Category: Uncategorized

Interview with Corinna Spencer-Scheurich
of the South Texas Civil Rights Project

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier

Several weeks ago I heard a powerful presentation on why poor people in the Valley have a difficult time building up a “nest-egg” to get out of poverty. It was given by an attorney for the South Texas Civil Rights Project, Corinna Spencer-Scheurich, who has an office behind the United Farm Workers (UFW-LUPE) hall in Alamo. Meeting her again at the May Day immigration rights march, I arranged this interview.

Author: By way of introduction, your organization is a “Civil Rights Project,” and yet you are working on poverty issues. What’s the connection?

Spencer-Scheurich: Civil rights and economic justice are profoundly connected. It is difficult to worry about, let alone exercise, your 1st Amendment rights if you are struggling to make ends meet. But, it is also hard to critique and change the economic forces that are working to keep people, minorities in particular, in poverty if you are not able to march, write, and speak about what is happening to you. So, to be the human rights organization we hope we are, we must address both issues.

Author: In the speech I heard, you gave some startling data on the general gap between rich and poor. Please go over it again.

Spencer-Scheurich: Well, in the U.S. in 2001, the median net worth of white families was $120,989. But for Latino families it was $11,458. What a huge difference! And because economic assets, like inheritance, land, and education, are often passed from one generation to the next, the deck keeps being unfairly stacked against low income, minority families.

Author: And along the Border, the deck has been stacked for generations, through social habits, discriminatory laws and policies.

Spencer-Scheurich: Yes, for example, after the US-Mexican War, it is estimated that as many as 80% of Mexican-Americans lost their land to Anglo-Americans, because they were not able to prove their title in courts run by Anglo judges and juries. Then the 1933 Social Security Act did not cover farm workers, laborers, housemaids, and other service workers. And since many Latinos worked in these occupations, they lost out on this security net in their later years.

After the US Border Patrol was created in 1924, many Mexican American citizens and their families were exported, and again, with Operation Wetback in 1954, even families with native-born children were deported. Factor in the historic segregation in schools limiting the futures of many Latino children, affecting generations to come. These are just a few historic examples of how Latino families have been divested of their wealth in prior generations, setting the stage for the current situation where Latinos lag behind Anglo whites in all categories of wealth and economic security.

Author: Building on that history, you spoke about various things working against the poor today, such as consumer issues that make getting out of poverty, building a nest egg, very difficult. Is that right?

Spencer-Scheurich: Yes. There are a number of examples of the stacked deck today. Studies have shown that, on average, low income people pay more than higher income people for basic consumer goods and services. Low income drivers will pay more on average for car insurance. Studies even show that low income neighborhoods are charged more for certain grocery items than upper income neighborhoods.

Low income people are more likely to use predatory financial institutions that charge extremely high interest rates for short term loans, and the poor often use check cashing services as opposed to mainstream banks. Low income families are more likely to use a rent-to-own store to buy a television on a high interest rate than to be able to find a great deal on one.

This inequality does not just happen because low income people are higher credit risks. Many times it is because low income families have less access to information, fewer choices of businesses in their neighborhoods, become targets for unscrupulous businesses, and have less ability to get transportation to better deals in other places.

Since low income families pay too much for their necessities, they have an even harder time saving for the education of their children or for a car that will allow them to have a better job – keeping them in the cycle of poverty and stacking the deck against future generations.

Author: Where should we start on these issues?

Spencer-Scheurich: Immediately, we should encourage individuals and groups to start examining which businesses are having a positive effect on the community and which are predatory and sucking important capital and resources away. United, we can wield power as consumers, and we have local power to choose leaders who will draw good businesses and mainstream financial institutions into our communities and discourage predatory businesses.

The following article was previously posted as a site announcement above.–gm

Scroll down or click here to get updates for the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday iteneraries.

And if you are following Jay’s walk through cyberspace, here’s a little background reading on Rio Grande Valley culture. It’s the fresh issue of Laredos. Check it out.

Finally, adding to our list of peaceful type work that can be provided to the Rio Grande Valley, we’d like to add phone line technicians. We tried to call Jay Thursday night and got an “all circuits are busy” message. Sounds like they need something besides prisons down there.–gm

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez reference this article in their report on the boy they helped to free. Will Suzi be Next? Below, Isenberg says he’s working on it.–gm

Texas Samaritan for Canadian boy says he’ll help more kids detained in U.S.

BETH GORHAM

Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — Ralph Isenberg never met the nine-year-old Canadian boy he helped spring from a Texas immigration jail.

But the fate of Kevin Yourdkhani, who finally headed to Toronto on Wednesday with his Iranian parents, is still very personal for Isenberg, a wealthy Dallas property manager.

“I’m so happy. I pray to God that Canadians welcome that family home. Now it’s on to the next family.”
Mr. Isenberg, 55, who says he had his own immigration nightmare over the status of his Chinese wife, is determined to get all the kids out of the T. Don Hutto detention facility near Austin, Texas. He wants to force officials to shut it down.

“The conditions are atrocious,” Mr. Isenberg said from Dallas. “When I see an injustice where I can do something, I step right in. I’m not afraid of these bastards. To hell with ’em.”

A colourful, blunt-speaking businessman, Mr. Isenberg tears up when discussing how detainees have been treated by authorities.

He says the U.S. Immigration Control Enforcement is out of control. “They need to be put out of business.”

“You can’t allow a law-enforcement agency to have such power over all these foreign nationals. ICE in itself is creating terrorists of the future by jailing kids nine or 10 or 15 years old,” he said.

“I’ve seen the faces of the children who’ve been in there. Those kids are damaged goods.”

Kevin Yourdkhani was born in Canada. His parents lived in Toronto for 10 years before they were deported to Iran in 2005.

They were caught with fake passports by U.S. authorities in early February when they made an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico while en route to Canada to seek asylum for the second time.

They spent weeks in detention. Kevin, who was threatened with foster care, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and pleaded to be allowed to go home.

Last week, Ottawa granted the three a temporary residence permit.

Mr. Isenberg read about the boy’s case early on and stepped in, covering US$1,000 for travel permits and offering to pay the legal fees of the family’s Canadian lawyers.

While others are working on a lawsuit designed to close the facility, Isenberg works with individual families like Kevin’s.

“Somebody’s got to do it. You don’t need any more reason than it’s not right,” he says.

“It’s plain, pure and simple – not right. His was the most egregious case. He was literally kidnapped.”

“I don’t think our government understands what they did to that family.”

There is, though, a compelling reason for Mr. Isenberg’s activism and the money he devotes to it – his own battle over the status of his second wife, Nicole.

She had come to the United States in 1999 seeking political asylum. In 2003, by then Mr. Isenberg’s fiancee, she spent 52 days in the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell after authorities nabbed her for failing to attend a hearing.

The prison, a mix of hardened criminals and immigration cases, was “a hell hole out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Isenberg, with scant services or medical attention for detainees.

“All you have to do is experience the screams of your fiancee with an abscessed tooth, no one to help her.”

Nicole was eventually force to leave the United States. The couple and their baby had just returned in January from 14 months in China while they sorted out her case. She is now a legal permanent resident of the United States.

“I was in exile,” said Mr. Isenberg. “It was a terrible ordeal.”

It was after his return that he found out about the Hutto facility, opened last May by the Homeland Security Department.

“I went crazy when I heard about it,” he said.

“I may not have been in prison but I certainly know what this government is capable of doing to anyone and everyone.”

“If we do this to foreign nationals, it’s going to be us next.”

About half of some 400 people at Hutto are children. None of the detained have criminal records.

U.S. officials say the facility, and one like it in Pennsylvania, provide a humane way to keep families together while immigration laws are being enforced. Officials say this is what Congress directed them to do. But activists say legislators actually wanted the families held in home-like environments, not jails where they sleep in cells, wear prison garb and face major restrictions.

Mr. Isenberg helped secure the release last month of the Ibrahims, a Palestinian family held at Hutto since November on immigration violations.

When they got out, he sent a limousine to pick up Hanan and four of her five children. Their father was imprisoned hundreds of kilometres away while the family’s youngest, a three-year-old, stayed with an uncle.

Next, Mr. Isenberg is taking up the cause of three or four families who are Iraqi and Syrian.

And he’s hoping for the imminent release of Suzi Hazahza, 20, and her sister Mirvat from the same prison where his wife was once locked up.

Mr. Isenberg said it’s terrible to think about what U.S. officials did to Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was sent to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured.

“I think of that poor person at least once a week,” he said. “I’m kind of blessed. At least I haven’t been tortured.”

He was among the first reporters to be notified of the plight of immigrant families at T. Don Hutto prision camp in Taylor, Texas. At last, his editors appear to have given him permission to give the story the coverage it deserves, perhaps because a federal judge last week expressed exasperation in open court. Below are the first few paragraphs of a comprehensive overview posted Sunday morning at statesman.com (subscription).–gm

Familial bonds

Is government’s policy to detain immigrant families fair?

By Juan Castillo
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 25, 2007

TAYLOR — Conversations with her mother and the son she left behind in Somalia because she feared for her life there. Visits to her grandmother’s tranquil vegetable garden. Walks past her grandparents’ house on her way home; they were always waiting to greet her.

These recurring images filled Bahjo Hosen’s dreams as she slept — with her 2-year-old son, Mustafa, curled up next to her — on a narrow metal bunk bed in a roughly 8-foot-by-12-foot cell with an open toilet and sink in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

On most mornings about 5:30, a guard’s rap on the door jarred Bahjo awake, drawing a dark curtain on her dreams and beginning another day of confinement while she and Mustafa pursued asylum in the U.S. immigration system’s slow-grinding bureaucracy.

“I never dreamed I would be in jail,” said Hosen, who fled a Somalian clan’s death threats, only to be locked up in the immigrant detention center in Taylor.

The former state prison is in the bull’s-eye of a growing controversy over a federal policy that requires families like Bahjo and Mustafa to be confined on immigration violations while they await outcomes of their asylum petitions or deportation. The waits can drag on for days, months, sometimes years.

The controversy raises two questions: Is it inhumane to confine children and families for running afoul of immigration laws? And are there better alternatives than locking people up?

Critics answer yes to both. Lawsuits filed on behalf of 10 children confined in Taylor accuse federal officials of illegally and inhumanely housing children, failing to meet the standards of a 1997 court settlement for the care of minors in immigration custody, and ignoring Congress’ orders to exhaust other options before detaining families — in homelike environments.

At a hearing on the lawsuits last week, even U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks expressed exasperation at the restrictions under which families are living at the Hutto facility.

“This is detention. This isn’t the penitentiary,” Sparks said. Detainees “have less rights than the people I send to the penitentiary.”

Sparks ordered that some restrictions on attorney visits with detainee clients be removed immediately. . . .