Author: mopress

Note: there are several resources archived at this site regarding the plight of three Texas families of Palestinian heritage who were abducted and imprisoned in early November. This morning we received the latest information from an attorney for two of the families, the Suleimans and Ibrahims.–gm

email from John Wheat Gibson (Jan. 13, 2007)

Mr. Suleiman told me he cannot stand any more and wants right away to be deported to Jordan. He has been in solitary confinement since December 20,
(yesterday, when I finally found him and telephoned him, he said was the first time in 24 days he was allowed out of his 8×5 foot cell) apparently to
punish him for telling me on the telephone about conditions in the Garvin County, Oklahoma Jail. [Mr. Suleiman was moved to the Oklahoma County, Oklahoma Jail, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and that is where attorney Gibson found him.]

Ayman, the son, having grown up in Texas, being
a high school senior, does not want to go. Apparently the BICE [Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement] now has the travel documents from Jordan it needed to deport the Suleimans, and is making airline arrangements. Because Mr. Suleiman asked me not to, I have not pressed the BIA [Board of Immigration Appeals] to grant the motion to stay deportation that I filed for him last year. The BIA will dismiss it as moot after the deportation.

The Ibrahims almost surely will not be deported. They cannot be deported to Jordan because Jordan refuses to cooperate with the BICE. They cannot legally be deported through Israel, although in the past Israel has assisted the BICE illegally to deport people to the Occupied Territories.
Considering how hard Israel has been trying in the past couple of years to finish the ethnic cleansing of the Palesinians in the Occupied Territories, I do not see why Tel Aviv would help BICE send the Ibrahims back to Palestine, unless they just want to make sure they can kill them.

In any event, there remains not even a pretense of legality in the continuing incarceration of the Ibrahims. The BICE officers will review their detention after 90 days (I calculate February 1) but, because they work
for the sadistic racist Chertoff, will almost surely refuse to release them.

After 180 days, they must be released pursuant to the US Supreme Court decision in the Zadvydas case, but since the monarchists have packed the courts, there is a chance the BICE (executive branch) will fight to
keep them in jail anyway. Still, I intend to file the Zadvydas habeas corpus petition after 180 days, since it is a straightforward legal argument based on established law, and I can base the pleadings on pleadings that I have filed previously with good results….

A more serious challenge to the detention of children
generally, however, must be filed by somebody like the ACLU, who has the resources to do it right and see it through to the end. At this juncture, it is more than I can manage, since if I undertook it I would find myself
practicing law out of a shopping cart under a bridge.

I do appreciate your disseminating my letter to [Austin American-Statesman Reporter Juan] Castillo. I think it aroused the interest of many folks, and it appears the bureaucrats are receiving lots of e-mails, letters, and phone calls as a result. There is a lot of media interest, including San Antonio Express, Houston
Chronicle, and nationally In These Times and New American Media. Of course, the San Antonio Express and Houston Chronicle reporters assume these children
must be terrorists, since the king can do no wrong.

John Wheat Gibson, P.C.

Hola y’all…

This is about a historical 5000 mile journey that begins in three weeks. We wanted you to have a heads up.

You are being sent this e-mail because you are (1) opposed to the border wall, (2) if you are interested in putting and end to incarcerating women and children in prison camps on American soil…(3) if you’re interested in preventing the death toll that is as a result of failed immigration policies in this country…(4) some of, or (5) all of the above.

The Attached is the schedule for Marcha Migrante II-Border Caravan which will focus on (5)…“all the above”.

Link to Jan. 12 version of schedule

One of the features of the Marcha Migrante II is that the Border Caravan will not only go from San Diego, CA all the way to Brownsville, TX…it will also swing up to Taylor, Texas…where 400-600 women and mostly children are imprisoned behind razor wire walls, in prison uniforms and are kept in cells for 22 hours a day.

Taylor is just 35 miles northeast of the Texas Capitol city of Austin . There we will hold a third vigil at the Hutto prison camp. By doing this we will be able to show our unrelenting opposition to the imprisoning of helpless women and innocent children in FOR PROFIT prison camps.
I am providing you with a video link of the Christmas Eve Vigil that was conducted this past December 24 at the Hutto prison camp in Taylor , TX and sponsored by my Flamenco artist friends, Teye & Belen, and me. This video clip is provided the young documentary film maker, Jesse Salmeron. www.jessesalmeron.com

This schedule remains a work in progress. As we progress, more precise details, such as departure and arrival times and locations, will be easier to determine and we will therefore post them.

We obviously need to have some flexibility on this 5000 mile journey. We hope to have a website available to track our progress. When we do, we’ll notify you. (As always…if you prefer to not receive this information…we will accommodate your wishes.)
and we will therefore post them.

If you or an association that you are affiliated with would like to provide food, lodging…or would simply like to show solidarity with us in any way, please contact us. Please feel free to share and forward this to your friends, families, organizations, political and religious representatives and those that you know in the media.
and we will therefore post them.

Most especially…if you are able to arrange it…please join us…anywhere along the way…
and we will therefore post them.

Hasta entonces…

Jay

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Border Ambassador

Connecting the Dots…Making a Difference

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

Del Rio, Texas

Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila , Mexico

by John Wheat Gibson

The Albanian who publicly announced the names of the assassins who killed Albanian Democratic Party leader Azem Hajdari will be deported to Albania, said Carl Rusnok, public relations officer for the Dallas district of the Department of Homeland Security.

The assassins will be waiting for him with sharpened knives, because on 5 September 2007 the Albanian newspaper Korrieri in Tirana, the capital, on its front page announced that Rrustem Neza, whom the headline called a “Witness of Murder of Azem Hajdari,” had been denied asylum in the US and was about to be returned to Albania. Additionally, reports were broadcast by Albanian television stations.

Rrustem Neza fled to the United States, but was prevented by his previous attorney from presenting the facts of his case when he appeared before an immigration judge to ask for asylum. As a result, the immigration judge denied his asylum application and he now is in immigration custody under a final order of deportation. His two brothers Xhemal and Ismet, who subsequently presented their cases to an immigration judge, both were granted asylum.

BICE deportation officer Kevin Czechowicz took Rrustem Neza to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to deport him to Albania, but he pleaded for his life so loudly that airline officials would not let him board the plane. Czechowicz said that he will take Mr. Neza to the airport again, and will deport him. At present, Mr. Neza is detained by the DHS at the contract prison in Haskell, Texas.

To date, Mr. Neza never has been allowed to present the facts of his case to an immigration judge. The Board of Immigration Appeals denied his motion to reopen on account of his previous attorney’s ineffectiveness. The BIA did not doubt that Mr. Neza will be killed for his political affiliation when he is deported to Albania. Instead, the BIA said it would not reopen his case because more than 180 days had passed since its first decision.

A petition for review is pending in the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, but DHS could deport Mr. Neza before the 11th Circuit makes a decision. Another problem is that in the 11th Circuit Mr. Neza must prove by clear and convincing evidence that he would win his asylum case if it is reopened. But the Court of Appeals cannot receive any evidence except what the previous attorney submitted to the immigration judge. Yet, it was the previous attorney’s failure to submit the abundant evidence that the Court of Appeals now will not look at which prevented Mr. Neza from receiving a fair hearing and being granted asylum in the first place!

Desperately trying to save his brother’s life, Xhemal Neza has been talking to everyone who will listen about the danger to Rrustem. It was Rrustem’s brother Xhemal who told him the names of the killers, after Xhemal personally witnessed the machine-gunning of Hajdari and his bodyguards. At least one of the assassins was a police officer. Rrustem told the names of the killers to a crowd at a meeting in the Albanian city of Tropoje while Xhemal was unconscious in a hospital in the capital city Tirana, after Xhemal was injured by police fire during a demonstration protesting the assassination.

The assassins were associated with both the ruling Socialist Party and Hajdari’s rival for Democratic Party leadership Sali Berisha. Xhemal and Rrustem hid from the police with two of their cousins, both of whom were murdered before they could flee from Albania.

At the hearing on Rrustem’s asylum application in Miami, the immigration judge doubted that the cousins had been murdered. The official death certificates of both cousins and a newspaper account of the murder of one of them were available to prove the truth, but Rrustem’s attorney was unaware of them and did not show them to the immigration judge.

All pleadings, affidavits, and other evidence are available for inspection and copying at the office of Rrustem’s present attorney John Wheat Gibson. They include a detailed, sworn, account of the murder of Hajdari, and the course of Rrustem’s asylum application in the immigration court.

Attorney John Wheat Gibson’s telephone number is (214)748-6944. Xhemal Neza may be reached at (936)676-8460.

On the occasion of Sunday, New Year’s Eve, Eid ul-Adha, 2006

By Greg Moses

“21 criminal aliens, fugitive aliens, and other immigration status violators” is how the Dallas office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) counted booty in a web-posted press release last Nov. 3 following two days of arrests.

Two months later, three families from that pre-election roundup remain in jail, of whom only one person—a teenaged boy—stands convicted of crimes, and that 17-year-old young man sits alone, pissing blood, in isolation from his parents and four siblings, because he is being held as a minor in an adult jail at Haskell, Texas.

For all the rest of the members of the three families, none, as it turns out, has been identified as either criminal or fugitive. They were only a handful of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” coming to America with passports and visas, working with attorneys to secure asylum through legal means, going to work, to school, and in some cases getting married or pregnant, trying to live and make life in ways we all know.
But they were all Arab, and it was election time in the USA. Never mind that seven of them were school children, or that one of them was a newlywed bride, recently graduated from college with honors, or that another was pursuing college on and off, planning to be married, or that the six parents worked hard and kept their families close. They were Arab, after all, and it was election time.

I still get emails from people telling me “we should send them all back”, and these are emails from precisely the kinds of voters that such a roundup was meant, and is still meant, to appease. Thirteen percent of Americans think Bush is a hero. And with these three Arab families, the President repays his loyalists for the way they stick.

But I also get emails from others, many more others, who say, “my God, what can I do to help.” And these are the majority of voters, to be sure, thank goodness. And for most of the voters, these three families–Ibrahim, Suleiman, and Hazahza–are just the kind of people that neighbors are made of in America. They try, they fail, they try again, they succeed. Family troubles come, and to some families they come hard. But we know them, if we know any neighborhood at all.

One of the email supporters, Rita Zawaideh, has mobilized the Arab American Community Coalition, and a call to action has been circulated to free the Ibrahim family, whose toddler daughter needs them out of jail now and back home.

Really, it’s the simplest thing. Free the Ibrahim family. Free the pregnant mother so that she can take proper care of herself and her coming son. Free the kindergarten daughter who shares a bunkbed with her mother. Free the two sisters who share another cell nearby. Free the teenage boy who calls his uncle every day from the T. Don Hutto jail in Taylor, Texas. And free the father, too, who is kept 300 miles away, at Haskell.

That’s it. Free the Ibrahim family today. It can be done very quickly by anyone along the chain of command from the White House to San Antonio ICE. And if you’re listening, Mr. President, you can do it with the stroke of a pen. Those voters who would make a fortress of America? You’ll never have need for them again. But your conscience is something you really can’t leave behind.

The New Year is a traditional time for politicians to set people free. Let the Ibrahims go back to their neighborhood in Texas, where they can gather themselves as a family and get some rest, together.

[Note: recommended listening: Lyle Lovett, “That’s right, you’re not from Texas, but Texas wants you, anyway!”–gm]