Thursday, September 29, 2011

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit - NYTimes.com

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit - NYTimes.com

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained.

It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.

Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

“They’re very good at the glossy brochure,” said Kaye Bernard, general secretary of the union of detention workers on the Australian territory of Christmas Island, where riots erupted this year between asylum seekers and guards. “On the ground, it’s almost laughable, the chaos and the inability to function.”

Private prisons in the United States have long stirred controversy. But while there have been conflicting studies about their costs and benefits, no systematic comparisons exist for immigration detention, say scholars like Matthew J. Gibney, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who tracks immigration systems.

Still, Mr. Gibney and others say the pitfalls of outsourcing immigration enforcement have become evident in the past 15 years. “When something goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure,” he said.

In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.

No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998. All three are now major players in the international business of locking up and transporting unwanted foreigners.

The first, the Florida-based prison company GEO Group, lost its Australia contract in 2003 amid a commission’s findings that detained children were subjected to cruel treatment. An Australian government audit reported that the contract had not delivered “value-for-money.” In the United States, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds.

The second company, G4S, an Anglo-Danish security conglomerate with more than 600,000 employees in 125 countries, was faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of solitary confinement in Australia. By the middle of the past decade, after refugee children had sewed their lips together during hunger strikes in camps like Woomera and Curtin, and government commissions discovered that Australian citizens and legal residents were being wrongly detained and deported, protests pushed the Liberal Party government to dismantle some aspects of the system.

But after promising to return the work to the public sector, a Labor government awarded a five-year, $370 million contract to Serco in 2009. The value of the contract has since soared beyond $756 million as detention sites quadrupled, to 24, and the number of detainees ballooned to 6,700 from 1,000.

Dangerous Problems

Over the past year, riots, fires and suicidal protests left millions of dollars in damage at Serco-run centers from Christmas Island to Villawood, outside Sydney, and self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold, government documents show. In August, a government inspection report cited dangerous overcrowding, inadequate and ill-trained staff, no crisis planning and no requirement that Serco add employees when population exceeded capacity.

At the detention center Serco runs in Villawood, immigrants spoke of long, open-ended detentions making them crazy. Alwy Fadhel, 33, an Indonesian Christian who said he needed asylum from Islamic persecution, had long black hair coming out in clumps after being held for more than three years, in and out of solitary confinement.

“We talk to ourselves,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We talk to the mirror; we talk to the wall.”

Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport, sank into depression.

Naomi and her mother became a cause célèbre in protests against the mandatory detention system, leading to their release in 2005 on rare humanitarian visas. They are now citizens.

“I come here to give little bit of hope to the people,” Ms. Leong said during a recent visit to Villawood, where posters display the governing principles of Serco, beginning with “We foster an entrepreneurial culture.”

Free-Market Solutions

Companies often say that losing a contract is the ultimate accountability.

“We are acutely aware of our responsibilities and are committed to the humane, fair and decent treatment of all those in our care,” a Serco spokesman said in an e-mail. “We will continue to work with our customers around the world and seek to improve the services we provide for them.”

But lost detention contracts are rare and easily replaced in this fast-growing business. Serco’s $10 billion portfolio includes many other businesses, from air traffic control and visa processing in the United States, to nuclear weapons maintenance, video surveillance and welfare-to-work programs in Britain, where it also operates several prisons and two “immigration removal centers.”

“If one area or territory slows down, we can move where the growth is,” Christopher Hyman, Serco’s chief executive, told investors last year, after reporting a 35 percent increase in profits. This spring, Serco reported a 13 percent profit rise.

Its rival G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security.

Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.

“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.

In Britain last fall, the company came under criminal investigation in the asphyxiation of an Angolan man who died as three G4S escorts held him down on a British Airways flight. Soon afterward, British immigration authorities announced that the company had lost its bid to renew a $48 million deportation escort contract because it was underbid by a competitor.

Even so, G4S has more than $1.1 billion in government contracts in Britain, a spokesman said, only about $126 million from the immigration authority. It quickly replaced the lost revenue with contracts to build, lease and run more police jails and prisons.

In 2007, Western Australia’s Human Rights Commission found that G4S drivers had ignored the cries of detainees locked in a scorching van, leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, but three of the five victims already had been deported. Immigration officials, relying on company misinformation, had dismissed their complaints without investigation, the commission found.

There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in another state, Victoria, without competition.

G4S pleaded guilty to negligence in the van death this year, and was fined $285,000. Mr. Buckles, its chief executive, alluded to the case at a meeting with analysts in March, reassuring them.

“There is only two or three major players, typically sometimes only two people bidding,” Mr. Buckles said. “In time, we will become a winner in that market because there’s a lot of outsourcing opportunities and not many competitors.”

In August, when GEO, the Florida prison company, posted a 40 percent rise in second-quarter profits, its executives in Boca Raton spoke of new immigration business on both sides of the Atlantic.

John M. Hurley, a GEO executive for North American operations, cited “the continued growth in the criminal alien population,” larger facilities, and longer federal contracts, some up to 20 years.

At the company’s Reeves County Detention Center in Texas, immigrant inmates rioted in 2009 and 2010 after several detainees died in solitary confinement. GEO executives declined to comment. But speaking to shareholders, they credited much of the quarter’s $10 million increase in international revenue to the expansion of a detention center in Britain, where immigration was a hot issue in the 2010 election.

A Policy Backfires

“Britain is no longer a soft touch,” Damian Green, the immigration minister, said in August 2010 when he visited the center, near Heathrow Airport, reopening wings that had burned in 2006 during detainee riots under a different private operator.

The riots started the day the chief inspector of prisons released a blistering report about abuses there, including excessive waits for deportation. Months after Mr. Green’s appearance, an independent monitoring board complained that at the expanded center — now Europe’s largest, with 610 detainees — at least 35 men had been waiting more than a year to be deported, including one locked up for three years and seven months at a cost of at least $237,000.

The camp that Serco took over in the Australian outback, the Curtin Immigration Detention Center, had also been shut down amid riots and hunger strikes in 2002. But it was reopened last year to handle a surge of asylum seekers arriving by boat even as the government imposed a moratorium on processing their claims. Refurbished for 300 men, the camp sits on an old air force base and held more than 1,500 detainees in huts and tents behind an electrified fence. Serco guards likened the compound to a free-range chicken farm.

On March 28, a 19-year-old Afghan from a group persecuted by the Taliban hanged himself after 10 months’ detention — the system’s fifth suicide in seven months. A dozen guards, short of sleep and training, found themselves battling hundreds of grieving, angry detainees for the teenager’s body.

“We have lost control,” said Richard Harding, who served for a decade as Western Australia’s chief prison inspector. He is no enemy of privatization, and his praise for a Serco-run prison is posted on the company’s Web site. But he said Curtin today was emblematic of “a flawed arrangement that’s going to go wrong no matter who’s running it.”

“These big global companies, in relation to specific activities, are more powerful than the governments they’re dealing with,” he added.

Matt Siegel contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia.


Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Gabriel Lerner: I Was There, Obama Responded To Latinos

Gabriel Lerner: I Was There, Obama Responded To Latinos

A few hours ago, HuffPost LatinoVoices and AOL Latino interviewed President Obama during the first roundtable of its kind made available to digital media. More than any declaration, the mere organization of a roundtable meeting with President Obama for Hispanic media was a confirmation of a shift for this Administration.

The event, which took place during Hispanic Heritage Month, was evidence that the Obama Administration intends to recuperate the support of the Latino community. Whether we agree or disagree with Obama in this never ending political campaign, the President showed a deep understanding of the intricacies of the issues that are dear to Hispanics, and of the priorities needed to improve the standing of the Latino community.

First, Obama said, is education. With it, we'll achieve not only social and economic progress, but also further participation and integration with the rest of the country. He also justly asked those that can to become citizens, to register, so they can vote and participate in the political process.

Mr. Obama answered a total of 15 questions, asked by myself and by representatives from MSN Latino and Yahoo! En Español. All questions were sent by readers from our sites, in Spanish and English, from Facebook and Twitter. Thousands of questions, observations, critiques, statements, comments, requests and even blessings and curses were submitted. HuffPost LatinoVoices and AOL Latino selected questions that were relevant and authentic, representing some of the most crucial interests of Hispanics in the United States.

Joining me at the roundtable, were Karine Medina, Executive Producer at MSN Latino, who came from Seattle, Washington, and Jose Siade, Head of Editorial and Network Programming at Yahoo! Latin America, from Miami, Florida.

The President was explicit and thorough when asked about immigration reform, the DREAM Act, the federal investigation of Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and even how immigration reform and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) interact.

He was asked why payments for elders receiving Social Security had not increased, the conditions for improved bilateral relations with Cuba, his recent bill proposal for the creation of jobs, bullying against minorities in schools, relations with Mexico, influx of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico after operation Fast and Furious, Health Reform and, lastly, his certainty that there will be a Latino President in his lifetime.

These topics added to the impression that even if the immigration topic is of particular interest for the Hispanic community, there are no "Latino issues" per se, because we Latinos are an integral part of this society, and inherently participate in all of its shared experiences and contradictions. Or, like millions of protesters in the streets of our major cities said five years ago as they demanded the attention of President Bush "Aquì estamos, y no nos vamos."

We are here, and we're not leaving.

Follow Gabriel Lerner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hispanicla

Judge Won't Block Key Parts Of Alabama Immigration Law : NPR

Judge Won't Block Key Parts Of Alabama Immigration Law : NPR

NJAID Press Conference on Mandatory Detention & Essex County's IGSA w/IC...

Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting - CBS News

Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting - CBS News

(AP) MEXICO CITY — Police found a woman's decapitated body in a Mexican border city on Saturday, alongside a handwritten sign saying she was killed in retaliation for her postings on a social networking site.

The gruesome killing may be the third so far this month in which people in Nuevo Laredo were killed by a drug cartel for what they said on the internet.

Morelos Canseco, the interior secretary of northern Tamaulipas state, where Nuevo Laredo is located, identified the victim as Marisol Macias Castaneda, a newsroom manager for the Nuevo Laredo newspaper Primera Hora.

The newspaper has not confirmed that title, and an employee of the paper said Macias Castaneda held an administrative post, not a reporting job. The employee was not authorized to be quoted by name.

But it was apparently what the woman posted on the local social networking site, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, or "Nuevo Laredo Live," rather than her role at the newspaper, that resulted in her killing.

The site prominently features tip hotlines for the Mexican army, navy and police, and includes a section for reporting the location of drug gang lookouts and drug sales points — possibly the information that angered the cartel.

The message found next to her body on the side of a main thoroughfare referred to the nickname the victim purportedly used on the site, "La Nena de Laredo," or "Laredo Girl." Her head was found placed on a large stone piling nearby.

"Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and social networking sites, I'm The Laredo Girl, and I'm here because of my reports, and yours," the message read. "For those who don't want to believe, this happened to me because of my actions, for believing in the army and the navy. Thank you for your attention, respectfully, Laredo Girl...ZZZZ."

The letter "Z'' refers to the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel, which is believed to dominate the city across from Laredo, Texas.

It was unclear how the killers found out her real identity.

By late Saturday, the chat room at Nuevo Laredo en Vivo was abuzz with fellow posters who said they knew the victim from her online postings, and railing against the Zetas, a gang founded by military deserters who have become known for mass killings and gruesome executions.

They described her as a frequent poster, who used a laptop or cell phone to send reports.

"Girl why didn't she buy a gun given that she was posting reports about the RatZZZ ... why didn't she buy a gun?" wrote one chat participant under the nickname "Gol."

Earlier this month, a man and a woman were found hanging dead from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo with a similar message threatening "this is what will happen" to internet users. However, it has not been clearly established whether the two had in fact ever posted any messages, or on what sites.

Residents of Mexican border cities often post under nicknames to report drug gang violence, because the posts allow a certain degree of anonymity.

Social media like local chat rooms and blogs, and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, are often the only outlet for residents of violence-wracked cities to find out what areas to avoid because of ongoing drug cartel shootouts or attacks.

Local media outlets, whose journalists have been hit by killings, kidnappings and threats, are often too intimidated to report the violence.

Mexico's Human Rights Commission says eight journalists have been killed in Mexico this year and 74 since 2000. Other press groups cite lower numbers, and figures differ based on the definition of who is a journalist and whether the killings appeared to involve their professional work.

While helpful, social networking posts sometimes are inaccurate and can lead to chaotic situations in cities wracked by gang confrontations. In the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, just south of Tamaulipas, the state government dropped terrorism charges last week against two Twitter users for false posts that officials said caused panic and chaos in late August.

Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting - CBS News

Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting - CBS News

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Border Solidarity Report Back to Queens 9/21/11 : Ishita Srivastava & Da...

Essex County immigrant detention center a house of controversy | NJ.com

Essex County immigrant detention center a house of controversy | NJ.com

Published: Thursday, September 22, 2011, 8:00 AM Updated: Thursday, September 22, 2011, 11:58 AM
delaney.jpgDelaney Hall, an Essex County-based private correctional facility for immigrant detainees. The center has become a focal point of controversy, as civil libertarians contend the privatized center profits from mandatory detention for immigrants who have committed civil, not criminal, violations. The signs on the walls will be taken down when detainees arrive.

NEWARK — Despite the barbed wire snaking across the top of its perimeter fence, Delaney Hall is not a traditional lock-up.

Some dorm rooms have skylights. Bookshelves line a library wall. When immigration detainees begin filling the stark-white rooms next month — thanks to the new contract between the federal government and Essex County — they will be free to walk the halls during the day.

These small comforts are part of a wide-ranging reform effort by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (known as ICE), which is seeking a less punitive form of incarceration for immigrant detainees. But the Newark facility, run by the company Community Education Centers and toured by The Star-Ledger last month, became the center of a controversy that pitted immigrant activists against politicians and company executives.

The battle took a distinctly New Jersey turn, with allegations that a now-canceled bidding process was stacked in favor of the politically connected company. It’s also provided a window into the raucous national debate over immigration detention.

Detention facilities create moneymaking opportunities for local governments and private firms, but advocates say they’re profiting from a flawed policy of mandatory detention for immigrants who may have only committed civil, not criminal, violations.

"There’s been no discussion that these are people," said Kathy O’Leary of Pax Christi, a Catholic social justice organization. "There’s been much discussion about the dollars and cents."

Detainees will include legal and illegal immigrants facing deportation for breaking immigration rules, such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without proper documents, or for committing nonviolent crimes. The contract with ICE, approved by the Essex freeholder board Sept. 7, will roughly double the number of detainees held in Newark, bringing the total to 1,250.

Essex County expects to earn $50 million a year and Community Education Centers gets a bigger bite of a growing market other companies have already tapped. Most detainees will be kept at the county jail and up to 450 will go to Delaney Hall, which also houses parolees and county inmates.

essex-county-detention.jpgView full size

The five-year arrangement allows the county to act as a middleman. If the detainee is housed in the jail, the county gets the full $108-a-night payment from ICE. If the detainee goes to Delaney Hall, the county pays the company $71 a night and keeps the $37 difference. "This is a very unpleasant way of getting revenue," said Ralph Caputo, vice president of the freeholder board. "But it’s going to be helpful."

Essex County Executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr., once called the "Jack Welsh of correctional facilities" for his ability to turn inmates into dollars, said detainees will be a crucial source of revenue as his county wrestles with a tough economy.

"The $250 million we expect to receive over the five-year contract will significantly help reduce the financial burden on our taxpayers," he said.

DiVincenzo said the county jail and Delaney Hall would provide "modern, safe and dignified housing with access to health care and visitation."

POLICY AND PROFITS

Immigrant advocates say it’s wrong to turn faulty federal policy into a gold rush.

"They’re making money off the backs of immigrant suffering," said Amy Gottlieb, director of the Immigrant Rights Program with the American Friends Service Committee in Newark.

Antonio Ginatta, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program, said too may people are being detained because of strict federal laws signed in the 1990s.

"The immigration system is detaining people that are not flight risks and are not dangers to the community," he said.

Philip Alagia, DiVincenzo’s chief of staff, said Essex County doesn’t set immigration policy and detainees have to be housed somewhere.

"If it didn’t go to Essex, right now it would be in a county in Pennsylvania," he said.

The Obama administration disappointed advocates by increasing deportations, but recently announced it would review 300,000 cases to focus on those considered a security risk. There are 33,390 detainees held by ICE on an average day this year, up from 30,295 in the 2007 fiscal year, the agency said.

The $2.6 billion detention network includes about 250 facilities. ICE also plans new operations near Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Kansas City.

The expansion is geared toward two goals set by the Obama administration: increase capacity in urban areas so immigrants detained there aren’t shipped to rural facilities far away from their families, and reduce its reliance on local jails that rent unused beds to the federal government.

In New Jersey, which has an average of 941 detainees each day, immigration authorities use five county jails: Essex, Bergen, Monmouth, Hudson and Sussex. They also use a private facility in Elizabeth run by Corrections Corporation of America, a Nashville, Tenn. company and one of ICE’s biggest contractors. Detainees housed in the Northeast spend an average of 49 days in ICE facilities, according to contract documents.

Because many detainees haven’t committed crimes, advocates say it’s wrong to incarcerate them in a criminal setting. So ICE says it’s seeking a "wholly new generation of detention facilities."

PRIVATIZING DETENTION

That’s where private companies like Community Education Centers step in. The West Caldwell company is better known in New Jersey for its drug rehabilitation programs and is the state Department of Corrections’ biggest contractor for halfway homes. The company, which also runs two Texas correctional facilities where ICE detainees are housed, has worked with Essex County for more than a decade.

The company has modified Delaney Hall in preparation for housing detainees. The lowest-security detainees will be sent there while those facing criminal charges will stay in the county jail. The front half will continue to house parolees and county inmates, while the back half will be for detainees. A second entrance is labeled "immigration services."

This is a second chance for the company to use Delaney Hall for detainees. In 2008, one escaped and was later recaptured in Kentucky. All 120 detainees were moved back to the county jail. Officials said security is now tighter.

But the contracting process became ensnared in controversy when critics said the county’s request for proposals was tailor-made for Delaney Hall. For example, bidders were required to already have an existing correctional facility located within 10 miles of the jail — Delaney Hall is adjacent to the jail. The company’s leader, John Clancy, has been a big-dollar donor to county and state politicians. A senior vice president, William Palatucci, is a close adviser to Gov. Chris Christie. U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) questioned whether the process was "entirely fair, open and transparent."

County officials denied any wrongdoing. Eric Shuffler, a spokesman for Clancy, said it’s not surprising Delaney Hall would be "ready to accommodate the well-known policy of the federal government."

After Clancy’s organization was the only one to bid on the contract on July 28, the county said it would restart the bidding process later this year. Delaney Hall will house detainees through Dec. 31 under an existing contract, which DiVincenzo said would save the county $600,000.

A look at ICE projects around the country shows it’s not unusual for a company to work closely with local government. Sometimes the company leads the charge to bring in detainees.

That’s what happened in Crete, Ill., about 40 miles south of Chicago. Representatives from the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) called the town last year with a pitch for a new facility, saying it would bring new jobs and tax revenue to the area. Town administrator Thomas Durkin said Crete worked with the company to pitch a plan to ICE. They were tenatively selected as a site for a new facility in June.

ICE also tenatively selected Southwest Ranches, Fla., 30 miles north of Miami, for a facility. CCA owns land there and the town approved the site plan, administrator Burt Wraines said.

Nationwide, half of all ICE detainees were housed in private facilities in 2009, according to Detention Watch Network.

Ruthie Epstein, a critic of detention policies who works at Human Rights First in New York City, said Delaney Hall is better than county jails.

Said Shuffler: "We intend to exceed ICE’s standards when it comes to medical facilities, indoor and outdoor recreational opportunities, and visitation."

That does not assuage all activists. Some note the chemical smell that wafts through the surrounding industrial park. Most of all, though, they are troubled by the underlying federal policy of mandatory detention. "No matter how nice you try to spin it, you’re looking at people with civil immigration violations behind barbed wire," Gottlieb said.

Taking Freedom Plaza (the Documentary)

National Border Solidarity Report Back to Queens 9/21/11 : A Moment Of S...


A Moment Of Silence For Troy Davis

At this point, we didn't know that he'd been granted a temporary reprieve....

They executed him 4 hours later! Another innocent man assassinated by an out-of-control racist government!

National Border Solidarity Report Back to Queens 9/21/11 : A Moment Of S...

Monday, September 19, 2011

I Am Troy Davis (T.R.O.Y.)

Meet and Greet Dreamers Act on Vimeo

Meet and Greet Dreamers Act on Vimeo

Undocumented, Unafraid and Unashamed!, 9/17/2011 on Vimeo

Undocumented, Unafraid and Unashamed!, 9/17/2011 on Vimeo

The Northwest Immigrant Youth Alliance Comes out of the Shadows at the Tacoma, Washington Detention Center. NWIYA and allies protest Immigration policies that cause innocent people to be incarcerated at the privatized detention center as a step in deportation. "E-verify" and "Secure Communities" programs are protested. Undocumented youth come out of the shadows, loudly proclaiming themselves, "Undocumented, unafraid and unashamed!" Allies include New Sanctuary Movement groups from Oregon and Washington and Portland Jobs with Justice.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Redefining Cruel & Unusual

Redefining Cruel & Unusual

Indefinite Immigration Detention for-Profit Amid Toxic Waste in Essex County

Protest, Rally & March
October 9th
1:30 pm
Beginning at
Peter Francisco Park
Newark, NJ

Marching to and from:
Essex County Correctional Facility & Delaney Hall
356 Doremus Ave,
Newark, NJ


After 14 years the IRATE & First Friends annual protest is moving to Newark along with the detainees from the Elizabeth Detention Center. ICE listened to us year after year complain about conditions at the converted warehouse with no outdoor recreation where people were kept, sometimes for years on end. They responded by working with Essex County and the private for-profit company Community Education Centers (CEC).

Up to 1250 detainees will now be held in either the Essex County Jail or in the neighboring privately run. Delaney Hall. These sites allow for outdoor recreation but are located in the middle of numerous TOXIC WASTE sites. The jail and Delaney Hall are both located on Doremus Avenue, a highly polluted area with active polluters where air quality is a constant issue.

Concerns also persist that the Essex County Jail is restricting visits from family, lawyers, and clergy in addition to concerns about adequate food, and general safety.

The Essex County Freeholders just voted to approve a five year contact with ICE that expands an inhumane system that breaks apart families and is wasteful of tax dollars.

We oppose this expansion of immigration detention in Essex County. Many of those ensnared in the indiscriminate immigration enforcement dragnet which automatically leads to detention are long-term residents, green card holders, U.S. citizens, business owners, college graduates and veterans. We have grave concerns about the conditions under which they are being held.

Can't join us in Newark on Oct 9th? Sign the Petition http://www.change.org/petitions/oppose-expansion-of-immigration-detention-at-a-jail-accused-of-inhumane-conditions

"Embedded in Afghanistan"

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Friday, September 9, 2011

Border Lines: Media Release: On the Border Ten Years After 9/11

Border Lines: Media Release: On the Border Ten Years After 9/11: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 9, 2011 INTERNATIONAL POLICY REPORT Policy on the Edge On the Border ...

STATEMENT: Rights Working Group Reflects on a Changed America Since 9/11; Calls for Restoration of Civil and Human Rights | Rights Working Group

STATEMENT: Rights Working Group Reflects on a Changed America Since 9/11; Calls for Restoration of Civil and Human Rights | Rights Working Group

"We join people throughout this country and the world who are reflecting on the lives lost, the pain suffered by their loved ones and the many ways in which our nation has changed."

Rights Working Group Reflects on a Changed America Since 9/11; Makes Call for Restoration of Civil and Human Rights

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Keith Rushing, Communications Manager

(p) 202.591.3305 (c) 202.557.4291

Today, we pause to reflect on the horrible attacks that happened 10 years ago this Sunday, when nearly 3,000 people were torn from their families and loved ones in one horrible moment. We join people throughout this country and the world who are reflecting on the lives lost, the pain suffered by their loved ones and the many ways in which our nation has changed.

Despite the horrors of that day, we remain moved by the way people throughout the United States put aside their differences in the aftermath of the attacks and came together in empathy, courage and support. We remember the many firefighters, police officers and ordinary citizens who searched for survivors and so generously gave of themselves to help the families of the deceased.

This nation was changed following the attacks, not only by the attacks themselves but by the government’s response, which included two wars and the expansion of the federal government’s powers of surveillance, detention, and access to private information and property, along with the curtailment of civil liberties and human rights. Since 9/11, many have contended with greater levels of discrimination, restrictions of their free speech rights and freedom of movement, while undergoing intrusive searches, racial profiling, and deportations without due process--all in the name of the “War on Terror.” These laws, practices and policies are not only morally wrong but they have diminished America’s global standing and made us all less safe.

On Wednesday, September 14, the Rights Working Group, founded in the aftermath of 9/11 to address the curtailment of these rights, will call on Congress and the Obama Administration to end these discriminatory laws and policies and to restore our civil liberties and human rights and support passage of the End Racial Profiling Act.

In the months before Sept. 11, the End the Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) had bipartisan support and passage of the bill was virtually guaranteed. For African Americans, who had long experienced the humiliation of unwarranted stops and searches based on the color of their skin, passage of ERPA would break new ground. But after Sept. 11,congressional interest in ERPA dimmed as the focus turned to national security and passage of the PATRIOT Act. The federal government began targeting people of Arab, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Muslim background for extra scrutiny.

Under the Bush administration, more than 1,200 men of Arab, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Muslim backgrounds were detained. In addition, the federal government launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSSERS) that required more than 80,000 men, who were Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian to register and undergo interrogations, detentions and deportations. The program did not yield a single terrorism conviction.

The federal government through the Department of Homeland Security conflated immigration law with national security policies and devoted additional resources to detentions and deportations of immigrants, worksite raids, home raids and collaborations with local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. Through the 287 (g) program, the Criminal Alien Program and the Secure Communities program, the federal government has enlisted local and state law enforcement agencies to enforce civil immigration law. These programs have incentivized racial profiling and broken the trust between police and local law enforcement.

Under the PATRIOT Act, the federal government has expanded its power to search and seize private documents and records and engage in surveillance, indefinite detentions and deportations without due process. The FBI’s Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines expanded opportunities for profiling because race, ethnicity and religion can now be used as factors to launch an investigation.

Federal policies that encourage or enable racial profiling are not consistent with this nation’s values as recognized in the U.S. Constitution. In the interest of restoring civil liberties and civil and human rights protections for all those living in the United States, RWG makes a number of recommendations. Among them are the following:

President Obama should:

  • Support and strenuously advocate passage of the End Racial Profiling Act which would ban racial profiling based on race, religion, ethnicity or national origin, on the federal, state and local level and mandate the collection of data on racial profiling.
  • Issue an executive order prohibiting racial profiling by federal officers and banning law enforcement practices that disproportionately target people for investigation and enforcement based on race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. The executive order should also require the collection of data by federal enforcement agencies about law enforcement actions broken down by the apparent or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin and religion of individuals targeted by enforcement agents. This data should include charges lodged against those targeted and the ultimate disposition of the cases.
  • Terminate the 287 (g) program that empowers state and local police to enforce immigration law and state unequivocally that the federal government alone has jurisdiction and authority to enforce immigration law.

TheDepartment Of Justice Should:

  • Revise the 2003 Guidance on the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies. The revised guidance should include the following changes: eliminate the loopholes that allow profiling in the context of national security and border security; include religion and national origin as protected classes; include a prohibition against racial profiling for law enforcement surveillance activities; apply the guidance to state and local law enforcement agencies that cooperate with or receive funding from the federal government; and make the guidance enforceable.
  • Revise the 2008 Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations and the 2011 FBI’s Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines to ensure that they fully comport with constitutional and international human rights protections.

Congress should:

  • Enact the End Racial Profiling Act.
  • Provide oversight to ensure that the various agencies of the executive branch are undertaking the reforms identified in the recommendations above. If agencies are not adopting these reforms, Congress should adopt legislation mandating relevant and meaningful changes in policy.
  • Repeal section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
  • Eliminate funding for the Secure Communities Initiative, the Criminal Alien Program and other programs that utilize state and local law enforcement agencies to conduct immigration enforcement, until and unless meaningful and effective oversight mechanisms can be implemented to ensure that these programs do not allow for racial profiling or other civil and human rights violations.

This post is part of the Reflecting on Our Loss and Reclaiming Our Rights National Week of Action. To learn more, click here. To take action, sign the petition to President Obama.

Watch the new Restore Fairness documentary, “Checkpoint Nation? Building Community Across Borders” « Restore Fairness

Watch the new Restore Fairness documentary, “Checkpoint Nation? Building Community Across Borders” « Restore Fairness