciating back pain went unattended. He was eventually taken to a hospital and diagnosed with a fractured spine and late-stage cancer.
An ICE investigation found he was denied a wheelchair, as well as access to counsel and a medical appointment, says Bassett. After concluding that the facility’s staff “failed to adhere to the facility’s own use-of-force policy,” ICE canceled its contract and removed its detainees—an example, she says, of the way the agency’s standards are enforced.
But a recent revelation would seem to undermine the argument that ICE always takes the appropriate action when standards are not being met. It comes from one of the first cases that triggered calls for Congressional oversight—a death of another immigrant detainee held in the same jail, and under similar circumstances, as Guido Newbrough.
In September, 2006, a 50-year-old mechanic named Abdoulai Sall showed up for a green card interview in Fairfax, Virginia. Born in Guinea, Sall had spent the past 17 years working at Washington, D.C., taxi company, and his boss had agreed to sponsor his application. When he showed up at the interview, he was arrested on an outstanding deportation order and was transferred to the Piedmont Regional jail in Farmville.
Sall’s attorney, Paul S. Allen, wrote numerous letters to authorities warning them his client suffered a kidney disorder, that he was not getting the appropriate medication, and that his feet had begun to swell. “I don’t make assumptions that the government is going to do the right thing,” he said recently.
In December of that year, Allen learned his client was dead. Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, wrote to detainees at the Piedmont jail for information about Sall’s death and learned he had indeed been sick for a prolonged period and, in his final days, was seen shivering under a heater for warmth. “Everyone knew that he was requesting care,” said Jawetz. When Sall collapsed, the detainees took it upon themselves to call 911. Allen wrote the county sheriff saying the circumstances of his client’s death were “suspicious and suggested negligence,” and asking how he planned to investigate the matter.
While jails officials denied any wrongdoing and ICE defended the quality of care, an internal investigation actually concluded that “the facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervisions and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees.” That report, which was obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, was published last month in The New York Times.
Jawetz called the internal report “a very serious indictment” of the agency’s inability to provide oversight at its contract facilities. “There are clearly some parallels [between the deaths] that raise serious questions about what, if anything, ICE did to make sure those concerns about detainee health are mitigated.”
The issue isn’t about the debate over immigration, says California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren a co-sponsor of the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act, a bill that is under House consideration. “Wherever you stand on the issue of reforming immigration law, common decency and the Constitution require a provision of basic medical care to those in custody,” she says. “You have to feed them, supply them with water and a basic level of medical care. When you have someone in custody they can’t go down the street and get a burger at Burger King. They can’t go down the street and get their own physician. That’s true for every county jail and its true for ICE as well.”
Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer who chairs the House Subcommittee that heard inquiry on the detention system last spring, pointed to the case of Francisco Castaneda as an example of how some immigration authorities might be breaking the law. Castaneda was in a private detention center in San Diego when he developed a painful lesion on his penis. In spite of doctors’ recommendations, Castaneda’s pleas for medical attention went unanswered for 11 months. The 36-year-old man was eventually castrated and died last February of metastasized cancer. A federal court judge said the treatment Castaneda received “can be characterized by one word: nothing,” and called the case “one of the most, if not the most, egregious” violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment that “the court has ever encountered.”
But Lofgren and others have said that to fix some of the current problems in the detention system, administrative reforms—not legislation—would be the most efficient route. Some expect the Obama administration to make such policy reforms within the next few months. Immigration is one of seven priority issues to which the president assigned a study group, and his top domestic policy advisor recently committed not to forget its campaign promises to the immigrant community that proved decisive in his victories in several key states.
Since deaths in custody have become front-page news, said Jawetz, immigration officials have already taken some commendable actions themselves, removing detainees from several facilities. “What we need to do now is make sure they aren’t just removing detainees from a facility after they have died,” he said. “We need to make sure that the day-to-day oversight that they perform is sufficient to make sure that detainees don’t unnecessarily die in the first place.”
What that means for Farmville is unclear. A rural town in the rolling hills of central Virginia, it is home to 7,000 residents (with a median household income just over $26,000) and a withering manufacturing industry. In a clearing just off a main drag, construction is underway on a 1,040-bed facility that investors are hoping will become the largest immigrant detention facility in the mid-Atlantic. If ICE approves the site when it’s finished, the facility could generate millions of dollars in profit, as well as hundreds of thousands in taxes for city and county coffers, and new jobs for residents.
The project is not without opposition. Armed with research from Washington State University on the debilitating effects prison projects have on local economies, community organizer Jeff Winder has been speaking at town council meetings, distributing flyers at the town Christmas parade, and organizing protests, including a vigil for Abdoulai Sall and Guido Newbrough in early December.
Winder takes issue with the fact that the investors behind the new private detention facility have no experience in caring for detainees. They’ve promised to build a facility that benefits from economies of scale, offering better conditions for detainees at a lower cost to taxpayers. Neither argument has managed to dissuade Winder. “When we talk about turning over prisons to free market principles, you can see where that got Wall Street,” he said. “We’re going to have private shareholders making profit and lobbying for more criminal legislation and penalties. For them its just dollars and cents but the human cost is incredible.”
Jack Newbrough, who has filed a lawsuit for wrongful death, agrees. “That was my son. He didn’t deserve that,” he says. “Nobody in this country deserves that.”
After large-scale transfers in recent weeks, Piedmont is housing only around 60 immigrant detainees (down from 300). Immigration officials have denied that the transfers have anything to do with the investigation underway into Newbrough’s death.
I wrote ICE spokesperson Cori Bassett for an explanation as to why detainees were not removed from Piedmont jail after the investigation into Sall’s death determined that “the facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervisions and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees.”
She replied: “Among ICE’s highest priorities is to ensure safe, humane conditions of confinement for those in our custody. We make every effort to enforce all existing standards and, whenever possible, to improve upon them. When we find that standards are not being met, we take immediate action to correct deficiencies and when we believe that the deficiencies cannot be corrected, we take action to relocate our detainees to other facilities.”
In response to my question of whether ICE is in the process of removing all detainees or canceling its contract with the jail, she replied: “The investigation remains ongoing and it would not be appropriate to comment further until the investigation is completed.”
Saturday, February 14, 2009
a rose by any other name...
Blackwater had changed its name and now will provide training of killers from A to Xe.
Interesting name choice, there.
Like the element xenon.
Also "rhymes" with
xenophobe
xenocide
Monday, February 2, 2009
THIS SUCKS
‘‘American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009’’.
1 SEC. 1114. REQUIRED PARTICIPATION IN E-VERIFY PRO2
GRAM.
3 None of the funds made available in this Act may
4 be used to enter into a contract with an entity that does
5 not participate in the E-verify program described in sec6
tion 401(b) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immi7
grant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1324a note).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
