American Forum Op-Ed

FLORIDA FORUM

By Jonathan Fried

Teresa Garcia [not her real name] was stopped in September 2009 by a Miami-Dade County police officer while on her way home after dropping off her children at school. When she could not produce a driver's license, he arrested her for driving without a license, and she was booked into the Miami-Dade jail system. Although she had no criminal record, ICE placed a detainer on her and took her into custody. After spending several weeks in ICE detention, she was deported to her native country, leaving her two young U.S.-citizen children behind with a relative.

Garcia's story is illustrative of thousands of others resulting from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement "Secure Communities" program. Marketed by ICE under the guise of making our streets safer, that program has become a nightmare for countless immigrants, while adding to the uncertainty of us all.

This past Monday, four days after we learned that Arizona was poised to become an apartheid state for immigrants, ICE announced that it intends to make Florida a little Arizona. Apparently eight more counties joined ICE's "Secure Communities" program. In light of the recent bad press coming out of Arizona, ICE is marketing the Secure Communities program heavily, touting it as a program that will rid the streets of "dangerous criminal aliens."

Keeping our streets safe would be wonderful, if it were but true. "Secure Communities," in a nutshell, is a fingerprinting system that ICE sets up in county jails across the country. The program basically flags any immigrant arrested and booked in jail to be turned over to ICE for deportation, whether or not they are eventually convicted of a crime. There is nothing that stops an abusive husband from falsely accusing his wife of a crime. Nothing stops an unscrupulous employer from falsely accusing a worker he doesn't want to pay of a crime. Even if innocent, being an immigrant will get them flagged for deportation the second they are booked.

ICE's own statistics show that almost 90 percent of immigrants deported through Secure Communities, almost 15,000 people last year, were not charged for serious or dangerous crimes. ICE refuses to say how many of those 15,000 immigrants were never convicted of any crime.

What we can be sure of is that programs like Secure Communities are making our communities insecure. Last summer, more than half of the immigrants we surveyed said they are afraid to call 911 for help. When asked why, one-third cited collaboration with ICE as the main reason – and this is in immigrant-friendly Miami. Imagine what the numbers would look like in the rest of Florida.

For us to be truly secure, ICE has to stop touting a program it claims makes us secure, when it doesn't. ICE's own numbers tell the truth, even when ICE doesn't.

VIRGINIA FORUM

By Pat Byington

AMERICAN FORUM

By Deb Katz

LOUISIANA FORUM

By Camille Moran

AMERICAN FORUM

AMERICAN FORUM

By David Hills and Michael Lent

AMERICAN FORUM

By Erik Camayd-Freixas

On April 23, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law a draconian bill that flies in the face of the United States Constitution and undermines the core values upon which this nation is founded.

When this law goes into effect in August, it purportedly will be legal in Arizona to dispense with the Fourth Amendment right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. As in totalitarian regimes, local police will be authorized to detain anyone they “reasonably suspect” is in the country illegally. It will be a crime to be present in Arizona without carrying proper documentation. And who might the police reasonably suspect of this new crime? Well, certainly not the white majority.

Gov. Brewer justified the racist law with empty rhetoric: “Racial profiling will not be tolerated," and, "we have to trust our law enforcement.” Meanwhile, Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio already is under federal investigation following allegations of abuse of power and racial profiling.

Trust must be earned -- by police through their actions and by lawmakers through their judgment. The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the bill because they realize it erodes community trust and causes real crimes to go unreported. Former state attorney general Grant Woods, a fellow Republican, also opposed it on constitutional grounds. In Gov. Brewer's judgment, the law is “another tool” for the state to solve a “crisis” that “the federal government has refused to fix." But police chiefs don’t need or want this "tool."

What “crisis” and what “federal inaction”? The U.S. built hundreds of miles of new fence and militarized the border. Also, illegal entries have dramatically decreased since the recession. Our undocumented population grew by only 3 percent a year during the last decade, and is now on the decline, in tandem with U.S. labor demands. Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials imprisoned and deported a record 380,000 immigrants, 80 percent of whom, by government accounts, were non-criminals -- common workers, including thousands of parents, spouses and siblings of American citizens and veterans. Hundreds of legal residents are deported in error each year, too. But nothing quenches radical lawmakers’ thirst for systematic persecution and repression.

This Arizona law is meant to feed migrant mothers and fathers into a brutal immigration system and its engorged network of privatized prisons. Local police will be pressed to meet arrest quotas.

While Congress defines illegal entry as a civil infraction, Arizona will arrest migrants on criminal complaints -- no trial. They simply get checked against a database and turned over to ICE for indefinite, mandatory immigration detention -- without charges, lawyers, bail or rights. They are then shipped cross-country to one of 300 profit-hungry contract prisons -- far from family, community and legal support, thrown in with common criminals, under abject conditions, until the day they're deported as “criminal aliens."

The harshness of federal enforcement prefigures the newly authorized Arizona police state. Noncriminal arrests will top 2007 levels, when 91 percent of deportees had no criminal record. The law hides this utter failure by declaring all undocumented migrants “criminals.”

The record shows that immigration crackdowns neither make us safer nor combat true criminality. The recent surge in drug violence near the border has nothing to do with centuries-old labor migration patterns, and everything to do with the U.S. demand for drugs and its lack of gun control, Arizona being a source of weapons for Mexican cartels. To blame all migrants for crimes of others is more than unjust; it is the essence of prejudice.

Our country’s true crisis is one of human rights and constitutionality. Elitist politicians, out of touch with the people, are callous to the hundreds of thousands of lives and families arbitrarily shattered each year, and unbothered by the erosion of American justice and democracy. Their “crisis”? People of color turning up at the country club.

Defenders of the Constitution are preparing to sue for a federal injunction. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., called for a boycott of his state, which would lead to billion-dollar losses in conventions, tourism and trade. State violation of the Civil Rights Act jeopardizes millions in Title VI funding.

This law will be swiftly stricken down. Perhaps then, zealots and radical politicians will get the message: that Arizona is not their private ranch, but an inalienable member of our Union; and that Americans of every color, creed and conviction regard such affronts to our Constitution as manifest acts of tyranny.
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Camayd-Freixas, who has a doctorate in Spanish from Harvard, is professor of Hispanic studies at Florida International University.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the American Forum. 4/10

WASHINGTON FORUM

By Pramila Jayapal

As the debate around the recently passed Arizona immigration law clearly demonstrates, racial and religious profiling remains a real and urgent problem in the United States.

Washington state isn't immune to the scourge of this discriminatory behavior by law-enforcement officials. This past October, we discovered that FBI agents, instead of collecting information only about people with direct links to national security threats, scrutinized Somali communities across the nation, including those in Seattle. Within 150 miles of our northern border, in counties such as Skagit, Snohomish and Whatcom, Latino, Arab and Muslim communities face an everyday threat of profiling from both border patrol agents and Immigration Control Enforcement officials. And right here in Seattle, we continue to see the racial disparities that disproportionately affect African-Americans, Asians and other people of color.

Although racial profiling has been unfairly familiar to African-Americans and others for decades, mainstream America has only in the recent decades started to acknowledge the issue. Referred to as "driving while black or brown," racial profiling surfaced in popular culture long before law enforcement conceded the practice.

After 9/11, the U.S. government began an era of blatant profiling, rounding up more than 1,200 Arab, South Asian and Muslim men and holding them without charges.

This didn’t make us safer. In fact, the mass roundup never apprehended anyone linked to the 9/11 attacks. An inspector general's report later revealed that many detainees had been blocked from contacting attorneys and some had been beaten or otherwise physically abused by guards in federal prisons.

Unfortunately, the scope of racial profiling is expanding. As responsibility for enforcing immigration laws and finding undocumented immigrants has been increasingly delegated to state and local police, evidence of increased racial profiling is emerging. Bad immigration laws like the one in Arizona threaten to sanction racial and religious profiling by local police.

History has shown that using race as a substitute for criminal behavior is bad policy. Research has shown that focusing on behavior rather than race is smart law enforcement.

When law-enforcement officers abolish race as a factor and instead rely on behavior, they catch more criminals. In the late 1990s, U.S. Customs Service eliminated use of race in deciding which individuals to stop and search for illegal contraband and instead began focusing on suspects' behavior. Studies showed that this shift to "color-blind profiling techniques" increased the rate at which searches led to discovery of illegal contraband or activity by more than 300 percent.

In response to the revelation about FBI profiling of Somalis, Farhana Khera, president of Muslim Advocates and a commissioner in the upcoming hearing on May 8th, Racial Profiling: Face the Truth Hearing, noted that the FBI is harassing Muslim-Americans by singling them out for scrutiny. “We think the FBI should be focused on following actual leads rather than putting entire communities under the microscope,” Khera said to the New York Times.

On May 8th, OneAmerica, in conjunction with The Rights Working Group, will hold the first of six hearings on racial profiling from noon to 4 p.m. at the Burlington Public Library in Burlington, Wash., on profiling in diverse immigrant communities. We expect Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans will all come forward to share the shared but unjust experience of being targeted because of racial, religious or ethnic backgrounds.
I will be joining a distinguished panel of national and local commissioners who will listen to testimony, including Monica Ramirez, Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at DOJ; Karen Narasaki, Executive Director of Asian American Justice Center; Farhana Khera, Executive Director of Muslim Advocates and National Association of Muslim Lawyers; and Judge Steven Gonzalez, King County Superior Court.
We hope community members from across the state will join us. It is time to tell our story and make our voices heard so we can put an end to racial profiling.
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Jayapal is The author is Pramila Jayapal, executive director of OneAmerica.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by Washington Forum. 5/10

AMERICAN FORUM

By Simon Cho

Five years after leaving my hometown of Upper Marlboro, Md., I returned to my elementary school to speak about being an Olympian.

Everyone knew I’d helped the United States speed skating team win a bronze medal in the 5000-meter relay. But there’s another important part of my story I don’t always talk about: I’m a Korean immigrant who grew up in the U.S. without immigration documents.

I was 4 when, clutching my mother’s hand, we crossed into the U.S. from Canada. My father secured my U.S. citizenship and passport when I was 11, but I remember little of the process.

When I was a child, my parents ran a small seafood take-out shop, worked 365 days a year, and came home late each night. Even with all their hard work, we barely scraped by. Growing up, I was the only child I knew who never had a family vacation, even on Christmas, Thanksgiving, Labor Day or New Year’s. On days I helped my parents at the shop I came home exhausted, and I couldn’t believe they worked this hard every day.

Then my parents made an even bigger sacrifice for me.

I’d started speed skating as a child and showed a particular aptitude for it. Later, to support my skating, my parents depleted the family resources and we moved to Salt Lake City for my training. Without any job waiting for them, they risked everything so I could skate and dream big.

There aren’t a lot of people of color in speed skating, which in the U.S. tends to be a white sport. When I came to skating, I came not just as a kid who wanted to compete, but also as a Korean American who knew how challenging it could be to live as an immigrant, with all the hard work and insecurity, especially given that we still weren’t citizens.

At times, seeing all the sacrifices and risks, I wanted to give up. I even took a break from skating. But my friends and schoolmates encouraged me to return, and I also got lots of support from older skaters of color, people like Apolo Ohno and Shani Davis, who told me I should cherish the journey.

This winter, I was a member of the U.S. Olympic short track speed skating team, and I brought home a medal. I reached my dreams. And driving me on was the sacrifice my parents had made.

America’s always been my home. Yet returning from the Olympics I knew I was truly an American and felt accepted. We flew from Vancouver to San Francisco, where we had a layover, and when our team got off the plane a bunch of passengers gave us an ovation.

It’s been an amazing journey. I was thrilled to be able to return as an Olympian to Stone Mill Elementary School. I spoke with all the children at the school, from kindergarteners to fifth graders, and saw the teachers who had helped build my character. It was great to share my story, which is unique but also typical. We all have dreams and hopes.

As important as skating continues to be for me, it’s not the only area in which I want to succeed and make a difference. I want to help remove some of the challenges immigrant families face, because I know that our immigration system doesn’t reflect the best that we can be.

This year, President Obama has an opportunity to reform our immigration laws. I hope my story will inspire him and countless others to go full force and have no regrets. It’s time to bring that medal home.
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Simon Cho is an Olympic short track speed skater.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the American Forum. 5/10

ARIZONA EDITORIAL FORUM

By Bonnie Saunders and John Loredo

It’s been a dozen years since Arizona voters passed the landmark Citizens Clean Elections Act allowing candidates to seek office without depending on corporate brass, labor unions, and deep pocketed special interests. Clean Elections has given community leaders, teachers, and small business folk a chance to run for office and govern, answerable not to Big Money, but to Arizona’s voters.

Clean Elections is working as advertised. So it should come as no surprise that developers, bankers and the like are trying to pull off a power grab this November. Their goal is to fool Arizonans into gutting Clean Elections and returning our state to the “good old days” when controlling politics was as simple as controlling the money given to candidates.

Turning back the clock would rob Arizonans of the right to have their voice heard on Election Day and in the halls of power. That’s why the resolutions that would put Clean Elections on the 2010 ballot under a different, contorted name, must fail, either by legislative vote or on November 2nd at the polls.

Before Clean Elections, statewide and legislative candidates begged for campaign cash from a small pool of power players: CEOs, union heads, lobbyists, residents of the state’s priciest ZIP codes, and out-of-state operatives. If officeholders proved insufficiently loyal to their agendas, away went the money. In came new candidates all too happy to bend to the will of these interests.

It’s a ruthlessly efficient system, if you have the money to sit atop it.

Clean Elections changed that one $5 bill at a time. Candidates able to demonstrate community support by collecting a set number of $5 qualifying contributions are allotted funds to run competitive campaigns. As a result, Corporate Arizona lost sway and voters have been in the driver’s seat.

Not a single dollar of Clean Elections funds comes from Arizona’s cash-strapped General Fund. It’s funded by voluntary contributions or through surcharges on criminal penalties and violations like traffic tickets. In fact, Clean Elections has donated $20 million to the General Fund in the last two years.

Clean Elections has helped elect a different breed of leader. After a majority of the Arizona Corporation Commission won “running clean,” the ACC passed a law requiring that 15 percent of all power produced in Arizona come from renewable energy sources by 2025. Who hates that idea? The power companies. Is it any surprise they’re now helping fund the campaign to kill Clean Elections?

They’re joined in this effort by a “who’s who” of Big Money: The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Arizona Homebuilders, and Qwest. They are hoping we’ve forgotten about AZScam when newscasts featured grainy video of legislators taking bags of cash in exchange for their votes. No doubt it galls them, that in polling done annually by the Clean Elections Commission, citizen support for the new system remains steady at 77 percent.

Clean Elections is a historic path chosen by Arizona’s voters. It represents progress and political equality. No wonder inside political power players and lobbyists want so badly to kill it.
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Saunders is president of the League of Women Voters of Arizona. Loredo is a political consultant and former State Representative. For more information, go to www.savecleanelections.com.
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Copyright © 2010 by the Arizona Editorial Forum. 4/10