Category: Uncategorized

By Greg Moses

Speaking on his cell phone from somewhere near the border, Jay Johnson-Castro is explaining how his lone walk from Laredo to Brownsville last October, “tore down the wall before it ever got built. That wall will never be built!”

Now it is Christmas Eve, and Johnson-Castro will be driving all afternoon from Del Rio to Taylor to join a vigil outside the T. Don Hutto jail for immigrant children. He is determined to shut it down.

“Can you hold on a minute?” he asks. “There’s a checkpoint.” “Are you a citizen of the United States?” comes a voice. “Where are you going?”

After answering the questions, Johnson-Castro is waved onward.

“Unfortunately this is one of the realities of living on the border,” explains Johnson-Castro, returning to the phone. “Nowhere else in the USA do you have to prove you’re a citizen just to drive down the road.”

I tell him that I’ve been to the Rio Grande Valley before, and I’ve heard stories that the police nuisance is getting worse by the year.

“And it’s getting worse by the year, because of the way the US government is dealing with it,” rejoins Johnson-Castro.

“Before the border walk I was the go-to guy for border tourism. Heritage tourism. I was all about tourism,” he explains.

“But look how we’re being treated on the border by our state and federal governments. We have 13,000 going on 19,000 border patrol agents here along the border with Mexico, while along the border with Canada, there are fewer than 1,000.

“But US policies are part of the reason why we have an immigration problem to begin with. US companies put up factories along the border in Northern Mexico where they pay workers $75 per week for 48 hours of work. Then they close the factories and move them to Indonesia. And many of the factory workers are single moms who live under desperate conditions. We created this situation.”

Citizens north of the Mexico border have “responsibility” for people who have served as “slave labor” in factories of the South, says Johnson-Castro. “And people who imprison the migrant workers are not any different from people who supported Hitler. No different. How far does it have to go?”

“How can I be silent?” asks Johnson-Castro. “At some point they might consider me an enemy of . . . “

The cell phone enters a dead zone. The voice of Jay Johnson-Castro disappears, but he keeps a hand at the wheel, driving to a Christmas Eve vigil that will go down in history some day as the spark that shut down detention camps for desperate Southern children, whose only crime was to join a social movement in search of work further North.

On the occasion of Sunday, New Year’s Eve, Eid ul-Adha, 2006

By Greg Moses

“21 criminal aliens, fugitive aliens, and other immigration status violators” is how the Dallas office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) counted booty in a web-posted press release last Nov. 3 following two days of arrests.

Two months later, three families from that pre-election roundup remain in jail, of whom only one person—a teenaged boy—stands convicted of crimes, and that 17-year-old young man sits alone, pissing blood, in isolation from his parents and four siblings, because he is being held as a minor in an adult jail at Haskell, Texas.

For all the rest of the members of the three families, none, as it turns out, has been identified as either criminal or fugitive. They were only a handful of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” coming to America with passports and visas, working with attorneys to secure asylum through legal means, going to work, to school, and in some cases getting married or pregnant, trying to live and make life in ways we all know.
But they were all Arab, and it was election time in the USA. Never mind that seven of them were school children, or that one of them was a newlywed bride, recently graduated from college with honors, or that another was pursuing college on and off, planning to be married, or that the six parents worked hard and kept their families close. They were Arab, after all, and it was election time.

I still get emails from people telling me “we should send them all back”, and these are emails from precisely the kinds of voters that such a roundup was meant, and is still meant, to appease. Thirteen percent of Americans think Bush is a hero. And with these three Arab families, the President repays his loyalists for the way they stick.

But I also get emails from others, many more others, who say, “my God, what can I do to help.” And these are the majority of voters, to be sure, thank goodness. And for most of the voters, these three families–Ibrahim, Suleiman, and Hazahza–are just the kind of people that neighbors are made of in America. They try, they fail, they try again, they succeed. Family troubles come, and to some families they come hard. But we know them, if we know any neighborhood at all.

One of the email supporters, Rita Zawaideh, has mobilized the Arab American Community Coalition, and a call to action has been circulated to free the Ibrahim family, whose toddler daughter needs them out of jail now and back home.

Really, it’s the simplest thing. Free the Ibrahim family. Free the pregnant mother so that she can take proper care of herself and her coming son. Free the kindergarten daughter who shares a bunkbed with her mother. Free the two sisters who share another cell nearby. Free the teenage boy who calls his uncle every day from the T. Don Hutto jail in Taylor, Texas. And free the father, too, who is kept 300 miles away, at Haskell.

That’s it. Free the Ibrahim family today. It can be done very quickly by anyone along the chain of command from the White House to San Antonio ICE. And if you’re listening, Mr. President, you can do it with the stroke of a pen. Those voters who would make a fortress of America? You’ll never have need for them again. But your conscience is something you really can’t leave behind.

The New Year is a traditional time for politicians to set people free. Let the Ibrahims go back to their neighborhood in Texas, where they can gather themselves as a family and get some rest, together.

[Note: recommended listening: Lyle Lovett, “That’s right, you’re not from Texas, but Texas wants you, anyway!”–gm]

View a haunting greeting card from Oregon, inspired by the children of Hutto Jail.

“IT IS NO ACCIDENT that I have combined fotos/images/concepts from four different attacks on the Brown. It is in these “multiple theater” anti-brown moments that we can find cause to celebrate such a joyous Murkan Xmas.
“Merry Christ’sMask, little Macacas all over the world; you who have fallen under the crosshairs of this mighty and heartless nation. I love you all, and I offer my deepest empathy for you and your families’ sorrow this day and every day since you made the error of not bowing down before everything and anything that Murka wants.

“I will be thinking of you.”

by John Wheat Gibson

The Albanian who publicly announced the names of the assassins who killed Albanian Democratic Party leader Azem Hajdari will be deported to Albania, said Carl Rusnok, public relations officer for the Dallas district of the Department of Homeland Security.

The assassins will be waiting for him with sharpened knives, because on 5 September 2007 the Albanian newspaper Korrieri in Tirana, the capital, on its front page announced that Rrustem Neza, whom the headline called a “Witness of Murder of Azem Hajdari,” had been denied asylum in the US and was about to be returned to Albania. Additionally, reports were broadcast by Albanian television stations.

Rrustem Neza fled to the United States, but was prevented by his previous attorney from presenting the facts of his case when he appeared before an immigration judge to ask for asylum. As a result, the immigration judge denied his asylum application and he now is in immigration custody under a final order of deportation. His two brothers Xhemal and Ismet, who subsequently presented their cases to an immigration judge, both were granted asylum.

BICE deportation officer Kevin Czechowicz took Rrustem Neza to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to deport him to Albania, but he pleaded for his life so loudly that airline officials would not let him board the plane. Czechowicz said that he will take Mr. Neza to the airport again, and will deport him. At present, Mr. Neza is detained by the DHS at the contract prison in Haskell, Texas.

To date, Mr. Neza never has been allowed to present the facts of his case to an immigration judge. The Board of Immigration Appeals denied his motion to reopen on account of his previous attorney’s ineffectiveness. The BIA did not doubt that Mr. Neza will be killed for his political affiliation when he is deported to Albania. Instead, the BIA said it would not reopen his case because more than 180 days had passed since its first decision.

A petition for review is pending in the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, but DHS could deport Mr. Neza before the 11th Circuit makes a decision. Another problem is that in the 11th Circuit Mr. Neza must prove by clear and convincing evidence that he would win his asylum case if it is reopened. But the Court of Appeals cannot receive any evidence except what the previous attorney submitted to the immigration judge. Yet, it was the previous attorney’s failure to submit the abundant evidence that the Court of Appeals now will not look at which prevented Mr. Neza from receiving a fair hearing and being granted asylum in the first place!

Desperately trying to save his brother’s life, Xhemal Neza has been talking to everyone who will listen about the danger to Rrustem. It was Rrustem’s brother Xhemal who told him the names of the killers, after Xhemal personally witnessed the machine-gunning of Hajdari and his bodyguards. At least one of the assassins was a police officer. Rrustem told the names of the killers to a crowd at a meeting in the Albanian city of Tropoje while Xhemal was unconscious in a hospital in the capital city Tirana, after Xhemal was injured by police fire during a demonstration protesting the assassination.

The assassins were associated with both the ruling Socialist Party and Hajdari’s rival for Democratic Party leadership Sali Berisha. Xhemal and Rrustem hid from the police with two of their cousins, both of whom were murdered before they could flee from Albania.

At the hearing on Rrustem’s asylum application in Miami, the immigration judge doubted that the cousins had been murdered. The official death certificates of both cousins and a newspaper account of the murder of one of them were available to prove the truth, but Rrustem’s attorney was unaware of them and did not show them to the immigration judge.

All pleadings, affidavits, and other evidence are available for inspection and copying at the office of Rrustem’s present attorney John Wheat Gibson. They include a detailed, sworn, account of the murder of Hajdari, and the course of Rrustem’s asylum application in the immigration court.

Attorney John Wheat Gibson’s telephone number is (214)748-6944. Xhemal Neza may be reached at (936)676-8460.