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Along with the Dallas Morning News, local ABC and CBS stations have logged stories aobut the Hazahza family during the first week of April. Here are the headlines and lead paragraphs.–gm

Concern over detention of immigrant family

02:00 AM CDT on Saturday, April 7, 2007

By BRETT SHIPP / WFAA-TV

Brett Shipp reports

A federal magistrate in Dallas says he is deeply concerned by the government’s continued detention of an immigrant family from Irving.
But that concern is nothing compared to the disappointment being expressed tonight by the man whose fiancé remains behind bars.

Reza Bacardi of Plano wants Americans to see a few photographs, as well as the immigration issue from his perspective.

His fiancé is Suzi Hazahza.

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

Palestinians’ detention case to be revisited

Dispute of Irving family jailed for 5 months to be taken up May 2

12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, April 5, 2007

By DIANNE SOLÍS / The Dallas Morning News
dsolis@dallasnewscom

A federal magistrate recommended that a detention dispute be revisited May 2 in the case of Radi Hazahza and his four adult children, Palestinians formerly living in Irving who have been held in a rural Texas jail for five months over deportation conflicts.

Magistrate Paul D. Stickney said his jurisdiction was limited because of recent immigration law changes. But the judge recommended to a federal judge that a habeas corpus writ over the detention be held in suspension, and not dismissed, until May 2.

The case illustrates the difficulties in deporting stateless Palestinians to a region not recognized as a nation by the U.S. government. Attorneys for the Hazahzas have attempted to get them travel documents to more than 50 countries, including the occupied territories and Jordan.

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

Apr 4, 2007 9:52 pm US/Central

Texas Judge Rules To Free Palestinian Family
Image

Jay Gormley
Reporting

(CBS 11 News) IRVING A judge has found that there is not enough evidence to hold a Palestinian family at a detention center in Haskell, TX.

The Hazahza family has been living in Irving since 2001. But last November, the federal government detained the family after their request for political asylum was denied.

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

April 1, 2007

Five months later, detainees in limbo

Jurisdiction issue snarls case for 5 members of Palestinian family

By DIANNE SOLÍS / The Dallas Morning News
dsolis@dallasnews.com

Two weeks ago, 19-year-old Suzi Hazahza would have celebrated an elaborate wedding with 29-year-old Reza Barkhordari. The Arabic music had been chosen, along with a few U.S. pop tunes. And Mr. Barkhordari’s parents had selected a special gift for the hazel-eyed bride: an antique jeweled headpiece.

Instead, Ms. Hazahza and other family members remain in a rural Texas jail on immigration charges of failing to appear for deportation.

A federal magistrate said last week that he does not have jurisdiction in the case and that his authority is “severely limited.” That’s snarling the fight for release of Ms. Hazahza, her father and three siblings.

NOTE: the Solis story includes the following passage:

In the documents, the Hazahzas’ attorney alleged humiliations such as body cavity searches of the two Hazahza women, lack of medical attention, and holding the two women in the bedless drunk tank for two days in the Haskell jail in west-central Texas.

At ICE offices, spokesman Carl Rusnok denied that detainees have been subjected to the searches.

The medium-security Haskell facility is under contract with ICE to provide services. It also houses state and county inmates, but the populations are kept in separate areas from the immigration detainees.

“In short, they have been fully afforded their due process,” said Mr. Rusnok. “Since their arrest Nov. 2, they have been treated fairly and humanely.”

On April 5, the Morning News published the following letter from Ralph Isenberg:

ICE lying about abuse

Re: “Five months later, detainees in limbo — Jurisdiction issue snarls case for 5 members of Palestinian family,” Monday news story.

Carl Rusnok of Immigration and Customs Enforcement hides behind the fact that ICE contracts detention to a for-profit vendor.

He should explain how he can deny the Hazahah family’s contentions, when I have testimony from current and former employees outing those abuses and worse.

Detention of foreign nationals does not make those detainees criminals. The criminals are those at ICE who lie about the abuses.

Ralph Isenberg, Dallas

Attorney Joshua Bardavid also issued a statement in reply to ICE denials of abuse, saying that ICE had every opportunity to deny the abuses under oath, but chose not to. We haven’t seen Bardavid’s statement published anywhere else but the Texas Civil Rights Review.–gm

In Texas they call it privatization. In Argentina they call it neo-Liberalism. In both places today they are calling it a bad idea. See stories from Austin and Argentina below….

A shift away from privatization

Around Latin America, countries are eschewing privatization dating from the ’80s and ’90s in a trend back toward government-controlled utilities.

BY MONTE REEL
Washington Post Service

LOMAS DE ZAMORA, Argentina – Carina Grossi turned on the tap in her kitchen sink and raised a glass of water to the light, her eyes narrowing in disgust.

”Look at that,” said Grossi, 32. “Look how cloudy the water is, how dirty.”

Like many of their neighbors in this working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, the Grossis are convinced their water is contaminated and blame the French company that has provided water and sewer service since the federal government privatized the utility in 1993.

Across Latin America, a growing number of people say the privatization of public services, a movement that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s, has failed. Protests have erupted over the issue in several countries, and some governments are beginning to reverse these policies. Last month, Argentina said it was rescinding its 30-year contract with the French company Suez and reinstating government control of the water supply.

The Grossis, among many others, welcomed the about-face….

—–

Troubled social services call centers on hold

Web Posted: 04/07/2006 12:00 AM CDT

Elizabeth Allen
Express-News Staff Writer

A much-touted rollout of privately operated call centers to replace state workers who screened applicants for Medicaid, food stamp and other social service benefits has been put on hold for at least 30 days because of staffing shortages and a variety of technical problems.

In announcing the delay, Texas Health and Human Services Commission officials essentially scraped the early summer date by which applicants in San Antonio and South Texas were to have been on the system, which the state initiated because it said it would save hundreds of millions of dollars.

After the 30-day hold, the officials will take another look at the privatization schedule that would have changed Bexar County services over in June. The commission is also taking steps to slow the hemorrhaging of state workers after 2,900 got news last year that their jobs were going away this year.

It is not clear how many of those workers have actually left state employment. One union representative estimated at least one-third of the targeted state employees left their jobs.

Nor is it clear how the delay will affect the more than $600 million that the agency promised legislators it would save by privatizing those functions.

Critics of the process cheered the move.

“I think it’s very good news that they are acknowledging that there are very significant problems,” said Celia Hagert, an analyst with the Texas Center for Public Policy Priorities.

“Our only hope is that if they determine that more time is needed to fix those problems, they will take that time.”

The new system, run by contractor Texas Access Alliance, lets people apply for benefits over the phone, online or in person. Using the new system, the state plans to replace 99 of its 310 eligibility offices with four call centers run by the contractor.

But long wait times and computer problems have plagued the pilot program in Hays and Travis Counties center, in part because of state staffing shortages related to layoffs that the Texas State Employees Union is urging the state to rescind.

Late last year, Texas Access Alliance, a private consortium anchored by Accenture, a Bermuda-based firm, also took over the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which has always been contracted out.

CHIP was designed to provide basic coverage for children of families who earned too much for Medicaid but too little to afford private insurance, essentially the working poor.

While coverage has fallen by more than 200,000 statewide since the state began cutting the program and toughening eligibility requirements in 2003, the rolls have dropped by more than 20,000 since Texas Access Alliance took over.

It began operating the Travis and Hays County pilot program in January.

Health and Human Services spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said the state wants to fix two major issues: better management of high call volumes and better training.

Some people have spent as much as 20 minutes on hold and many hung up in frustration. Goodman said that wait time has been sharply reduced “but we want to get that down a little more.”

Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said he hopes the delay is an early indication that the state will decide that privatizing benefits services is a bad idea, while Texas State Employees Union Vice President Mike Gross said the unstable climate is causing the state to lose its more experienced employees.

Gross called for the state to hold off on the layoff of the 2,900 employees who were told last fall they would not have jobs after the call centers began operating this year.

He estimated that about 1,000 state workers have already left.

Hagert agreed that the heavy turnover is causing even more headaches, but that it’s too late to stop that leak.

“I’m not saying we don’t support that recommendation. It just might not be a realistic one,” she said. “But we certainly support the idea that it’s going to take more state workers to make the system work.”

Goodman said the state hasn’t actually laid anyone off, but it has seen more people leave for other jobs faster than expected. The agency is taking steps to keep people in place for now, especially in the Travis-Hays counties area, because of the numbers jumping ship.

She noted the agency is now developing a retention plan that will include a bonus to state workers whose jobs were to have been eliminated.

In light of the April 4 release of a map for the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, it might be worthwhile to re-consider Richard D. Vogel’s February analysis in Monthly Review that the larger strategy at work is a plan to re-route Asian container traffic through the ports of Mexico (to reduce labor costs of course).

Sparked by organized resistance and wildcat actions by workers against falling wages and deteriorating working conditions at America’s ports and on the nation’s highways, the flow of container traffic is being shifted to a south-north orientation. By leveraging both the U.S. and Mexican governments and taking advantage of the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), big capital is developing container terminals in Mexico and using that country as a land bridge and labor pool to deliver shipping containers to destinations in the United States at discount prices.

By Nick Braune

Although Homeland Security’s border wall has been out of the news recently and off some activists’ radar, there is still strong opposition to it.

Besides its other problems, the wall is mean-spirited and ugly, and a group of Valley “Artists Against the Wall” pointed out that fact a month ago in Brownsville at an outdoor exhibit. (Although attending two rallies in Brownsville’s Hope Park a while back, I had not visited since the wall went up there. I first saw the monstrosity last week: a long metal serrated knife scarring Hope. I am very happy the artists decided to decorate it for a day.)

The Brownsville Herald reported the art show: “About a dozen artists…rested their work on the fence in Hope Park, overlooking the Rio Grande. A 30-foot ladder fashioned out of bamboo and twine, a wreath of ribbon and artificial flowers measuring 8 feet in diameter, and a deflated black inner tube that had been salvaged from along the riverbank were included in the exhibition.”

A six-foot painting by the art show’s organizer, Mark Clark, mocked the “gringo’s nightmare” of Mexican immigration. The “nightmare” canvas showed “a shaman dispensing peyote buttons, Americans covering their ears at the sound of a mariachi band, an unemployed McDonald’s worker selling Mexican ice cream, Mayan women washing their clothes in a blonde woman’s swimming pool, a Mayan soccer player and an American soccer player kicking around the decapitated head of a Dallas Cowboys football player…”

The event was energetic and the Border Patrol kept distant.

***

Gathering background data about the wall, I recently interviewed political activist (and artist) Scott Nicol, cofounder of the No Border Wall organization.

Braune: Scott, how pushy has the government been lately? I am particularly interested in Brownsville’s wall.

Nicol: Well, in Cameron County there have been a number of landowners who had their property condemned by DHS [Department of Homeland Security] in the past year and have watched border walls be constructed on their seized land. At the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, some of these landowners were served with a second, or in a few cases a third, condemnation to take even more land in the vicinity of the border wall. It looks like DHS wants to establish a broader zone of control around the wall.

The City of Brownsville itself was one of the landowners receiving a second condemnation. In the summer of 2009, the City Commission signed a contract with the DHS in which they gave away $95,000 worth of city property for free, despite strong opposition from the community. In exchange, DHS agreed to build what they called a “floating fence” that would sit on top of the levee, and at some future date the city could pay to have a new border wall built somewhere else.

It was a really bad deal, and it was unlikely that Brownsville would ever raise the $12 million per mile necessary to build the replacement wall. DHS ignored the deal and built permanent border walls that cannot be removed from the levee and in January filed a condemnation notice that they intend to take another 20 acres of municipal land.

Braune: I understand that you also have been helping a Sierra Club project.

Nicol: Yes, besides working with No Border Wall, I have been working with the Sierra Club’s national Borderlands Team, which focuses largely on the environmental impacts of the border wall. In South Texas the wall slices through the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, which was established to create a wildlife corridor along the river to help keep endangered ocelots and jaguarundi from going extinct in the United States. Because former DHS Secretary Chertoff used the Real ID Act to waive 36 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, there has been little effort to ensure that the border wall does not fragment or destroy large swathes of ocelot habitat.

There is also a great deal of concern about the wall’s effect on flooding along the border. In South Texas no studies of the hydrological impacts of the border wall have been released, raising the specter of deflected water and increased flooding in Mexico. In Arizona this has already happened. The border wall that divides Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora backed up seasonal flood waters, causing two deaths in Mexico and inflicting millions of dollars in damage.

The same flood damaged Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The laws that DHS waived were there for a reason. They protect human communities and the natural environment, and ignoring them puts us all at risk. The Sierra Club recognizes this, and has been working to prevent Congress from calling for more border walls. The Sierra Club is also worried about the precedent that the Real ID Act represents, where all potentially opposing laws can be tossed out the window.

[This column also appears in the Mid-Valley Town Crier in Weslaco, Texas.]