ICE Crimes and Coverup in Baltimore, MD

CASA de Maryland, an immigrant rights group, on January 28, 2009, released video footage taken by 7-11 cameras showing ICE agents literally rounding up patrons in and outside the store based solely on their appearance as Latino. The link to the video, taken in Baltimore in 2007, is here and you might want to start around 2:45, which is where the events in question are most visible and, at 3:10, you see the ICE agents marching three customers out of the store and sitting them on the curb alongside several others similarly detained.

The video makes two points very clear: 1) ICE initiated contact with the individuals; 2) there is absolutely no "probable cause" or grounds for "reasonable suspicion" other than the illegal motive of racial profiling.

Even more troubling than the initial violation of these people's civil rights is the subsequent cover-up of the ICE agents' illegal activities. According to the CASA attorney Justin Cox, an ICE internal report quoted ICE agents stating that they were approached by the individuals they detained. Cox explains that the agents told the ICE investigator that they "happened to stumble on these people who volunteered that they were in the country with no immigration status." Many of those detained of course were citizens or legally in the country.

The CASA attorney also noted that the investigators who conducted a review of the raid did not interview a single one of the individuals ICE detained. Hardly a sign of an unbiased investigation into civil rights violations.

In response to the release of the video, Washington-based ICE representative Kelly Nantel told an NPR reporter:

"Those who were targeted were the individuals who were congregating and who had approached the vehicle. Obviously, I know there were allegations of racial profiling, those allegations are two years old, more than two years old now. They were thoroughly investigated at the time. That investigation found those allegations to be unsubstantiated."

The video footage renders this statement demonstrably false, as you can see individuals being taken from the store, not near a truck, and also herded AFTER a white pickup truck leaves.

In an interview with a Baltimore Sun reporter, another ICE spokesman, Richard Rocha, says:

"In this case our officers used their training and experience to respond to a developing situation as it unfolded. They were approached by individuals asking if they needed workers. Those workers were questioned and ultimately it was determined they were in the country illegally."

Again, it is obvious that the only situation that developed occurred because of ICE agents acting illegally.

Best wishes to CASA de Maryland in its wrongful arrest lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claim Act. I hope they win every penny of the $500,000 damages they're claiming on behalf of their three clients.

Still, defending civil rights and punishing government coverups shouldn't be left to private individuals and non-profit groups. It's time for the Department of Justice to step up on behalf of not only wrongfully detained US citizens and residents but also the U.S. taxpayer. It's one thing to have the US government, not the agents themselves, pay out millions of dollars in lawsuits, as has happened. If a few ICE agents were imprisoned for their crimes, including lying to a federal officer, which is what appears to have occurred when the agents told ICE investigators about what transpired, perhaps then ICE would pay a bit more attention to the laws and the U.S. Constitution.

ICE Lawbreaking Costing Taxpayers Big Bucks

Yesterday I was interviewed about my research for the June 23, 2008 Nation article "Thin ICE" by a local NPR show "Crosstalk." (The shows are not archived.) The host, Jim Rondeau, asked how ICE responds to charges that it is detaining and deporting U.S. citizens. There used to be one answer to this question, but since a couple of weeks ago, ICE has two. I want to discuss these in more detail from a factual and legal standpoint.

The early response, which I first heard in the February 2008 testimony of Gary Mead, Assistant Director for Management of Detention and Removal Operations, in the House Judiciary Subcomittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, was that ICE "does not knowingly or willingly" detain or deport US citizens. This also was the line mouthed to me by Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery, an Public Relations Officer, when I interviewed him for the Nation article.

There are several problems with this answer. The first is that it is demonstrably false. In the cases my article documented, including one specific case whose facts I brought to the attention of Alvarez-Montgomery and several other ICE officials, they ignored the evidence I sent them of Rene Saldivar's citizenship and he continued to be held in the Eloy Detention Center. In other words, ICE will have a birth certificate or other documents indicating legal requirements of citizenship are satisfied, and nonetheless hold the citizen in detention. (I'll speculate on why they do this later.)

The pattern of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the ICE predecessor agency, and ICE losing civil cases in which the allegation is unlawful detention of US citizens, or settling these cases, provides historical evidence that the government is indeed knowingly and willfully detaining U.S. citizens. In other words, the legal arm of ICE over the last decade has been shelling out what I estimate to be millions of dollars in restitution for false imprisonment lawsuits filed by residents and citizens over the last several years, while the public relations wing of the operation claims this never happens.

In one case, just brought to my attention by attorney Philip Hwang at the San Francisco office of the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, a US citizen was falsely imprisoned for hours at the San Francisco Airport. According to the SF Chronicle, Chima Obi, who was born in Redwood City, California and then raised in Africa, was shackled to a chair and taunted by immigration agents who refused to believe that a woman of African descent could be a doctor and a US citizen. She showed them her passport. That wasn't enough. She showed them her birth certificate, and, she said, that made them only angrier. She and her husband were fearful that they would not be able to settle in the US because the INS would never believe them. She eventually was released and her documentation approved, and the INS paid $50,000 to settle the case.

Between 1995 and 2002, the SF based Lawyers Committee for Civil and Constitutional Rights represented 8 cases of people being unlawfully detained for which the INS paid $675,000 to settle.

Claiming that an ICE agent does "not know" a US passport and birth certificate are authentic because racism makes them stupid is not a defense against false imprisonment, but grounds for additional civil rights charges.

{To be cont.}

image above is from here.

Interview on today's "Crosstalk," 1:05 pm PST

I'm going to be interviewed today on the local NPR station for Ventura County and Santa Barbara, starting at 1:05 PST. It will be streamed at http://www.kclu.org.

Robert's Story, cont.

"Thin Ice," an article I wrote for The Nation about US citizens being detained and deported by ICE, just scratches the surface of the information I gathered in the last few months. Lives really have been shattered. I met Robert, a US citizen deported twice, in his home in Los Angeles last week. He has a wife, who is a nurse, and a son, also named Robert. Robert Jr. was born in 1999. But his father wasn't around for most of his life. Dad was being held either in detention or in prison for no crime other than having a Spanish last name.

That's how Robert says he and dozens of others are screened when the Los Angeles County Jail releases its inmates each day. There are two release areas, one for Whites and Anglos, another for everyone else. "They only stop the people with Latino last names," he told me. I asked if he thought this would happen if his last name were Johnson. He said, "No they would not. It's discriminating." Once he was in the room of racially profiled suspected aliens, the ICE custodial agent looked at Robert's green card, disregarded Robert's assertion that he was a US citizen, and sent Robert to the El Centro Detention Center. One wrong waiting room changed Robert's life.

In Robert's living room we went through a chaotic box of papers, some duplicates, including records for people with similar names who were not him. He showed me the first deposition he gave to a judge on May 29, 2001 in El Centro. It states: "I was adopted by my father and mother of which my father is a native U.S. born citizen, namely [father's name] and mother who is now deceased." He gave this same information to two immigration judges who deported him, one who sentenced him to three years in prison for falsely impersonating a US citizen, and then finally the fourth judge who, with no additional documentation, released Robert on bond.

Robert described the stress of detention, the anxiety about losing his wife, his son, how detention "takes me away from my family. That's what matters to me. It's taking a piece of my heart out. I feel in myself that it was just dehumanized." Robert also feels a tremendous amount of guilt because he knows that because of his absence, they suffered. When he came home "it was very poor. In the refridgerator, they had no food." All those years away take a toll. Things between them are improving but it's still a sore point. "I still hear my wife, bringing it to my face: 'Only if you weren't deported. Only if you had your papers. It's the only thing. We're always fighting because of the fact of so many years [that I was gone]."

Even apart from missing his family, time in detention was hard: "I seen people in that process, in the immigration courts, they kill themselves. They kill themselves." Robert told me of the stress he felt, the building up of tension in his head so he thought it might explode, that he might explode, that he had no way to leave even though he never should never have been there, and he said that there were a lot of people in his same situation.

At a number of points it seemed that Robert's memory was slipping, that he would go back and forth between the narrative of his first trial and that of his second. Part of the reason for this is that he was shuffled all over the place, to several detention centers and several judges. But these are also symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Robert's in construction, framing, and is happy to have work right now. But he's in almost constant pain because of an injury from when he was in El Centro. He threw his back out throwing heavy pails of water to clean the floors. He did this for $1 a day "because sometimes at night you're hungry and want a snack." It is surprising that a few hundred detainees in Guantanamo have caused such a fuss but there is little outcry about the approximately 22,000 people going to sleep tonight in detention facilities in the far corners of the US mainland, who are not accused of any crime at all -- or they would be in the penal system -- many doing hard labor in exchange for a little snack.

Race and the California Primary

Race Politics Are Everywhere and Nowhere
The race question in this presidential election seems to be everywhere and nowhere. It's the first time an African American has a credible chance of becoming President, but neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has made race a point of contention.

The brief ruckus when Clinton suggested Lyndon Johnson was more important than Martin Luther King Jr. in passing the Civil Rights Bill was about different views of how power works, not race, and has been largely forgotten. Both Obama and Clinton credibly avow commitments to people of color, and their social and economic policies will have roughly the same effects.

The White House Must Stay White
Nonetheless the media have played up the possibility that the electorate will remain fixated on race. The angle has been that people of color are worried that the White majority will not countenance a Black president (unless he's in a television show starring Kiefer Sutherland). A journalist for Politico posted an article just before the South Carolina election claiming "Black Voters Fear DC Unready for Black President," and then Obama went on to win all but three counties in that state. But that same night Latino voters in Nevada went for Clinton.

Si Se Puede?
Race has been a factor, but not in the way the pundits predicted. In the topsy turvy racial politics of the U.S., Obama, the "si se puede" candidate, the only one who supports drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants, is losing among Mexican-Americans and winning among White men. Exit polls showed that White men supported Obama by 18 points over Clinton. Meanwhile, Black voters have refuted anecdotal accounts of their anxieties. He's receiving around 85% of the African-American vote.

Why Clinton's Brown Appeal?
In last night's California primary, Latinos voted 2 to 1 for Clinton and Asian Americans voted for her 3 to 1. Why were African Americans and White men in an alliance that did not include Latinos and Asian Americans? There probably is no single explanation but one clear result is that the voters who may keep Obama out of the White House are more likely to be from the barrios than Beverly Hills. (Image is from appearance at National Council of Law Raza.)