Category: Uncategorized

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
Posted with Permission

Last weekend, March 24 and 25, I joined a pilgrimage led by Jay Johnson-Castro, who has been walking (walking) to various detention sites for immigrants. He and his friends are causing quite a stir around the state; I hooked up with him a bit on his route from an ugly Port Isabel detention center to an ugly one in Raymondville.

My wife and I rode slowly in our car in a short caravan behind Jay and some other stalwart walkers — pilgrims to the Raymondville immigrant detention center. Jay, seeming to me to be in his mid-fifties and wearing a light straw hat to keep the sun off of him, was feeling upbeat, and he made a series of beautiful stump speeches for the press — I saw three news media interview him.

Why should it be a crime, he asks the press, to be an economic or political refugee? Why do authorities lock people up as criminals for being oppressed and wanting to escape to America? Isn’t that (seeking refuge) what the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty is about?
Emma Lazarus’ stunning sonnet refers to America as the “Mother of Exiles” with mild eyes welcoming the tired, the poor and “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But these detention centers do not have mild eyes.

The most emotional part of the pilgrimage for me was simply the sight of the Raymondville center. As we moved off of the highway to it, we saw the bleak prison and the barbed wire. There are regular buildings around, but the detainees are held in huge puffy tents. An article in Rolling Stone magazine last year said the center looked like it just landed from Mars.

(The Raymondville area, the Rolling Stone article explained, was labeled the Valley of Tears in the late 1970s during an onion strike. After the strike, the growers got rid of most farm workers, and the Raymondville area tried textiles to survive. But NAFTA killed the textiles. Then the idea of making Raymondville “Prisonville” caught on. And now Raymondville with its windowless tents, is a Valley of Tears for yet another reason.)

Hundreds and hundreds live inside the tents, twenty three hours a day inside. I asked Jodi Goodwin, a Harlingen lawyer who joined the walk with Jay, some questions about the detainees.

Author: Do lawyers regularly help detainees learn their rights and do detainees know what to do to free themselves from the tents?

Goodwin: There are no lawyers that regularly visit the detainees to give legal rights presentations. A group of about 6 lawyers volunteered from August through December to give such presentations to the detainees, but ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] cut off our access to the detainees when they found out we were able to go inside the tents to give the presentations. As far as I know, no rights presentations have been given since the second week of December of 2006. I do not believe that ICE gives the detainees information about how to free themselves from the tents. That was part of the information we used to provide during our rights presentations.

Author: I suspect there is a deliberate effort to make detainees feel like criminals, even though they have not been convicted of a crime. Do they have prison clothes, have to stand in line, get yelled at, etc.?

Goodwin: Yes, they wear prison clothes; yes, they are kept in lines; yes, they are yelled at. Actually, they are treated worse than criminals. Criminals at least have a right to representation regardless of their financial ability. Immigration detainees have no right to counsel unless they can afford to pay a lawyer themselves.

Author: I heard you say earlier that some are having trouble sleeping; any comments on how their basic needs (food, sleep, exercise, medical help) are being met?

Goodwin: I believe that basic needs such as sleep, food, exercise, medical attention are in fact not being met. My clients report being incommunicado because the phones do not work, or because they have no money to buy an overpriced phone card. My clients report insufficient amounts of food. Stale or undercooked food. Rancid milk served past the expiration dates. Weeks of waiting to see someone from the medical staff. Lights being left on 24 hours a day. No toilet paper available for days on end. And there’s much more lacking in the way of basic needs.

Author: Is there anything my readers can do to help?

Goodwin: Call or email Senators and Representatives to encourage them to pass meaningful immigration reform and to demand ICE live up to its own detention standards by treating human beings with dignity.

Part II, next week.

NAACP reviews Cotton situation
By Mary Madewell
The Paris News

Published March 25, 2007

The Paris Branch of the NAACP called for a timely release of Shaquanda Cotton from the Texas Youth Commission after a four-hour executive committee meeting Saturday.

The group also asked that an emergency item be placed on Monday night’s Paris City Council agenda to consider naming a diversity task force.

The group also called for an expedited appeal of the Cotton case by the Texarkana Court of Appeals in motions approved unanimously by nine board members at Saturday’s meeting.

Tensions have mounted here in recent days since a Chicago Tribune article appeared March 12 about the Cotton case. … ************

To some in Paris, sinister past is back

In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family’s home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.’

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 12, 2007

PARIS, Texas — The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.

There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.

Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the “black” side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she’s begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself “the best small town in Texas.”

“Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston,” Cherry said. “They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s.”

There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims’ family.

There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.

And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.

The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor–a 58-year-old teacher’s aide–was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town’s juvenile court, convicted of “assault on a public servant” and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.

Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

“All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?” said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. “It’s like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated.” …

Posted with Certificate of Service

Copied and pasted from a pdf file, here is the claim made by the government of the USA that its own federal courts may not release wrongfully detained immigrants unless they have been wrongfully detained at least six months.

Technically, the motion argues that Homeland Security enjoys the discretion to call immigrants “flight risks”; and so long as Homeland Security makes this claim, the court has no jurisdiction to intervene. The motion does not state a background assumption made by the Federal Magistrate and US Attorneys that the power to hold immigrant prisoners on such discretionay basis has been limited by previous court rulings to 180 days.
-gm

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS
DALLAS DIVISION

Radi Hazahza, et al.,
Petitioners,

v.

Michael Chertoff, et al.,
Respondents.

No. 3:07-CV-0327-D (BF)
ECF
Referred to the U.S. Magistrate Judge

FEDERAL RESPONDENTS’ POST-HEARING SUBMISSION

In the March 29, 2007, hearing before the Court on Petitioner’s habeas corpus petition, the Federal Respondents argued that 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) strips federal district courts of jurisdiction to review discretionary immigration decisions of the Attorney General where such discretion is specified in a statute, and thus the Court did not have jurisdiction to review the discretionary decision that Petitioners are a flight risk under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6). The Federal Respondents submit this post-hearing brief to
provide the Court and opposing counsel with the case law cited by the Government on this issue at the hearing.

* * *

Section 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) provides that no court shall have jurisdiction to review “any other decision or action of the Attorney General or the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority for which is specified under this subchapter to be in the discretion of the Attorney General or the Secretary of Homeland Security . . . .” 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii).1 The Fifth Circuit has held that § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) strips courts of
jurisdiction to review discretionary authority specified in a statute. See Zhao v. Gonzales, 404 F.3d 295, 303 (5th Cir. 2005) (ruling that courts retain jurisdiction to review discretionary decisions where discretion derived from regulations promulgated by Attorney General).

In this case, the Court does not have jurisdiction to review ICE’s discretionary determination that Petitioners were a flight risk under § 1231(a)(6), and thus could be detained beyond the 90-day removal period. Section 1231(a)(6) states that “[a]n alien
ordered removed . . . who has been determined by the Attorney General to be . . . unlikely to comply with the order of removal” may be detained beyond the removal period. 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6) (emphasis added). Because this statute clearly grants discretion to the Attorney General to determine whether individuals, such as Petitioners, are flight risks, § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) strips this Court of jurisdiction to review this discretionary decision. See, e.g., Ghanem v. Upchurch, 2007 WL 666091, at *2 (5th Cir. Mar. 7, 2007) (affirming Judge McBryde’s decision that because statute governing revocation of a visa
grants discretion to Secretary of Homeland Security, § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) strips court of jurisdiction).[Note 2]

************

[Note 1] The phrase “this subchapter” refers to subchapter II of Chapter 1 12 of Title 8 of the United States Code, which includes §§ 1151-1381. Guyadin v. Gonzales, 449 F.3d 465, 468 (2d Cir. 2006).

[Note 2] The Federal Respondents also contend that Petitioners cannot challenge ICE’s §1231(a)(6) determination by way of a habeas corpus petition, as habeas jurisdiction does not extend to review of discretionary determinations made by agencies, only pure questions of law. See Bravo v. Ashcroft, 341 F.3d 590, 592-93 (5th Cir. 2003); Gallegos-Reyes

Respectfully submitted,
RICHARD B. ROPER
United States Attorney
____/s/ Stephen P. Fahey_______
STEPHEN P. FAHEY
Assistant United States Attorney
Illinois State Bar No. 6274893
U.S. Federal Building & Courthouse
1100 Commerce Street, Third Floor
Dallas, Texas 75242-1699
Telephone: 214.659.8600
Facsimile: 214.767.2916
Email: Steve.P.Fahey@usdoj.gov

OF COUNSEL:

JUDSON J. DAVIS
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
8101 N. Stemmons Frwy.
Dallas, Texas 75247
Telephone: 214.905.5779
Facsimile: 214.905.5593
ATTORNEYS FOR FEDERAL RESPONDENTS

************

CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE

I hereby certify that on March 29, 2007, I electronically filed the foregoing document with the clerk of court for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, using the electronic case filing system of the court. The electronic case
filing system sent a “Notice of Electronic Filing” to the following attorneys of record who have consented in writing to accept this Notice as service of this document by electronic means:

Joshua E. Bardavid

Theodore N. Cox

[SIGNED BY]
__/s/ Stephen P. Fahey______
Assistant United States Attorney

We haven’t said enough good stuff about the Eye on Williamson Blog. The progressive Democrat site has editorialized in favor of closing the T. Don Hutto prison for immigrant families, most recently endorsing the conclusion reached by the editorial board at the Houston Chronicle.

BTW we have an email suggesting that there is a lingering IP issue with folks in Williamson County accessing the Texas Civil Rights Review. Our best diagnosis of the situation is that all the new development there is activating brand new IP ranges. If you know someone in this predicament, please ask them to contact me at gmosesx@prodigy.net so that we can troubleshoot.–gm