We’re going to look at immigration today — but, to segue a moment, I’m listening to John McCrusty on CNN and I’ve discovered something … I can’t bear the sound of his voice; I can’t look at him, either. He and Dubby are morphing in my senses like a huge, gelatinous blob of primordial ooze – something you want to blow into a hanky and dispose of quickly. His speeches are ill-crafted, simplistic, bombastic and accusatory, and he’s clumsy in delivery. The stink of hypocrisy rolls off him when he infers … for instance … that Obama wants to get cozy with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez and all other enemies of our glorious nation-state. This leads me to worry that if the Hillary youtubes and the Appalachian vote gives us this old fart for four years, I’m going to have to open a vein. SIGH.
OK - on to another thing to make us nuts … immigration. Talk about elitism! There it is, there … class and profit and xenophobic fear woven into a Gordian Knot that threatens the bogus exceptionalism of a single race. That’s what’s on our plate across the board, in a country that is roughly 2/3rds Caucasian, and less by the hour. We’ve got to let go of the tribal distinctions and move our intention toward the humanistic possibilities, the unity that working together for the common good has always offered us. “Take the hand of the person next to you,” has its priorities straight … person; no other distinctions. We’ve gotta get over ourselves.
It can be done — yesterday, 90 year old Robert Byrd, our oldest Congressional member and Senator from … gasp! … West Virginia, endorsed Barack Obama, saying, “Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support.” I find this particularly poignant NOT because West Virginia rejected him along lines of race, but BECAUSE Byrd held a leadership position in the Klu Klux Klan in his youth. One mans evolution is apparent with these words, from 2005: “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.” He went a little farther to redeem himself yesterday.
Immigration is a sleeping giant … it drives the Republican base, who [in my opinion] bolster their insecurities by needing to have “inferiors” around [not enjoying the same status as themselves.] I expect they ARE afraid they’ll be wiped out in their sleep, their possessions looted and their daughters carried off in the night — but they have only their own history of repression and exploitation to thank. Homeland Security hasn’t made all this easier; they’re SNAFU from start to finish, and mean-spirited to boot. Besides the illegals, legal immigrants are not finding America the ‘land of opportunity’ and freedom … our ability to attract bright minds and talent to this nation, as we always have, is being hampered effectively.
Here are reads — and another big SIGH. This also reminds me of ALL that must be looked at and reconfigured when the Dems get the Hill.
[R]evolution — it’s what’s for breakfast.
Jude
Some U.S. detainees drugged for deportation: report
Reuters via Yahoo
Wed May 14
WASHINGTON - The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.
The newspaper said it has identified 250 cases in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003.
Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees without medical justification is a violation of some international human rights codes, the Post reported.
Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.
The Department of Homeland Security’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) took over deportations in 2003.
ICE has stepped up the arrest and removal of foreigners who are in the
United States illegally, who have been turned down for asylum or have been
convicted of a crime in the past, the Post reported.
A spokesman for the agency was not immediately available for comment. ++
[here's the official tit for tat]
Caring for Immigration Detainees
Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Washington Post
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Too Much Secrecy
Information on deaths of immigration detainees should be public
Las Vegas Sun Editorial
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
The deaths of U.S. immigration detainees are lost in a patchwork process in which they can be dead for days or even weeks before their families are notified.
The New York Times reports that detention for immigration violations is administered through a tangle of federal detention centers, county jails and privately run prisons. And no government entity is required to report or investigate detainees’ deaths.
In one horrific example, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor, died in May 2007, four months after he collapsed in a bathroom and his head hit the floor, the Times reports.
Bah, a native of Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa, was detained at a New Jersey facility privately run by the Corrections Corp. of America. After his collapse, Bah was restrained on the floor with handcuffs and shackles as he cried and vomited. He was then placed in a solitary confinement cell where he remained - incoherent and foaming at the mouth - for 14 hours.
Detention officials then called 911 and Bah was taken to a hospital, where an examination showed he had a fractured skull and was hemorrhaging in several areas of his brain. He underwent surgery but never regained consciousness.
A friend told Bah’s family of his fall four days after it happened. Detention center officials refused to give Bah’s relatives the records of his treatment, which had been labeled “proprietary information.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials review cases of detainee deaths internally but are not required to investigate them or report them to the public.
Members of Congress have said such a system gives the agency too much discretion and allows mistreatment to go unreported. Legislation that has passed in the House, but is stalled in the Senate, would require states that receive federal law enforcement funding to report detainees’ deaths to their attorney general.
But even that is not enough. That a man can lie shackled on the floor in his own vomit without medical assistance is beyond disgraceful. Detainees are people and deserve to be treated humanely. ++
Immigration Raid Jars a Small Town
Critics Say Employers Should Be Targeted
Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post
Sunday, May 18, 2008
POSTVILLE, Iowa — Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest.
“I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa,” said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. “Are they mad because I’m working?”
Monday’s raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration’s largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself “Hometown to the World.” Half of the school system’s 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.
Current and former officials of the Department of Homeland Security say its raid on the largest employer in northeast Iowa reflects the administration’s decision to put pressure on companies with large numbers of illegal immigrant workers, particularly in the meat industry. But its disruptive impact on the nation’s largest supplier of kosher beef and on the surrounding community has provoked renewed criticism that the administration is disproportionately targeting workers instead of employers, and that the resulting turmoil is worse than the underlying crimes.
“They don’t go after employers. They don’t put CEOs in jail,” complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff, 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 “is like a natural disaster — only this one is manmade.”
He added, “In the end, it is the greater population that will suffer and the workforce that will be held accountable.”
Congressman Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) said enforcement efforts against corporations that commit immigration violations have “plummeted” under the Bush administration. “Until we enforce our immigration laws equally against both employers and employees who break the law, we will continue to have a problem,” he said.
Julie L. Myers, assistant homeland security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said that to the contrary, the agency has seldom been so aggressive, including opening criminal investigations of company officials. While cases have netted only a handful of sentences for low-level managers so far, Myers said, such white-collar crime investigations typically take years to develop.
“Can we really execute a search warrant without taking any action against [illegal employment] that we know is taking place?” she asked. “Or will just taking business records through a search warrant cause illegal aliens to leave, and then we’re not fulfilling that part of the mission, as well?”
Lobbyists and former officials say that in unleashing ICE, the administration is trying to “turn up the pain” to motivate businesses and Congress to support the comprehensive immigration changes sought by President Bush, such as a temporary-worker program and earned legalization. If the existing legal tools are too blunt, they said, Congress should create a fairer system.
But the pressure on employers — whose wages and hiring practices have lured illegal workers to both large cities and small towns — has mostly been indirect and economic: While workplace arrests have risen tenfold since 2002, from 510 to 4,940, only 90 criminal arrests have involved company personnel officials.
So far, no officials at Agriprocessors have been charged. The company, founded by Aaron Rubashkin, has a storybook history whose recent chapters have turned murky. After some of Rubashkin’s Lubavitch Hasidic family moved here from Brooklyn in 1987, the firm became the nation’s largest processor of glatt kosher beef, the strictest kosher standard. It produces kosher and non-kosher beef, veal, lamb, turkey and chicken products under brands such as Iowa Best Beef, Aaron’s Best and Rubashkin’s.
According to an affidavit filed by an ICE agent in conjunction with this week’s arrests, 76 percent of the 968 employees on the company’s payroll over the last three months of 2007 used false or suspect Social Security numbers. The affidavit cited unnamed sources who alleged that some company supervisors employed 15-year-olds, helped cash checks for workers with fake documents, and pressured workers without documents to purchase vehicles and register them in other names.
In addition, the affidavit alleged that company supervisors ignored a report of a methamphetamine drug lab operating in the plant. It also cited a case in which a supervisor blindfolded a Guatemalan worker and allegedly struck him with a meat hook, without serious injury.
Agriprocessors has faced other troubles, as well. In 2006, it paid a $600,000 settlement to the Environmental Protection Agency to resolve wastewater pollution problems, and this March it was assessed $182,000 in fines for 39 state health, safety and labor violations. In 2004, the U.S. Agriculture Department’s inspector general accused the company of “acts of inhumane slaughter” after animal rights advocates publicized an unauthorized video of a stumbling, dying cow, and some Jewish groups attacked its worker practices.
And last month, the company lost a federal appellate court battle over whether it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize, on grounds that those in favor were illegal immigrants and not entitled to federal labor protections.
“This employer has a long history of violating every law that’s out there — labor laws, environmental laws, now immigration laws,” said Mark Lauritsen, international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has waged a bitter battle to organize the Postville plant. The union charged that the immigration raid disrupted a separate U.S. Labor Department investigation into alleged child labor law violations and other infractions.
ICE may be “deporting 390 witnesses” to the labor investigation, Lauritsen said, adding, “This administration seems to place a larger value on big, splashy shows in this immigration raid than in vigorously enforcing other labor laws.”
In November, Sholom Rubashkin, company vice president and the founder’s son, wrote a letter to customers decrying “a slanderous and patently false campaign” by the union, and defending the company’s record and its products as “safe and wholesome.” After this week’s raid, the family released brief statements expressing its sympathies to workers, commitment to customers and cooperation with authorities.
Chaim Abrahams, a company representative, said Agriprocessors is working to “bolster our compliance efforts to employ only properly documented employees” and has launched an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to the raid.
The blitz, which occurred after a 16-month investigation, began with helicopters, buses and vans encircling the western edge of town at 10 a.m. Witnesses said hundreds of agents surrounded the plant in 10 minutes, began interviewing workers and seized company records.
By early afternoon, illegal immigrants began arriving by bus at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa, about 75 miles from Postville. ICE held 313 male suspects at an exhibit hall and 76 female suspects in local jails for administrative violations of immigration law.
Those arrested include 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 2 Israelis and 4 Ukrainians, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Iowa.
Eighteen were juveniles who have been released or turned over for refugee resettlement, and the prosecutor’s office would not say if there were underage workers at the plant. Of the adults, 306 face criminal charges for aggravated identity theft and other crimes related to the use of false documents. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the workers on Thursday, meanwhile, accused the government of violating their constitutional rights through arbitrary and indefinite detention.
For now, Postville residents — immigrants and native-born — are holding their breath. On Greene Street, where the Hall Roberts’ Son Inc. feed store, Kosher Community Grocery and Restaurante Rinconcito Guatemalteco sit side by side, workers fear a chain of empty apartments, falling home prices and business downturns. The main street, punctuated by a single blinking traffic signal, has been quiet; a Guatemalan restaurant temporarily closed; and the storekeeper next door reported a steady trickle of families quietly booking flights to Central America via Chicago.
“Postville will be a ghost town,” said Lili, a Ukrainian store clerk who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld.
But Cesar Jochol, 48, a native of Patzun, Guatemala, and owner of a market called Tonita’s Express, questioned whether the raid will be a deterrent. People who can afford to eat meat only once or twice a week in Guatemala, while earning $4 a day, can earn $60 a day in Iowa, enough to eat beef or chicken three times a day, he said. “You take away a hundred people. A couple hundred more will come tomorrow; they’ll just go to L.A., New York, New Jersey and Miami,” said Jochol, a 21-year U.S. resident.
At St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, Eduardo Santos, 27, who came from Guatemala and lost two of his fingers working at the factory, said the raid was “fair . . . but it’s bad for everybody. There’s no work.” He plans to go home.
“The problem is, who is going to do the work?” said Stephen G. Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor who wrote a 2000 book on the clash of cultures in Postville as Agriprocessors’ Lubavitch Jewish leaders gained influence in the mostly Lutheran town. “This is a no-win situation.” ++
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
Immigration agency plans new family detention centers
The federal ICE, which already runs two such facilities, is taking bids for as many as three more. Critics say detaining families is punitive and unnecessary.
Anna Gorman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 18, 2008
The federal government is accepting bids for up to three new family detention centers that would house as many as 600 men, women and children fighting deportation cases.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a call for proposals last month and set June 16 as the deadline. New facilities are being considered on both coasts and on the Southwestern border. The agency calls for minimum-security residential facilities that would provide a “least restrictive, nonsecure setting” and provide schooling for children, recreational activities and access to religious services.
Family detention has been condemned by human rights groups and immigrant rights organizations as punitive and unnecessary. But immigration authorities said it ensures that immigrants show up for their court hearings and leave the country when ordered deported.
“Family detention has had the desired impact,” ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. “We don’t see as many families coming across the border. That automatic pass is no longer there.”
There are currently two family facilities — a former nursing home in Pennsylvania and a former prison in Texas. The T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas, opened in 2006 and faced protests and lawsuits within the year charging that the children were living in substandard conditions. A settlement resulted in changes in how the children are treated.
New facilities would allow the government more flexibility and enable the agency to keep families together, Nantel said. In Los Angeles this week, three illegal immigrant mothers and their toddlers, including one American child, were among about 60 people discovered at a drop house used by smugglers. Because there is no family facility nearby, the women and children are being housed in a private shelter.
The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the proposed plan to open new family detention centers.
“After the horrible conditions that were revealed at the Hutto facility, it is very disappointing that the government appears to want to produce more immigration prisons for families and children,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney at the Southern California office.
Arulanantham said most families do not pose a safety or flight risk and should not be detained. Instead, he said, they should post bonds, wear electronic monitors or be part of an intensive supervision program.
“There are other ways to deter illegal immigration without imprisoning children,” he said. “This shows that we have become addicted to incarceration as a method to solving our problems, which it is obviously not.”
In extreme cases, Arulanantham said, he could see families being housed in some sort of halfway house, but not a former prison run by a private prison company.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to review the proposals and make a decision within several months, Nantel said. The bids could come from county governments or private companies. The facilities would house up to 200 people each, about 150 juveniles and 50 adults. Authorities estimate detainees would be kept at the center for between 20 and 30 days.
The proposal calls for minimal security facilities and refers to the centers as residential family shelters, but says the contractor should structure programs “designed to prevent escapes” and should provide a plan that “monitors resident movement and physically counts residents.” Nobody with a criminal record would be admitted.
Corrections Corp. of America senior vice president Damon Hininger said he was aware of the request for proposals and that the company was “taking a look at it.” The company already runs several immigration detention centers, including Hutto.
Hutto has 450 beds, and as of last week there were about 150 people being held in family detention there. If new facilities are built, Nantel said the agency would consider transferring the families out of Hutto and using it as an adult immigration detention center.
“Running a residential facility in what was a former prison, that was a challenge,” she said. “There have been lessons learned out of Hutto.”
When the center opened, children were given hospital scrubs to wear, forbidden to have toys and allowed only one hour of recreation per day, attorneys said. As a result of the settlement, children are allowed to wear pajamas, move freely around the center and bring toys into their rooms. There also have been changes made to the facility, including adding individual bathrooms, adding murals and replacing metal doors.
Given the national security goals of the Department of Homeland Security, advocates said they are skeptical about future family centers.
“They really do have this penal system model in their heads,” said Andrea Black, coordinator of Detention Watch Network, a coalition advocating reform of immigration detention and deportation. “I think it’s going to be challenging for them to actually be able to run a family facility that is nonpunitive given their current philosophy and practices.”
The need to imprison families stems from the presence of so many illegal families sneaking across the border or hiding in the United States, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that advocates a reduction in the number of immigrants.
“This is really recognizing the realities of the illegal alien population,” he said. “They used to let everybody out and trust them to come back. That hasn’t worked out, to say the least. This is simply the pendulum moving back the other way.” ++
Blunt Federal Letters Tell Students They’re Security Threats
SCOTT SHANE, New York Times
May 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T. applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card allowing him to work around ships and docks.
What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M. Busch, a security administration official: “I have determined that you pose a security threat.”
Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of terrorism, agency officials said Monday.
The officials also said they were sorry about the language, which they may change in the future, but had no intention of withdrawing letters already sent.
“It’s an unfortunate choice of words in a bureaucratic letter,” said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman.
Ms. Howe and Maurine Fanguy, who oversees the new ID card program, said that most foreign students did not qualify for the identity cards, but that the letters were not intended to label the recipients as potential terrorists. (Some applicants are also turned down because of criminal records.)
Mr. von Appen, 23, one of at least four oceanography students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received identical letters, said he was stunned by its language.
“I was pretty much speechless and quite intimidated,” said Mr. von Appen, whose research is supported by a $65,000-a-year grant from the National Science Foundation.
A British student at M.I.T. who was rejected, Sophie Clayton, 28, said that at first she was amused at what appeared to be a bureaucratic absurdity. But as she pondered the designation, Ms. Clayton said she grew worried. “The two words ’security threat’ are now in the files next to my name, my photograph and my fingerprints,” she said.
Institute officials were also disturbed. The agency controls airport security, and “our students travel in and out of the country a lot,” said Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, associate dean and director of the international student office at M.I.T.
And the agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration matters, including student visas.
Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said the security agency should remove the misleading language from all files and issue new letters formally withdrawing the “threat” label.
But Ms. Howe, the agency spokeswoman, said that the letters were legal, if flawed, and that there were no plans to send replacements.
She said she did not believe the denial letters would cause students any problems with visa renewal or airport security checks. They will even be able to enter secure ports and ships for their work as long as they are accompanied by someone with the new ID, Ms. Howe said.
The Transportation Worker Identification Credential requirement is being phased in starting Oct. 15. The cards cost the applicant $132.50 and have been issued to 275,000 people so far of 1.2 million people expected to receive the credential, officials said. ++
Hospital Attempts Deportation of Woman With Inadequate Insurance
An immigrant women from Honduras - with legal documentation - faces deportation because her insurance does not cover long-term care.
Cara , Feministe via Alternet
May 19, 2008
An immigrant woman from Honduras who has very recently awakened from a coma is being threatened with what can effectively be called deportation, because she does not have the insurance needed to cover her medical bills. (Don’t read the comments in these articles unless you want to lose your lunch.) But here is the real kicker: while it would be repulsive and incredibly inhumane to deport an uninsured/under-insured person with a serious medical condition because of their undocumented status, despite the lack of adequate facilities for their care in their nations of citizenship, it isn’t even the case here. Sonia del Cid Iscoa has a current visa and in the U.S. legally. (All emphasis in quoted text is mine.)
A gravely ill woman at risk of being removed from the country for lack of adequate insurance coverage awoke from a coma Tuesday.
The hospital has been seeking to return her to her native Honduras; her family took the hospital to court.
[. . .]
Iscoa, 34, has a valid visa and has lived in the United States for more than 17 years. She has no family in Honduras.
But St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center sought to have her sent to Honduras when she went into a coma April 20 after giving birth to a daughter about 8 weeks premature. Iscoa has an amended version of Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System coverage that does not cover long-term care, Curtin said. But her family worried that the move would seriously harm her, or, at the very least, prevent her from ever returning to the United States.
Iscoa’s mother, Joaquina del Cid Plasecea, obtained a temporary restraining order to keep her from being moved. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Carey Hyatt also ordered that the family post a $20,000 bond by Tuesday to cover St. Joseph’s costs of postponing the transfer.
However, Curtin said that the hospital gave the family three more days to come up with the money before a hearing Friday.
If the family can prove that Iscoa would suffer irreparable injury by a move, the bond will be refunded and Iscoa will not be transferred. But if Hyatt determines that Iscoa is not in imminent danger by a move, the family will forfeit the bond.
A stipulation to a court order issued by Hyatt Tuesday evening said that the parties were “actively exploring alternative sources of securing payment for the medical bills of Sonia Iscoa.”
The original story is close to a week old — but a judge has postponed the hearing until this Friday (which would be May 23rd). As I said, the Honduran hospital that St. Joseph’s is looking to transfer Iscoa to has agreed to accept her as a patient but warns that they cannot provide her with the care she needs.
Iscoa went to the hospital on April 16 because of abnormal bleeding, but the hospital sent her home, family members said. The next day, her doctor asked her to return, and when her water broke and she began having contractions on April 20, she was rushed into surgery and did not regain consciousness afterwards.
“They told us that she was bleeding excessively, and they had to do a hysterectomy on her, but they didn’t know why she was in a coma,” said Maria Adame, a family spokeswoman.
Iscoa went into kidney failure. She had two more surgeries and had an ovary removed.
Meanwhile, Adame said the family is having trouble getting medical records from St. Joseph’s.
An independent doctor was scheduled to examine her on Saturday to help assess whether she can or should be moved.
Liliana Flores, a spokeswoman for Hospital Escuela, said that the hospital would accept Iscoa but cautioned that its ICU unit only has four beds and the hospital has no dialysis unit.
There are attorneys and Honduran groups who are desperately trying to help Iscoa and her family.
Suzanne Pfister, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said that as many as eight patients are transferred each month to other countries, mostly to Mexico.
It’s a practice some lawyers are calling into question, specifically whether a hospital has the legal authority to force patients to cross international borders against their will. One attorney in Tucson has twice called police and accused hospital staff of kidnapping to stop the transfers.
“Right now the hospital is exploring with us the alternative means of being able to try to provide a long-term solution to the problem,” said Iscoa’s attorney, Joel Robbins.
[. . .]
The relatives contacted attorneys and got a temporary restraining order.
Judge Carey Snyder Hyatt of Maricopa County Superior Court ordered that the family post a $20,000 bond against expenses incurred by the hospital in the delay.
Robbins said it will be posted by the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association.
Nora Montoya, consul general for Honduras in Arizona, said that Honduran groups here and in Los Angeles and Washington are raising money for her medical care.
Robbins is hopeful that a compromise can be reached to find long-term medical care for Iscoa in Arizona, and he and his associates are talking with other health-care organizations.
[. . .]
Mitchel, who has lived with Iscoa for four years but is not married to her, wondered how they could send her to another country against their wishes.
Hospital representatives were not sure if such transfers had been successfully challenged in court, despite the frequency with which they are carried out. It is the federal government that ordinarily determines who must leave the country.
Fernando Gaxiola, a criminal-defense and immigration attorney in Tucson, said that he has twice thwarted such transfers by calling police and Mexican authorities and reported the transfers as kidnappings.
You know, the question really does seem like a no-brainer. In what rational world does a hospital have the right to send a patient to another country against her wishes? I know that on a day-to-day basis, our shitty health care system seems to have as much if not more direct power over our lives than the government does. But despite the common perception, they are not all-powerful. They are not the government. And they do not have the right to deport anyone, let alone a woman who is in the country legally and in grave medical condition. Gaxiola was entirely right to report previous “transfers” to authorities as kidnappings. And pretty damn smart to have done so.
Furthermore, knowingly and forcibly transferring a patient with kidney failure to a facility that does not have a dialysis unit is nothing short of violence. Plain and simple. Regardless of how we tend to behave, being a citizen of any nation other than the United States does not revoke your status as a human being. This is both racist and classist. This is flat out wrong.
A fund to help pay for Sonia del Cid Iscoa’s medical care has been set up through Wells Fargo Bank. Please help disseminate this information.
Helping Iscoa’s loved ones to pay for her medical care will not solve the bigger problem or help those who come after her. That is why the legal action is absolutely necessary. But we can help one woman receive the care she needs to live and to stay with her family, and loudly voice our opinion that this is in no way acceptable. ++
When is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Going to Start Using Gas Chambers?
E. Nelson, OpEdNews
May 19, 2008
Days after the largest Immigration raid in U.S. history netted nearly 400 workers, including 18 children, at a Kosher meat packing plant in the tiny town of Postville, Iowa, images of the crude detention camps setup by ICE agents at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo started highlighting a disturbing side to our countries immigration policy and enforcement. Are our immigration policies and enforcement spinning out of control?
What are we trying to protect ourselves from? The Washington Post quoted a Mexican caught in the raid as saying, “I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa.” He has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville, Iowa and he went on to say, “Are they mad because I’m working?”
From its wikipedia entry, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the largest and primary investigative arm of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), responsible for identifying, investigating, and dismantling vulnerabilities regarding the nation’s border, economic, transportation, and infrastructure security.” ICE was established in 2003 and has a yearly budget that has grown to over $5 billion dollars a year. With its stated mission of protecting America and upholding public safety by targeting the people, money and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities one has to wonder how this massive raid in Iowa has furthered the stated goals by ICE?
Initially the reports of the raid in Postville had a much different spin. A number of reports on major news outlets emphatically stated the following, “Other illegal immigrants were found along with a methamphetamine laboratory.” These initial reports stated that a Kosher meat-packing plant in Iowa was raided because federal authorities charged that a methamphetamine laboratory was housed there and that employees carried weapons to work. Headlines like the following that quickly followed this statement only stoked the fire — “Meth Lab Operated Out of Kosher Meat Plant in Iowa” or “Drugs made at Kosher Meat Plant”. Strangely or not so strangely as the facts started to come out these headlines disappeared and were replaced with headlines like, “Largest Immigration Raid in US History.”
In a story that ran a couple days later on the 14th of May in the “Times Republican” in central Iowa the following was said, “Multiple sources in the warrant application also said they saw what appeared to be underage workers at the plant. Another source cited in the warrant application, a former supervisor at the plant who was later fired, claimed to have seen a meth lab at the facility. The supervisor claimed to have been fired after trying to destroy the meth lab.”
Ben Harris of the Des Monies register wrote, “In laying the legal groundwork for a massive raid of the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, federal authorities cited claims that the factory housed illegal narcotics production and employed hundreds of illegal immigrants, including several of the rabbis responsible for kosher supervision.”
The claims for the presence of a methamphetamine lab seem to be quietly disappearing and now no evidence or statements have appeared in the past few days that it ever even existed. And most of the initial headlines stating this no longer exist on the major news outlets.
Nevertheless, immigration services stated that they had warrants for 697 people who worked at the plant and continue to be actively pursuing the ones who have not yet been caught in the initial raid.
Meanwhile the town of Postville has been ripped apart by the sudden removal of so many of its residents. Consider that the arrests of more than 10% of the entire population have occurred in the past week. Nearly half of the 600 school children from the Postville community were absent the day after the raid. Some businesses are empty and the streets are nearly deserted. One has to wonder how the economic and social devastation that will follow in the coming months to this small American town, has really furthered the stated goal of ICE “dismantling vulnerabilities regarding the nation’s border, economic, transportation, and infrastructure security.” Is this town really better off now? Is it safer and more economically viable now?
David Strudthoff, the Postville Community Schools superintendent stated that, “They don’t go after employers. They don’t put CEOs in jail.” He went on to say that the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 “is like a natural disaster — only this one is manmade.”
We were taught in school that the symbol of our country, the Statute of Liberty, was a reminder to the intent and formation of our country, to be a melting pot of immigrants seeking refuge in a country based on the ideal of liberty and freedom. Bring me your huddled masses searching for a better life. In many regards Postville, Iowa is the idyllic American town where long-bearded rabbis, Latin American immigrants, and German Lutherans had learned to live and work side by side.
Our immigration policies and enforcement are on a disturbing path to be sure. The intent seems to be more the creation of fear and distrust then the actual protection of US citizens. Will our kids someday see the miles of railcars packed with the human faces of men, women, and children, who entered this country without proper papers, peering out of the railcars as they are being shipped back to where they came from — or worst somewhere else? ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
May 20th, 2008