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Civil Rights 
Wed Dec 15, 2010 at 23:00:00 PM EST
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In Shenandoah, PA, the community is inching its way toward justice.
Three federal indictments that include commission of a hate crime, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, official misconduct, and extortion have been recently handed down by a federal grand jury in the case of the fatal beating of Luis Ramirez. On July 12, 2008, Ramirez was beaten to death when his alleged assailants attacked him in the street on their way home from a town festival, kicking and hitting him while members of the group yelled racial slurs. Ramirez died from the injuries he sustained in that hateful attack, leaving behind his partner and their two children, whose interests the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) represented in court soon thereafter.
In spite of the horrific details of the crime, damning evidence, and a number of serious criminal charges, the state trial released the defendants with little more than a slap on the wrist. This was not a trial for a petty infraction mind you, but rather a case whose outcome should have found justice for a man's death and for his surviving family. Therefore, MALDEF called upon the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate the fatal beating and the accounts of police misconduct that were brought forth in testimony at the trial.
The indictments, just unsealed yesterday after being returned on December 10, 2009, allege that Derrick Donchak and Brandon Piekarsky--the primary defendants in the murder trial--and others, including some members of the Shenandoah Police Department, conspired to obstruct the investigation of Ramirez's murder. An indictment is a formal accusation of criminal conduct, not evidence of guilt, so justice still has yet to be served.
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Tue Feb 09, 2010 at 15:29:43 PM EST
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Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. – From ‘The New Jim Crow’.
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Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 14:44:45 PM EST
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 600 US born children have filed a lawsuit against Obama to stop the deportation of their undocumented immigrant parents, who mostly immigrated from Latin American countries. The children do not oppose President Obama, but rather are hopeful that he will exercise his authority to either adopt an Executive Order or promote immigration reform in Congress to cease this governmental policy of separating families. A similar lawsuit against Bush did not accomplish diddly-shit. This is another problem that Obama has inherited from Bush's immigration policies and also from immigration "reform" enacted in 1996. One thing the children really need is public pressure. While children suing Obama should be an attention-getting story, so far the lawsuit has been reported "almost exclusively by Spanish-language media."
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Fri Nov 14, 2008 at 16:35:32 PM EST
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Crossposted at OurChart.com and DreamActivist.org - Feel free to disseminate. In light of the massive uprising against Prop 8 in California and similar attacks on LGBT communities, this segment is dedicated to the queer and 'illegal' lives of our undocumented LGBT youth. President-elect Barack Obama has stated that undocumented students raised in the United States are “Americans for all intent and purposes.” Yet, these undocumented American are punished for the alleged transgressions of their parents, and face many barriers to their DREAMs upon graduation from high school—often they cannot attend college, drive or work legally, obtains loans, or even legalize their status. While illegal presence is not a crime, anti-immigrant hysteria has effectively given them the tag of ‘criminal.’ The situation gets worse with the heteronormativity of U.S. immigration laws. The fact that even LGBT immigration organizations like ‘Immigration Equality’ and the elitist 'Human Rights' Campaign pay scant attention and continue to ignore the plight of undocumented gay students in the United States makes the situation even more precarious. This is not just a gay issue or Latino issue; it is a human rights issue and undocumented queer students are caught in the middle of two ensuing culture wars: the battle for gay rights and immigrant rights, neither of which is seen as a civil and human rights struggle by the mainstream. In this entry, you will come across undocumented LGBT youth from diverse backgrounds, states and circumstances that have come together in these waiting rooms of history to share the limbo of their lives. Juan and Felipe depict how love cannot be illegal, Mohammad expresses how going back to Iran is certainly not an option, Prerna represents a life in isolation with a desire to succeed against all odds, Karla wants to serve this country and Moreno is currently in high school with dreams of becoming an artist.
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Wed Aug 13, 2008 at 12:11:14 PM EDT
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(Edited for formating purposes - promoted by Duke)
Describing conditions out of a Third World prison, The New York Times Nina Bernstein describes the horrible ordeal of Hiu Lui Ng, an immigrant who had lived in the United States for most of his adult life and died an excruciating death at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ng was suffering with such crushing pain, from undiagnosed cancer, that he needed help from other detainees just to get out of his bunk and use the toilet. Orwellian bureaucrats refused to give him painkillers because he would not get up to get in line to receive them, (due to his excruciating pain). On his deathbed he was told by ICE staff to stop faking it. Herein an excerpt from the New York Times article:
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Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 12:30:00 PM EDT
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Today's New York Times features an article based upon an exclusive interview with Erik Camayd-Freixas, Ph.D. of Florida International University. Dr Camayd-Freixas was one of 26 federally certified interpreters called into service during the Postville Iowa meat packing raid this past May. As a court appointed interpreter, Dr Camayd-Freixas witnessed first hand the abuses and systematic disregard for civil and human-rights that marked that raid.
In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.
Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.
In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.
In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.
He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.
"The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on," Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. "The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud."
NYT
(Article also contains a video interview with Dr Camayd-Freixas ..it's a must view)
Last month I received a copy of the essay Dr Camayd-Freixas wrote detailing the raid.
It is published here in its entirety to document what went on behind closed doors at the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo Iowa where 390 migrants were subjected to kangaroo court proceedings that resulted in guilty pleas and mandatory jail sentences.
Dr Camayd-Freixas will be testifying before Congress later this month at the Immigration Sub-Committee of the House of Representatives in regards to the raid.
He has asked that anyone moved by his account help the relief effort in any way possible;
"Finally, my new friends from Postville involved in the relief effort inform me that they are still dealing with a very tough humanitarian crisis. So, please, if you have any opportunity for fundraising, this is the address where donations can be sent:
St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry Fund
c/o Sister Mary McCauley
PO Box 369
Postville, Iowa 52162"
What follows is the complete story of what happened after the Postville raid:
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Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 12:30:05 PM EDT
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While I would argue with the Times characterization of last year's failed "Grand Compromise" legislation as a "sensible" "fix" for the myriad of problems in the current immigration system, their assessment of the current anti-immigrant frenzy, with it's abuses of civil and human rights, as a source of national shame, is right on target.
Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don't mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.
A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.
...This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.
...The restrictionist message is brutally simple - that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.
Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation's most deeply held values.
NYT
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