Criminalizing Immigrants Makes Them Easier to Deport

New America Media, Commentary, Paromita Shah, Posted: Aug 10, 2007

Editor’s Note: The current spate of immigration raids and harsh ordinances did not come out of the blue but is the fruition of the careful build-up of an immigration law enforcement infrastructure for over a decade. Paromita Shah is associate director of the National Immigration Project (NIP) of the National Lawyers Guild. NIP is a member of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition working to reform the U.S. immigration detention system. IMMIGRATION MATTERS regularly features the views of the nation's leading immigrant rights advocates.

Immigration reform is dead – at least for the time being – but more raids, detentions and deportations continue.

But we also face a new emerging “deportation” strategy – one from local and state governments that seek to pass laws that essentially “deport” immigrants from the towns and the states in which they live.

The concept is simple: pass laws that make the lives of immigrants so miserable that they will be forced to leave, turning them into internal deportees in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, state and local governments have filed over 1,000 such bills. While most empower local police to act as immigration agents, a significant number obstruct immigrants' ability to obtain jobs, use necessary medical services, send children to public schools, find housing, get driver's licenses and receive many other government services. For example, the notorious Hazelton town ordinance required tenants obtain an occupancy permit from the city before renting a unit. One had to prove lawful residence or citizenship to get the permit. The town imposed hefty fines, $1,000, for violation of the ordinance.

The analogy to Jim Crow laws is inescapable. Towns like Hazelton complain of overcrowding, crime and strained resources, much like proponents of Jim Crow laws did when they oppressed and discriminated against African-Americans. Fortunately, late last month, a federal judge declared the Hazelton ordinance unconstitutional because it would have violated due process and interfered with federal law. It also fragmented a community and polarized it along color lines, not immigration ones. The 200-page decision contained excruciating detail about how U.S. citizen Latinos were harassed by Hazelton residents with the introduction of these ordinances.

Did all this come out of nowhere? Not really. In Operation Endgame, ICE’s national strategic plan, collaboration and memoranda of agreements (MOAs) with local law, enforcement comprises a major role in immigration enforcement. Since the 2002 MOA with Florida State Police, at least a dozen police departments have signed MOAs with ICE and dozens more are asking for information. These partnerships have fostered sentiments that local and state governments should control immigration and immigrants. The Hazeltons of the country seek to take advantage of the vast immigration enforcement structure assembled over the past decade by enmeshing immigrants in the criminal justice system. By turning more immigrants into criminals, immigration authorities can deport them more easily.

Any advocacy plan must include an education around the detention and deportation system. Understanding it provides critical tools for fighting threats of deportation or deportation itself. Organizations around the country knowledgeable of deportation defense advocacy and the detention system have created resources and trainings precisely for this purpose. Some of them include Families for Freedom Detention Watch Network, the National Immigration Law Center, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, National Day Laborers and Organizing Network, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Rights Working Group.

At this very moment, federal counterparts of local anti-immigrant ordinances percolate in Congress –tacked on to an unrelated DHS appropriations bill. The fear of deportation and discrimination underlie the desperation within communities facing anti-immigrant ordinances. There is no doubt that the fight against anti-immigrant ordinances has a direct impact on the national advocacy and dialogue on enforcement and immigration reform in the future. But that desperation alone should not become the starting point of the debate around immigration reform.