As the right wingers fanned the flames of anti-immigrant hatred, a liberal response began to emerge and then suddenly you were hearing it everywhere. Rather than persecuting and torturing and murdering "aliens" as the right wingers advocated, they advocated hurting the employers. (Can we dispense with all of the euphemisms? Seriously hurting "aliens" - otherwise known as people who are different than "us," with "us" being straight white males, is what this has always been about: hurting people of color and dissidents and GLBTQ people and poor people in any way possible, here, in Iraq, at Guantanamo, wherever and whenever.)

In other words, the liberals were in complete agreement with the right wingers on all of the fundamental points: that there is such a thing as "aliens" who were "illegal," that there is a "them" as opposed to "us," that there is a "problem" that "we" must "do something about," and that punishment is the most appropriate tool for achieving any social change.

Now we are seeing the results of the liberal approach to "the problem," and as is so often the case it is worse than the right wing approach.

The Brutal Dark Side of Obama's "Softer" Immigration Enforcement

Ana Contreras would have been a competitor for the national tai kwon do championship team this year. She's 14. For six years she's gone to practice instead of birthday parties, giving up the friendships most teenagers live for. Then two months ago disaster struck. Her mother Dolores lost her job. The money for classes was gone, and not just that.

"I only bought clothes for her once a year, when my tax refund check came," Dolores Contreras explains. "Now she needs shoes, and I had to tell her we didn't have any money. I stopped the cable and the internet she needs for school. When my cell phone contract is up next month, I'll stop that too. I've never had enough money for a car, and now we've gone three months without paying the light bill."

Contreras shares her misery with eighteen hundred other families. All lost their jobs when their employer, American Apparel, fired them for lacking immigration status. {Her name was changed for this article.] She still has her letter from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), handed her two months ago by the company lawyer. It says the documents she provided when she was hired are no good, and without work authorization, her work life is over.

Of course, it's not really over. Contreras still has to keep working if she and her daughter are to eat and pay rent. So instead of a job that barely paid her bills, she had to find another one that won't even do that.

Contreras is a skilled sewing machine operator. She came to the U.S. thirteen years ago, after working many years in the garment factories of Tehuacan, Puebla. There companies like Levis make so many pairs of stonewashed jeans that the town's water has turned blue. In Los Angeles, Contreras hoped to find the money to send home for her sister's weekly dialysis treatments, and to pay the living and school expenses for four other siblings. For five years she moved from shop to shop. Like most garment workers, she didn't get paid for overtime, her paychecks were often short, and sometimes her employer disappeared overnight, owing weeks in back pay.

Finally Contreras got a job at American Apparel, famous for its sexy clothing, made in Los Angeles instead of overseas. She still had to work like a demon. Her team of ten experienced seamstresses turned out 30 dozen tee shirts an hour. After dividing the piece rate evenly among them, she'd come home with $400 for a 4-day week, after taxes. She paid Social Security too, although she'll never see a dime in benefits because her contributions were credited to an invented number.

Now Contreras's working again in a sweatshop at half what she earned before. Meanwhile, American Apparel is replacing those who were fired. Contreras says they're mostly older women with documents, who can't work as fast. "Maybe they sew 10 dozen a day apiece," she claims. "The only operators with papers are the older ones. Younger, faster workers either have no papers, or if they have them, they find better-paying jobs doing something easier.

"President Obama is responsible for putting us in this situation," she charges angrily. "This is worse than an immigration raid. They want to keep us from working at all."

Contreras may be angry, but she's not wrong. The White House website says "President Obama will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by preventing employers from hiring undocumented workers and enforcing the law." On June 24 he told Congress members that the government was "cracking down on employers who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages -- and oftentimes mistreat those workers." The law Obama is enforcing is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which requires employers to keep records of workers' immigration status, and prohibits them from hiring those who have no legal documents, or "work authorization." In effect, the law made it a crime for undocumented immigrants to work. This provision, employer sanctions, is the legal basis for all the workplace immigration raids and enforcement of the last 23 years. "Sanctions pretend to punish employers," says Bill Ong Hing, law professor at the University of California at Davis. "In reality, they punish workers." The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of DHS said early this year that it was auditing the records of 654 companies nationwide. The audit at American Apparel actually began in 2007, under President Bush. In Minneapolis, another Bush-era audit examined the records of janitors employed by American Building Maintenance. In May, the company and ICE told 1200 workers that if they didn't provide new documents that showed that they could legally work, they'd be fired. Weekly firings in groups of 300 began in October. The janitors belong to Service Employees Local 26, and work at union wages. The terminations took place as the union was negotiating a new contract.

In Los Angeles 254 workers at Overhill Farms were fired in May. The company, with over 800 employees, was audited by the Internal Revenue Service earlier this year. According to John Grant, packinghouse division director for Local 770 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents production employees at the food processing plant, "they found discrepancies in the Social Security numbers of many workers. Overhill then sent a letter on April 6 to 254 people-- all members of our union - giving them 30 days to reconcile their numbers."

On May 2 the company stopped the production lines and sent everyone home, saying, according to worker Isela Hernandez, "there would be no work until they called us to come back." For 254 people that call never came. According to Alex Auerbach, spokesperson for Overhill Farms, "the company was required by federal law to terminate these employees because they had invalid Social Security numbers. To do otherwise would have exposed both the employees and the company to criminal and civil prosecution."

"We asked to see the IRS letter or any other documents related to this," Grant responds. "We've never heard of the IRS demanding the termination of a worker. They never showed us any letter. The company doesn't have to terminate these people. No document we know of says they do." Some of the terminated workers actually had valid Social Security numbers, and were fired anyway.

Workers accuse the company of hiring replacements, classified as "part timers," who don't receive the benefits in the union contract. "By getting rid of the regular workers, to whom they have to pay benefits, they're saving a lot of money," worker Lucia Vasquez charges. Auerbach says the replacements are paid at the same rate, although he acknowledges they lack benefits.

The history of workplace immigration enforcement is filled with examples of employers who use audits and discrepancies as pretexts to discharge union militants or discourage worker organization. The 16-year union drive at the Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina, for instance, saw two raids, and the firing of 300 workers for bad Social Security numbers.

Nevertheless, whether or not they're motivated by economic gain or anti-union animus, the current firings highlight larger questions of immigration enforcement policy. "These workers have not only done nothing wrong, they've spent years making the company rich. No one ever called company profits illegal, or says they should give them back to the workers. So why are the workers called illegal?" asks Nativo Lopez, director of the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana. The Hermandad, with roots in Los Angeles' immigrant rights movement going back to legendary activist Bert Corona, has organized protests against the firings at Overhill Farms and American Apparel. "Any immigration policy that says these workers have no right to work and feed their families is wrong and needs to be changed," he declares.

President Obama says sanctions enforcement targets employers "who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages -- and oftentimes mistreat those workers." This restates a common Bush administration rationale for workplace raids. Former ICE Director Julie Meyers asserted that she was targeting "unscrupulous criminals who use illegal workers to cut costs and gain a competitive advantage." An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claims "unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions." Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting the workers who endure them doesn't help the workers or change the conditions, however. But that's not who ICE targets anyway. Workers at Smithfield were trying to organize a union to improve conditions. Overhill Farms has a union. American Apparel pays better than most garment factories. In Minneapolis, the 1200 fired janitors at ABM get a higher wage than non-union workers - and they had to strike to win it.

ICE's campaign of audits and firings, which SEIU Local 26 president Javier Murillo calls "the Obama enforcement policy," targets the same set of employers the Bush raids went after - union companies or those with organizing drives. If anything, ICE seems intent on punishing undocumented workers who earn too much, or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions.

And despite Obama's notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM the employers were rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution. ICE threatened to fine Dov Charney, American Apparel's owner, but then withdrew the threat, according to attorney Peter Schey. Murillo says, "the promise made during the audit is that if the company cooperates and complies, they won't be fined. So this policy really only hurts workers."

And the justification for hurting workers is also implicit in the policy announced on the White House site: "remove incentives to enter the country illegally." This was the original justification for employer sanctions in 1986 - if migrants can't work, they won't come. Of course, people did come, because at the same time Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, it also began debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement. That virtually guaranteed future migration. Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, over six million Mexicans, like Dolores Contreras, have been driven by poverty across the border. "The real questions we need to ask are what uproots people in Mexico," Hing says, "and why U.S. employers rely so heavily on low-wage workers."

No one in the Obama or Bush administrations, or the Clinton administration before them, wants to stop migration to the U.S. or imagines that this could be done without catastrophic consequences. The very industries they target for enforcement are so dependent on the labor of migrants they would collapse without it. Instead, immigration policy and enforcement consigns those migrants to an "illegal" status, and undermines the price of their labor. Enforcement is a means for managing the flow of migrants, and making their labor available to employers at a price they want to pay.

In 1998, the Clinton administration mounted the largest sanctions enforcement action to date, in which agents sifted through the names of 24,310 workers in 40 Nebraska meatpacking plants. They then sent letters to 4,762 people, saying their documents were bad, and over 3500 were forced from their jobs. Mark Reed, who directed "Operation Vanguard," claimed it was really intended to pressure Congress and employer groups to support guest worker legislation. "We depend on foreign labor," he declared. "If we don't have illegal immigration anymore, we'll have the political support for guest workers."

Bush's DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said the same thing. "There's an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the front door and you shut the back door." "Opening the front door" allows employers to recruit workers to come to the U.S., giving them visas that tie their ability to stay to their employment. And to force workers to come through this system, "closing the back door" criminalizes migrants who work without "work authorization." As Arizona governor, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano supported this arrangement, signing the state's own draconian employer sanctions bill, while supporting guest worker programs.

In its final proposal to "shut the back door," the Bush administration announced a regulation requiring employers to fire any worker whose Social Security number didn't match SSA's database. Social Security no-match letters don't currently require employers to fire workers with mismatched numbers, although employers have nevertheless used them to terminate thousands of people. Bush would have made such terminations mandatory. Unions, the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center got an injunction to stop the rule's implementation in the summer of 2008, arguing it would harm citizens and legal residents who might be victims of clerical mistakes. In October 2009, the Obama administration decided not to contest the injunction. But while dropping Bush's regulation, DHS announced it would beef up the use of the E-Verify electronic database, arguing that it's more efficient in targeting the undocumented.

Social Security, however, continues to send no-match letters to employers, and the E-Verify database is compiled, in part, by sifting through Social Security numbers, looking for mismatches. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called on employers to screen new hires using E-Verify, and said those who do so will be entitled to put a special logo on their products stating "I E-Verify."

John T. Morton, DHS assistant secretary for ICE, told the New York Times in November that the 654 companies audited in 2008 and early 2009 were just a beginning, and that audits would be expanded to an additional 1000 companies. "All manner of companies face the very real possibility that the government ... is going to come knocking on the door," he warned. The original 654 audits, Morton said, had already led to action at 328 employers, which presumably will include a demand to fire workers identified as undocumented.

This growing wave of firings is provoking sharp debate in unions, especially those with large immigrant memberships. Many of the food processing workers at Overhill Farms and ABM's janitors have been dues-paying members for years. They expect the union to defend them when the company fires them for lack of status. "The union should try to stop people from losing their jobs," demanded Erlinda Silerio, an Overhill Farms worker. "It should try to get the company to hire us back, and pay compensation for the time we've been out."

At American Apparel, although there was no union, some workers had actively tried to form one in past years. Jose Covarrubias got a job as a cleaner when the garment union was helping them organize. "I'd worked with the International Ladies' Garment Workers and the Garment Workers Center before," he recalls, "in sweatshops where we sued the owners when they disappeared without paying us. When I got to American Apparel I joined right away. I debated with the non-union workers, trying to convince them the union would defend us."

The twelve million undocumented people in the U.S., spread in factories, fields and construction sites throughout the country, encompass lots of workers like Covarrubias. Many are aware of their rights and anxious to improve their lives. National union organizing campaigns, like Justice for Janitors and Hotel Workers Rising, depend on the determination and activism of these immigrants, documented and undocumented alike.

That reality finally convinced the AFL-CIO in 1999 to reject the federation's former support for employer sanctions, and call for repeal. Unions recognized that sanctions enforcement makes it much more difficult for workers to defend their rights, organize unions, and raise wages.

Opposing sanctions, however, puts labor in opposition to the current administration, which it helped elect. Some Washington DC lobbying groups have decided to support the administration policy of sanctions enforcement instead. One of them, Reform Immigration for America, says, "any employment verification system should determine employment authorization accurately and efficiently." Verification of authorization is exactly what happened at American Apparel and ABM, and inevitably leads to firings. The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win labor federation this spring also agreed on a new immigration position that supports a "secure and effective worker authorization mechanism ...one that determines employment authorization accurately while providing maximum protection for workers." Covarrubias is left defenseless by such protection, however. Instead, he says, "we need the unity of workers. There are 15 million people in the AFL-CIO. They have a lot of economic and political power. Why don't they oppose these firings and defend us?" he asks. "We've contributed to this movement for 20 years, and we're not leaving. We're going to stay and fight for a more just immigration reform." Nativo Lopez says he'll organize the workers being fired if unions won't, although recently he also expressed a desire for greater cooperation with the UFCW in the defense of fired workers. Last year the Hermandad began setting up workers' councils in southern California neighborhoods, to oppose employer sanctions and help workers resist them. "If companies start firing people as they have here, this place will look like a war zone," he warns, "but if we fight to defend people, we can organize them."

http://www.alternet.org/rights/144584/the_brutal_dark_side_of_obama%27s_%22softer%22_immigration_enforcement?page=entire

By David Bacon

"We Can Make Him Disappear"

Immigration Officials Are Holding People In Secret, Unmarked Jails

By Jacqueline Stevens

In addition to publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is holding prisoners in 186 unlisted, unmarked locations, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces.

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants -- nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. "This points to an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of ICE," said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957 immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his official bio stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 287(g) program," legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration law enforcement functions.

A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on background, saw the list and exclaimed, "You cannot have secret detention! The public has the right to know where detention is happening."

Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far Away." Even she had never heard of the subfield offices and was concerned that the failure to disclose their locations violates the UN's Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. She explained that the government must provide "an impartial authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known to a court."

The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers, documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at in the Schriro report, as well as cover-ups.

ICE refused a request for an interview, selectively responded to questions sent by e-mail and refused to identify the person authorizing the reply -- another symptom of ICE thwarting transparency and hence accountability. The anonymous official provided no explanation for ICE not posting a list of subfield office locations and phone numbers or for its lack of a real-time locator database.

It is not surprising to find that, with no detention rules and being off the map spatially and otherwise, ICE agents at these locations are acting in ways that are unconscionable and unlawful. According to Ahilan Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."

It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.

Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. "No one could visit; they couldn't find me. I was thinking these people are going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and sell them in the local market."

Sleep deprivation and extreme cold were among the "enhanced interrogation" techniques promoted by the Bush White House and later set aside by the Justice Department because of concerns that they amounted to torture. Although without the intent to elicit information, ICE under the Obama administration was holding people charged with a civil infraction in conditions approaching those no longer authorized for accused terrorists.

According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City, "Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous. Their procedures are lax. You've got these senior agents who have all the authority in the world because they're out in the middle of nowhere. You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked." Like other attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card, was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin said, describing the hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads, unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each infraction. "I argued with the guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is this?'" Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy here."

Rafael Galvez, an attorney in Maine, explained why he would like ICE to release its entire list of subfield office addresses and phone numbers. "If they're detaining someone, I will need to contact the people on the list. If I can advocate on a person's behalf and provide documents, a lot of complications could be avoided."

Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, has a typical subfield office at the rear of CentreWest Commons, an office park adjacent to gated communities, large artificial ponds and an Oxford University Press production plant. ICE's low-lying brick building with a bright blue awning has darkened windows, no sign and no US flag. People in shackles and handcuffs are shuffled in from the rear. The office complex has perhaps twenty other businesses, all of which do have signs. The agents, who are armed, might not wear uniforms and drive their passengers in unmarked, often windowless white vans. Even Dani Martinez-Moore, who lives nearby and coordinates the North Carolina Network of Immigrant Advocates, did not know people were being held there until she read about it on my blog.

In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison, where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an immigration judge."

Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.

Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in the North Carolina prison system, but the trail went cold after he was transferred to ICE custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila envelope [he sent to the prison]--'Refused'--and we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was crying. "We kept trying to find out where he was." It never crossed their minds that Mark might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

ICE spokesman Temple Black first told me the list was "not releasable" and that it was "law enforcement sensitive," but coordinator for community outreach Andrew Lorenzen-Strait e-mailed me a partial list of addresses and no phone numbers. I then obtained a more complete list, including telephone numbers, in response to a FOIA request. That list, received in November and dated September 2009, is about forty locations shy of the 186 subfield offices mentioned in the Schriro report and omits thirty-nine locations listed in an August ICE job announcement seeking applicants for immigration enforcement agents. These include ICE postings in Champlain, New York; Alamosa, Colorado; Pembroke Pines, Florida; and Livermore, California. The anonymous ICE official neither answered questions about why I was sent an incomplete list nor accounted for the disparity in official explanations of the list's confidentiality.

ICE obscures its presence in other ways as well. Everyone knows that detention centers are in sparsely populated areas, but according to Amnesty International's Reynolds, policy director of migrant and refugee rights, "Quite a lot of communities don't know they're detaining thousands of people, because the signs say Service Processing Center," not Detention Center, although the latter designation is used for privately contracted facilities. The ICE e-mail stated that the "service processing" term was first used when the centers were run by the predecessor agency Immigration and Naturalization Service, "because these facilities were used to process aliens for deportation," ignoring the fact that these structures were and are distinctive for confining people and not the Orwellian "processing."

Even the largest complexes, which are usually off side roads from small highways, are visible only if you drive right up to the entrance. Unlike federal prisons, detention centers post no road signs to guide travelers. The anonymous ICE official would not provide a reason for this disparity.

ICE agents are also working in hidden offices in one of the grooviest buildings in one of the hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Tommy Kilbride, an ICE detention and removal officer and a star of A&E's reality show Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force, is part of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force, housed on the third floor of the Chelsea Market, above Fat Witch Bakery and alongside Rachael Ray and the Food Network. Across the street are Craftsteak and Del Posto, both fancy venues for two other Food Network stars, Tom Colicchio and Mario Batali. Above their restaurants are agents working for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Someone who had been working in that building for about a year said he had heard rumors of FBI agents, though he didn't see one until nine months later when a guy was openly carrying a gun through the lobby. In November, at midday, he saw two men in plain clothes walk a third man in handcuffs through a side-street door behind Craftsteak. "It was weird, creepy," he said, adding that the whole arrangement made him uncomfortable. "I don't like it. It makes you wonder, what are they hiding? Is it for good reasons or bad reasons?"

Natalie Jeremijenko, who lives nearby and is a professor of visual arts at New York University, pointed out the "twisted genius" of hiding federal agents in the "worldwide center of visuality and public space," referring to the galleries and High Line park among these buildings. Jeremijenko was incensed. "For a participatory democracy to work, you need to have real-time visual evidence of what is going on" and not just knowledge by professors who file a FOIA request or even readers of a Nation article.

In response to a question about the absence of signs at subfield offices, the ICE e-mail stated, "ICE attempts to place signs wherever possible, however there are many variables to consider such as shared buildings, law enforcement activities, zoning laws, etc." Except for "law enforcement activities," the reasons did not apply to the facilities listed here, as evidenced by signs on adjacent businesses.

The Obama administration continued to ignore complaints about the LA subfield office known as B-18 until April 1, when Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as ICE officials, were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center. In September, the parties reached a settlement. The ACLU's Arulanantham said, "I never understood what ICE had to gain. The fact that after we filed the suit they completely fixed it makes it more mysterious" as to why their months of earlier negotiation brought few results. At the time of the lawsuit, he said, the nearby Mira Loma Detention Center had space. When I asked if ICE was trying to punish people by bringing them to B-18, Arulanantham said, "No, no one was targeted," adding, "If it were punitive, it would be less disturbing."

Arulanantham's response is, alas, more than fodder for a law school hypothetical about whether intentional or unintentional rights violations are more egregious. In 2006 ICE punished several Iraqi hunger strikers in Virginia--they were protesting being unlawfully held for more than six months after agreeing to deportation--by shuffling them between a variety of different facilities, ensuring that they would not encounter lawyers or be found by loved ones. This went on from weeks to months, according to Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the National Immigration Forum. "The message was, We're going to make you disappear."

As an alternative to the system of unmarked subfield offices and unaccountable agents, consider the approach of neighborhood police precincts, where dangerous criminals are held every day and police carry out their work in full view of their neighbors. Not only can citizens watch out for strange police actions, and know where to look if a family member is missing; local accountability helps discourage misconduct. ICE agents' persistent flouting of rules and laws is abetted by their ability to scurry back to secret dens, avoiding the scrutiny and resulting inhibitions that arise when law enforcement officers develop relationships with the communities they serve.

Indeed, the jacket Kilbride wears during arrests says POLICE in large letters. Working out of a heretofore secret location -- Manhunters has no exterior shots -- one that his supervisor had requested I not reveal, gives their operation the trappings of a secret police. An attorney who had a client held in a subfield office said on background, "The president released in January a memorandum about transparency, but that's not happening. He says one thing, but we have these clandestine operations, akin to extraordinary renditions within the United States. They're misguided as to what their true mission is, and they are doing things contrary to the best interests of the country."

http://www.alternet.org/rights/144656/%22we_can_make_him_disappear%22%3A_immigration_officials_are_holding_people_in_secret%2C_unmarked_jails?page=entire

He'd been detained in Russia, then been deported. He'd been detained in Pakistan, in Germany... I think once somewhere in the middle east, maybe Dubai.

He rated Germany as the best. He had a bed, he had meals, he even had tv. From the smile as he related the experience, it might well have been nicer than where he'd grown up in India (I think he was from somewhere in Kashmir, not sure though... his English is awful).

He rated Russia as the worst... a hard cot, a thin blanket, cold, and showers only once a week. I don't think he liked the food either.

From the sounds of this article... the US has *finally gotten its shit together, and is no longer coddling illegal immigrants... "if Russia can make it awful, well, this is the USA! We can make it worse !!"

** of course, I forgot to ask him where he got the obviously prison "AUM" tattoo... Maybe the next time I see him, I'll ask, and let him know that he should make sure to keep his paperwork here in the States current...

http://www.monmouth.edu/academics/API/religious_studies/images/aum7.jpg

Restaurant guy I know, an immigrant himself, just opened an restaurant in one of the mill towns, doing surprisingly well. Told me last week he was really worried about ICE, word is out they're working the area..........

The screw keeps on turning. I talked about the Ohio BMV decision that made it impossible for immigrants to register vehicles on another thread. We had two more members stopped for driving while being brown this weekend. One was in Cincinnati; the car was impounded, but the driver was released with misdemeanor tickets for no license and improper registration. The other was in a suburb and was arrested for the same offenses, and sits in jail with an immigration hold and will shortly be deported. His wife, has temporary legal status, but was still arrested and later released. Another member went to court to plead to the same charges on Friday, and was immediately arrested by ICE.

We've (a delegation of our members, Faith and Community leaders) met with the Cincinnati Police Chief, and were told they will not spot check registrations, and if someone is stopped for a traffic violation, they will take the car, but only issue tickets for driver's license/registration violations. Same with the Sheriff of Hamilton County. So far that has been the case.

The suburbs are a different story. We're trying to meet with law enforcement in all of them, and so far they love the idea of being able to scan some plates and grab people. A couple of these areas house large immigrant populations, so people are trying to avoid driving through them.

A law suit continues to try to overturn the BMV ruling. We've been very successful in setting up volunteer drivers to take people to work, doctors appointments, food shopping, etc. I'm facilitating that effort, and am amazed at how many people are willing to help. Today, I got a woman to work at 7:00 AM, and told several other volunteers who could do it, that I had it covered. I have dozens of hook-ups arranged for the next couple of weeks. Yeah, this is the least of reform bullshit, but I gotta think that everyone benefits, politically, from it.

So here's the deal, I keep trying to tell everyone involved: members, staff, volunteers, activists, etc., that collective action on all fronts is the only way we can survive this assault. But, truthfully, I don't believe it. If the legal remedy doesn't occur (and it usually doesn't), immigrant workers will not be able to drive, and thus work in this state. In Cincinnati alone it is 5,300 families whose registrations have been canceled.

The one thing that is evident is that this crap leads to solidarity among immigrants and other low wage workers. Our membership meetings have been huge, multi-ethnic and united around this issue. Our members to date think that lobbying for immigration reform is the way forward. I don't think we'll get it without militant action, but it's not my call.

I don't think there is anything to say to reassure or even console you or all the people under siege in Ohio. I can only say that this type of situation is part of what we're trying to develop a means of coping with. Not the direct struggle, but the mental battery that accompanies it.

There's no easy answer other than we can't give up, and we can't withdraw. Now is the time to make our aims and intentions bolder and our criticisms that much louder.

Those things start to seem pointless or empty or theoretical in the face of real defeats and setbacks I know. My experiences aren't on the same scale as you're working on, but I could tell you some tales from my rinky dink hometown that would leave you staggering.

Use us to vent, man

Nah, I'm doing OK. My domestic partner and I (she's as active as I am in our Workers Center) tend to get really angry instead of feeling down. We just get so pissed, that it becomes difficult not to jump ahead of the organization.

So far, since Dec. 8, 10% of our members have been stopped for bad registration. That's out of about 100 Latinos. Can you imagine what's going on statewide? It has got to be thousands of people.

Many people who are involved in liberal and Left politics here, know us as voices for the WC, so we really can't speak, entirely, independently. We can still put forward a pretty radical line, internally, but don't, and won't, try to convince our immigrant and low wage worker members that the work should explicitly focus on ending Capitalism. It's no surprise to people that they are involved in class struggle, they just don't see revolution as a possibility.

As an organization, we are usually able to escalate any reform campaign. It just depends on where we start. This time we're starting pretty far down, relying on lawyers and appeals to law enforcement and policy makers. Our members will up the ante (unless they're all deported).

:)