Sunday, January 4, 2009

Facts on the Ground: the Occupation in America

The Los Angeles Times ran a great story today about the 35,000 truckloads of dirt used to fill in a gulch in California, to change the landscape enough to make the earth a barrier instead of a corridor. And then the US government is adding layers and layers of fence, with the result that people will lose their homes, jobs, families, and communities.

It is true that unlike the Palestinians, the residents designated by their birth certificates or other legal documents as Mexicans are not being killed at war. That happened just over 150 years ago, and the losers never mounted another serious armed struggle against the victors. If they had, the US would turn their weapons on them without hesitation (as happened against the Puerto Rican separatists), and the civilians in the borderlands would be praying they were being attacked by the Israelis.

This comes to mind because I am receiving a welcome round of petitions through various listserves, from colleagues venting righteous anger against Israel's bombing of Gaza, including its educational institutions and therefore students.

I endorse their cause, but wonder at the irony. The state of California is using its police and prisons to illegally deport US citizens of Mexican descent. As UC faculty we are not protesting our own employer removing from "the homeland" residents born in Mexico and even the US. The state of California only exists in "our" borders because of occupation, terrorism, and state armies.

This is a point that Israeli nationalists make when challenged for their exclusions of non-Jews: what Israel did is no different from the US expanding into Mexico. (This also was a point repeatedly stressed by someone who was highly placed in Franjo Tudjman's government in Croatia in 1996 , and he included a fine-grained analysis of the US displacement of Native Americans.) The observation is only ever offered for the purpose of naming US hypocrisy toward its own occupation, assuming this is a fait accompli, but perhaps it might be turned to another purpose.

What about ending US hypocrisy on civil rights, human rights, and the rule of law by doing the right thing and allowing free movement, at least starting with those on our borders? (Yeah, if Mexicans could move here freely then the Canadians might make a fuss. There goes the neighborhood, eh?)

Thursday, January 1, 2009

DHS Illegally Detains and Deports US Citizen Born in Fresno, Califonia


Daily Journal reporter Sandra Hernandez details another familiar-sounding case of ICE agents and immigration judges ignoring the rule of law. Jose Ledesma showed immigration agents a copy of his Fresno birth certificate, also on file with Madera County. Numerous agents and immigration judges ignored their burden of proof and asserted he was lying. On various occasions Ledesma was detained, deported, and also charged with falsely impersonating a US citizen.

Ledesma told Hernandez, "I know my rights, but in court you don't really understand all the legal stuff or they just don't believe you."

"I think the only reason I got out is immigration saw the newspaper stuff and didn't want to keep me in there after it was public," he said.

You can find out the rest of a very familiar story in Sandra Hernandez's article here.

Thanks to Dan Kowalksi for posting this on Bender's Immigration Bulletin.