Email from Joshua Bardavid, Esq.
Just wanted to give you an update. We will have a hearing tomorrow at 10am before the Magistrate Judge. We hope that the Judge will give the government a deadline to either release the Hazahzas or to provide a written response to our habeas by providing the legal justification for continued detention.
Also, I will be on Democracy Now!, (88.7FM KAZI in Austin) tomorrow morning at 7am.
Take care,
Josh
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
Frankly we don’t see the problem with Bank of America’s decision to give credit cards without social security numbers, mainly to make a buck off of workers who have been impoverished by free trade and criminalized by USA immigration laws. Now those workers get to join the debt brigades of El Norte. Welcome.
But a poll on the matter will tell us something about our readers. So here we go again…
Bank of America? American or UnAmerican, you tell us. See poll on righthand side of the home page. We vote American.
Oops, on second thought, BOA bank management called the cops on some College Station war protesters today, including our dear friend Danny Yeager, so never mind. We’re pulling the poll.
As it turns out BOA rents office space in the same building as Congressman Chet Edwards, but BOA is apparently uwilling to tolerate peaceful dissent on the premises. UnAmerican.–gm
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