Thursday, November 27, 2008

Illegal immigrants get one-way trip home on ICE Air

Illegal immigrants get one-way trip home on ICE Air


By ERIC PALMER
The Kansas City Star


The MD-80 that took off Friday from Kansas City International Airport carried about 120 passengers. Some were headed for Mexico, others to Central and South America.

Once off the ground, food and beverages would be served.

The flight was one of up to 180 flights flown each month by Kansas City’s only locally based airline. While most are to Central and South America, others are to such exotic locales as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Palestine.

Yet most Kansas Citians will never get a seat on one of the flights — nor would want to.

The little-known Flight Operations Unit was established by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2006 to handle the repatriation of the surging number of illegal immigrants caught up in tougher enforcement.

In fiscal 2008, which ended Sept. 30, the airline delivered more than 76,000 OTMs (other than Mexicans) back to their homes, a 51 percent jump from two years before. It also delivered abo ut 134,000 Mexicans, mostly to places like San Antonio or San Diego, before they were bused to20the border.

This year’s budget for all transportation and removal efforts is $281.4 million.

It is not unlike running Delta Air Lines, said Craig Charles, a 22-year veteran of the immigration service and a Shawnee Mission South High School graduate, who is now acting director of flight operations for what is known as ICE Air. It works to fill every seat on each plane to keep costs low, keep flights on time and treat its passengers well.

“We are all about cost-effectiveness and safety and getting these people back to their homeland as fast as we can,” Charles said in an interview Friday at the flight operations offices in the Briarcliff West development.

Most illegal immigrants have come in by land but all of them cannot be removed that way, said Pat Reilly, public affairs officer for ICE Air.

“Mexico is a sovereign nation and it doesn’t take people who are not entitled to be there either, so if they are other than Mexican, they have to be flown over Mexico,” Reilly said.

Speed means savings

ICE Air is an outgrowth of the Justice Prisoner and A lien Transportation System (JPATS), which moves federal prisoners as well as illegal immigrants. T hat system is headquartered in Kansas City, and Charles became the liaison from the immigration agency in 1996.

Initially, illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico were mostly moved on commercial aircraft.

With the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, ICE kept officers with JPATS to monitor movements of illegal immigrants. But by 2006, ICE was growing so fast that the JPATS system couldn’t keep up.

So ICE Air was formed.

ICE contracts with JPATS, which has four MD-80s, to handle domestic flights. It leases four 737s from private contractors to handle flights to Central and South America and the Caribbean. It also leases larger aircraft for less- frequent transcontinental flights to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

All told, ICE Air flies to more than 190 countries.

Charles said his “customers” were the 24 ICE field offices that take custody of illegal immigrants and are responsible for their welfare until they are removed. That means housing, feeding and health care. Some are kept in ICE facilities, others in county jails through contract arrangements. So the faster ICE can fly them out, the less the cost is to taxpayers.

Rei lly said growth has been fed by beefed-up enforcement, particularly two programs:

One tries to identify every illegal immigrant booked into a county, state or federal jail. ICE arranges for their deportations while they serve jail time, and is waiting for them when they get out. They once were usually released when their time was served.

About a third of the “removals” last year came from this program.

The other enforcement effort involves 100 teams looking for the half-million illegal immigrants who have ignored legal orders to leave the country. The 38,000 arrests in fiscal 2008 that resulted from this initiative was twice the fiscal 2006 arrests.

Such efforts have forced the system to become more efficient. It has reduced the length of stay that illegal immigrants are in ICE custody from about 90 days to 30 days.

‘I wish to stay here’

It was a cloudless but cold and windy day Friday when a large tour bus, three vans and a Ford F-150 pulled into the driveway of Executive Beechcraft at KCI.

Of the 60 passengers, including one woman, only Horacio Hermoncillo, 22, agreed to discuss his journey. He sat in a van, handcuffed and shackled like the other deportees .

Hermoncillo came to the U.S. on a visa four yea rs ago for the money, then never went home. He knew a bit about fixing cars and landed as a mechanic in Chicago for a “great” man who he said taught him a lot. It allowed him to send money to his family.

But on a recent vacation to St. Louis, he was stopped by police and his illegal status was revealed.

He said he hoped to open a mechanic’s shop when he returned home. But he had mixed feelings about his return to Mexico.

“I wish to stay here. The money is better, but I’m going to my country,” Hermoncillo said. “My mom and brothers will make a big party with a lot of beer.”

Once the MD-80 landed, the buses and vans pulled into a semicircle next to the plane, creating a staging area.

Canvas, plastic and paper bags containing underwear and belts, cell phones and other belongings were laid on the tarmac as a phalanx of men in blue U.S. marshal uniforms and sunglasses disembarked. They were unarmed. Weapons are not allowed on the tarmac, or in the cabin of the plane.

Then in twos and threes, the illegal immigrants were taken off the bus and out of the vans. Some were dressed warmly, but others had only shorts and T-shirts. Each was patted down, and cuffs and shackles were checked to make sure they were not biting=2 0into skin before boarding.

The domestic flights, manned by the U.S. Marshals Service, require that the passengers be handcuffed and shackled onboard.

With the illegal immigrants already on the plane, the flight would have more than 120 passengers. Like any airline, ICE Air tries to fill every available seat to tamp down costs.

“It costs the American taxpayer around $700 a seat,” Charles said. “If we sent everybody on commercial airlines, we just couldn’t afford it.”

To use its planes to best advantage, ICE Air employs a system of spokes and hubs, like most airlines. It flies people in from nearly 20 cities, including a weekly flight to Kansas City to pick up the illegal immigrants rounded up from Kansas and Missouri.

Flights end up in hubs such as Mesa, Ariz., and San Antonio. From those hubs, Mexican nationals are bused to the Mexican border and released. Those other than Mexicans are combined and flown to other cities from which regularly scheduled international ICE Air flights take them to their home countries.

On the international flights, which are handled by ICE employees, all nonviolent, noncriminal passengers have the chains removed.

Reill y noted that when most illegal immigrants get into the ICE system, they have served t heir time.

“They have paid their debt to society and now they are being removed on immigration issues,” she said.

Onboard meals might be a sandwich, a bottle of water and an apple. No oranges because they are sticky and messy. No milk because it can cause upset stomachs. After all, this is the first time that many of these passengers have ever been on a plane. There is a nurse on every flight.

Treating well those being removed pays dividends in getting cooperation from other countries in managing immigration issues. But Charles said there was no reason not to.

“We really want to make a good impression on these people,” he said. “Those of us who have been around this for 20 years, we have seen the plight of these people. We can’t get personal with this but again, there is no reason whatsoever that we can’t treat them with as much respect as is possible. No one holds a grudge against these people.”

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In

Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In
By David Bacon
The Nation, web edition, November 26, 2008
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081215/bacon?rel=hp_picks

Since 2001 the Bush administration has deported more than a million people--including 349,041 individuals in the fiscal year ending just prior to the election. It has resurrected the discredited community sweeps and factory raids of earlier eras, and started sending waves of migrants to privately run jails for crimes like inventing a Social Security number to get a job. Every day in Tucson 70 young people, including many teenagers, are brought before a federal judge in heavy chains and sentenced to prison because they walked across the border.

It's no wonder that Latinos, Asians and other communities with large immigrant populations voted for Barack Obama by huge margins. People want and expect a change. Ending the administration's failed program of raids, jail time and deportations is at the top of the list. National demonstrations have called for a moratorium on raids since the summer, and one big reason why Los Angeles turned out so heavily for Obama was the anti-raid encampment and hunger strike in the Placita Olvera, which electrified the city.

But the raids program has been rejected by more than immigrants alone. The election took place as millions of people were losing their jobs and homes. Yet while Lou Dobbs and the talk show hysteria-mongers tried to scapegoat immigrants for this crisis ("What about illegal don't you understand?"), most voters did not drink the Kool-Aid. In fact, every poll shows that a big majority reject raids and want basic rights and fair treatment for everyone, immigrants included. The political coalition that put Obama into office--African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and union families, expects change.

The country needs not just an end to raids but a move away from the policies they've been intended to promote. From the beginning, the administration's enforcement program has been cynically designed to pressure Congress into re-establishing discredited guest worker schemes called "close to slavery" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, being reminiscent of the old bracero program. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called these raids "closing the back door and opening the front door."

At least Chertoff was honest about his intentions. His underlings at Homeland Security, like Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tried to pretend that the imprisonment and deportation of abused workers was a form of labor standards enforcement. Meanwhile, actual protection for US wages, working conditions and union rights has been in free fall for eight years. Other Homeland Security officials mendaciously claimed immigrants were a threat to national security, as though imprisoning hungry teenagers or terrorized workers would help a fearful public to sleep at night.

No one whose eyes are open to the terrible human suffering caused by these draconian policies will be very sorry to see Chertoff go. But what policies will take their place, and who will enforce them? So far, the choice of Janet Napolitano is not encouraging. The Tucson "Operation Streamline" court convenes in her home state every day, and the situation of immigrants in Arizona is worse than almost anywhere else. Napolitano herself has publicly supported most of the worst ideas of the Bush administration, including guest worker programs with no amnesty for the currently undocumented, and brutal enforcement schemes like E-Verify and workplace raids.

But Obama does not have to be imprisoned by the failure of Napolitano to imagine a more progressive alternative. In fact, his new administration's need to respond to the economic crisis, and to strengthen the political coalition that won the election, can open new possibilities for a just and fair immigration policy.

Economic crisis does not have to pit working people against each other, or lead to the further demonization of immigrants. In fact, there is common ground between immigrants, communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations, and working families. Legalization and immigrant rights can be tied to guaranteeing jobs for anyone who wants to work, and unions to raise wages and win better conditions for everyone in the workplace.

These are not revolutionary demands. In fact, they're what the Democratic Party used to stand for. Nor is the idea of combining them into a common program just pie-in-the-sky. For two sessions of Congress, the Black Caucus and leaders like Sheila Jackson Lee and Barbara Lee have proposed legislation to create jobs, at the same time offering rights and legal status to immigrants without papers. The AFL-CIO's campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act supports the surest means of ending the low-wage, second-class status of immigrant workers-- organizing unions. And repealing unfair trade agreements and ending structural adjustment policies would raise the standard of living and reduce the pressure for migration in Oaxaca or El Salvador, while making jobs more secure in working-class communities in the US.

Justice for immigrants does not have to be the third rail of US politics, as Rahm Emmanuel has called it. Instead, immigrant rights is the demand of one part of a broad coalition that seeks fundamental social change. Immigrants can't achieve justice on their own, but then no element of this coalition can win its demands in isolation. Only a common-ground strategy can actually achieve the changes people hoped for when they went to the polls. Stopping the raids is the first step in a process that will help to end the nightmare of the past few years, and at the same time can help the administration begin to address the larger issues of immigration reform, jobs and workplace rights.

Something is clearly wrong with immigration enforcement. Desperate workers get fired and deported, families get terrorized and divided, while the government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into a managed labor supply for business. Even before presenting a reform plan to Congress, the Obama administration has the power to change some of the worst elements of the Bush program by administrative and executive action. What Bush put in place by fiat can be changed by the same process. In its first 100 days, a new administration could take simple steps to protect human and workplace rights, instead of allowing the abuse to continue:

* Stop ICE from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, when a worker lacks papers or has a bad Social Security numbers.

* Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants.

* Halt community sweeps, checkpoints and roadblocks, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government's campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances and drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.

* Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US wage and hour violations and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.

* Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into a system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose--paying retirement and disability benefits--not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.

* Re-establish worker protections, ended under Bush, connected with existing guest worker programs; force employers to hire domestically first and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.

* Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.

Democrats still have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups have been pushing for years for big guestworker programs. They are more than willing to accept raids and enforcement as a price, and are already working to bring back the "comprehensive" bills that would give them what they want. Instead of arguing over "what's politically possible" in Congress, immigrant and labor rights activists need a movement for a progressive alternative.

That alternative has to strengthen human rights on both sides of the global divide. In countries like Mexico and the Philippines, the families of migrants are fighting for real development instead of poverty, forced migration and a remittance-based economy. Here in the US movements in immigrant communities have brought millions of people into the streets on May Day, and continue to fight the raids and deportations. We need proposals that address both the situation of immigrants here and the conditions in their countries that force them to migrate.

To move towards equality and rights in the US:

* A law to give permanent residence (green-card) visas to the undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them abroad. If visas were more easily available, people wouldn't have to cross the border without them. Employer sanctions that make it a crime for immigrants to hold a job should be repealed. Guestworker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.

To end the displacement at the root of most forced migration:

* A new approach to trade policy, including renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and rejection of potential new trade agreements with countries like Colombia. Protecting corporate access to markets and low wages leads to rising poverty and the displacement of communities. We need to concentrate on the welfare of people at the bottom rather than the top, help grassroots communities of farmers stay on their land, and boost wages and employment for urban workers. Instead of subsidizing war and displacement, US tax dollars could expand rural credit, education and health care abroad, easing the pressure behind migration.

A new administration that has raised such high expectations should look for new ideas in the areas of immigration reform and trade policy, not recycle the bad ones of the last few years. The constituency that won the election will support a change in direction, and in fact is demanding it. The Obama administration owes its victory to that constituency, and its promises of change that brought it to the polls. Now it needs to deliver.

-- __________________________________

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

ICE raids take 16 Flagstaff residents

ICE raids take 16 Flagstaff residents

November 26th, 2008 by Sarah Pickering


Protesters gather Thursday evening at the corner of E Butler and E Sawmill rd to protest the deportation of illegal immigrants and to support immigration rights. The protesters held signs and chanted in front of a news camera to show their support. - Jim Truncali/ The Lumberjack

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrived in Flagstaff on Wednesday, Nov. 19 to arrest undocumented citizens with criminal records, sparking an impromptu protest by various immigrant rights and activist groups.

On Nov. 20, the Repeal Coalition, a group dedicated to the repeal of all anti-immigration legislation in Arizona, organized various efforts to warn the community that members of ICE would be conducting raids in target neighborhoods. ICE is a governmental agency responsible for identifying and investigating illegal activity with regards to the United States border.

The Repeal Coalition gathered a group of approxminately two dozen people at Killip Elementary School in Sunnyside to escort children to their homes
. In the evening, the group, including members from CopWatch, ASWI, NAU Peace and Justice, MEChA and Save the Peaks protested numbers of arrests already made by ICE.

Approximately 70 people stood near the county jail on Butler Avenue chanting, “ICE is on thin ice” and “No more body snatching.”

Joel Olson, a member of the Repeal Coalition and assistant professor
in the NAU Department of Political Science, said ICE’s raids are a violation of civil rights.

“They’ve raided homes, they’ve arrested six people and they’ve got warrants for 40 people total,” Olson said. “We’re opposed to body snatching and all the laws that are preventing citizens and non-citizens alike from being able to live and love and work wherever they please.”



George Villas leads a group of Anti Immigration protesters in a chant Thursday Evening on the corner of E Butler and E Sawmill rd. Protesters were calling for an end to deportation and Immigration rights. - Jim Truncali/ The Lumberjack

Maren Lester, a freshman undeclared major, disagreed with alleged tactics to raid elementary schools, but agreed with neighborhood raids.

“If (undocumented citizens) haven’t pursued legal ways to get into the country, then they have no right to be here,” Lester said.

According to ICE’s Web site, the agency pr
otects the nation’s homeland security.

“(ICE) upholds public safety by targeting criminal networks and terrorist organizations that seek to


exploit vulnerabilities in our immigration system, in our financial networks, along20our border, at federal facilities and elsewhere in order to do harm to the United States,” the mission statement reads.

When contacted for a comment, ICE did not respond.

Olson said he felt the most important part of the protest was getting the word out about the problems with ICE and other anti-immigration legislation.

“Our overall goal is the repeal of all anti-immigration laws in the state of Arizona,” Olson said, referring to the Repeal Coalition’s mission. “Arizona is ground zero for immigration reform. If we change the laws in Arizona, we change them nationwide.”

“All day we’ve been doing patrols around the neighborhood, making sure ICE is informing the undocumented citizens of their rights,” said George Villas, a protester.

Erin Entringer, a freshman choral education major, said she agreed with ICE’s practices from an economic standpoint.

“I understand that people are coming here to make a better life for themselves,” Entringer said. “I think those people should go through the legal process to become citizens, rather than free-loading off of =0
D
our tax money.”

ICE obtained 40 warrants for undocumented citizens, arresting 16 who were previously ordered to leave the country.

“ICE is taking people that they don’t have=2 0warrants for,” said Eva Amaral, a member of the Repeal Coalition. “That’s what’s happening in Maricopa County and we don’t want it here.”

Amaral said she wants the city of Flagstaff to join in the resistance against ICE, and said a community effort is crucial to maintaining civil rights.

“Lives are being destroyed,” Amaral said. “We’re not going to let a government agency tell us that we aren’t people.”