IMMIGRATION MATTERS: Defending the Civil Rights of Immigrants

IMMIGRATION MATTERS: Defending the Civil Rights of Immigrants

Looking Back, Looking Forward

New America Media, Commentary, Maya Harris, Posted: Jan 18, 2008

Editor’s Note: 2007 was a grim year for many immigrants with the double whammy of failed comprehensive immigration reform and increased enforcement measures across the country. What's in store for 2008? Maya Harris is the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California, the organization’s largest affiliate in the country. She is the first African American and first Indian American to hold that position. IMMIGRATION MATTERS regularly features the views of the nation’s leading immigrant rights advocates.


SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – First-grader Kebin Reyes, a U.S. citizen who lives with his father in San Rafael, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, missed a field trip with his class one day last March. In the early dawn hours, armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stormed into the Reyes’ apartment, handcuffed Kebin’s father, and took both father and son into custody. The terrified six-year-old was locked in a room with his father for 10 hours, with nothing to eat but bread and water.

Kebin is one of our clients. A month after the raid, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the little boy for violation of his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

Kebin was just one of thousands of children across the country who were traumatized by the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Return to Sender” program last year, an initiative characterized not only by racial profiling and a disregard of constitutional rights, but by tremendous inefficiency. Though DHS chief Michael Chertoff claims that the ongoing campaign is aimed at capturing criminals and fugitives, less than one quarter of those arrested last year in Northern California had criminal records.

Despite the fact that Congress was unable to agree on a major immigration reform bill in 2007, state and local laws proliferated. This election year is sure to bring heightened rhetoric and even more draconian proposals. Some of these will be high-profile photo opportunities orchestrated to benefit politicians – like more neighborhood raids and an ever longer, stronger border fence. Others will be more subtle, contrived in the corridors of power, but whose influence will be felt sharply by families, students and workers.

Here are some priorities for the ACLU in the new year:

“No-Match” letters: In 2007, a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the AFL-CIO temporarily halted the federal government plan to punish employers who do not fire employees whose work authorizations are not in the Social Security database. The government has acknowledged that the database is rife with errors, and that more than 70 percent of the discrepancies are in records of U.S. citizens. The court predicted that the program could cause irreparable harm to more than 8 million workers and their employers. Nevertheless, the government intends to reintroduce its flawed proposal in March 2008.

REAL ID: Tucked away in a supplemental bill for the Iraq War and Tsunami relief in 2005, the REAL ID Act turns a driver’s license into a national identity card that everyone will need in order to travel by plane, enter government buildings or open a bank account. Under REAL ID, every person who applies for a driver’s license must prove to a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk that he or she is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. This national database will not solve the problem of illegal immigration or enhance national security – it will, however, endanger the privacy of all Americans. Seventeen states have registered their opposition to REAL ID, and a measure to repeal it is now pending in Congress.

Citizenship delays: As a “national security” measure, the government expanded its use of FBI background checks in 2007 to include a “name check” for each applicant against every name that appears as a reference (as a victim, witness, or other relevant party) in an FBI investigation database. This practice, which results in “false hits,” has caused delays for hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country.

DREAM Act: The California Legislature passed a bill to ensure that all California high school graduates accepted into state public institutions of post-secondary education would be eligible for state-sponsored financial aid, regardless of their immigration status. Though the Governor vetoed the bill, it will be reintroduced this year in hopes that all California kids have a chance to fulfill their dreams of higher education.

Now for some good news. Last year, California became the first state to enact a law prohibiting landlords from checking the immigration status of tenants and prohibiting local governments from requiring such checks. The bill was sponsored by apartment owners who did not want to be put in the position of acting like Border Patrol agents. The California law, which was signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in direct response to local ordinances around the country that would ban landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants.

People often ask me, why is the ACLU involved in immigration issues?

There are very big reasons for doing so.

The ACLU was founded during the 1920s Palmer Raids, when our government ordered European immigrants detained and deported because of their political views. As the U.S. Supreme Court later established, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution apply to all persons in this country, not just to U.S. citizens.

There are also many small reasons. Like first-grader Kebin Reyes.