Author: mopress

By Nick Braune

The South Texas Civil Rights Project sent out a press release this week on a lawsuit filed against Cameron County. The suit contends that the county has retaliated against Gail Hanson, a minister and former volunteer chaplain at the county jail, after she spoke publicly about the conditions women prisoners face at the jail. The suit contends that her free speech rights have been violated.

Hanson, through her church, became an official volunteer chaplain in 2000, and had visited with and prayed with prisoners weekly up until February of 2008, but her visits were stopped after she made the public comments about the jail and criticized the sheriff.

“Preventing someone from volunteering their time to help rehabilitate prisoners because she was critical of the County is outrageous,” said Mrs. Hanson’s attorney, Scott Medlock, quoted in the press release. Medlock is Director of the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Prisoners’ Rights Program. “Mrs. Hanson should be commended for her dedication to ministering to the women held in the jail, not punished for speaking the truth about what she saw behind prison bars,” he said.

The press release explains that in February 2008, “Mrs. Hanson criticized conditions in the jail at a candidate forum in advance of the Democratic Party primary. Prisoners told her they were denied sanitary napkins, forced to sleep on the floor, given adulterated food with hair and gnats in it, and held for long periods of time without being brought to court for trial.”

The suit is not asking for money but for the simple restoration of Hanson’s access to the jail so she can continue her ministerial visits.

These complaints against the Brownsville facility are not the first. There have been many complaints over the recent years about the county jail there. The press release quotes Hanson, “I just want to make sure these women’s voices are heard. I never thought the County would prevent me from praying with them for speaking about what I saw in the jail.”

I contacted Corinna Spencer-Scheurich from the Texas Civil Rights Project for a quick comment.

Braune: I read a previous article on the Texas Jail Project website, and it sounds to me that the Cameron County Jail is improperly run and is a stressful place for women to be held, particularly stressful for the pre-trial detainees. Do you think what your client has said publicly has hit some nerve? And do you think they revoked her privilege to visit the women in the jail as a message to others to be quiet too?

Spencer-Scheurich: Clearly what Gail Hanson said hit a nerve. And, it is also clear that banning her from the jail was calculated to chill free speech on the issue of jail conditions. One of the purposes of the 1st Amendment is to protect exactly what Mrs. Hanson did — speaking out about injustice that she witnessed or heard about first hand. While there is reason to believe that things have gotten better in the jail lately, protecting Mrs. Hanson’s right to talk about the conditions is almost as important as improving the conditions themselves. Otherwise, the women in the jail would have no one to advocate for them, no one to tell their stories. What kind of society would we be if we isolated these women to the point that they suffer atrocities without us knowing?

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier<br
by permission

Although I am a sourpuss and think President Obama is beholden to much the same crowd as was ex-President Bush, there are many people anticipating that things will change for the better soon. And so there is a resurgence of progressive activity going on, and that is good.

One source of optimism is that Michael Chertoff is gone as Homeland Security head. Two weeks ago, after another disturbing factory raid by ICE in Bellingham, Washington, Janet Napolitano, the new DHS chief, said publically that she had not even been informed the raid was going to happen and that she was ordering a full review of it. “I want to get to the bottom of this,” she said. It is not a clear message, but it provides a glimmer of hope that the recent workplace raids, dramatically handcuffing and imprisoning working people, might be softened in favor of restarting discussions about comprehensive immigration reform.

Interestingly, Napolitano also sent the Rio Grande Valley a signal last month. When Brownsville’s city commissioners had been pressured by Homeland Security to put up more border fencing right in the middle of an area that the city had planned for development, Napolitano stepped in, saying that she was not aware that a deadline had been given to the city and that she wanted to reconsider some of these projects. How far she will go is a mystery, but recent events have provided some hope.

Another sign of hope is that President Obama seems more favorable to labor organizing, and a press release I saw from a local uni*n group quotes Obama that labor is not “part of the problem but…part of the solution.”

Since I have not reported anything on labor recently, let me do that now.

Several weeks ago I reported attending an interesting anti-NAFTA event held by the Southwest Workers (SWU), which is based in San Antonio but also does work here in the Valley. SWU has started an organizing effort in Edinburg, trying to reach the school district’s bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other low income employees. I phone-interviewed organizer Anayanse Garza.

Braune: The SWU is trying to reach workers in Edinburg, but the district is balking. Is that correct?

Garza: Yes, we already have members, but we want more. But the ECISD (Edinburg School District) has been uncooperative. About a month ago, an assistant superintendant yelled at us, saying that if it were up to him there would be no uni*ns allowed. After we made his comments public, we had a series of meetings.

Braune: You certainly should have the right to organize.

Garza: Certainly, and we feel that the workers are being given false information and it is having an intimidating effect. Some are being told what we are doing is illegal. Some are being told it is against ECISD policy to be part of the SWU. Actually, it goes against ECISD policy to discourage us from getting members.

Braune: I know you had a rally in front of the school board last Tuesday night. What was your message there?

Garza: We were trying to inform the board about our continuing problems. We have met with a couple of board members but not with the whole board, and we have not spoken, even after about a month of this dispute, with the head of the school board. One of our SWU representatives and one of the bus drivers spoke at the public testimony session last night while the rest of us were rallying with signs outside. We told them that we want to have a meeting and that we have been trying to schedule a way to work out the problems. But so far today we have not gotten a call from them.

Braune: Your organization has experience with this sort of organizing; I take it what you immediately want is a fair opportunity to meet with the workers.

Garza: Yes, and we are surprised at the problems we are facing. The school district workers have mandated lunch and break time, and they discourage employees from leaving the campuses. So there are lunch rooms and meeting rooms where the workers congregate. We have simply asked that we can meet with them at the breaks on occasion. Part of the disinformation is that we want to interrupt the work time, which is not true. We simply want to visit during the breaks.

Another bit of disinformation is that we are demanding that we can just walk into the schools at any time. That is ridiculous. We would sign in at the desk like all other legitimate visitors. In other districts where we have members, we are able to meet with the workers in an orderly way with no problem.

We hope the ECISD School Board will hear us so that we may work together to correct these issues and help our schools, our families, and the community of Edinburg prosper as a whole.

Braune: Thanks for your work and the interview. Keep us informed how it is going.

By Nick Braune

According to the McAllen paper, The Monitor, some 5,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley applied for jobs with the Border Patrol in the last four months. That it is not completely surprising since the agency pays almost $50,000 a year and has embarrassingly low entry-level requirements, a high school diploma. (Compare that to other federal enforcement agencies which require a college degree at minimum.)

As I have reported in previous columns, there has also been some question, arising from within their own ranks, about how well the new recruits are being screened and mentored. And The Monitor has also noted lately that there were four Border Patrol officers in the Valley arrested for felonies in 2008. Five, if you count the brother of one of the arrested agents. The brother is also in the Patrol and was arrested in neighboring Zapata County for taking $23,000 in bribes from drug traffickers. Four of the five arrested last year were involved in drug trafficking.

Why is it important to keep an eye on the Border Patrol? Well, it has been beefed up massively as part of the “virtual wall” initiated by the Bush crowd, a trend which probably will continue under Obama and his conflicted Homeland Security nominee, Janet Napolitano. And the Patrol’s rapid growth is also ominous because it is taking place during this unethical period of “criminalizing” immigrant labor violations. (“Search” for several other online articles about the Border Patrol and “Operation Streamline” in the Texas Civil Rights Review site.)

The Patrol has traditionally been hapless, and its mission unclear. Founded in 1924, its intended mission was not really to prevent Mexican immigrants, but European and Asian immigrants, from entering. Also worth noting is that it has always policed the working class – note its conflict recently with the California Day Laborers Organizing Network, which is accusing the Border Patrol of blatant profiling and operating on the basis of a quota. One often hears the chant “Abajo La Migra” in farm worker circles, and it makes sense: founded as part of the Labor Department and staying there for its first 16 years, the Border Patrol has always kept labor it its ken and served the employers.

During the 1930s it remained “poorly staffed, poorly equipped, poorly administered and largely disorganized.” (For this article I’m following Juan Ramon Garcia’s classic book, Operation Wetback, written in 1980.) And the Patrol soon developed an embarrassing reputation, which still survives in Border areas, that it will enforce the laws except when powerful interests, certain growers, don’t want it to. Even the Border Patrol’s clothing was inconsistent (generally lacking the usual military or police uniforms).

But in 1940, the Immigration and Naturalization Services was moved from the Labor Department to the Justice Department. Garcia explains that Roosevelt, when WWII was nearing, was worried about Italians and Germans entering the country, not Mexicans. However, the Patrol also did not even do well in WWII. Why? First, many agents wanted to join the real military and quit, depleting the ranks. But secondly, the government, during the war, was happy to have documented and undocumented Mexicans coming into the U.S. to work, freeing up other workers to go into the military, so the Patrol agents were held in limbo, reinforcing their do-nothing image. And lastly, no doubt it was a little unclear what kind of important national security or law enforcement role the Patrol played.

Although we might think that joining the Justice Department would have been an ego boost for the Patrol, actually it made them feel even more like a second-rate enforcement agency, compared to the famed and focused FBI, for instance. And Garcia notes that the Justice Department did little to promote the Patrol — it is not very glamorous tracking down hungry and unarmed people.

Often half-blindfolding itself, it let in enough undocumented workers to serve the growers’ interests while also making sure there were not too many immigrants. And Garcia says, “It was not unusual for them to allow undocumented workers to roam the Valley and concentrate their efforts on keeping the undocumented away from the industrial jobs up North.” Could this — controlling the flow of labor north — be the origin of today’s “checkpoints,” the ugly, racially profiling, permanent roadblocks on highways about 80 miles north of the Border? (There were no such checkpoints coming south from Canada.)

It was really not until “Operation Wetback,” a racist military operation in 1954, coordinated by General “Jumping Joe” Swing, that the Border Patrol started to get some recognition and status. (Swing, a “professional Mexican hater” who served with General Pershing chasing Pancho Villa decades before, ran a military style sweep and a flashy publicity campaign against “wetbacks.” (Even President Eisenhower used this crude term, although he apparently apologized for it once.) Interestingly, today we hear of “border security” keeping terrorists from coming up from Mexico; in 1954, they warned us of communist infiltrators coming over the border.

General Swing, within a few short months, scattered hundreds of thousands of Mexicans — he bragged it was well over a million — deep into Mexico. Today we would call it “ethnic cleansing.” A thousand people a day were moved in and out of the McAllen detention camp. Swing even used ships, one called The Constitution, to drop immigrants off in Vera Cruz, 800 miles from the Tex-Mex border. (According to Garcia, The Patrol kindly let those who were dropped off have at least three dollars with them when they reached a part of Mexico they had never seen before.)

After participating in that touted 1954 success, the Border Patrol began to be seen as a bit more “respectable,” in the sense that it was said to have been successful in something. The uniforms got spiffier. But it has always been considered seedy, in the pocket of business, and it has had an inferiority complex and a chip on its shoulder; and consequently, when we see rapidly growing numbers of agents in the Rio Grande Valley, with vans and green uniforms and side arms, we feel uneasy.

[Much of this article appeared in the Mid-Valley Town Crier.]

Dear All:

As friends and colleagues of mine, I wanted to let you know about a great, inspiring upcoming documentary that will be aired on PBS the evening of Feb. 23 titled “A Class Apart.” Some of you may have received cross-postings already about this feature, and if so, then I’m very happy that the word is getting out. Some of you may have also seen the pre-screenings in San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas, NY, SF or DC. For those of you who have not heard of the film or seen it, please read on and share w/ your friends, familia and colleagues.

The film chronicles the U.S. Supreme Court case, Hernandez v. Texas, in which the Court held [unanimously] that Mexican Americans are a distinct class and entitled to protections as a group under the Fourteenth Amendment. But it is much more than just a film about the case and also includes details about the civil rights lawyers who argued the case before the Supreme Court (including the late Gus Garcia and Judge Carlos Cadena, among others) and the tough times Mexican Americans faced in the mid 1900s. The film was co-produced and co-directed by Carlos Sandoval and Peter Miller and is narrated by Edward James Olmos.

I had the pleasure of watching a run of the film before the final edits were made and I can tell you that I truly enjoyed the film from start to finish, and being a Latino civil rights lawyer in San Antonio had little to do w/ it.

I hope you will take the opportunity to enjoy the film and perhaps you can share w/ your friends and familia.

Links:

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE has launched its official A Class Apart page here; Active Voice has the A Class Apart, A Night Together toolkits online here; the filmmakers webpage is here; and we’ve also created an A Class Apart Facebook page, where we’re posting links to reviews and articles, notice about upcoming screenings, and so on.

Hasta luego,

David G. Hinojosa
Staff Attorney
MALDEF