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.” …

By Greg Moses

There are some people who live in the shadow of Lady Liberty, and some people who don’t.

We feel nothing but sympathy for Mamadou Soumare, the much publicized New York cabdriver, whom immigration authorities will allow to return to the USA after he buries his family in Mali.

And we feel nothing but heartache for Radi Hazahza, the widely ignored Texas vehicle inspector whom immigration authorities will not release to the embrace of his living family until at least the end of April.
Toward the arbitrary gavels of power that grant humanitarian treatment, international press coverage, and involvement of a US Senator in one case, while the other case begs for anything that could be counted on two hands–we feel nothing but rage.

Our readers lately have turned to symbols of Civil War to make sense of the moral gravity we feel about the struggles that surround us. And the contrast between news from New York and Texas does remind us of the difference between blue and gray.

As Jay Johnson-Castro prepares for a walk next week to dramatize the injustice of immigrant detention, he sends a list:

The Rio Grande Valley is home to several detention facilities. Other than the newly built county jails in Cameron, Hidalgo and Willacy counties, there are the Segovia State Prison, Lopez State Prison, La Villa Detention Center, Wackenhut Detention Center, and the federal detention centers for immigrants in Raymondville and Bayview.

When we compare the political economies of New York City with the Rio Grande Valley or the Texas Rolling Plains, we do find Civil War parallels in contrasting maturities of industrial development.

Yet we do not forget that New York also has its prisons and immigrant detention hells, which also get ignored more than they get reported. And although the jails of New York are mixed into neo-liberal development, we do not forget that their functions are no different than the ones in Texas.

So we ask for something besides a military-prison economy in Texas, but we ask for something better than even New York has seen. Today it looks like the shadow of Lady Liberty covers New York better than Texas, but we’ve been down Malcolm X Boulevard, where the shadow of Lady Liberty’s gown also blows this way and that.

Taking Action Against Deportations

Maldefian, March 19

Sixty-five years ago President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, requiring Japanese Americans on the West Coast to abandon their jobs, lives, and homes and leave the region or enter relocation camps. A decade before, California and federal officials systematically rounded up and transported to Mexico 1.2 million Americans of Latino ancestry. Whether out of fear, indifference, lack of knowledge or implicit agreement, few outside the Japanese American or Mexican American communities spoke out against this deprivation of basic civil rights.
Today, fears of the separation of immigrant families and the destruction of immigrant communities permeate many cities and towns across the nation. Last December, immigration agents swept through meat packing plants in four states to arrest and detain unauthorized immigrant workers. MALDEF, joined by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), and the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA), called on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and top immigration officials to end the raids as ill-timed, poorly planned and devastating to family members, including United States citizens. Workers in Iowa were relocated and held in Georgia, one thousand miles away from loved ones and legal counsel. Since then, additional enforcement operations are “a stopgap solution that unfairly penalizes vulnerable workers in an already flawed system. that does not begin to solve the immigration issue,”as U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy noted referring to one in New Bedford, Massachusetts,

Later this week, we will renew our call to stop the raids and to start reforming our immigration laws to truly serve our national interest and values.

On the litigation front, progress continues to be made against anti-immigrant local ordinances. Requiring landlords to check immigration and citizenship documents of prospective tenants – even children – is a thinly veiled attempt to evict people from communities and children from schools. Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe (a MALDEF case) that free, public education was to be available to all children, irrespective of their immigration status. We are fighting for that right again today. MALDEF, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), and the American Civil Liberties Uni*n (ACLU) are challenging the local ordinances in at least six states. Thus far, every judge who has examined the ordinances has kept them from being enforced.

We are winning some battles and not yet winning others. Many of us lacked the power or voice to do anything about the deportations and relocations of the 1930s and 1940s. We have that voice today and value your role in that fight.

Founded in 1968, MALDEF, the nation’s leading Latino legal organization, promotes and protects the rights of Latinos through litigation, advocacy, community education and outreach, leadership development, and higher education scholarships. MALDEF is party to the Unity Blueprint for Immigration Reform posted at the MAPA website and archived here. One deportation that we would like to see reversed is that of the Suleiman family. whose plight affects two 4-year-old American citizaens. Their story is also archived (so far, exclusively) in our database of articles.–gm