INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class

151 Federal Agents Carry Out Massive Assault at Miami Home

MIAMI—In a brutal attack on democratic rights and in an assault on working people, 151 federal agents, many of them heavily armed, carried out a raid under authority of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, in the early morning hours of April 22.

A force of 131 INS agents and 20 U.S. marshals were involved. Some 53 INS agents surrounded the two-bedroom house, threatening a crowd there and roughing up a number of people. The cops used battering rams to knock down the door. An eight-member Border Patrol Tactical Unit, wearing goggles and bullet-proof vests, and carrying automatic rifles, led the charge inside.

An AP photographer inside the house caught the now-famous scene of an agent with the barrel of an automatic weapon in the face of Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who rescued the boy, holding Elian Gonzalez in his arms in a bedroom. Outside, the cops ordered bystanders to the ground, told reporters to stay where they were, and doused protesters with pepper spray, both as they launched the raid and before they sped off in their vans.

NBC has filed a complaint with INS commissioner Doris Meissner for federal agents roughing up a cameraman and sound man to prevent them from shooting footage of the assault.

Earlier in the day, Miami police and federal agents arrested two men who lived in a house behind the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, claiming there had been reports of weapons being stockpiled. Lacking evidence, they arrested both men on immigration charges.

The raid was organized by attorney General Janet Reno, who briefed President William Clinton in advance of the assault. In the days since, they have won substantial backing within U.S. ruling circles for the attack.

Gonzalez is a Cuban-American worker and U.S. citizen. He was given custody of the boy by the INS last November after the six-year-old was found at sea, one of the few survivors of the collapse of a flimsy boat carrying him, his mother, and 12 others who had left Cuba. The INS revoked Gonzalez's custody rights April 13 and had been involved in negotiations about turning over the boy to his father up until the moment the raid began.

Lazaro Gonzalez is an opponent of the Cuban revolution and became a temporary front man for the U.S. government as he used his possession of the boy to provide a platform from which to denounce Cuban president Fidel Castro, smear the Cuban revolution, and attempt to gain custody of the child.

Reno ordered the invasion of Gonzalez's home three days after the 11th Circuit Court of appeals dealt a blow to the Justice Department when it barred anyone from taking the boy from the United States until a court hearing on what is purported to be a request for asylum by the six-year-old. The document was filed by the distant relatives. After the raid, a judge on the appeals Court added further conditions to his stay and indicated he may seek to secure "a special guardian" to "report to the Court directly on the Plaintiff's [Elian Gonzalez's] condition and care as well as the circumstances of his present custody."

'A textbook police operation'

"A textbook police tactical operation," boasted Janet Reno and echoed by other U.S. officials and pro-police "experts." Clinton praised Reno, stating: "When all efforts failed, there was no alternative but to enforce the decision of the INS.... The law has been upheld, and that was the right thing to do."

Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Albert Gore blamed the Cuban government for the conflict, opposing administration statements that Elian and his father should be reunited. Bush denounced the raid, claiming, "The chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America."

New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani took the opportunity to accuse the Clinton administration of police brutality, comparing the federal agents in the raid to "storm troopers." On April 24, Giuliani held a news conference denouncing "Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, and Janet Reno"—repeating the three names three times—and the INS agents' use of force. "The action was unprecedented and unconscionable," he said.

Hillary Clinton, the main Democratic contender for U.S. Senate in New York state, who is running against Giuliani, condemned her opponent and praised Reno. She argued that the INS action "was accomplished rapidly and without injury." In a campaign appearance, she urged Juan Miguel Gonzalez to defect with Elian and the rest of his family, declaring, "I don't have any liking for Fidel Castro and the Cuban government."

'What happens if you defy the law'

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that it "warmed his heart" to see "a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez." Friedman said the picture should be put "in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: 'America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that."

Friedman, in a front-cover feature in the March 28, 1999, New York Times magazine, advocated similar course in U.S. foreign policy. "The hidden hand of the market will never work," he stated, "without a hidden fist—McDonalds cannot flourish with McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

The recent column, titled, "Reno for President," ran April 25 after two Times editorials opposed the raid. "The Justice Department acted rashly and unwisely in ordering the raid, and its decisions now require the most careful evaluation by Congress and the American people," an April 24 Times editorial said. The government "must exhaust other remedies first and insure that it obtains the unambiguous authorization of a court to take action." Noting that "these steps may not be required by law in an immigration case," the paper cautioned that "they are necessary to reassure the public that the government is not acting arbitrarily or using excessive force—even if it has a search warrant—when it invades someone's home in the middle of the night."

Harvard constitutional law professor and Democratic Party stalwart Laurence Tribe asks in a guest column in the New York Times, "Where did the attorney general derive the legal authority to invade that Miami home in order to seize the child?" The "government's actions," he wrote, "appear to have violated a basic principle of our society, a principle whose preservation lies at the core of ordered liberty under the rule of law."

Tribe points out that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the executive branch from entering "people's homes forcibly to remove innocent individuals without taking the time to seek a warrant or other order from a judge or magistrate." Reno's decision, he says, "to take the law as well as the child into her own hands seems worse than a political blunder. Even if well intended, her decision strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty."

Record of Clinton administration

Under the guise of fighting terrorism, drugs, and crime, the Clinton administration has overseen sweeping attacks on democratic rights and the beefing up of police forces across the country. These measures include:

• The 1994 crime bill that expanded the death penalty to about 60 federal offenses and restricted the amount of time death row inmates have to file habeous corpus appeals. The bill also assaulted Fourth amendment rights by allowing prosecutors to use illegally obtained evidence in court and allocated funds to put 100,000 more cops on the street.
• The next year, in wake of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, the government expanded its powers to use wiretaps, hold an accused person without bail in preventive detention, and to give the president the power to declare a person or organization "terrorist," and allow the government to deport those accused of terrorism without presenting a judge with evidence used against them.
• The bill also requires immigrants arriving without documents to have their asylum claims heard by a single INS officer, instead of an immigration judge as was the case previously.
• The number of cities of more than 50,000 people with police SWAT teams or paramilitary units reached nearly 90 percent. Some 75 percent of cities smaller than 50,000 now have SWAT teams.
• The Department of Defense has armed these units by giving them 1.2 million pieces of equipment between 1995 and 1997 alone. This includes 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. a 55,000 pound armored personnel carrier, named "any Time Baby" by the New York Police Department, was used to evict people in Manhattan in 1995.
• The INS now can detain and jail a person on the basis of secret evidence. Last year some two dozen people, all arab, were being held in jail, some for up to three years.
• Deportations hit a record high of 300,000 over the two years following the adoption of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act. The bill mandated the Border Patrol to bolster its forces by more than 1,000 a year. It more than doubled in size from 1993 to 1998 to nearly 8,000 cops. The INS has $1 billion a year at its disposal and boasts the largest federal police force with 15,000 officers carrying weapons and authorized to make arrests.
• The Clinton administration has set up a military command, giving the U.S. military policing powers and structure inside the United States. Organized under the Joint Forces Command, training exercises have been carried out in a number of cities across the country. In Chester, Pennsylvania, soldiers stormed vacant public housing project dwellings, detonating bombs, and sprayed live gunfire while helicopters buzzed overhead. Elite units of the National Guard have now been trained in addition to regular U.S. forces.
• Claiming to be seeking drug dealers, New York City cops burst into a Bronx apartment with a battering ram March 18, 1998. They acknowledged two days later they had smashed up the "wrong" apartment, one of 11 such "mistakes" admitted to that year.
• Declaring that "Effective law enforcement would be appreciably impaired without the ability to search a passengers personal belongings," the Supreme Court ruled that cops may not only search the belongings of the driver of a car but the passengers as well.
• The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the police have a right to forcibly enter any place for which they have a drug-related search warrant, a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court.
• Clinton has allowed states to free themselves from federal laws aimed at maintaining humane conditions in prisons; allowed police to join parole officers in surprise raids on the homes and living accommodations of parolees; and has overseen the rise of the U.S. prison population to 2 million in February, double what it was in 1990, and the execution of 98 people in 1999.
• The routine brutality of the police has been met with rising protests. Los angeles has been swept by a wave of "revelations" in which police, in the words of a New York Times editorial, "routinely framed innocent gang members, lied in court, and occasionally shot and planted weapons on unarmed people." The fact that working people don't get a fair trial was recently acknowledged by the governor of Illinois when he suspended the death penalty for that reason.
• The very way police are trained reinforces this tendency. In the trial of the cops who killed Amadou Diallo in New York, two recalled, as reported in the Times: "training at the 'funhouse,' an apartment building rife with gunmen and other faux dangers. When a prosecutor asked whether the training included learning to distinguish between guns and innocuous objects, Officer Carroll said, 'The only objects they ever pulled on us were firearms. In every incident we were killed.'"