UNITED STATES: Immigration Raids Increase, Say Activists

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 21 1996 (IPS) - The rising wave of anti-immigrant sentiment has prompted federal authorities to step up raids on immigrants, activists accuse.

Several immigrants’ rights groups charge that in recent months, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) has sharply increased its raids, especially in workplaces where undocumented immigrants are believed to work.

“We’re seeing more workplace raids in New York,” said Judy Rabinovitz, senior staff counsel for the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Rabinovitz says the scale of the increase is still hard to determine, but that the numbers are sharply up.

Immigration advocates blame the surge in raids on factors ranging from election-year politics to a crackdown on labour organising by workers.

“INS has been conducting many more raids now than in the past,” says Ursula Levelt, legal director of the Centre for Immigrants’ Rights here. She estimates that there are roughly twice as many raids now than there were just a few months ago.

What makes the current situation exceptional is not simply the increase in raids by federal immigration authorities, but the targets. Levelt says that many legal, documented immigrants are being snared in the raids, and briefly sent into detention.

In some recent cases, she argues, INS authorities have seized documented workers and shipped them to detention as far as Louisiana before the workers could prove their legal residency in the United States.

“In the meantime, they were unable to go to work for a week, and you know how much that means for an average immigrant family,” Levelt says.

Rabinovitz says the quick detentions are, in part, a side effect of the sweeping anti-terrorist legislation signed by President Bill Clinton last month. Whereas before, undocumented immigrants could remain free while hearings on their status would be conducted, the new laws require the detention of all immigrants charged with even minor crimes, she says.

INS officials contacted by IPS declined to say how much the raids on immigrants have increased. But INS Commissioner Doris Meissner and Attorney General Janet Reno have both vowed in recent months to crack down on illegal immigration, and Meissner had noted with pride the 10 percent drop in legal immigration from 1994 to 1995 as “a statement that the system can work.”

“I’m sure the election year has something to do with it,” Levelt says of the increased raids. Clinton, she notes, is striking a tougher stance on illegal immigration to counter the challenge of the Republican Congress, some of whose mem,Y..HX9YCà,X[6Z7