State-Sponsored Terrorism: Obama, Napolitano expand 287(g) Program : AZ IMC

SWAT teams of eight officers, bulletproof vests, shotguns, wearing jackets that read, “ICE Police” surround a home in Brooklyn, NY. An eleven-year-old girl answers the door at 6:02 a.m. to a team of ICE officers busting in, looking for her father—her father was in the shower getting ready up for work—the agents end up taking her father and then taking her uncle, who wasn’t even listed on their warrant. In another instance in Berry Hill, Tennessee, rather than issuing a routine ticket, a police officer arrested a driver in her last days of pregnancy. In jail, an ICE-deputized corrections officer placed a civil immigration detainer on her, subjecting her to indefinite incarceration pending ICE action. She went into labor while shackled to a jail hospital bed.

With police state-terrorism, increased militarization, persecution and surveillance of communities all over the country, it is ever-more clear that the war against migrants is escalating in intensity levels. The 287(g) program is plaguing local communities across the US. 287(g) is a brief section in federal immigration law passed under the Clinton administration allowing Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to come into agreement with local law enforcement agencies to train local “designated officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions.” Implemented by George W. Bush, this program has been widely criticized for increasing racial profiling and singling out “Latino” people for arrest without suspicion of a crime.
This month, under the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the expansion of the controversial 287(g) program to eleven new locations across the country. This is after community grassroots organizing efforts pushed the Department of Justice to call for an investigation on 287(g)’s most controversial contract— that between ICE and Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County—for serious civil rights violations.

Arpaio has gotten out of control. His deputies roam the streets in black ski masks, separating children from their parents during routine traffic stops. People with known connections to white supremacist groups are in charge of law enforcement activity. Vigilantes deputized as part of an official “posse program” raid government buildings with assault weapons and dogs to chase down suspected janitors. On February 4, 2009, Arpaio paraded 220 chained and shackled migrants through the streets of Phoenix from a detention center to a segregated "tent city" in the desert surrounded by a recently installed electric fence, where it can reach 120 degrees daily. Arpaio has cut their access to healthcare and plans to force them to work in chain gangs if they "misbehave." Currently, Arpaio is the poster child of the 287(g) program, and now Obama and Napolitano have given him the green light to continue his reign of terror—terrorism promising to continue extending to other counties.

As if this weren’t enough trauma and terror for the migrant community to experience, the Obama administration has also decided to expand and strengthen implementation of other controversial programs like E-Verify and Secure Communities. E-Verify is an electronic system that checks people’s eligibility to work, and Secure Communities brings ICE agents into local jails to identify and deport undocumented prisoners.

Apparently, it does not matter what party is in power—each one continues and expands on the colonial policies of the previous one. Whichever party is selected to rule, it serves a system founded on genocide, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexism. So it should come to no surprise that under a black, Democratic president, we are witnessing the largest racial state terrorism this country has ever seen. The 287(g) program has laid down the legal permission for an Amerikan gestapo to be unleashed to profile, persecute, raid, arrest, detain, prosecute, deport, murder and terrorize entire communities at levels and lengths never before seen in U.S. history.

In terms of solutions, we should have no faith in a “comprehensive immigration reform” because Obama and Napolitano have further proven to us that “immigration reform” is nothing but a code word for more betrayal, enforcement, terror, detentions, and deportations. Furthermore, “Immigration reform” is code word for more bloodshed at the U.S.-Mexico border, in detention centers and in our own communities. The federal investigations on Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the 287(g) program are fraudulent—how much time is needed to conclude that the actions of this government and this system are hypocritical, terrorist and criminal? For short-term solutions, the 287(g) program must be terminated and the migrant-industrial-complex abolished.

In conclusion, as the war escalates, there is no other choice but to increase and escalate our resistance. If we don’t organize to end this system that keeps us all down, generations to come will continue living in a militarized, police state of terror. Grassroots community and youth organizing has never been as critical in our history as it is at this very moment.

Please read the Justice Strategies report “Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement”. You can find it at http://www.justicestrategies.org

Also go to http://www.democracynow.org for more information

I think you would be better served telling your illegal friends to stay out of the US. That they are whining about being caught is idiocy. Stay your illegal ass home.