Border-control bill an affront to American Indians

From the Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2018623764_guest09flores.html#.T_sdydmcNbc.facebook

Would the Congress pass laws that tell other countries what to do, or dictate how their natural and cultural resources will be used and abused in whatever way Congress sees fit? Tribes are nations, and within this nation there is a protocol for this type of action.

By Kesner C. Flores Jr

Special to The Times

THERE are dozens of tribal nations with lands along the U.S. borders.
Our families, sacred sites and cultural treasures and traditions are based here, and protecting this heritage is critical to our identity and our sense of community. That's why a bill recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives was so disconcerting to American Indians. It proposed to waive protections for public lands and those who live or hunt or graze cattle within 100 miles of the northern or southern borders — under the guise of national security.
The border-control bill was buried in a massive public-lands bill, passed by the House, sponsored by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. H.R. 2578, as amended and approved by the House, allows U.S. Border Patrol to build roads and airstrips and forward-operating bases, erect vehicle barriers, and close off national parks, forests, and grazing lands to the public at a moment's notice within that 100 mile radius.
The 100-mile zone includes iconic locations in Washington state — North Cascades and Olympic National Parks; the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, Okanogan-Wenatchee, Kaniksu and Colville national forests; and the San Juan Islands, Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge.
As passed, the bill also authorizes Border Patrol to ignore 16 key laws protecting our heritage, including the National Historic Preservation Act, National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Wilderness Act.
The bill removes public participation in land-management decisions and amounts to what some have dubbed a land and power grab by the U.S. government.
Thing is, Border Patrol didn't ask for the bill and testified before Congress that it doesn't need it. The agency is already working hand-in-hand — and increasingly effectively — with tribal governments, private landowners, and national park and forest land managers.
Tribal nations weren't consulted when the bill was drafted, either, and the National Congress of American Indians has registered its concern by approving a resolution in opposition to the bill.
Individual tribes have also weighed in with Congress. The original version of Rep. Bishop's bill even overrode tribal sovereignty, but that was redacted in the final version passed by the House.
Tribes have a nation-to-nation relationship with the United States. The U.S. government has a responsibility to consult with tribes when an action such as this will affect their homelands. President Obama has upheld the rights of our people.
But these types of bills and actions by the House and Senate upset this relationship and responsibility. Would Congress pass laws that tell other countries what to do, or dictate how their natural and cultural resources will be used and abused in whatever way Congress sees fit? Tribes are nations, and within this nation there is a protocol for this type of action.
Despite efforts by some members of Congress to strip the border bill from the broader package of lands bills, the overall act passed the House in a 232-188 vote.
In Washington, only Reps. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton; Rick Larsen, D-Lake Stevens; Adam Smith, D-Tacoma; and Jim McDermott, D-Seattle; supported the effort to throw out the border bill. In addition to those members, Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, voted against the overall bill.
A Senate version of the border bill is sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
We'll be looking to see that our Democratic Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray don't allow the same railroading of our rights and responsibilities to protect our heritage for the next generation.
Kesner C. Flores Jr., is of Wintun and Paiute descent and is a member of the Cortina Indian Rancheria Band of California. He works for the National Tribal Environmental Council, a nonprofit that works with tribes to preserve the environment. 

 Bill Summary & Status - 112th Congress (2011 - 2012) - H.R.2578 - All Information - THOMAS (Library of Congress)

Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa: Beyond the BS1070 Supreme Court Ruling

Beyond the BS1070 Supreme Court Ruling:
“Not even the highest court can turn back a determined people!”

By Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa / 25 June 2012

This can’t be said any other way. Our migrant/Latino community is getting crushed. In fact, we are getting stomped on and beaten like a colorful piñata. The piñata is electoral and the more they hit, the more political points are scored—at our expense.

On the surface, the political class wants to make us think they are at war with each other over immigration. When in reality we have a US Supreme Court ruling over BS1070 that is in complete alignment with Republican and Democrat immigration policies of exclusion, exploitation, and police and ICE collaborations.

In the wake of the US Supreme Court ruling, injustice and oppression are upheld once again. The “papers please” section of BS1070 has been upheld. In effect standing in the tradition of white supremacist historical Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sanford of 1857 in which the court ruled that slaves and their descendants were not protected by the Constitution and were not US citizens...

Read more...

PCWC: JT READY IS DEAD: FASCISM AND THE ANARCHIST RESPONSE IN ARIZONA, 2005-2012

JT READY IS DEAD: FASCISM AND THE ANARCHIST RESPONSE IN ARIZONA, 2005-2012 ~ Fires never extinguished: A blog of the Phoenix Class War Council

JT Ready is dead.  And by his own hand.  It took a while, but in the end JT took the free advice of his many anarchist adversaries and followed his leader into oblivion.  Though in the end he opted for the Goebbels style over that of his boy Hitler.  That's the thing with JT: despite being a consistent white supremacist, he could sometimes surprise you.  Not with something entirely new.  No.  But with variations on a theme.  Most of us figured he would blow up somewhere, at some point, and given the history of white supremacists with regard to child and spousal abuse, we are not surprised that his end mimicked his political practice perfectly: violence mostly aimed down the social hierarchy. Consider the death of National Socialist Movement leader Jeff Hall as another case in point.

According to the cops, on Wednesday, May 2, JT, a former president of the Mesa Community College Republican Club and Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman, stormed the house of his much-abused and terrified girlfriend in Gilbert wearing full combat gear and then proceeded to open fire on everyone in the place.  The dead included Lisa Mederos, her daughter Amber (JT's former treasurer for his run for Pinal County Sheriff), as well as her fiance, Jim Hiott, who was a fellow militia member.  In a truly cowardly act, JT also killed Amber's 15 month-old baby.  Only Lisa's younger daughter survived, hiding under the bed in her upstairs room.

We in PCWC first began running into JT during the early parts of the immigration movement, around 2005, before there was a formal PCWC, really.  As many probably know, JT had a rather chaotic political career, but in those days he was allied with State Senator Russell Pearce and local car dealer Rusty Childress.  Even then political violence had already begun to rear its ugly head in the anti-immigrant scene.  It might be valuable to review some of what had happened in Arizona in the several years preceding JT's final bloody rampage, and it certainly would be worthwhile to consider the ways that anarchists in Phoenix and Arizona organized against him, his politics and his political allies (and enemies) over the last half decade or more.  While liberals advocated for his free speech, anarchists opposed him every step of the way.

Read more: http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com/2012/06/jt-ready-is-dead-fascism-and-anarchist.html

Feds to Sue Arpaio, but Carry Out Largest National Round-up Yet

It may seem like great news that the federal Justice Department will finally be suing sheriff joe.  According to "Government plans to sue Arizona sheriff for targeting Latinos",

The administration's Justice Department and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office have been in settlement talks for months over allegations that officers regularly made unlawful stops and arrests of Latinos, used excessive force against them and failed to adequately protect the Hispanic community.
Those negotiations have broken down because of a fight over the Justice Department's demand that an independent monitor be appointed by a federal court to oversee compliance with the settlement...

But can the federal government really take the moral high ground when you contrast the latest round-up, which happens to be the largest yet, with sheriff joe's sweeps?  In Colorlines' "ICE Arrest 3k Immigrants in 6 Days, Largest Roundup Ever", the raids are described:

On Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced 3,168 undocumented immigrants were detained over the course of six-days in a national operation the agency dubbed “Cross Check.” According to ICE, the six-day operation was the largest such effort in the agency’s history.

I find it interesting that I hardly saw any mention in my social media networks about this largest round-up ever.  Arizonans in particular seem to think that the federal government could and would save us from horrible politicians like Arpaio.  The Federal government prefers to think of their work as colorblind, that what sets them apart from Arpaio is that he is actively discriminating which "erodes the public trust," according to Napolitano.  I snarkily commented in last December's post, "Federal Goverment Prefers Their Way Better Than Arpaio's", "because blatant maliciousness and hypocrisy erode the public trust, the status quo doesn't."

The following points really contextualize the federal government's approach:

“The raids are in line with the administration’s record on immigration to date: while claiming to target serious offenders the majority of those detained were in fact people with misdemeanor convictions and people who’ve returned to the United States after having been deported previously. In the case of the later group, many have returned to the United States to be with their families,” [Colorlines.com’s investigative reporter Seth Freed] Wessler went on to point out.

In it’s press release, ICE again claims that the agency “is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that targets serious criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities.” And the Washington Post reported the news with an inevitable highlights reel, naming a Cameroonian drug distributer with a gun charge and Mexican murderer among the group. “But of course, the vast majority of those in the serious criminal list are not kin-pins and murderers. ICE officials continue to draw on racialized hysteria to naturalize what’s clearly a bald policy of mass deportation,” Wessler said.

Wessler also notes operation Cross Check is the third such national scale enforcement operation in the last year, which together have detained nearly 8,500 people. “These numbers amount to only a fraction of all deportations. Last year nearly 400,000 people were deported.”

Read that last paragraph again.  As I have pointed out in the past, the federal government does not create elaborate press circuses to feed their ego, accompanied by veiled racist rhetoric, quite the way Arpaio does.  But let's be honest here.  The federal government is doing the majority of the detaining and they're doing all of the deporting.  It has been over three years since I wrote, Federal Government will not be Maricopa County's Savior in response to the announcement that the House Judiciary Committee was pushing Eric Holder and Napolitano to investigate Arpaio.  I pointed out that "Much of the activism is focused around getting people from the federal government to pay attention, although others also call on the federal government to stop the raids. The primary voice of immigrants’ rights advocacy in anglo media is Stephen Lemons who recently said, 'The political reality of Cactus Country is this: Without intervention from the Obama administration, we are royally screwed.'"

In further commentary, I wrote,

We cannot expect a government that has been built on racism and continues to practice it in various ways (much higher rates of incarceration of people of color than whites, lack of indigenous rights, wars, just to name some examples) to be a force against white supremacy. The operator of immigration detention centers (or the ones who outsource private detention facilities), the performer of raids, is not the one whose going to save us from the similar actions of the Sheriff. He is doing their work for them. He's just doing it in an extra "look how demeaning i can be to these people" way. If the federal government does anything about it, it will only be to legitimize and continue its own actions and those of other jurisdictions.

The federal government is the reason why stepping across a man-made line or overstaying a visa are illegal in the first place.  They are they ones who have forced programs like Secure Communities onto city and state governments.  Arpaio just pushes the limits to see how far and blatant it can go.

It seems in some ways that Arizonans are still waiting and hoping for some federal intervention.   Considering the actions of the federal government, however, does this not seem rather ridiculous?  Not to mention that treating the lawsuit against Arpaio as a victory distracts from the major problems that continue to occur.

Edit:  See also: Operation Cross Check » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Federal Goverment Prefers Their Way Better Than Arpaio's

The federal government has finally decided it doesn't exactly like how Arpaio has been enforcing immigration, huh?  Admittedly I can't help but get a little kick out of the blow to Arpaio's ego (and career?) but at the same time, I really can't stand the idea that people would be celebrating the federal government for finally putting their foot down against maltreatment of migrants.  Why?

I broke it down almost three years ago in my blog post, Federal Government will not be Maricopa County's Savior, one of the main points being that the federal government is just as bad if not worse in handling the immigration issue.  I think of Arpaio as an extremist clown- he is a spectacle that pushes the limits of what the public will accept.  He makes nearly everyone else who is pro-immigration enforcement (aside from Pearce who was right there with him) look responsible and reasonable.  So the federal government militarizes the border, holds thousands of migrants in detention centers and/or deports them, still conducts huge raids (Obama's raids surpassed previous ones, i.e. here and here), etc,. but they get to decide, to the delight of many, that Arpaio just went to far because he's been using his federal authority to discriminate. 

"The Department of Homeland Security is troubled by the Department of Justice's findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office," Napolitano said in a statement. "Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust. DHS will not be a party to such practices. Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO's 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office access to the Secure Communities program." (Source).

Apparently the federal government knows how not to erode the public trust. For similar reasons I have a problem with people focusing on the "innocent" victims of racial profiling and such.  Sure, go after the real criminals, we won't question that concept, just as long as all the people caught up in the deportation/detention system are the ones you say you're going after- because blatant maliciousness and hypocrisy erode the public trust, the status quo doesn't.

Yes, I'd like to see Arpaio gone, just as I liked seeing Russell Pearce gone (it'd be better if he was goner) but the illusion of victory distracts from what's really happening.  As I've mentioned numerous times, the Phoenix PD continues to deport more people than MCSO, but they do it without all the media hubbub, and therefore without comment from Stephen Lemons and migrant rights groups.  Arpaio is the face that can be pasted to a piñata, but he's not the only one we should be hitting with the metaphorical (or not) stick.

Some of what I wrote in early 2009 is pretty out-dated, but the following concluding paragraphs are more timeless.

One problem with appealing to the government is that to do so would require not being a threat. But any real just solution to the “immigration problem”, inevitably involving the dismantling of NAFTA and other neoliberal projects, as well as a serious change in social/political structure, is and always will be a threat to the government.

Another problem is that the government has an interest in appearing to be able and willing to deliver justice. But overall it is not in its interest to truly liberate the people from injustice and in fact its existence is actually antithetical to such an action. It would like to have people ask instead of demand changes, however, and would like us to think of it as a benevolent force in such cases when it’s actually worth the time to make reforms that benefit the people. Therefore, if we ask and they give, they are the heroes. If we demand and they give, they are still the heroes although we still have some sense of having played a part.

Related, the government is not a just one. We cannot expect a government that has been built on racism and continues to practice it in various ways (much higher rates of incarceration of people of color than whites, lack of indigenous rights, wars, just to name some examples) to be a force against white supremacy. The operator of immigration detention centers (or the ones who outsource private detention facilities), the performer of raids, is not the one whose going to save us from the similar actions of the Sheriff. He is doing their work for them. He's just doing it in an extra "look how demeaning i can be to these people" way. If the federal government does anything about it, it will only be to legitimize and continue its own actions and those of other jurisdictions.

Law Enforcement Doesn't Stop Sexual Assault: On the MCSO Controversy

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

While it's embarrassing for the MCSO that former investigators' claims led to media attention such as MCSO priorities blamed for sex-crimes snafu, I cringe when thinking about how this will be framed, as usual, that regular police departments who are not led by extremist clowns like Arpaio, do a fine job at dealing with sex-crimes.  Interestingly, the articles I read barely mention Arpaio's focus on immigration, whereas independent media like Sheriff Arpaio ignored rape cases for years does.  It is clear that solving sexual assault cases took a back seat to the politically-motivated anti-immigrant campaign of attrition.  Yet this is not to insinuate that law enforcement is meant to prevent or even solve crime for the most part- particularly when it happens to especially-marginalized people.

Let's contrast this recent MCSO controversy with the situation that is rarely talked about: Immigrant Detainees: The New Sex Abuse Crisis.

There is abundant evidence that rape is a systemic problem in our immigration detention facilities—for women, for men, and, as the Women’s Refugee Commission has documented, for children. In 2010, Human Rights Watch released a report based on over fifty known incidents and allegations of sexual abuse of immigration detainees. The American Civil Liberties Union has discovered 185 government reports of such allegations since 2007, and a senior ACLU staff attorney says this is only “the tip of the iceberg.”

For crossing a man-made line in the sand in an unauthorized way, people are made particularly vulnerable to abuses inside and outside the prison system.  Sometimes the coyotes assault those they're helping to smuggle across the border.  Men have dressed as ICE agents to assault women.  Real ICE agents, police, and detention officers get away with abuses of this sort all the time.  Whether this behavior is excused or ignored because of racism or because the survivor is "illegal", it is made easier and more commonplace because of the criminalization of people.

Police or ICE officials sometimes make themselves out to be saviors of people held against their will, such as in drop-house busts in cases where migrants are held for ransom, only to turn around and hold the migrants in their own cages, where many of the same abuses occur.  The question that arises while people are calling out Arpaio for de-prioritizing sexual assault cases is, whose bodily integrity matters?  Are we considering the cases of those who get picked up for overstaying their visa?  Do they even have the choice to report the crimes perpetrated against them?

Terrified of deportation and separation from their families, immigrants in detention are often extremely reluctant to file grievances against facilities run by the very people who can expel them from the country; and there is little question that deportation is sometimes used as retribution against immigration detainees who complain, and sometimes as a way of forestalling investigations into abuses. And it’s clear that facilities holding people who do not feel able to complain are particularly fertile grounds for abuse, as are institutions that can easily deport witnesses against them. 

What comes to mind is the situation with criminalization of sex-workers, especially where it overlaps with immigration.  While sex-trafficking does occur, laws that are written to supposedly curb sex-trafficking actually make things worse for sex-workers.

As Nandita Sharma said in an interview,

Anti-trafficking legislation is used to target so-called “illegal migration.” Instead of placing the blame for migrants’ vulnerability on the restrictive immigration policies of national states that force people into a condition of illegality, it blames those who are actually facilitating their movement across borders... Anti-trafficking legislation criminalizes people who facilitate migrants’ entry into national states. I think this is the underlying agenda behind anti-trafficking legislation. It offers ideological cover to target both the migrants themselves and the people who facilitate their movement. In this way, anti-trafficking legislation strengthens border policing...

Let me give you two examples of how anti-trafficking legislation actually increases the vulnerability and exploitation that many women migrants face. First, anti-trafficking legislation targets people who are helping women cross borders. This raises the cost of moving across borders and, as a result, women have to go further into debt in order to do so. Second, by imposing these enormous penalties – which, in Canada, can include a life-sentence and in the United States can include a death sentence – those facilitating movement make migrants use routes that are less safe. People are being forced to cross borders in very vulnerable places like deserts and mountains, places where hundreds of migrant bodies are found dead every year. Anti-trafficking legislation is thus making migration less safe for women.

Jessica Yee was also interviewed:

Women around the world, especially racialized women, shoulder the burden of labour that doesn’t get acknowledged or reported. Forced labour and exploitation are reported even less. When we’re talking about “trafficking,” people assume we’re talking only about sex work, and only about cross-border trafficking. We need to remind ourselves that sexual slavery and the forcing of sexual acts are not the only kinds of exploitation, even though they seem particularly salacious compared to other forms of forced labour. We also need to understand that “trafficking” takes place within nation states, and against Indigenous people.

Many people uncritically accept the conflation of trafficking and sex work. The same people who think it is taboo to talk about sex are the first to suggest that this is the number one issue of forced labour, but it’s not. And people who are actually being trafficked and moved against their will receive no attention because the state is so focused on raiding massage parlours and arresting women who are sex workers. This neglect occurs in the name of righteousness and “saving” women, yet it is merely the further colonization of women’s bodies, women’s spaces, and women’s choices.

(Listen to the radio show here).

This is all to familiar to those of us who had been following the situation of the migrants in Maricopa County who were charged with conspiracy in human smuggling cases.  Even though the law wasn't meant to go after migrants themselves, hundreds of migrants were charged with conspiracy by MCSO over the last few years.  While many who didn't take a guilty plea were not convicted, MCSO was still able to get them caught up in the legal system because they could take them in under reasonable suspicion.  And even though the authors of the bill said they didn't intend for the law to be used that way, it was clearly an effort to cut down on migration, while likely increasing the risks of those involved in a similar way as the sex-trafficking laws discussed above.  This is also similar to the ways in which the Employer Sanctions Law should really be called the Employee Sanctions Law because many more employees have been arrested under the guise of going after employers, few of whom have seen any consequences (Another workplace raid targets workers not bosses).

The criminalization of unauthorized movement, drugs, and sex-work is done allegedly for the sake of minimizing violence, issues of security, and health problems, when in fact it perpetuates these things.
The badges, guns, and official vehicles, this assumption that law enforcement are never/rarely law-breakers, allows violations to occur against people, not to mention the drug smuggling enabled by the authority provided to various agents (Mexican Smugglers Exploit the Corrupt Reputation of U.S. Border Officers).  This is not about the unfortunate bad apples who spoil the barrel- this is a systemic, institutional problem.  And even while Arpaio gets publicly called out for deprioritizing sex-crimes, it is not as though the media doesn't praise the (other) police as well as perpetuate victim-blaming.

ALEC Resistance Continues with SRP Protest

As a follow-up to my last post, I want to say, that I had not closely seen the banners in the following photo, which clearly show a more radical message. Of course there were others, but I felt that overall it was not an adequate attempt at drawing a bigger picture of people. It's difficult however, as when I found myself explaining ALEC to passersby tonight, since so few people have ever heard of it, it makes sense to just stick to the basics. Anyway, these banners had great messaging.



When I wrote my last piece I also make a distinction between tactics and message. I include the call for shutting down ALEC more as tactics than messaging. Again, many people were down with the "shutdown" message as well as the actual tactics which were as close as could be gotten to that goal, which you can read about here.

Check out this zine also: N30 Shutdown ALEC zine

I was delightfully surprised about the protest planned for the morning of Dec 2nd at the Salt River Project (SRP), which is a local energy company and an ALEC board member, and has collaborated with Peabody Coal (another ALEC member) for resource extraction. I wasn't aware of the issues with SRP specifically and so I imagine very few other people were until this action. This action definitely addressed the broader issue of colonization, which was present at the N30 event, but perhaps a bit drowned out. Although several people involved with Occupy Phoenix showed up, some of whom were down with what was going on while others didn't get it but showed up because they got the message to, this action steered away from the occupy message. It helped to make clear that the opposition to ALEC is not just coming out of occupy, even though the media seems to be portraying the N30 action that way.

Please check out the following independent media: BREAKING NEWS: Indigenous Elders & Supporters Occupy ALEC Member Salt River Project Headquarters
PHOTOS & VIDEO Indigenous Elders & Supporters Occupy ALEC Member Salt River Project Headquarters
and more at http://azresistsalec.wordpress.com/