ICE

Denying due process to people without US citizenship, residency papers, green cards or a visa is becoming a business racket for private prisons and private security (aka paramilitary) companies.

The more people are thrown into those jails, the more money the concentration camps make.

Welcome to the new American economy.

h/t American Humanity

I just wrote a post about López Lomong for Awearness blog over at Kenneth Cole's. I am waiting for it to be published. It's a bit of a recap of his life as a Lost Boy from Sudán and now, not only an Olympic athlete, but an American citizen and the flag bearer for the US Olympic team in China.

While writing his Cinderella story I couldn't help but think of Hiu Lui Ng's horror story.

Hiu Lui Ng died in the custody of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs' Enforcement agency. Actually, he was documented : He had a job as a computer programmer. He had a wife and children and a home in Queens.

His crime? His visa had expired.

ON JULY FIFTEEN OF 2008, Rhode Island Republican Governor Donald L. Carcieri signed an executive "Illegal Immigration Control Order" [pdf] into law. It begins with some storytelling.

WHEREAS, most Rhode Islanders and most Americans are descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world

Stop. Most are, true. And you know who aren't "descendants of immigrants from all regions of the world"?

Mexicans, for one. We are not "immigrants" on this land. We are Indians who have been invaded and occupied (just as Iraq has) by Imperialist Euro-forces, and who eventually blended with our greedy, self-justifying, resource-thirsting overlords by means of rape, occupation, an eventual perverse desire to blend and be like the rulers, and in time simply because we've all been living on the same land since then.

Not immigrants. Indians. People indigenous to the continent long before map lines were drawn by invading forces.

Farmers. Workers. Campesinos. For the longest time, we (this is how my nanita and abuelo made their living with my father) have been migrating farmers on this land, for thousands of years we have been quien lo trabajo esta tierra. And for all this time, we have been moving about with the seasons and the flow, just like rivers, just like pollen, just like water through the soil.

It was los perfumados with their WHEREAS clauses who blew in here with butchery and deception and greed and now want to tell stories about opportunity and ownership.

MMMM! DO YOU SMELL WHAT NEZUA'S COOKIN'? It's the flava of the voting week, and that flava is currently simmering and spiceh!!! It may fade in a few, but for now, that flavor is Obama and McCain's Concern for Latin@ Issues. It also means that the "Left Blogosphere" or the "Liberal Blogosphere" is alight with talk of Immigration! Of course too much of this talk is related to electoral possibilities bereft of a moral context, and on the part of the candidates is frankly quite vague or rearrangeable from moment to moment.

WASHINGTON -- In a new ad targeted at the battleground states of the West, John McCain presents himself as a champion of Latino immigrants, making particular effort to highlight his differences with other members of his party on the issue.

It is a message that threatens to disrupt the delicate balance McCain had sought on the issue by simultaneously defending of the contributions of illegal immigrants to American life while demanding secure borders to prevent the arrival of new ones.

"So let's from time to time remember that these are God's children. They must come into the country legally, but they have enriched our culture and our nation as every generation of immigrants before them," McCain says in a clip from a Republican-primary debate in June 2007 in which he celebrated the sacrifice of Latinos, including those not yet citizens, to the US military.

—McCain goes west with pro-immigration ad

It's rather moving, eh? Especially given how lately he has been pushing the security-laser-fence-raid-detainment-punishment aspect of the issue. But you know. "Maverix" are people who say, quite honestly and from the belly, whatever they think will increase their popularity.

And we know Obama cares, right?

The American people are a welcoming and generous people. But those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.

—Floor Statement of Senator Barack Obama on Immigration Reform

Oh wait, wrong quote! Sorry. Here we go.

The time to fix our broken immigration system is now. It is critical that as we embark on this enormous venture to update our immigration system, it is fully reflective of the powerful tradition of immigration in this country and fully reflective of our values and ideals.”

—[Obama Statement in U.S. Senate, 5/23/07] (PDF)

Good.

This is why The Sanctuary has created a survey of very specific questions through which the candidates (and we don't mean just Democrats and Republicans) can flesh out just what these very noble phrases mean in the context of some issues that are pressing, not only to Latin@s, but to those concerned with Human Rights.

FLOR CRISOSTOMO is 28 years old. She is not a citizen of the United States, though she is trying to live her own tiny dream here. Which involves being alive, working very hard, living on extremely modest means (I can earn in an hour or so what this person does in a ten-hour a day work-week), wearing clothes, sending money to her three children, and sharing a two-bedroom apartment with four other women. Flor was dropped off in the desert after she paid a smuggler to take her away from México and up to El Norte, where she knew (as all know down below) that she could feed herself and her kids.

Crisostomo, who spoke through a translator, said she left Iguala Guerrero, Mexico, after she was unable to find a job that would allow her to buy enough food for her two boys and one girl, ages 9 to 14.

In July 2000 she paid a smuggler to take her across the border and spent three days lost in desert-like conditions before making it to Los Angeles, she said. A month later she arrived in Chicago, where she worked 10 hours a day, six days a week in an IFCO Systems site that made packing materials.

By last year, she earned about $360 a week, sending $300 to her children for food, clothes and school books, she said. To keep her own costs down, she lived with four other women in a two-bedroom Chicago apartment.

'My children's lives improve a lot as a result,' she said. 'It wasn't luxury. But it meant they could survive.'

Immigration authorities raided more than 40 IFCO sites in the U.S. in 2006 and arrested Crisostomo, along with more than 1,100 other people. The Board of Immigration Appeals last year denied Crisostomo's appeal and told her to leave the United States by Monday.

—Church harbors woman facing deportation

THIS is the ILLEGUL you speak of, Dobbs. Buchanan. Tancredo, Romney. (And many, many other less-visible US Citizens, as evidenced by far too many threads online and Letters to the Editor in print.) Even while you and I benefit from millions who live in similar poverty, fear, and persecution. This is the type of person you choose to feel NOTHING for. Because of an invisible border, and I mean the one that chokes off your own sense of proportion, reason and humanity; the mental fence that squeezes a heart until it can only stream cess, poisoning the system with septic propagandic, misanthropic, greed-fueled thought. Yes, I would indict all those who do not sympathize or empathize with her plight. Yes, I think it is a moral issue, and YES, if the American Dream doesn't include her, then I want no part of it!

For now, Flor has taken refuge in a church, a church in a land where even a "man of god" feels the need to bow to the pressure of the current deportation-only zeitgeist of the USA, the current selective-human-rights approach; actually making excuses for sheltering her.

US to probe death of immigration detainee
Sister says police refused medicine for Milford man

By Milton J. Valencia, Globe Staff | August 9, 2007

A Brazilian national arrested Tuesday afternoon on a deportation warrant in Rhode Island died shortly after he was taken into federal custody, outraging family members who said authorities ignored their warnings that he had epilepsy and needed to take his medication daily.

Edmar Alves Araujo, 34, of Milford, called his sister to say he had been detained by local police after a traffic stop. Irene Araujo said she immediately brought his medication, Gardenal, to Woonsocket police headquarters, where he was being held, only to be turned away by officers who refused to accept it.

"I told them he needed the medication, and I told them he had seizure problems," Irene Araujo said yesterday. "He can't skip a day without medication."

According to Irene Araujo's account, authorities told her that if her brother had a medical condition, he could inform them himself. She said that officers then ignored her repeated pleas that it was urgent.

"They didn't give me a chance to show them or nothing," she said. "They didn't say anything."

A spokeswoman for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency confirmed yesterday that Edmar Araujo died Tuesday while in federal custody. But she declined to comment on the family's assertion that authorities were warned of Araujo's epilepsy and his need for Gardenal, a phenobarbital-based drug that helps control seizures in epileptics.

New America Media, Commentary, Michele Deitch and Sunita Patel, Posted: Jun 14, 2007

Editor’s Note: When the U.S. government denied a United Nations expert access to two immigrant detention lock-ups it sent a worrying message about secrecy and lack of transparency in a system already being condemned as woefully inadequate. Michele Deitch teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and is an expert on independent oversight of prisons and jails. Sunita Patel, a Soros Justice Fellow with the New York Legal Aid Society, is a human rights attorney focusing on immigrant detention issues. She 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.

Lost in the news about the immigration reform package was an incident with diplomatic implications. Recently the U.S. government shamefully denied a United Nations expert access to two immigrant detention lock-ups during the expert’s three-week fact-finding mission to the United States.

Jorge Bustamante, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, was invited by the U.S. State Department to observe and investigate immigrant detention in the United States. Yet on April 30, he was denied access to the T. Don Hutto detention facility, a private Texas prison that holds entire families, even small children, behind bars. Then, on May 14, the official was refused access to the Monmouth County jail in New Jersey, which houses almost 150 immigrant men and women pursuant to a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).