Six on History: Immigration
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
1) DeSantis sues Biden administration over immigration, issues broad state orders, too, Miami Herald
"Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday “encouraged” state law enforcement officers to pull over drivers who are transporting migrants into the state if there is “reasonable” suspicion of a crime, as many Haitian migrants who were recently released at the U.S.-Mexico border are expected to settle in Florida.
The new policy, issued as part of a broad executive order, also prohibits state executive agencies from assisting the federal government in transporting migrants from the southwestern border to Florida. Just two years ago, though, DeSantis made his top legislative priority a law that required state and local officials to fully cooperate with federal immigration agents.
DeSantis also tapped former North Florida U.S. Attorney Larry Keefe to be the state’s “public safety czar,” a position whose responsibilities include carrying out the governor’s new executive order, lobbying the Legislature and advising the governor on “relevant issues.” His annual salary was not immediately disclosed.
The actions in Florida on Tuesday come as the situation at the U.S-Mexico border gets national attention amid a surge in border crossings and as immigration becomes a key issue heading into the 2022 midterm elections. Both DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody, who filed the lawsuit, are positioning themselves for reelection next year.
Some critics called the governor’s order a “fundraising gimmick” and a “political stunt.” Others said it is a “liability” for the state to direct state troopers to pull over drivers who they “reasonably” believe are transporting migrants from the southwest border and who they suspect are committing a crime, specifically, as the order notes, drug trafficking and human trafficking.
“What is reasonable suspicion of being used for human or drug trafficking when you’re just seeing a vehicle drive by? That sounds a lot like racial profiling,” said state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando.
DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, said the order has a clause that says an agent or officer cannot consider a “person’s race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or other immutable characteristic.” Therefore, it does not constitute racial profiling, she said.
Smith also said a part of the order contradicts the governor’s stance that Florida law enforcement officers should fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
“Now, he’s saying he won’t cooperate because it’s Biden’s policy? That sounds like DeSantis is breaking the very same law he signed into statute because it’s politically convenient,” Smith said.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson of Miami said DeSantis is using the lawsuit in “another baseless attempt to recast himself in the image of former President Donald Trump.”
“Many of the migrants who have been allowed to stay since the border was cleared include families with children and unaccompanied children whom he despicably referred to as ‘illegal alien children,’ ” Wilson said.
Depending on the provision, the executive order can apply to all migrants or only those who are coming into Florida from the southwest border.
THE BULK OF THE EXECUTIVE ORDERMany parts of the governor’s executive order will reinforce state policies and practices that have long been in place when addressing migrants in the state. But there are provisions that will mark a change in the status quo.
For instance, one provision says state executive agencies should use a federal program to confirm the immigration status of people who are seeking benefits from the state, something that they already do.
Pushaw said the provision is “reiterating the commitment.”
Another section directs the Florida Department of Children and Families to review whether facilities that house unaccompanied migrant children should be able to keep their state licenses.
Pushaw said the administration is aware of group homes and foster homes that “house unaccompanied alien children and are licensed by the state,” but did not say how many. She said the executive order is meant to help the administration better understand the situation on the ground.
Wilson said DeSantis’ concern for Florida children is “laughable” because of his opposition to mask mandates in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Children should not be used as a political pawn, which is something that only a wannabe despot would do,” Wilson said.
Kurt Kelly, the CEO and president of the Florida Coalition for Children, said he supported any efforts by the governor to ensure the maximum number of resources are going to needy children who are Florida residents.
However, Kelly noted he had heard of no recent instances of an organization unfairly prioritizing the care of undocumented minors over other children.
The order also directs state agencies to determine how expensive it is to provide services to undocumented migrants as well as to tally numbers, identities and criminal histories of migrants who are coming from the southwestern border to Florida.
“This executive order lays the groundwork to understand the true costs of illegal immigration and the Biden administration’s irresponsible open-border policy to Florida taxpayers,” Pushaw said. “Understanding the extent of the issue is the first step toward addressing it.”
Pushaw said the state does not know “the full picture of the scope of the problem” because it has not yet received the information from the federal government.
Tessa Petit, a Haitian-American who works as the Florida Immigrant Coalition’s director of operations in Miami, said her organization has heard rumors that thousands of Haitian immigrants are coming to Florida.
“There have been rumors that most of the people being released are headed to Florida, but we don’t have numbers yet,” Petit said. “We have been asking, but they have not been released yet.”
Petit said she thinks that DeSantis is playing a “political game” with a group of immigrants who have ties to Florida, capitalizing on the national attention given to Haitian migrants in Texas.
THE SITUATION AT THE BORDERDeSantis’ executive order comes after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said between 10,000 and 12,000 Haitians were released into the U.S. until their pending asylum cases are heard by an immigration judge.
Another 5,000 Haitians are being processed by DHS and 3,000 Haitians are in detention. About 4,000 Haitians were deported by plane between September 19 and September 27, according to DHS statistics.
“Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000,” Mayorkas said on Fox News Sunday when asked how many have already been released. “It could be even higher. The number that are returned could be even higher. What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it.”
It’s not clear how many of those Haitians with court appearances could end up in Florida. Wilson told the Miami Herald last week that “hundreds” of Haitians released at the border made their way to Florida to be with relatives or sponsors who can help strengthen their asylum claims.
Florida has the largest Haitian-American community in the country with approximately 530,000 as of 2019, according to Census figures. Other major Haitian-American communities are in New York and Boston.
The lawsuit is primarily focused on the so-called “catch and release” practice that former President Donald Trump and many Republicans, including DeSantis, have blamed for crimes and violence committed by undocumented immigrants.
In a 23-page lawsuit filed in federal court in Pensacola, Moody alleges many of the migrants the Biden administration has “illegally released” will come to Florida and cost the state money.
“The Biden administration’s illegal border policies cause Florida harm,” according to the complaint. “Many of the aliens illegally released by the Biden administration are arriving, or will arrive in Florida, harming the state’s quasi-sovereign interests and forcing it to incur millions of dollars in expenses.”
Moody also alleges that some undocumented immigrants coming to Florida could be gang members, drug traffickers and other criminals.
When announcing the lawsuit, DeSantis said the crimes committed by undocumented immigrants are worse than those committed by U.S. citizens “in terms of the anguish that the families face” because they could have been prevented by the federal government.
“Had the government just done its job, this would not have happened. They would not have been in their situation,” DeSantis said. “So, it’s really, really a sad thing.”
Some of these claims were mentioned by DeSantis and Moody when visiting Del Rio, Texas, in July to highlight a two-month mission by Florida law enforcement officers in helping apprehend migrants at the border city.
At the time, DeSantis said that the vast majority of migrants state personnel encountered in Texas wanted to come to Florida. If they were to reach Florida, he said it would be a “stress on public resources, schools, medical, and all of these things.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki did not comment on the lawsuit on Tuesday because she had not reviewed the details.
That rhetoric has been resonating ever since in the right wing, repackaged lately in what’s known as “replacement theory,” espoused by conservative media figures like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. And it has seeped into the mainstream political discourse in the Capital Region, where Rep. Elise Stefanik has adapted this despicable tactic for campaign ads.
The Harvard-educated Ms. Stefanik surely knows the sordid history and context of this. The idea of stoking racial, ethnic, and religious tribalism among voters dates back to this country’s earliest days. At various times, politicians have warned that Catholics, Jews, or Muslims were out to change the “culture,” or that Irish, Italian, Asian or eastern European immigrants would take the jobs — to “replace” white, Protestant Americans. Mr. Trump made attacking Mexicans and Muslims a hallmark of his 2016 campaign, his presidency, and his current rants from the political sidelines.
The idea of America as a melting pot is not some idealistic fiction of the left; it is part of the foundation of this nation’s greatness. It is in this country’s best interests to bring those millions of people who are here illegally but living honest, productive lives out of the shadows and give them a path to citizenship — an idea even some Republican lawmakers once supported before Mr. Trump and his ilk poisoned the debate.
"The photographs that should be seared in your memory from the Del Rio debacle are not those of Border Patrol agents on horseback, defamed by their federal superiors — and in particular, by President Biden himself — for daring to do their job.
Focus instead on the photos of police vehicles arrayed in long, imposing rows on the American side of the river — state police vehicles, ordered to secure the border by the governor of Texas.
Does Governor Abbott have the authority to deploy a “steel wall” of Lone Star State troopers? Well, he has the raw power to do it, and in crisis conditions, that is what tends to matter. And — capped by White House oracle Jen Psaki’s astonishing assertion that the “migrants” Democrats are inviting into our country don’t need the COVID vaccines Biden is mandating for Americans because “they are not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time” — the administration’s ineptitude was sufficiently humiliating that Biden hasn’t challenged Abbott’s démarche . . . yet, anyway.
As it happens, I believe the state of Texas does have the authority to exclude illegal aliens. But it is a debatable question thanks to a century of federal jurisprudence, culminating in Obama-era Supreme Court decisions that sided with the federal government’s willful refusal to perform its basic constitutional duties, and against the basic constitutional principle of state sovereignty — of which self-defense is an ineliminable element.
As I argued at the time, this is a mortal threat to what makes the United States united.
The late, great Justice Antonin Scalia framed the matter starkly while dissenting in Arizona v. United States (2012): Imagine if Article I had granted Congress the power “to establish Limitations upon Immigration that will be exclusive and that will be enforced only to the extent the President deems appropriate.”
“Since You Arrived, My Heart Stopped Belonging to Me,” a film by Erin Semine Kökdil and Chris Filippone, follows the journey of a group of Central American mothers travelling through Mexico in search of their children, who disappeared while migrating to the U.S.
Released on 05/26/2021
Torabi was living in the country without documentation after moving to the United States from Iran with his mother and brother six years before. The attacks would divide his life into two distinct parts: “There was pre-9/11 life and post-9/11 life,” he recalled.
His father, a baker and construction worker in Shiraz, had been trying to join the family after his visa application was initially rejected pre-9/11. After 9/11, Torabi said, that became “nearly impossible,” and his dad would eventually give up hope of joining his family. They haven’t seen one another in 26 years.
Following the attacks, Torabi remembers classmates hurling racist slurs at him because of his Middle Eastern ethnicity. He got involved with anti-war protests, later marched against legislation seeking to criminalize unauthorized immigration, and eventually channeled his activism into his own fight to remain in the U.S.
The Sept. 11 attacks upended U.S. immigration policy, linking it for the first time to the nation’s anti-terrorism strategy and paving the way for two decades of restrictive laws. But it also gave rise to a new kind of immigrant rights movement led by young people like Torabi.
He and other young immigrants say they were spurred by post-Sept. 11 separations of family members and friends, the government’s renewed focus on restricting driver’s licenses and, most of all, by a sense that nearly all other paths to immigration reform had been choked off.
Some even adopted the very legal tactics that advocates had used to help immigrants immediately after 9/11 — tactics that would help lay the groundwork for the Obama administration’s landmark Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that has allowed some 800,000 immigrants who lack documentation to live and work in the United States.
Reforms shattered post 9/11In the days leading up to Sept. 11, broad immigration reform seemed to be gaining traction. Mexican President Vicente Fox had just visited President George W. Bush at the White House, where they discussed immigration. Bush called for an overhaul of U.S.-Mexico immigration policy, including granting permanent U.S. legal status to guest workers from Mexico. Earlier that year, he’d asked top advisors to review more options, including some form of legalization for millions of undocumented workers.
REPORT TO BUSH OFFERS OPTION OF AMNESTY TO ILLEGAL MEXICANS
“Everything looked very positive,” recalled Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Los Angeles-based immigrant advocacy group Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). She had traveled to Washington during Fox’s visit to give the White House thousands of postcards from Americans supporting immigration reform.
Meanwhile, advocates from around the country were set to give congressional testimony in support of an immigration bill focused on young people — the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the Dream Act. At the time, it seemed to have a better chance of passing than more sweeping legislation, said Chicago-based activist Tania Unzueta, the political director at Mijente, a network for Latinx communities dedicated to organizing around social justice issues.
Unzueta, then a recent high school graduate without legal status, had been set to testify in Congress in support of the Dream Act on Sept. 12. She got a call from the office of one of the bill‘s co-sponsors, Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, telling her that “something’s happened, and the congressional hearing would likely be canceled.”
A year later, the Department of Homeland Security was born, bringing customs, immigration services, detention and enforcement efforts together for the first time.
Enforcement spiked, “and that’s when people started getting into deportation proceedings,” said Isaias Guerrero, an immigrant rights organizer and DACA recipient.
Fahd Ahmed, 41, lived in the U.S. without documentation after emigrating from Pakistan but became an American citizen shortly before 9/11. At the time of the attacks, he was involved with Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), a South Asian and Indo-Caribbean advocacy group in New York City, to visit detainees and mobilize around deferred action. Young South Asians whose relatives were detained would ask him for advice on whether they should quit school and find jobs to support their families. “No 14- or 15-year-old should have to consider whether they should drop out of school or whether they should get a job in order to support their family,” he thought.
Cristina Jiménez, the co-founder and managing director of United We Dream, a youth-led immigrant rights group, and fellow New Yorker, also recalls members of the community becoming “caught up in the deportation pipeline” after 9/11.
“Many of us in the immigrant youth movement became involved because we increasingly experienced targeting and deportation by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents and by local police, and we got activated to defend people from deportation.”
The security crackdown also affected access to driver’s licenses, that American rite of passage. The nation’s desire to prevent future attacks, coupled with bubbling anti-immigrant bias, resulted in the Real ID Act of 2005, which ramped up security standards for obtaining licenses. Teenagers too young for college or full-time jobs had a more immediate cause to rally around. Even for younger children, Jiménez said, the restrictions left a lasting impression as their parents became more fearful to drive to work or to take them to school.
Youth speak outAnd some turned to an obscure legal tactic to slow down the government’s new, aggressive approach to immigration. The tactic, to call on the government to defer deportation or “defer action” for certain immigrants, would set the foundation for what would eventually become DACA.
Walter Barrientos, also a co-founder and national organizing director of United We Dream, said he and other young activists in New York adopted this technique from organizations like Ahmed’s DRUM group and another called Families for Freedom.
“That was one of the last resources left in the system to fight deportation,” he said.
Eventually, Barrientos remembers thinking, “What if we created a preemptive way of applying for [deferred action] so that you don’t have to do it only when you’re facing deportation and you’re in the court system?”
When it became clear that Congress would not pass immigration reform, not even the Dream Act, the young activists, along with advocates and lawyers, pushed for a broad executive order to at least temporarily defer action and protect young people from deportation. In June 2012, the Obama administration complied, issuing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
The legacy todayDACA was never the end goal for organizers and was never meant to be permanent. It was nearly tossed out by the Trump administration, salvaged at the last minute by the Supreme Court in 2020, but faces significant new legal challenges. Two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, and after the Dream Act was first introduced, young immigrants living in the country without documentation still face a precarious future despite broad public support for a permanent pathway to citizenship for them. Many others were never even eligible for DACA because they didn’t qualify for its strict timeline and age requirements.
More recent DACA recipients, like Abraham Cruz Hernandez, 22, and Carlos Alarcon, 21, have drawn lessons from post-9/11 organizers. Cruz Hernandez said they helped him understand “the link between 9/11 and the creation of the DHS,” and how the DHS’ practice of monitoring immigrants has sparked controversy. He and Alarcon say they have incorporated that history to push for more expansive immigrant rights.
“Yes, we want citizenship. Yes, we want a pathway,” Cruz Hernandez said. “But we don’t want it at the expense of even more surveillance, even more enforcement.”
Last month, they helped organize a virtual town hall with University of California students to advocate for a pathway to citizenship through the federal budget reconciliation process.
“DACA gave us some normality, rather than feeling like we’re building a foundation on toothpicks,” he said, adding, “once we had that stability, I think we started utilizing the protections that DACA gave us to advocate for the rest of our community.”
But for Torabi, now 31, the fight is far from over. He hopes younger activists will achieve a more permanent solution, drawing on the lessons of their predecessors who organized in the wake of 9/11.
“That is the legacy of immigrant advocacy as a whole,” he said. “You stand on the shoulders of others.”
