Their Eyes Remain the Guiding Star of My Conscience

By Faith Chatham -  May 7, 2017

It amazes me how my thoughts parallel those of others without collaboration. I went on a twitter storm day before yesterday on immigration and other things. Then my sister in San Antonio sent me an exquisitely expressive poem she wrote about a mother crossing the border with her child strapped to her back. It is a very sad and vibrant word picture. It won't be shared *yet" online yet because it is an unpublished work and most publishers require that it be submitted before publication and they consider even posting on Facebook or small blogs publication. However, it expresses what I was feeling. She also included a poem about a relief worker in Honduras who did not save for her retirement. Both hit "close to home" for me.

Many people went to Honduras following Hurricane Mitch and we had our perceptions and hearts transformed. Those who cross the US border are usually fleeing from the crime and terror and abject poverty/ They are not faceless to those of us who were on the ground several decades ago. The crime was enormous then and it is many times greater now. We were not allowed out after dark for any reason whatsoever and every time we left the cathedral compound the Bishop sent us out with an armed guard. This was a shock to our north American sensibilities. Seeing an armed guard with a machine gun at the entrance of the cathedral was quite different to us. Yet the school, clinic and relief supplies within the compound made it a target.

During that time, donors sent several new automobiles to missionaries in Honduras. Every auto was hijacked at gun point within a few weeks of its arrival. The military government (responsible for those many "disappeared persons" during the Reagan administration} had just been overthrown when Hurricane Mitch (a series of hurricanes which stayed stationary over Honduras for over a week dumping massive rains at the same time as an earthquake) occurred, devastating the entire country. Because the government was so corrupt, and the country was in such need, NGOs and religious institutions became the conduits for relief and development during that post Hurricane Mitch recovery period instead of the government.

My memories of the mega shelters are acute. They were military tents with concrete floors. Each family had about an 8-square foot section of living space with a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The cooking was in the aisle outside the tent by kerosene camp stoves and the sinks were tubs with a water hose. There were no locking doors on those tents in this country so terrorized by the former military who now operated as criminal banditos. These families lived for extended times in tents in a country where the Bishop required everyone who served to stay in the hotel or cathedral or at home after dark and to travel with armed guards! The children in those mega shelters grew up in tents which did not have locking doors. Most families were in the mega shelters for 9 to 28 months. San Pedro Sula is high in the hills and it is cold there much of the year.

The Episcopal Church and other folks acquired land (a rare commodity in that international fruit company controlled country) and built houses. Because all a man had to do to divorce his wife was to kick her and the children out of the house, the Episcopal Bishop placed the titles to the homes they built into the name of the wife so that if the man chose to leave, the family could retain the home! However, being legally the owner does not solve the problem of being able to retain the home if the husband is abusive and there are no authorities to enforce the law. 

When we had an influx of children crossing the Rio Grande a few years ago from Honduras it struck me that the parents of these children were the children who were in the Mega Shelters following Hurricane Mitch. Those children woke up one day and every one of them lost people who were close to them -- either parents, friends, teachers, neighbors, school mates, grandparents, siblings. Over 11,000 people died that week in Honduras. Small children were uprooted from their homes and families and displaced. The Government was unable to process paperwork or police the communities or jail criminals to a sufficient degree to establish order. Crime and gangs were already high and escalated following Hurricane Mitch. Women and children were the most vulnerable people in that society They had no rights. Rape was /is common. 

Murder is normal. Running for your life becomes the sane choice. Once North, they are viewed as economic illegal aliens instead of assault victims fleeing for their lives. If American foreign policy had not played such a key role in destabilizing Central America in our Cold War Communist/ Capitalist era struggle, the plight of these generations of Central Americans would not be as acute. We do not like having the fruits of our sins arrive on our shores. We want to ignore our roles in creating and sustaining the terror that these women and children and young men are subjected to. We choose to label them criminals for coming here or sending their children here so that they have a better chance of surviving. This is what it is about when folks say they come for a better life. Usually it means that they are coming to try to survive period fleeing a place where the realities of being beaten by terrorists with machetes is normal. 

I supported Hillary Clinton because I trusted her to work for solutions to help those who remained in such countries and for those who fled to our shores. I don't think that when our ancestors arrive here is nearly as important as the fact that people are human beings and we are all deserving of the opportunity to expect to survive each day and find a way to eat and work and care for our children and learn and be human. If we weighed the cost of terror as highly as we value economic selfishness our world would heal. I still see the eyes of the children I met in Honduras. They are part of the north star of conscience which guides me.

NOTE: Hurricane Mitch hit Oct. 22, 1998. Any US immigrant from Honduras born between 1978 and 1998 were children when it hit. Those born after 1998 in Honduras have never known a stable community where the streets and homes are reasonably safe. It was the most-deadly hurricane to hit the Western Hemisphere in over 200 years Over 11,000 persons died in a small Central American country and there was over $5 Billion in economic loss in a country where most of the wealth was held by absentee landowners and a very few resident elites. 

© 2017 J Chatham, Arlington, TX 

Target of Immigrant Raids Shifted

By NINA BERNSTEIN - New York Times - February 3, 2009

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation Return to Sender.

And they garnered bigger increases in money and staff from Congress than any other program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

The impact of the internal directives, obtained by a professor and students at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information lawsuit and shared with The New York Times, shows the power of administrative memos to significantly alter immigration enforcement policy without any legislative change.

The memos also help explain the pattern of arrests documented in a report, criticizing the fugitive operations program, to be released on Wednesday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Analyzing more than five years of arrest data supplied to the institute last year by Julie Myers, who was then chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report found that over all, as the program spent a total of $625 million, nearly three-quarters of the 96,000 people it apprehended had no criminal convictions.

Without consulting Congress, the report concluded, the program shifted to picking up “the easiest targets, not the most dangerous fugitives.”

It noted, however, that the most recent figures available indicate an increase in arrests of those with a criminal background last year, though it was unclear whether that resulted from a policy change.

The increased public attention comes as the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has ordered a review of the fugitive teams operation, which was set up in 2002 to find and deport noncitizens with outstanding orders of deportation, then rapidly expanded after 2003 with the mission of focusing on the most dangerous criminals.

Peter L. Markowitz, who teaches immigration law at Cardozo and directs its immigration legal clinic, said the memos obtained in its lawsuit reflected the Bush administration’s effort to appear tough on immigration enforcement during the unsuccessful push to pass comprehensive immigration legislation in 2006, and amid rising anger over illegal immigration.

“It looks like what happened here is that the law enforcement strategy was hijacked by the political agenda of the administration,” he said.

Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, defended the program. “For the first time in history, we continue to reduce the number of immigration fugitive cases,” she said, noting that the number of noncitizens at large with outstanding deportation orders, which peaked at 634,000 in the 2007 fiscal year, is now down to about 554,000. “These results speak for themselves and they are consistent with Congress’s mandate: locate and remove immigration absconders.”

Ms. Nantel said the number of fugitives with criminal backgrounds arrested in the 2008 fiscal year rose to 5,652, or 16 percent of 34,000 arrests, and nonfugitives fell to 8,062, or 23 percent.

Many Americans have welcomed roundups of what the agency calls “ordinary status violators” — noncitizens who have no outstanding order of deportation, but are suspected of being in the country unlawfully, either because they overstayed a visa or entered without one.

But Michael Wishnie, one of the authors of the report, who teaches law at Yale, said that random arrests of low-level violators in residential raids not only raised a new set of legal and humanitarian issues, including allegations of entering private homes without warrants or consent and separating children from their caretakers, but was “dramatically different from how ICE has sold this program to Congress.”

“If we just want to arrest undocumented people,” he said, “we can do it much more cheaply.”

Congressional financing for the fugitive operations program rose to $218 million in the 2008 fiscal year, from $9 million in 2003, as the number of seven-member teams multiplied to 104 from 8.

In Congressional briefings and public statements since 2003, agency officials have repeatedly said that given the vast number of immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, the program will focus its resources on the roughly 20 percent with a criminal background.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo dated Jan. 22, 2004, underscored that commitment: “Effective immediately, no less than 75 percent of all fugitive operations targets will be those classified as criminal aliens” — noncitizens with a criminal record as well as an order of deportation. It added that “collateral apprehensions” — immigration violators encountered by chance during an operation — would not be counted in that percentage.

But on Jan. 31, 2006, a new memo changed the rules. The directive, from John P. Torres, acting director of the agency, raised each team’s “target goal” to 1,000 a year, from 125.

And it removed the requirement that at least 75 percent of those sought out for arrest be criminals. Instead, it told the teams to prioritize cases according to the threat posed by the fugitive, with noncriminals in the lowest of five categories. And it repeated that “collateral apprehensions will not count” toward the 1,000 arrest quota.

But that standard, too, was dropped nine months later. A new memo from Mr. Torres said “nonfugitive arrests may now be included” to reach the required 1,000 arrests. On average, however, it said at least half of those arrested by each team should be fugitives. It also promised to “ensure the maximum availability of detention space for fugitive arrest operations.”

One result was an increase in noncriminals held in immigration detention. Another, the Migration Policy Institute report concluded, was that the percentage of criminal fugitives arrested plummeted, to 9 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30, 2007, from 39 percent in the 2004 fiscal year.

That same year, 15,646, or 51 percent of those arrested, had an outstanding deportation order, but no criminal record, and 12,084, or 40 percent, were termed “ordinary status violators” who did not fit any of the program’s priority categories.

The report said the program relied on a database riddled with errors, and that many deportation orders were issued without the subject in court, sometimes because of faulty addresses.

The looser rules were reflected in sweeps like one conducted in New Haven in June 2007. During the raid, lawyers at Yale’s immigration law center said, agents who found no one home at an address specified in a deportation order simply knocked on other doors until one opened, pushed their way in, and arrested residents who acknowledged that they lacked legal status.

Of the 32 arrested and scattered to jails around New England, only 5 had outstanding deportation orders, and only 1 or 2 had criminal records.
Read More in the New York Times

Inmmigration compromise reached in Washington

Highlights - Key components of the compromise immigration plan:
All illegal immigrants who arrived before Jan. 1, 2007, could stay and work after paying a $1,500 fee, passing a criminal background check, and showing a strong work record.

They would also have to pay a fine of $5,000.

After eight years, they could apply for a green card.

A new visa category would be created for parents of U.S. citizens, allowing them to visit for up to 100 days per year.

A temporary-worker program would allow 400,000 immigrant workers to enter on two-year visas, after which they would have to return home for a year before reapplying. The visas could be renewed up to three times.

A new point system would add factors for green-card eligibility to lessen the "chain migration" of family members.

The Border Patrol and interior enforcement would be expanded, and a new security perimeter would be created. Such border enforcement provisions would have to be implemented before immigrant-rights measures take effect.

SOURCES: Office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Congressional Quarterly

Deal on Immigration Reached
Bush Supports Senate's Bipartisan Compromise, but Hurdles Remain
Jonathan Weisman - Washington Post Staff Writer - Friday, May 18, 2007; Page A01

The Bush administration and a bipartisan group of senators reached agreement yesterday on a sprawling overhaul of the nation's immigration laws that would bring an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants out of society's shadows while stiffening border protections and cracking down on employers of undocumented workers.

The delicate compromise, 380 pages long and three months in the making, represents perhaps the last opportunity for President Bush to win a major legislative accomplishment for his second term, and it could become the most significant revision of the nation's immigration system in 41 years. Bush hailed the agreement as "one that will help enforce our borders, but equally importantly, it will treat people with respect."

Read more

Texas Wildlife Refuges Fast-Tracked for Border "Fence"

by blogger "Land of Enchantment"
posted on TEXAS KAOS Wed May 09, 2007 at 20:55:04 PM CDT

The first name given by Spanish explorers to the Rio Grande was actually the Rio de las Palmas, after the extensive forests of sabal palm trees along its lower reaches. Those forests are mostly gone now, replaced by grapefruit orchards and other farmland. Only small patches of it remain, in sanctuaries and wildlife refuges, such as Sabal Palms run by the Audubon Society east of Brownsville, Texas. The bird life at this southernmost point of the lower 48 has a Central American feel.

READ MORE of this stunning environmental post

Fence on the border

There are many parallels between Berlin and Texas.
Both were divided through war and political settlements of the border.
Families and bloodlines were divided into two separate nations.
Many of the people who fought or financed the war(s) found their families as citizens of two different nations.
Families faced dire consequences if they violated restrictions on free travel between the two countries without visa, passports, official papers, and special permissions.
I detested the Berlin Wall and all it stands for and I detest a fence at the border of Texas.

There are better solutions.

We have put men and women into space and walked on the moon.
We have helped broker peace in other continents.
We have cured some diseases.
We have managed to survive despite ourselves as a nation much longer than anyone envisioned.

Surely we can find a REASONABLE SOLUTION that doesn't involve barbed wire and prevent grandchildren from easily traveling to grandpa's house across the border.
Surely we can identify decent human beings who have settled in the USA, worked here for years, abided by all our laws except for having come here.

We used to be able to travel easily between the USA and Canada. It wasn't unusual for a US Citizen to go to Canada and work for a summer while in college. Travel was relaxed and free. Border security focused on CRIMINALS and folks who were REAL DANGERS. Then the Viet Nam War dragged on for decades. It was unpopular. Our government requested that Canada tighten their immigration and guest worker laws to make it very difficult for US Citizens to go to Canada and live and work. The border wasn't tightened to keep American safe. It was tightened to keep Americans in.

Fences work two ways. This one on the Southern border says more about predjuice and discrimination than it says about national security. It will not solve the immigration potholes. It will not identify real terrorists. It will not stop the cayotes from smuggling folks across the border. It may change the routes somewhat but it merely makes it more lucrative and rips off the vulnerable more.

To us 164 years seems like a long time; However, that is not all that long when you look at the history of people on this continent. Most politicians look at the peoples of Mexico and of the United States as two peoples -- but we really aren't. To my knowledge, I have no Latino or Hispanic bloodlines in my family. We came to Virigina from England and Ireland between 1630 and 1720 and most of my parents grandparents came to Texas between 1838 and 1870. We have benefited from the sacrifices of Navarro, Juan Seguin and others who helped forge this state and nation. It offends me when I hear folks assume that Texans with hispanic surnames migrated here from south of the Rio Grande. Many of them had families living in Texas long before my family arrived. Most of them also have relatives living in Mexico.

How different is a wall in Berlin from a wall at the border of Texas? Do we condemn communist governments who separate families who resided on different sides of the Berlin wall while urging US immigration and politicans to "tighten" the Texas /Mexico border? Should those who escape the poverty of Mexico and live underground working in the USA, raising their families and contributing to the US economy, risk incarceration and total loss of everything they have worked for during years of peaceful "illegal" residence by simply crossing the border to attend a parent's funeral or attend a family reunion? Is it truly moral to criminalize peaceful economic refugees while ignoring corporations who violate anti-trust rules and politicians who pass rules to legalize schemes that benefit corporations who fund their political campaign?

What difference is there between Germans who were restricted from visiting kin folks residing on different sides of the Berlin wall and families who are separated by the Rio Grande? Should it really be a crime to migrate back and forth across the border, to visit, shop and even work from time to time without extensive red tape and large outlays of money?

Somehow, I see a much stronger parallel than many seem to acknowledge.

Yes, I think we need to know who is crossing.
Yes, I think the cayotes need to be stopped.
Yes, I think we need to inspect cargo coming in and going out.
Yes, I think we need better guest worker programs.
Yes, I think that this nation has a right to vote and decide on citizenship and green card and guest worker immigration policy.

Stringing barbed wire and manning it with Soviet era style guard towers with soldiers armed with machine guns doesn't mesh with my view of America. To me, this is letting the terrorists of 9/11 win.

Surely we have better solutions than this.