Obama Accused of Continuing Bush's Racial Profiling of Immigrants

By Roberto Lovato, AlterNet. Posted July 29, 2009.
http://www.alternet.org/story/141624/?page=entire

Can a president who is, by any measure, far more forthright and lyrical than his predecessors about the pernicious effects of racism simultaneously promote and expand the racist policies of past administrations?

This is the question vexing many in immigrants rights, Latino, civil rights and other circles following what feels to them like the contradictory messages about racial profiling coming from the Obama administration in recent weeks.

On the one hand, many observers applauded Obama's July 15 speech to the NAACP convention and last week's statements about the circumstances surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Some found reassurance in statements like the one Obama made about the Gates incident last week: "…what we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that's just a fact."

But when they heard the crushing sound of new reports documenting the effects of the Obama administration's treatment of immigrants, the president's Martin Luther King-like cadences on racial profiling rang hollow.

A recently released report by Syracuse University concluded that "immigration enforcement under the Obama administration is returning to the unusually high levels that were reached under President Bush." Critics say that thousands of immigrants -- and hundreds of U.S. citizens -- continue to be prosecuted, jailed and deported by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in no small part because of racial profiling.

That was the case of Brian Lyttle. In one of the hundreds of cases involving U.S. citizens, Lyttle, 31, a North Carolinian who has no Mexican ancestry, speaks no Spanish and suffers from mental illness, was deported by ICE to Mexico in April.

Another damning report released last week by the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University analyzed the immigration raids of homes and workplaces conducted by ICE.

According to the report, the raids, which have continued under the Obama administration, have resulted in the kinds of constitutional violations and routine racial profiling exemplified most clearly by the fact that "approximately 90 percent of the collateral arrest records reviewed, where ICE officers did not note any basis for seizing and questioning the individual, were of Latino men and women -- although Latinos represented only 66 percent of target arrests."

Both citizens and non-citizens have been arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or what ICE calls "collateral arrests" -- arrests of people who are with or near someone who was ICE's original "target."

Virtually all advocates agree that the legal and policy foundations for such practices were laid by both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The result has been the creation of what legal scholar Juliet Stumpf calls the "crimmigration" system.

Stumpf and others continue to decry an immigration system that, they believe, leads to the disproportionate profiling and incarceration (Latinos are now the largest group in federal prisons) of mostly poor immigrants in much the same way that harsh drug laws have led to the disproportionate profiling of blacks, Latinos and other poor people that help make the United States home to the world's most massive prison system.

Coming from the Obama administration, one that created great expectations of change, the continuation and expansion of programs that systematically violate rights are beginning to wear thin the goodwill of immigrant defenders like Maria Muentes of the New York-based Families for Freedom.

"The nice speeches on race clash with the fact immigration enforcement is actually up under Obama; the levels of those incarcerated for immigration-related offenses look like they did during the Bush administration," said Muentes, whose organization advocates on behalf of detained immigrants. "Obama's speeches on racial profiling seem to leave out a lot of people. They exclude many immigrants, people for whom every aspect of their life is subject to racial profiling; people who are stopped while riding trains, people persecuted at work, people stopped while driving and all those families whose homes are terrorized by raids."

Most disturbing to Muentes and other immigrants-rights and Latino activists, many of whom have been ardent Obama supporters, was a very low-key announcement made on a late Friday afternoon just days after the president's NAACP speech on racial profiling by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that the Obama administration would not just continue, but actually expand what advocates say is one of the fastest-growing, most troubling racial-profiling programs of the federal government, the 287(g) program.

The initiative, which essentially deputizes state and local law enforcement officials to act as enforcers of federal immigration law, has been strongly criticized by the Government Accountability Office and research institutes such as Justice Strategies, which concluded that the Bush-era program is "driven more by racial animus than by concerns about public safety."

Among the most demoralizing and irksome consequences of Obama administration's expansion of 287(g) is that the controversial program's greatest benefactor, Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, still has a federally sanctioned license to pursue and jail massive numbers of mostly Latino immigrants, as well as some citizens.

Many law-enforcement officials have also denounced 287(g) because it diverts policing resources from more traditional law enforcement functions. In 2008, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, noting that while Arpaio's department was focused almost obsessively on locking up unauthorized immigrants, 48,000 violent felons were at large in Maricopa County, moved to block a grant that helped fund the sheriff's efforts.

More recently, anger at Obama's expansion of 287(g) sparked an unprecedented and very direct denunciation by immigrant advocates from across the country, many of whom hadn't previously criticized the administration. A "Statement Condemning Obama administration's Expansion of DHS's failed 287(g) Program" was signed by more than 25 groups from across the country, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Immigration Law Center and the Detention Watch Network.

Like many in the immigrants' rights community who have generally been supportive of the Obama administration, Jacqueline Esposito of the Detention Watch Network, one of the groups issuing the strongly worded statement, finds her organization caught in the conflict between the spirit and the letter of policies promoting racial profiling.

"Detention Watch Network applauds the Obama administration's recent statements about racial profiling," said Esposito. "But we are concerned, because the Department of Homeland Security's expansion of the 287(g) program is a direct contravention of the president's statements. 287(g) has been widely criticized by government officials, immigrant-rights advocates and many others, for undermining community safety and for racial profiling."

For her part, Muentes fears that when it comes to racial profiling, Obama's historic presidency may end up engendering hypocrisy of historic new proportions.

"Some people thought that because he (Obama) is African American, it automatically means he will be more aware or critical of racial profiling against immigrants or others in the larger criminal justice system", she continued. "That might not be the case."

Immigrant Detainee Rights are Routinely, Systematically Violated, New Report Finds

"A Broken System" is based on 18,000 Pages of Previously Confidential ICE, ABA, and UNHCR Reviews of Detention Centers


LOS ANGELES - Denied access to loved ones, lawyers and basic necessities, the fundamental rights of the men and women within the nation's immigration detention system are routinely and systematically violated, according to a new report released today by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the ACLU of Southern California, and the international law firm of Holland & Knight, LLP. The first nationwide comprehensive report of its kind, "A Broken System: Confidential Reports Reveal Failures in U.S. Detention Centers," sheds new light on the conditions suffered by hundreds of thousands of people housed in detention centers around the country, and offers policymakers specific recommendations to ameliorate the situation.

"Though the detainees are accused of civil immigration charges, there is nothing civil about our detention centers," said Karen Tumlin, co-author of the report and a staff attorney at NILC. "These centers, where people are detained for months and often years at a time, often fail to provide people with their fundamental rights: access to loved ones, the basic materials needed to research and prepare their cases, or even a simple explanation of their rights while within the immigrant detention system.

Added Linton Joaquin, co-author and general counsel at NILC, "The government's own standards for immigration detention are routinely violated. Such a flagrant disregard for this country's values for fairness and justice on behalf of the United States government is appalling."

Though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to conduct a formal review of each detention facility on a yearly basis, "A Broken System" shows that such reviews carry little enforcement weight, as many of the detention facilities fail to rectify problems identified by ICE's own inspectors. Even more troubling, the inadequacy of the ICE reviews is demonstrated when they are compared with independent reviews by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) of the same facilities, which often found a greater number and more severe violations in detention centers than was reported by ICE.

For instance, the ABA and UNHCR reviewers found detainees were retaliated or punished more severely than allowed for minor disciplinary infractions. ICE reviewers, on the other hand, overlooked these serious violations.

Ranjana Natarajan, a report co-author and former ACLU/SC attorney said, "At every level, federal, state and local jails and prisons have legal and binding rules they must abide. But in immigration detention, the government refuses to adopt binding rules. The result is utter disregard for basic humane conditions. Because we don't have rules, we don't have accountability."

The findings from "A Broken System" are particularly timely, as they are released in the wake of a DHS decision to reject the long-standing request of NGOs and the ABA to promulgate regulations that would require immigration detention facilities to adhere to basic standards of care.

This agency statement responds to a petition for rulemaking submitted in January 2007 by dozens of immigrant detainees and advocacy groups in the wake of public reports detailing the humanitarian crisis in the facilities.

The report highlights the importance of having independent monitors of detention centers. In the Kenosha County Detention Center, for example, a UNHCR report found that while men were allowed two daily hours of recreation, women housed in the same facility were denied recreation rights. The following year, ICE inspectors rated that same facility "acceptable," despite the fact that women were still being denied access to recreation facilities.

"A Broken System" is based on an analysis of hundreds of ICE, ABA and UNHCR detention facility review reports from 2001 through 2005. The reports, which had been withheld from the public, were obtained through discovery in litigation. Although the report is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind, the government withheld a significant number of documents it was ordered to produce. As a result, the violations outlined in the report represent only a fraction of the number of violations that actually occurred but could not be documented.

Christopher Nugent, pro bono senior counsel at Holland & Knight, said, "Though this report provides the most complete picture the public has of this massive system, it is still a sketch. We can, however, determine even more definitively that the immigration detention centers routinely violate the government's own standards for immigration detention, and based on this information we have made specific policy recommendations to encourage those with the power to change the system to do so."

The recommendations put forth by the report are based upon thousands of hours of research and analysis of the detention center reviews. Key among them is the proposal that the ICE revise its standards for immigration detention to make them judicially enforceable. The report also determines that given the gross abuses, further expansion of the immigrant detention system should be stopped, and more use should be made of humane alternatives to detention.

The findings from "A Broken System" are particularly timely, as they are released in the wake of a DHS decision to reject the long-standing request of NGOs and the ABA to promulgate regulations that would require immigration detention facilities to adhere to basic standards of care.

This agency statement responds to a petition for rulemaking submitted in January 2007 by dozens of immigrant detainees and advocacy groups in the wake of public reports detailing the humanitarian crisis in the facilities. The name of the case involved in the petition is Families for Freedom v. Napolitano, No. 08-CIV-4056 (DC).

To read "A Broken System," go to
www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/arrestdet/A-Broken-System-2009-07.pdf

O'Malley decries immigrant health care cut - Articles of Faith - Boston.com

O'Malley decries immigrant health care cut - Articles of Faith - Boston.com

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Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, is expressing opposition to a possible cut to state-subsidized health insurance coverage for some legal immigrants.

Here's the relevant portion of his most recent blog entry:

"As I do upon occasion, before I get to the events of my week, I would like to comment on an issue that is of great importance to me.

The Governor and the Legislature in the commonwealth face excruciatingly difficult choices this week. Final decisions about the budget bring together the fact of an economy in deep recession, declining state revenues and multiple human needs among the citizens of the commonwealth. Those human needs for nutrition, housing and health care must be a high priority for the Church and its ministry.

Our agencies Catholic Charities, the Caritas Health Care System and the Office of Planning and Urban Affairs are stretched to the limit these days, but that is the work we should be doing.

A particular issue of concern to me is the possibility that funding for health coverage for 28,000 legal immigrants may be cut in whole or in part. The Church, through Catholic Charities and through our parishes, is in direct and regular service of the immigrant community.

My hope and my request is that a way can be found to sustain health coverage for these legal members of our community. Their resources are few and their support system is always stretched thin. The commonwealth has done a very commendable job of providing health care to the citizens of Massachusetts. It would be a tragic mistake to let these 28,000 members of our community lose access to the precious good of health care."

(Photo, by John Blanding of the Globe staff, shows Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley of Boston in Gloucester on June 28, 2009.)

MA Treasurer Statement Justifies Treatment of Immigrants

Treasurer Devalues Immigrants

BOSTON-- On Friday, State Treasurer Tim Cahill raised the ugly rhetorical justification for the state legislature's termination of healthcare coverage to 30,000 legal, tax-paying residents. Commenting on the legislature's decision to cut recent permanent residents and other immigrants from Commonwealth Care coverage, Cahill told the State House News Service that immigrants may be receiving the message, "Come to Massachusetts and we'll cover you." The subscription-only service went on to quote Cahill, "That's not really protecting our own citizens who have grown up here and spent their lives here and want to either raise a family or keep their family here, like I'm trying to do."



"This is an extremely offensive statement," said Eva Millona, Executive Director for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA). "It is contrary to the spirit of inclusion that the Commonwealth stands for. Such a high-ranking state official should know that Massachusetts is one of four states with an official Integration Agenda, which acknowledges immigrants' valuable contribution to our community and economy. As treasurer, in particular, he should treasure what immigrants offer."


Proof is presented by the recently released report "Massachusetts Immigrants by the Numbers: Demographic Characteristics and Economic Footprint," prepared for the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden by Alan-Clayton Matthews, Faye Karp, and Paul Watanabe. The report shows conclusively that the state's immigrant population "countervails the net out-migration from Massachusetts to other states" and offsets the aging of our native-born workforce. Indeed, immigrants represent a larger percentage of the workforce (17 percent) than they do of the general state population (14 percent). The report also shows that "immigrants pay into the state income tax system at a higher rate than their percentage of the population."


"Cahill should know that immigrants don't come here to claim benefits," Millona continued. "They come here to work and raise their children in one of the most inclusive states in the most inclusive nation in the world. Cahill may be raising his family here, but you have to wonder if he shares our Commonwealth's values."

Immigrant fighting cancer and the fear of losing care - The Boston Globe

Immigrant fighting cancer and the fear of losing care - The Boston Globe

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By Kay Lazar and Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | July 15, 2009

Eugenio Hernandez believes that coming to America saved his life.

Almost two years ago, the immigrant from El Salvador was diagnosed with cancer, and his doctors in Boston fought it with surgery, radiation, and multiple checkups. It still lurks inside his stocky frame, but he is alive, and he has insurance.

Now he is among 30,000 legal immigrants who are poised to lose their state-subsidized health insurance at the end of the month, as Massachusetts leaders wrestle over the state budget.

As a low-wage worker with an expensive disease, he is suddenly confronting an unexpected dilemma: He cannot afford insurance, but missing his checkups could put him at risk.

“For me, the illness doesn’t end,’’ he said yesterday, sitting in the tiny parlor of the apartment he shares above a red-brick bodega in East Boston. “I have to keep going. I can’t just lie down and die.’’

State lawmakers deleted money for immigrants’ health insurance as one of many cuts made to balance the budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.

Governor Deval Patrick has proposed a $70 million compromise plan that would grant immigrants access to medical care in August, when their coverage ends, through a patchwork of other state programs that health advocates say is spotty and confusing, especially for those who, like Hernandez, do not speak English.

The proposal would require lawmakers and state regulators to create an alternative insurance system for these immigrants come September. Lawmakers expect to vote on the proposal before the end of this month.

If lawmakers reject the proposal, legal immigrants would use a state program, Health Safety Net, that would allow a limited amount of medical care indefinitely, but they would pay a larger share of their care than they do now.

The uncertainty is creating an anxiety that is palpable, said Carlos Solis, a counselor at the consumer group Health Care for All, who is helping Hernandez and dozens of other immigrants navigate the state system. The group has received calls from more than 200 families.

“The question we keep receiving is, ‘What am I going to do?’ ’’ Solis said.

Lawmakers proposed eliminating healthcare for legal immigrants because, as noncitizens, they do not qualify for matching federal subsidies and thus are more expensive for the state to insure.

But health policy specialists say terminating the immigrants’ coverage is probably going to shift costs to other portions of the state budget, as well as to hospitals that care for them.

“At least a portion of the costs . . . are still going to occur, because people will still get care if they need it. The question is, who is going to be paying for it?’’ said Anya Rader Wallack, executive director of the Massachusetts Medicaid Policy Institute and cochairwoman of a state-created committee that will soon recommend proposals to contain soaring healthcare costs.

The 30,000 immigrants caught in the middle have “special status’’ in the immigration system. Many have been in the country less than five years and are seeking asylum from war-ravaged regions.

Hernandez, a 51-year-old janitor, said he arrived in the United States on a visa in 1993, a year after a 12-year civil war ended in his homeland. He applied for asylum and was denied, but was able to obtain temporary legal status in 2001 after a series of earthquakes shattered his country.

Before his illness, his priority was work: He had two jobs, cleaning office buildings during the day and at night. Health insurance seemed beyond his reach.

Besides, his older brothers and a sister in El Salvador needed the money he sent home.

Then one day in 2007, he felt pain while going to the bathroom.

A local doctor referred him to Tufts Medical Center, where a specialist diagnosed him with prostate cancer. The rest is a blur: He recalls the worry on the doctors’ faces and being told that he had a 50 percent chance of survival. The doctors rushed him into surgery in October 2007.

“I didn’t know anything,’’ he said, shaking his head. “I fell into a depression. I didn’t ask anything.’’

After the surgery he spent two nights in the Boston hospital, and then embarked on a series of critical checkups. At three months and at six months, he was fine.

At nine months, the cancer was back. Eight weeks of radiation followed.

“The doctors have done everything for me,’’ Hernandez said. “Without them, I would have died.’’

But his illness has devastated his finances: Shortly after the operation, he received a bill for $24,000 because he did not have insurance at the time. The debt, which he is fighting through a lawyer, is more than he earns in a year.

“See how it is when you don’t have insurance?’’ he said, gesturing to the bill.

The cancer also cost him his day job. When he told the boss he needed two months to recover from the surgery, he was fired.

Now he works part time at night, sweeping and vacuuming an office building after the employees have gone home. He usually grosses $350 a week.

His latest pay stub shows that he has made a total so far this year of about $13,400, including overtime, and has paid roughly $2,000 of that in federal and state income taxes.

To keep costs low, he does not own a car, never eats out, and rents a room for $250 a month in a third-floor flat in East Boston, up a staircase covered with a tattered gray carpet.

Losing the insurance while still being treated for cancer is unthinkable, he said. He has no savings and has two doctor’s appointments coming up.

At the last visit, he underwent scans, because his doctor worried that his cancer may have spread.

“I don’t know what’s waiting for me,’’ he added. “Now, I’m OK. But what if I need more surgery, more radiation? And what if I don’t have insurance?’’

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at MSacchetti@globe.com. Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com