Author: mopress

Sunday Sermon

By Greg Moses

OpEdNews / RioGrandeGuardian (subscription)

One reason why we have too many prisons locking up too many people for too many reasons is that rural America has too many workers looking for good-paying jobs. And prisons promise steady paychecks.

The only reason why 20-year-old Suzi Hazahza and other young immigrant women from the Dallas area are still locked up at the Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas is not because they are threats to society. But if the feds keep people like Suzi in jail, they can spend a budget of $7,000 per prisoner per month to keep the prison empire propped up.
But if we are not to become a nation in which half of the population is paid to keep the other half locked up, we need to activate our imaginations and vaunted American know-how to figure out where prison money might be better spent on better jobs with better human consequences.

And so we have been talking with Jay Johnson-Castro of the Rio Grande Valley who next week will walk in protest of two, maybe three prison camps for immigrants in South Texas. We asked him what the Rio Grande Valley really needs. First on his list is a Veterans Administration Hospital. “Can you believe we don’t have one? But when you ask people around here why we don’t have one, they say there’s not enough money.”

Money flows without impediment into immigrant prisons, yet can’t find its way to a V.A. Hospital? Surely this is something easily fixed by a budget.

The next most obvious public need is education. With Latin America surging northward, we should greet people with classrooms and teachers, not guards and cells. If you go look at the geography of things near the Statue of Liberty, there is no end to the colleges one can choose from. And when the Ellis Island crowds were overflowing, some of the nearby public colleges were open for free.

So we are pleased with this morning’s news in the Rio Grande Guardian that one Hispanic lawmaker from the Rio Grande Valley has been appointed to a House Select Committee on Higher and Public Education Finance. Says State Rep. Ryan Guillen, D-Rio Grande City:

“This year I am fighting for funding for two new technology training centers in Starr and Zapata counties because students there need other options than they have today. I thank Chairman Craddick for the appointment and we will work hard to find a way to provide more educational opportunity for all students in Texas.”

Continuing the list of things that can be done with willing hands, Johnson-Castro says the Rio Grande Valley, like New Orleans, is a river delta. And like New Orleans, the Valley has levees that need work before the next hurricane disaster strikes.

Oh, and Highway 83 could be expanded in recognition of the fact that the Rio Grande Valley is a major metropolitan area with international traffic jams.

Finally, on this short list of things people need more than jail cells is running water. The Magic Valley teems with fruits and vegetable crops because of water, and a healthy, public water supply could use some upkeep.

Smarten up, America. If you can’t figure out anything better to do with willing hands than to criminalize them for profit, then your days of freedom leadership are sadly numbered.

The following photo and caption were previously posted in the announcement section.–gm

Suzi, Mirvat, and their Father Radi Hazahza at Home
Homeland Security officials say that regardless of prison conditions the family deserves six full months in prison for failure to appear for an appointment. The family says they never received notice that an appointment had been scheduled.

See Suzi’s case featured at TexasKaos, with a succinct polemic by XicanoPwr of what this case is really about–it’s about the untimely death of the American consciene, looking for a Spring resurrection.

Or go to XicanoPwr.com and get the full workover.–gm

When few would own up to the unjust treatment of Ramsey Muniz, the American G.I. Forum helped to get him transferred to a Texas prison. So we just want to make it clear that we are proud to support the American G.I. Forum, especially because it was founded in Corpus Christi and stands as a mentoring example to anyone now working for Texas Civil Rights.–gm

“The American G.I. Forum calls for an immediate boycott of PBS and its 354 affiliate stations across the nation until such time that the Latino experience is included in Ken Burns “The WAR” PBS WWII documentary that is scheduled for release on September 23, 2007;”

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / MakingPeaceBlog

“We are drawing attention to a humanitarian crisis,” says Penny Anderson, speaking from a Saturday morning protest outside the El Paso immigrant jail (March 17). She is the first person to take the cell phone being passed around by activist Amber Clark.

Among the prisoners in the nearby 800-bed jail are about one hundred women flown in from New Bedford, Massachusetts following an immigration raid at a manufacturing shop. Immigration authorities have reported that 116 of the women, believed to be mostly from Guatemala, were brought here to the El Paso Service Processing Center (EPC) on Montana Street. Another 90 were reportedly taken to another immigrant jail in Texas.

“We have heard horror stories of women rounded up at work in Massachusetts and sent to jail in Texas without being given a chance to say goodbye to their families–children coming home from school and not knowing where their mothers were,” says Anderson who is president of the El Paso Borderlands Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Word of the raid reached the Borderlands Chapter from NOW national offices, explains Anderson. And several news reports have followed the response of Massachusetts officials. Last Saturday, Massachusetts social workers visited both jails in Texas and managed to get nine mothers released on humanitarian grounds.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy visited New Bedford and described the situation as Katrina-like, with family members missing and nobody knowing where they were or if they were okay. The response of Massachusetts state workers and elected officials is an embarrassing contrast to the silence and inactivity that has accompanied news of Texas families rounded up by immigration authorities in recent years.

On Montana Street in El Paso Saturday morning, 20 protesters drew most of the local media, along with honks of support from passing cars, says Anderson. “The larger picture shows that current immigration system is broken,” she says. “The Bush administration claims to be pro family, but when they allow this to happen, it shows they are tearing families apart.”

Joining the protest is Kathy Staudt of the Coalition against Violence toward Women and Families at the US-Mexico Border (CAV). “We see this as part the structural problem of violence against women,” she says. “Many of the families affected by the immigration raid in Massachusetts were in the US for five or ten years working at the factory. All of a sudden there was this raid. Women were sent away. And people were frantic to find out what happened to them.”

CAV was formed in 2001 to address the issue of femicide in Juarez, where 370 women were killed between 2000 and 2003. “They think in Mexico there has been some limited institutional response to the issue, but many killers remain on the loose,” says Staudt. “And Mexico is only recently taking violence against women as a serious issue at the national level.”

Staudt says the problem of stopping violence against women in Mexico is made more difficult by a widespread distrust of police, because of a feeling that police are corrupt and can act with impunity.

As Staudt speaks we think of 20-year-old Suzi Hazahza and her sister Mirvat, two immigrant women rounded up with their family at gunpoint by Dallas immigration authorities in early November, 2006, now serving hard time at the Rolling Plains prison in Haskell, Texas, for the crime of allegedly missing an appointment—an appointment they claim not to have known about.

“There is a whole structure of violence and lack of respect for women that transcends borders,” says Staudt. It is a structure that the militarized posture of border enforcement will only continue to make worse.

Next at the cell phone is John Boucher of El Paso’s Annunciation House. “We are a house of hospitality,” he explains. “We work with undocumented immigrants in the area and with student groups in the USA. We have Catholic origins. I’m just a volunteer.”

For Boucher, the treatment of Massachusetts workers is connected to what he sees closer to the border, “from the economic policies that force people to be displaced, continued in our country by a lack of acknowledgement that people who work cheap subsidize our lives.” Boucher sees fewer undocumented workers crossing the border these days, but he sees evidence that “people are being forced into more desperate situations.”

As the border is militarized, migrants are relying on paid help to get across. “Coyotes and smugglers are in the family reunification business, too,” explains Boucher. “And their involvement makes crossing the border more dangerous for everyone.”

With her cell phone returned, Amber Clark promises to email photos and media links.

“The treatment of the factory workers differs sharply from the treatment of the factory owner who had abused undocumented workers for years by underpaying and overworking them while reaping profits from lucrative government contracts,” says a press release circulated by Clark. “The factory owner is free on bail and was allowed to take a trip to Puerto Rico.”

If an image of corrupt and arbitrary law enforcement is not actually what immigration authorities are trying to convey by their recent activities in Texas and Massachusetts, you’d be hard pressed to say why.