Many in the crowd of San Francisco May Day marchers wore butterfly wings; the Monarch butterfly migrates to Mexico and then back to the U.S. every year. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
SAN FRANCISCO, California, May 2 2013 (IPS)

More than 1,000 people marched under the brilliant San Francisco sun on May Day. Their signs, such as “Work in America/Live in America/Dream in America. Immigration reform now,” their songs, chants and speeches wove together the twin themes of the day: worker justice and immigrant justice.

Alphonso Pines of the hotel and restaurant workers union Unite HERE put it this way, speaking to the crowd before the march: “We’re marching for our families; we’re marching to honour the sweat and the contributions of each and every working person. We’re marching to honour the beauty of each and every family – queer or straight, immigrant or born here. We’re marching because together we can make history.“People are getting separated from their families every day. We want a stop to that immediately." -- Kitzia Esteva of Causa Justa

“Together we can win immigration reform that includes all workers and all families. Together we can stop the pain of deportation.”

In all, there were some 85 marches calling for worker and immigrant rights around the U.S., including a march of 700 in Oakland, California, 2,000 in Los Angeles and several thousand in New York.

Seattle-based journalist Mark Taylor Canfield told IPS that unions brought large numbers of people out to a peaceful march of several thousand in Seattle. A break-off group broke windows and damaged property. Police reacted with “large amounts of pepper spray and flash-bang grenades,” he said. There were 13 arrests.

In San Francisco, Tessa Levine was getting ready to march with Mujeres Unidas. Like many in the crowd, she wore butterfly wings. The Monarch butterfly flies to Mexico then back to the U.S. every year, she said, explaining, “It’s really a symbol that migration is beautiful, that migration is natural.”

Still, migration is regulated by law. And at this point, no one knows exactly what the new immigration law will look like – or if one will actually make it through both houses of Congress and on to the president’s desk.

A number of demonstrators told IPS they had serious questions about the bill known as the Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform scheduled for consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 9.

A primary concern with the bill is the 13 years it would take most immigrants in the U.S. without documents to become citizens. The positive aspect is that, during the waiting period, they would be able to work legally. However, during that time, they would be excluded from social services, including the right to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

“We want a fast and just path to citizenship,” said Kitzia Esteva, of the advocacy organisation Causa Justa.Just Cause, noting that immigrants’ taxes pay for these services.

Emily Lee, with the Chinese Progressive Association, expressed similar concerns. Noting that one million out of the 11 million undocumented persons living in the U.S. are Asian-Pacific Islanders, she asked, “What does that mean when you’re paying back taxes, and you’re expected to contribute to the society, but you’re not receiving the benefits?”

But even getting onto the path for citizenship under the Senate bill under discussion could be impossible for people who have worked informally as day labourers or domestic workers, since the applicant is expected to show proof of having worked in the U.S.

“These are men who are working every day,” said Emiliano Bourgois-Chacon, with the San Francisco Day Labor Program and Women’s Collective. But because they are undocumented, they don’t have paperwork to prove they have been working, Bourgois-Chacon said.

Keeping the family together was another concern of May Day demonstrators.

The bill in the Senate would make it more difficult for families to sponsor siblings. “Family reunification has been a cornerstone of immigration in the U.S.,” Lee, of the Chinese Progressive Association, said. “And to start chipping away at that…is very problematic.”

Many people in the Chinese community wouldn’t otherwise have been able to come to the U.S., she added.

Deportations that rip families apart are of great concern to a number of demonstrators IPS interviewed. There have been some 800 deportations from San Francisco since 2009, with the introduction of Secure Communities or “S-Comm”, the programme where local police share arrest information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Estava of Causa Justa.

Across the Bay in Alameda County, the Oakland-Berkeley area, there have been 2,000 deportations since 2009.

“People are getting separated from their families every day,” Estava said. “We want a stop to that immediately. We are fighting to get local police to stop the collaboration between police and ICE, and we have that same demand on the national level with immigration reform.”

Deportation has also heavily impacted the Arab immigrant community, said Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. “There’s obviously racial discrimination and systemic criminalisation of Arabs and Muslims here in the United States, which leads oftentimes to deportation,” she said.

Like Estava, Kiswani said the high number of deportations comes from collaboration between local and federal law enforcement. “There should be an end to S-Comm so that there’s more accountability to local law enforcement and so that people aren’t unjustly targeted and deported for various misdemeanors,” she said.

Another problem with the current and proposed law is the E-verify programme through which an employer can verify a person’s social security number. ICE can request an employer perform an E-verify audit.

Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees International Union Local 87, said a few years ago several hundred of her union janitors were targeted by an E-verify audit, fired, and “lost everything overnight”.

Esteva pointed to another problem with the proposed law: putting resources into enhanced law enforcement on the border.

ICE and the border patrol have the most law enforcement money in the country, Esteva said. “Instead of putting that money into border enforcement, we could see a lot more social services and resources for the community. We think that money would not be well invested in protecting the border.”

Nancy Mackowsky marched the two-mile route holding an American Federation of Teachers banner. She teaches English as a second language at San Francisco City College and said some of her students work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., then come to her class in the evening four days a week.

“They have goals, they have dreams and they deserve to be able to fulfill them,” she said.

The TRUST Act would allow local police to detain individuals for ICE only if they are convicted of a serious crime. Credit: photostock

By Charlotte Silver
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

Challenges are mounting to a key U.S. immigration enforcement programme that requires local police to share the fingerprints of individuals they arrest, triggering a federal investigation into the immigration status of the detainee.

Introduced in 2008, the Secure Communities programme (S-Comm) rapidly expanded over the next four years utilising approximately 750 million dollars allotted to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the programme."Immigrant communities are more fearful of going to the police, to report crimes they are victims of." -- ALC's Tim Huey

This month, the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) sued ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for information related to the agencies’ communications with California government officials about the California TRUST Act and S-Comm.

The lawsuit was filed after ICE failed to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request the San Francisco-based civil rights organisation submitted over three months ago.

The ALC submitted the FOIA request on Dec. 21, 2012 because of suspicions that ICE had attempted to improperly influence the governor’s decision on the TRUST Act, which was reintroduced to the state assembly that month.

“ICE has a history of misrepresenting facts about the Secure Communities program to the public and to state and local officials. ICE also has a history of attempting to influence state and local officials who seek to limit compliance with Secure Communities,” the complaint, filed on Apr. 9 with a San Francisco District Court, states.

According to the complaint, ICE has had two private meetings with Governor Jerry Brown: one before Brown’s veto of the bill last September and one shortly after the TRUST Act was reintroduced by California state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano on Dec. 3, 2012.

California’s revised TRUST Act is slated to be voted on by the State Assembly on May 31.

“There’s a public right to know about issues surrounding pending legislation. The public has a right to know what information was given that may have motivated decisions on the bill,” said Jessica Karp, an adjunct professor at University of California, Irvine who also works with UC Irvine’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, which is representing ALC.

The TRUST Act, which passed the California Senate and State Assembly last summer only to be vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown on Sep. 30, 2012, would prevent the pre-conviction sharing of fingerprints by law enforcement with ICE, allowing local police to detain individuals for ICE only if they are convicted of a serious crime.

The TRUST Act was designed to alter the state’s participation in ICE’s Secure Communities programme, which is responsible for deporting 266,137 immigrants, ostensibly in order to prioritise the deportation of immigrants convicted of serious crimes. However, according to ICE’s statistics, less than 30 percent of those deported were convicted of Level 1 crimes.

“When it was first implemented it was politically untouchable,” Karp told IPS, explaining that it was impossible to publicly oppose a piece of legislation with the stated objective of removing serious criminals.

But two years after it was implemented, the actual impact on the community has been very different from the programme’s alleged goal. The vast majority of those detained or deported under S-Comm had no criminal history or had committed, at most, a small misdemeanor.

Numerous stories of individuals ending up in deportation proceedings because they had committed small infractions, traffic violations – or were themselves the victims of crime – quickly hit the news.

As Karp explained, “Secure Communities has allowed ICE to use local law enforcement agencies to help them meet their deportation quota of 400,000 people each year. S-Comm helps them do that using local resources.”

In addition, S-Comm has proven to be a pricey measure for state and local resources, costing the state of California an estimated 65 million dollars a year to detain immigrants for ICE.

In response to the overwhelming evidence that S-Comm was not focusing on serious criminals, some local communities, law enforcement agencies and state legislatures attempted to opt-out of the programme in which they had initially agreed to participate by voluntarily signing a Memorandum of Agreement.

San Francisco’s sheriff, Michael Hennessey, was one of the first to seek to opt out in 2010.

In an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle in May 2011, Hennessy wrote, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial Secure Communities program violates… hard-earned trust with immigrant residents.”

Hennessy went on to explain that S-Comm gave local law enforcement no discretion over which arrestees would trigger an ICE deportation proceeding.

Counties throughout California and the nation followed suit in seeking to opt-outof the programme.

However, to the confoundment of many localities and state representatives, ICE responded by asserting that sharing fingerprints was no longer optional and canceling the initial Memorandum of Agreements.

ICE has repeatedly emphasised that S-Comm targets immigrants with criminal histories, but evidence that the programme continues to ensnare individuals with no criminal conduct or background abounds.

In early April, in Bakersfield, California, Ruth Montano – a 14-year resident of the state whose three children were born and raised in the United States – faced deportation proceedings after police came to her apartment in response to neighbours’ complaints over her barking dogs.

Montano’s case caught the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and immigrants’ advocacy group Cuentame, which orchestrated a successful information campaign to pressure for Montano’s release from deportation. But as ACLU lawyer Jennie Pasquarella pointed out at the time, Montano’s good fortune is the exception.

“Immigrant communities are more fearful of going to the police, to report crimes they are victims of. This is why the TRUST Act is so important, so that Secure Communities can do what it is meant to do while restoring trust between local law enforcement and immigrant communities,” Tim Huey of the ALC told IPS.

While the TRUST Act was originally drafted for California, copycat bills have been proposed in Massachusetts, Florida, Connecticut, Colorado and a number of other localities this year.

ICE does not take an official position on pending legislation and thus has not stated opposition to the TRUST Act. The agency would not comment on pending litigation with the Asian Law Caucus.