From NYPD Spying to Trayvon Martin, By Jordan Flaherty

A version of this article originally appeared on The Progressive website.

When I heard that my name was featured in a New York City Police Department report, I should have been outraged. I had followed revelations of NYPD spying, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they would come to New Orleans to watch me speak at a film festival.

However, I also knew that the NYPD, in their crusade under the guise of safety, had gone whitewater rafting with college students and aggressively monitored and infiltrated mosques and Muslim businesses. They operate in at least 9 foreign countries, so why shouldn’t they come to New Orleans, listen to me say a few words at a public event, and write a classified report about it? Perhaps the only strange thing about the case is that I don’t fit their regular profile. As a white US citizen, I feel my case is a bit of an anomaly for a department that has developed a reputation for targeting immigrants and communities of color. My privilege has given me a certain amount of security and expectation of privacy that many others simply don’t experience.

Recent revelations about NYPD abuses go beyond spying. The notorious stop-and-frisk program, which has led to the criminalization of virtually an entire generation of young men of color in the city, is one example. The New York Civil Liberties Union reported that more than 4 million stops and interrogations from 2004 through 2011 led to no evidence of any wrongdoing – about 90% of all stops. Other recent revelations about NYPD abuses have included arrest quotas, sexual assaults, and the harassment and arrest of an officer who had turned whistleblower. So my little brush with violation of privacy was just a small taste of what is possible from a police department that never met a boundary it didn’t want to cross.

The Occupy movement – now just over six months old - first captured mainstream attention when police were filmed pepperspraying young white women on a New York sidewalk. Subsequent instances of police violence, such as the wounding of former Marine Scott Olsen in Oakland, and the nonchalant pepperspraying of UC Davis students, brought more public outrage and attention. The response from many in the Black community has been, “welcome to our world.”

Step-by-step, we have seen any idea of privacy disappear – everything we do is the business of police. This has always been true for communities of color; now the scope has simply gotten wider. While law enforcement representatives defend the presence of officers filming at every protest around the country as harmless public safety measures, there is no doubt this has had a chilling effect on dissent.

It is not just in New York that there is a divide in how people see – and experience - police. The national outrage over the killing of Trayvon Martin shows that his death – and the continued freedom of his killer – has struck a nerve among Black communities nationwide.

Here in New Orleans, public outrage has been mounting over the abuses carried out by our own city’s police department. More than a dozen officers have faced charges for their involvement in the murder of unarmed civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, most notoriously in the Danziger Bridge shootings. In that incident, two families fleeing the storm’s devastation were attacked under a hail of police gunfire that left four wounded and two dead, including Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged 40-year-old, and James Brissette, a sixteen-year-old who had been called nerdy and studious by friends. Most alarmingly, our local media, district attorney, and other systems of accountability mostly failed in their oversight – it was not until the US Justice Department became involved in 2009 that the officers faced charges. The next year, a Justice Department investigation of the NOPD found "reasonable cause to believe that patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas."

In the latest outrage, during the first week of March, two young Black men were killed by New Orleans police in separate incidents. One of the victims, Justin Sipp, was shot by officers during a traffic stop. The other youth, 20-year-old Wendell Allen, was shot in his own home by an officer executing a warrant. Allen was apparently unarmed and only partially dressed. Allen’s killer remains free, as does George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon.

This week, it was revealed that one of the officers who killed Sipp recently wrote a racist rant about Trayvon Martin on a news website, saying the young man deserved to die, and is now "in hell."

I am disappointed that the NYPD choose to make me a target – however peripheral – of their spying. But I am truly angered by the role that police play in communities of color, at the criminalization of young Black children wearing a hooded sweatshirts. These latest revelations have had the effect of renewing my commitment to fighting for a system that knows that true safety and security comes from providing justice, liberation, and human rights for all; not in the harsh and violent justice of law enforcement.

Images above from New Orleans monuments to white supremacy, recently spraypainted in support of Justin Sipp, Wendell Allen, and Trayvon Martin.

Report From Resistance in Alabama to Racist Anti-Immigrant Bill HB56, By Ingrid Chapman

I arrived in Alabama 2 days before HB 56 went into effect with the original plan of being here for 2 weeks. That turned into 3 months. I have just returned for 6 more months to work with the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice.

I learned about the incredibly egregious law HB 56 and I listened to my heart, which told me to respond to the call for organizing support and to go to Alabama. Now I am living in Alabama, a place I never imagined myself, every day is incredibly challenging, full of simultaneous heartbreak and inspiration and yet I am thankful to be here. I am working side by side with hundreds of incredible people and I do believe from this atrocity a movement is being born that will impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of people if not millions.

I know many do not know the extent of both the crisis and developing movement and so I want to update you and ask for your thinking and support building a national movement and outcry against the most vicious anti-immigration law in the country. I have included some suggested ways to support at the very bottom.

The first weeks were really trying, with a heart-breaking human rights disaster exploding across the state. Alabama citizens taking on the role of immigration enforcers and checking people’s immigration status at every intersection of people’s lives; public schools, children’s sports teams, power and water companies, hospitals, pharmacies, super stores like Walmart, trailer parks, apartment buildings, by police at every traffic stop and much, much more.

The goal of this law is to make Alabama unlivable for undocumented immigrants. Thousands and thousands of people have left the state. Thousands are living in fear and only leave their homes for work, school and the absolute necessities. At the same time thousands are stepping up and organizing, fighting back and an incredible cross cultural, multiracial movement is growing in Alabama.

Alabama is a place that has experienced some of the harshest racism and civil rights abuses and yet some of the most impactful and influential organizing of the civil rights movement. That history is still so present, and many of the veterans and descendants of the civil rights movement are stepping up in the struggle against HB 56, outraged at the parallels of racism, abuse and Jim Crow.
The movement in Alabama right now is probably one of the most inspiring examples of immigrant communities coming together with African Americans and building unity on a state wide level. Immigrants are getting organized and forming new organizations all over the state. In late December we held a rally in Montgomery. Community leaders mobilized over 26 buses from around the state and 3,000 people to march to the Governor’s mansion. Hundreds of children led the march bringing letters they had written to the Governor asking him to repeal HB 56.
That afternoon we held a strategy meeting with immigrant leaders. Community leaders representing all regions of the state shared the success from their efforts over the past 3 months and their strategies for building up power in the coming period to fight for repeal of HB 56. Just this week we held another strategy retreat with over 85 immigrant leaders representing cities from around the state, building up organizing skills and collectively setting the priorities for the legislative and organizing struggle ahead. Feb 7th, the first day of the legislature is the next big action in Montgomery.

We are also amidst a major education and organizing campaign happening among communities of faith. Immigration 101 workshops are being held in churches across the state and hundreds of faith leaders are speaking out against the law.

As the impacts become more widely felt and recognized unlikely allies, such as Republican farmers, local and international business owners, business associations, city chambers of commerce, mayors, county sheriffs and police chiefs are coming out against the law. The implementation of the law is having deep economic impacts, with a loss of skilled workers, businesses shutting down, loss of jobs and of state tax revenues.

International businesses are canceling projects in AL, because it is not safe for their workers. Farmers whose tomatoes rotted in the field because all their workers fled the state have confronted the Governor with buckets asking if he would help pick the crops. The Alabama Farmers Federation estimated the sector would suffer $63 million in losses as the result of the new law going into effect. The Sheriff of Jefferson County spoke at a congressional hearing stating that the police force absolutely does not have the resources or training to take on the role of immigration enforcement and admitted that the law requires his officers to racially profile. A survey done showed that the majority of Alabamians are now against the law.
It is becoming more and more clear that HB 56 a law driven by racism and scapegoating is a false solutions to economic problems and will not fix the economy but devastate the lives of thousands and hurt all Alabamians morally, spiritually and economically. Also ever-present is the potential national impact of the struggle and possible deep effects of a repeal of HB 56. This law is the most aggressive and extensive statewide anti-immigrant bill in the country with 30 different provisions.

Below are some of the harshest pieces of the law that are in effect and just some of the stories of the real human impacts:

1) Police are required to check the immigration status of people they stop and reasonably suspect to be in the country unlawfully.
Impacts: Racial profiling of all people who are brown and or have accents. People are afraid to leave their homes, afraid to drive to work, to school, to the grocery store. People have feelings of being hunted and constantly surveilled. A 13-year-old told me she sends text messages to her parents all day while she is at school fearing everyday may be the day she loses her parents because they have been detained and deported during a traffic stop. A mother I met started having panic attacks from the stress of fearing she will be torn apart from her children and deported. A judge advised a lawyer that the lawyer had an obligation to report her own client to ICE as undocumented. The same judge stated that he might have to report to ICE any person who asked for an interpreter, as such a request would be a red flag.* Latino workers on a construction jobsite were threatened by a group of men with guns, who told them to go back to Mexico and threatened to kill them if they were there the following day. They declined to report the crime to law enforcement because of fears of what would happen to them if they did.* A victim of domestic violence went to court to obtain a protective order. The clerk told her that she’d be reported to ICE if she proceeded.* Much, much more…

2) All new contracts between an undocumented immigrant and another person are unenforceable in state court.
Impacts: In Northport, the water authority provided notices to Latino customers that their services will be shut off if they didn’t provide proof of immigration status immediately.* In Madison County and in Decatur, the public utilities have announced that they will not provide water, gas, or sewage service to people who could not prove their status.* A women called and said the manager of her trailer parked asking residents to prove their status and then evicted everyone, claiming their leases where now null and void. A mother took her ill child to the hospital and was denied health care and thus service. A husband called us to report that his wife, nine months pregnant, was too afraid to go to a hospital in Alabama to give birth, and that he was trying to decide whether to have her give birth at home or somehow to try to get to Florida.* Clerks at Walmart have asked Latinos to show an Alabama drivers license in order to check out. A mother spoke to the local office of the Department of Human Resources about her US citizen children's eligibility for food stamps. The social worker told the mother that she would be turning the mother into the federal government for deportation. The family went into hiding.*

3) It is a felony for undocumented immigrants to enter into a “business transaction” with the state of Alabama.
Impacts: People could not renew car tags, providing more excuses for the police to stop them. People could not renew their tags for their mobile homes; causing fear people may lose their homes. Immigrant owned businesses went under causing more unemployment and decrease in revenue for the state. A Latino man was arrested and detained. While in jail, he was told that he could not use the telephone to call his attorney because the use of the phone would be a “business transaction” prohibited by HB56* (the business transaction part of the law has recently been advised against enforcing by the AL attorney general and is changing in some parts of the state).

4) K-12 school officials are required to question students about their immigration status and that of their parents.
Impacts: Parents were afraid to send their kids to school. 2500 children were taken out of school by their parents. Thousands more were absent in the first weeks. An ESL teacher told me the parents dropped their kids off at her house afraid the schools would report them to ICE if they took their children directly to school. Schools lost millions of dollars in federal funding, and thus jobs because of the un-enrollment of thousands. Racism and bullying has increased in the schools. Teachers jokingly made comments about ICE picking up absent Latino students. A group of immigrant children were denied the ability to participate on a sports team, with coaches stating they were not supposed to invest resources in immigrant children. (This part of the law went into effect and then was temporally enjoined two weeks later. However much damage was done.)

*Stories from the ACIJ hotline

Other provisions of the law have been temporarily blocked by the courts. These include provisions that:

● Prohibit residents from transporting or harboring undocumented immigrants

● Make it a traffic violation for motorists who stop in the roadway to hire a day laborer

● Prohibit universities from enrolling certain immigrants – including asylees, refugees or those granted temporary protected status

● Make it a misdemeanor for failing to complete or carry an alien registration card

● Prohibit employers from taking state tax deductions for wages paid to undocumented workers

● Allow employers to be sued for discrimination by people with U.S. citizen or legal immigration status when they are fired or not hired by an employer with undocumented employees

Because the law is so extensive AL citizens are taking on the role of interpreting the law on their own and enforcing it as they see fit. This is causing wide spread and deep human consequences.

The potential and impact of both our victories and losses in Alabama will be far reaching. Organizing resources in AL are very minimal and national solidarity and outcry against this law are imperative to whether AL sets the new standard for the level of racism, abuse and dehumanization that is acceptable and the new normal or whether this is the moment the tide really turns and laws like this become politically impossible.
What you can do:
Talk amongst your friends and organizations about how you can help build the movement nationally in support of the people of Alabama.
Learn from national solidarity organizing against Arizona’s SB 1070 (example: pass city council resolutions condemning HB 56 and committing your city to be a welcoming city to all. Organize artists to create visuals and cultures of resistance to HB 56). Also be creative and develop new ideas, then make a plan and make it happen.
Help organize an Occupy Day of Action in Solidarity with the people in AL and against racist false economic solutions such as scapegoating of immigrants.
The Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice needs resources to do the organizing on the ground. Organize a fundraiser to raise awareness and funds. Show your solidarity and make a meaningful personal donation at www.acij.net. Raise the national consciousness by getting and keeping what is happening in Alabama in the media, both mainstream and social media.
We need skilled organizers on the ground in Alabama (Spanish speaking a major plus). Fundraise in your community and come to AL for 2 weeks or longer and plug into a growing and imperative movement.

Thank you for reading this update and for your solidarity and support.

For more information and updates:

Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ)

100 Reasons Why Alabama’s Immigration Law is a Disaster

Ingrid Chapman is an anti-racist activist and until recently a member of the Catalyst Project. She spent many months in New Orleans post-Katrina volunteering with Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, Common Ground, and other organizations.

Top image: Days after HB 56 went into effect, One Family One Alabama pray outside of church of HB 56 sponsor, Senator Scott Beason. 100 people came out with a day and half notice.
Other images: 3000 people rally in Montgomery against HB 56.

Jackson City Council Passes Anti-Profiling Legislation

From our friends at the ACLU of Mississippi:

JACKSON - The ACLU of Mississippi announced today that it applauds the Jackson City Council 6-1 vote to pass an anti-racial profiling ordinance. The ordinance prohibits police officers from stopping or detaining people based on the person’s race, immigration status, perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. It also prohibits police officers from asking people about their immigration status solely to determine if they are in the United States illegally.

“I commend the council members for standing up for the protection of civil rights and civil liberties,” said Nsombi Lambright, ACLU-MS Executive Director. “A person’s race should never be grounds to suspect that someone has committed a crime. This ordinance declares that Mississippi’s capital city will not tolerate racial profiling.”

The ordinance also enforces basic Constitutional protections.

“The Constitution guarantees equal protection and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement,” said Bear Atwood. “This ordinance underscores those protections and reminds police officers that they have a sworn duty to uphold them.”

New Orleans Workers Stand in Solidarity With People of Arizona

In recent weeks, the New Orleans' Workers Center for Racial Justice has been sending activists from their organization to Arizona to document and stand in solidarity with the grassroots immigrants' rights movement in that state. Since the passage of SB 1070, the notorious Arizona law that legalizes racial profiling, Arizona legislators have also passed laws that ban ethnic studies and attack teachers based on perceived accents. In short, they are creating an atmosphere that is unsafe and unlivable for many, and it is time to fight back.

On Mother's Day, a delegation of national feminists and labor leaders, journalists and organizers - including several folks from the New Orleans Workers Center - went to Arizona to record the experiences of women and children in the wake of this bill.

According to a recent report from the Workers Center, "The testimonies we heard make clear in vivid and haunting detail that SB 1070 constitutes a violation of principles we hold dear. The draconian legislation has paved the way for assaults on basic human rights and has created an environment in which violence against women and children - physical, spiritual and legal - has been state-sanctioned. Recognizing these issues are relevant across ethnic and immigrant communities, the national outrage at the passage of this bill has catalyzed a movement for immigrant rights."

New Orleanians who had been to Arizona came to a reportback on Saturday, May 22, at First Grace United Methodist Church in Midcity. More than a hundred members and staff of the Workers Center and their allies, including representatives from STAND for Dignity, the Congress of Day Laborers, and Safe Streets Strong Communities, came out to the event. Black and Latino New Orleanians in attendance drew links between the racial profiling faced by African Americans here with that faced by Latinos in Arizona, and spoke of the importance of uniting and struggling together for justice everywhere.

As a next step, members of the Workers Center are planning to send a large delegation to Arizona for this weekend's mass protests and National Day of Action to Stop the Criminalization of Our Communities. Thousands of people concerned about justice from around the US as well as tens of thousands of Arizonans are expected to take to the streets for the massive protest in Arizona's capitol.

Similar legislation to SB 1070 has recently been introduced in 13 other states. This is an important time for us all to stand up and be counted.

Not Just Arizona: Immigration Enforcement Out of Control on Federal Level, By Bill Quigley

While people protest the terrible Arizona state law that uses local law enforcement to target immigrants, the federal government is expanding its efforts to use local law enforcement in immigration enforcement and has launched a major PR campaign to defend it.

One example of the out of control federal program occurred last week in Maryland. Florinda Lorenzo-Desimilian, a 26 year old married mother of three, lives in Prince George’s County Maryland. Last week she was arrested in her home by local police on a misdemeanor charge of selling $2 phone cards out of her apartment window without a license.

Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian was booked at the county jail. During booking, she was fingerprinted. Local police sent her prints to the FBI who in turn notified ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that she had overstayed her work visa. Even though her three children are U.S. citizens, ICE kept her in jail for two days and is now trying to deport her.

This is the result of a federal ICE and Homeland Security program called “Secure Communities” which is supposed to be targeting violent criminals. Instead, this program is really operating a dragnet scooping up and deporting tens of thousands of immigrants, like Ms. Lorenzo Desimilian, who are no security risk to anyone.

Congress provided funding to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security in 2008 to “identify aliens convicted of a crime, sentenced to imprisonment, who may be deportable, and remove them from the US once they are judged deportable.”

ICE says this program “supports public safety by strengthening efforts to identify and remove the most dangerous criminal aliens from the United States.”

However, ICE is not actually targeting convicted criminal aliens, dangerous aliens, or even violent aliens. They are targeting everyone.

ICE, through Secure Communities contracts with local law enforcement offices, runs every accused person’s fingerprints through multiple databases regardless how minor the charges. Thus, people like Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian are subject to ICE investigation, detention and deportation.

Monday, forty-five people protested with the human rights organization CASA Maryland against the ICE actions aimed at Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian. Maryland State Representative Del Victor Ramirez challenged the Secure Communities sweeps in a statement to the Maryland Gazette. “She’s not a threat. Should you really be deporting a nonviolent mother of three? There are much bigger problems we could be using our resources for.”

This ICE program is now operating in 165 jurisdictions in 20 states and aims to be in partnership with every local law enforcement office in the country in a few years. ICE admits that in its first one year period almost one million people were fingerprinted under this program. About one percent, or 11,000 people, were identified as immigrants arrested – arrested not convicted - for major crimes. Most of the people deported by ICE were picked up for minor or traffic charges and not violent crimes. As the Washington Post revealed in March, ICE has explicit internal goals to remove 150,000 immigrants through the “criminal alien removals” and to deport 250,000 others this year.

Basic information about the ICE Secure Communities program has never seen the light of day. Questions like what are the error rates, what is the cost, how is oversight done, what about accountability for racial profiling and other questions have not been publicly disclosed. That is why the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic of Benjamin Cardozo School of Law filed a federal Freedom of Information Act case against ICE and others this week.

Protests aimed at the Secure Communities programs have occurred this week in Houston, Washington DC, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh, San Bernardino, and Maryland. Critics say the program makes the public less safe not more because it effectively blurs the role between local law enforcement and ICE agents seeking to deport immigrants. Protestors challenge the program deports people before they are even found guilty of committing a crime or even if the
arrest was illegal or later dropped. They seek a moratorium on all ICE-local law enforcement partnerships until basic facts about the program are disclosed, debated and evaluated. They created a website of information at uncoverthetruth.org.

ICE responded to these protests with a six page internal media plan which included targeted op-eds in “major newspapers in the right cities where protests are planned.” The ICE media memo indicated it also arranged ICE interviews with the New York Times, the Associated Press, La Opinion, Telemundo and the BBC.

Regional ICE offices were directed to “reach out to English and Spanish language reporters initially in the eight cities where protests are planned Monday, April 23, to discuss the program and highlight its successes in that local area.” The ICE memo listed sound bites and talking points including “Secure Communities is not about immigration. It’s about information
sharing with local law enforcement…”

The ICE media plan also states incredibly, on page five, “To date, ICE has not received any complaints of racial profiling.” That would be real news to people across the country including Ms. Lorenzo-Similian and CASA Maryland.

As the Arizona experience shows us, combining local law enforcement and federal immigration can prove to be quite toxic. Perhaps if ICE would stop spending money on PR to defend its lack of transparency and spend it instead on sharing information about the program so it could be fairly evaluated, the public would be better served.

Bill Quigley is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His email is quigley77@gmail.com.