Tag: immigration enforcement

Workplace Immigration Enforcement Trampled On Workers' Rights, Report Says

Workplace raids by immigration authorities have “severely interfered with the protection of labor rights for immigrant workers,” according to a new report released Tuesday by labor organizations.

A July 27, 2008, pro-immigration reform march in Postville, Iowa, in support of workers at Agriproccessors plant - Photo: Prairie Robin/Flickr

A July 27, 2008, pro-immigration reform march in Postville, Iowa, in support of workers at Agriproccessors plant. (Photo: Prairie Robin/Flickr)

“The single-minded focus on immigration enforcement without regard to violations of workplace laws has enabled employers with rampant labor and employment violations to profit by employing workers who are terrified to complain about substandard wages, unsafe conditions, and lack of benefits, or to demand their right to bargain collectively,” reads the report prepared by the National Employment Law Project, the AFL-CIO, and the American Rights at Work Education Fund (click here for pdf).

The report comes as the Obama administration has continued many of the Bush-era enforcement policies, although work-site raids have been scaled back since the Democrats took over in January. Nevertheless, local police forces with immigration enforcement powers –like Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose federal contract was scaled back— had until recently continued to conduct these operations.

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New Homeland Security Chief Napolitano To Focus On Employers Who Hire Undocumented Immigrants

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor
New York Times.

Napolitano - Photo: New York Times.

Hours after President Barack Obama was sworn in, the Senate confirmed now-former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in response to the attacks of 9-11.

Napolitano’s confirmation did not face any opposition: only a voice vote was taken on the Senate floor — no need for a roll call, according to Azstarnet.com.

The former governor succeeds Michael Chertoff as Secretary of Homeland Security, and is the first Democrat to head the agency. She comes to the job pledging to get tougher with “the demand side” of illegal immigration, namely employers who hire undocumented workers.

“You have to deal with illegal immigration from the demand side as well as the supply side,” she told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee during her confirmation hearing last week.

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News Analysis: Immigration Policy in 2009

By Suman Raghunathan, FI2W columnist

As the dust begins to settle after the historic November elections, the incoming Obama administration has lost no time in assembling transition teams on a host of pressing issues, including immigration.

The new administration faces difficult questions about the recent focus on immigration enforcement, particularly after the Obama campaign’s promises to reform the nation’s immigration laws in a fair and humane fashion. In fact, one of President-elect Obama’s only explicit references to immigration policy during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was about the harsh effects of immigration raids on immigrant families – particularly on the over 5 million U.S.-citizen children nationwide with parents who are non-citizens.

What’s more, there’s a sense among many immigrant communities and civil rights groups that Obama is indebted to them after a landslide victory among immigrant voters. Strong Latino voter support for Obama tipped the balance against Sen. McCain in several key battleground states, including Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Florida.

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Virginia, A State Latinos Helped Swing Democratic, Shifts Tactics on Immigration

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

NY·DF/Flickr

Manassas and other parts of Virginia have seen a heated debate on immigration. Photo: NY·DF/Flickr

This year’s elections showed that the use of immigration as a campaign issue apparently backfired for enforcement-only, hardline candidates. Now the results are starting to have an impact on policy: Virginia, where immigration laws are among the toughest in the nation, seems poised to radically alter its approach towards immigrants.

The Washington Post reported this week that the Virginia Commission on Immigration is about to send Gov. Timothy M. Kaine a set of recommendations, “most of which would help immigrants instead of penalizing them.”

Virginia was one of several traditionally-red states that swung Democratic this year. Latino voters there have been credited with helping President-elect Barack Obama win the state.

Now, “backlash at the voting booth” is cited as one reason for the new attitude towards immigrants, together with a lack of interest in the issue due to the economic crisis and “a clearer understanding of the state’s limitations on a largely federal issue,” The Post‘s Anita Kumar wrote.

Recommendations include shortening the Medicaid residency requirements for certain qualified immigrants, offering in-state tuition to immigrants who meet specific criteria and creating an immigration assistance office.

The commission considered but did not adopt proposals to force immigrants to carry special identification cards, allow hospitals to fingerprint patients who do not pay their bills and require proof of legal residence to be eligible for public assistance.

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Immigration Implications: What Does Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security Mean for Reform?

Barack Obama and Janet Napolitano -- Getty Images

As Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano appears ready to become the first Democratic secretary of Homeland Security, pro- and anti-immigration observers are trying to decipher what her designation will mean for the future of immigration laws under President Barack Obama.

Napolitano, Spanish wire Agencia EFE remembered today, declared a state of emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border and was the first governor to ask for National Guard troops to be deployed to secure the border between the two countries. She has also vetoed tough immigration enforcement bills put forward by state Republicans and advocated measures like the prosecution of companies that hire undocumented workers. Overall she is seen as more of a hardliner on immigration than most Democrats.

Napolitano’s approach on immigration is fundamentally pragmatic, her friend and think tank founder Fred DuVal told the Christian Science Monitor, adding her philosophy is, “Drop the ideology and let’s talk about what we need to both make the border secure and the relationship with Mexico functional.”

“Napolitano is probably the closest the Democrats could get to an immigration hawk,” Mark Kirkorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank advocating low immigration rates, told reporter Matthew Bell of nationally-syndicated radio show The World. [You can hear Bell’s report here.]

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Reaction to Immigration Enforcement: Washington Post Portrays Dysfunctional System; LA Times Calls for Reform

Northern Virginia is one of the places where the immigration debate has been the most heated. In August, we reported on the effect of authorizing local law enforcement to inquire about the immigration status of people who are arrested. Due to stepped up enforcement the Latino population in the city of Manassas and Prince William County has plummeted.

There has also been a sharp increase in the number of people detained on immigration charges. Yesterday, the Washington Post -which has reported extensively on the immigration issue in the D.C. area- ran an article that provides a stark portrait of the system set up to deport those people.

Reporters Nick Miroff and Josh White write,

Illegal immigrants detained as part of the stepped-up enforcement effort in Virginia stay in the country far longer than they should because of a detention and deportation system beset by waste and dysfunction, according to lawyers, detainee accounts and observations of courtroom proceedings.

The article details the case of a legal immigrant from Paraguay who was kept in jail for 30 days “accused of lying about a two-decade-old criminal violation by federal agents who then misplaced his file.” He was then freed, but he told the newspaper he met inmates who had been at the Virginia Beach jail for five or ten months. His case was not an exception, the Post says,

During recent court proceedings before an immigration judge, in more than half the cases the government was missing detainee files, did not know where detainees were being held or failed to bring a detainee to a facility with proper videoconferencing equipment. In one instance, the government lost track of a nursing mother who had been separated from her newborn, thinking she was in a Hampton Roads jail; she was sitting in court a few feet away and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet. In another case, Judge Wayne R. Iskra grew so frustrated over a detainee’s missing file that he berated the government prosecutor in open court, asking her, “How would you like to sit in jail for two more weeks?”

“The system is broken!” the judge said.

Even voluntary deportations –which we have written about before– have been problematic. One inmate apparently “has been waiting for eight months while his requests to be deported go unanswered.”

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Another big-city paper addressed immigration on Sunday: the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial in which it commended Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the recent raids that netted some 1,700 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes or linked to criminal gangs. However, the paper said, the raids also demonstrated the need for comprehensive immigration reform, including legalization for most of the 12 million people estimated to be in the country illegally.

The arrests apparently were surgical strikes, not a carpet bombing of communities where illegal immigrants reside peacefully or work to feed their families. Certainly they bear little resemblance to the disruptive raids on meatpacking plants, garment factories and other businesses with large, undocumented workforces. Those operations, which seem motivated by a desire to prove that the government is tough on illegal immigration, disrupt the lives of the very families that would be legalized under comprehensive reform legislation.

While approving of the arrests of “gangbangers, gunmen and child molesters,” the paper warned that “under the law, even illegal immigrants without criminal records can be detained and deported.

That reality complicates efforts to combine law enforcement and immigration control. No doubt many of the young men arrested in the sweep deserve the designation of gang member, but the term “gang associate” is disturbingly vague. As long as the defining characteristic of those arrested is their illegal status, even the most carefully designed dragnet risks pulling in innocent friends or relatives of gang members.

Hartford Votes to Integrate its Immigrants

In an interesting update to the ongoing national debate over police officers enforcing immigration law (and to Feet in 2 Worlds’ reporting on the issue), Hartford, CT’s City Council voted unanimously Monday to prohibit all city workers, including police officers, from asking about residents’ immigration status except in criminal cases and from turning over undocumented immigrants to federal authorities solely due to their lack of legal status. The local ordinance, which must still be approved by Mayor Eddie Perez, also bars city employees from asking residents about their immigration status as they access city services.

Perez says he supports the idea behind the resolution, but it’s still not clear if he will approve it: in the past he‘s cited a policy (issued by Hartford Chief of Police Daryl Roberts in March 2008 that allows officers to only inquire about the immigration status of those involved in a criminal investigation) as enough to encourage city residents to cooperate with police.

The new resolution expands upon the existing policy by prohibiting city workers from asking about immigration status based on the rationale that immigration law is a federal issue and therefore not under the jurisdiction of local police, which are only responsible for enforcing criminal laws.

The vote comes after a public firestorm engulfed Hartford last month during public hearings where dozens of residents argued for the resolution, and means Hartford could join the ranks of several other cities including New York, Los Angeles, Newark, and its Connecticut neighbor New Haven, which have all enacted similar ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ city policies protecting residents’ immigration status. Metropolitan police chiefs such as New York’s Ray Kelly and Los Angeles’ Bill Bratton have argued in favor of such policies in the name of community policing and to encourage immigrant witnesses and crime victims to come forward to cooperate with law enforcement officials. Feet in 2 Worlds reported on the controversy in Connecticut last month as often emotional and heated public hearings raged on the issue.

Hartford’s pending decision to grant its residents confidentiality of their immigration status comes as the federal government seeks more ways to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and deport undocumented immigrants to their home countries via a menu of programs; an approach widely excoriated by immigrant rights advocates.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws, announced last month that it had deported over 270,000 undocumented immigrants in 2007 – an agency record. In May, criminal defense attorneys and immigrant rights advocates alike denounced the nation’s largest immigration raid in history at the now-infamous Agriprocessors plant in Postville, IA; over 300 undocumented workers were put into fast-track deportation proceedings and whisked out of the country amid questions of whether they were granted due process.

And last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new ‘self-deportation’ pilot program, ‘Operation Scheduled Departure’, which invites undocumented residents to volunteer to deport themselves by coming forward to immigration authorities. In return, they are not put in detention facilities and are given 90 days to wind up their affairs in the US before returning to their home countries. As of last week, only one individual had volunteered to leave the country through the program.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent, is actively seeking to enroll local police departments in partnership programs that train local law enforcement officers as immigration agents. Dubbed 287(g) programs for the section of federal immigration law they reference, several cities and counties nationwide have entered into such agreements– notably Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes metropolitan Phoenix.

Despite growing signs the practice is extremely expensive (a recent investigation by Arizona’s East Valley Tribune found Maricopa County’s participation in the program resulted in a $1.3 million deficit; had a negative impact on arrest rates (they plunged by 75% between 2005 and 2007); and slowed response times (two-thirds of patrol cars responding to the most serious 911 calls arrived late), counties and cities nationwide continue to sign up for the program, particularly given the continued federal legislative vacuum on the issue. Feet in 2 Worlds’ Diego Graglia’s recent dispatches from Manassas, VA illustrate the arguments and heightened emotions behind both sides’ views on the issue.

Though Connecticut is a small state, Hartford’s neighbor Danbury (less than 50 miles away) has taken a dramatically different approach to its undocumented residents and signed a 287(g) agreement with federal authorities. Meanwhile, local domestic violence and immigrant groups joined a new statewide task force convened by the Speaker of the State House of Representativesthat hopes to determine why many of the city’s immigrant women and other victims of domestic abuse are not reporting crimes and serving as witnesses in criminal investigations.