Calero, the associate editor of Perspectiva Mundial and a Militant staff writer, has been locked up in an immigration jail since he was detained at Houston’s international airport December 3.

Thousands of immigrants, including permanent residents like Calero, have faced a similar denial of their rights. Over the past decade the U.S. government has adopted a series of laws that it has used to step up attacks on the rights of working people and others born abroad. Those attacks have accelerated in the past year.

Several anti-immigrant measures were passed by Congress and enacted by the Clinton administration in 1996. One was the so-called Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. It expanded the number of crimes for which a person can be deported to include a range of misdemeanors, as minor as jumping a subway turnstile or shoplifting, redefining them as "aggravated felonies." Another 1996 law that curtailed the rights of the foreign-born was the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

The Illegal Immigration Reform law was made retroactive, meaning that even small infractions on a person’s record that happened years ago--before the law was enacted--could be used as the basis for deportation proceedings today.

Immigrants who had been granted legal residence with the 1986 nationwide amnesty faced losing their legal status after the 1996 law was passed if they had a conviction on their records. While la migra has carried out factory raids to round up and deport undocumented workers, it has usually not sought out permanent residents who are in this situation. Instead, legal residents have been victimized when they leave the country and try to return; when they go to the INS to apply for a change in their status or some other reason; or if they are subsequently arrested on a criminal charge.

Here are a few examples of people the INS calls "criminal aliens" who have been snared by the immigration police.  
 
40-year resident faces exclusion
José Velásquez immigrated here from Panama more than 40 years ago, became a permanent resident in 1960, married, and has children and grandchildren who are U.S. citizens. He and his wife have operated a small grocery store in Philadelphia since the early 1980s.

Twenty years ago, Velásquez was approached at a party by an individual who asked about buying cocaine. When he pointed to someone he thought might accommodate that request, Velásquez was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to five years’ probation. In December 1998, as Velásquez was returning home to the United States after visiting his mother, who was having hip surgery, the INS dredged up his earlier conviction, detained him, and began exclusion proceedings.

In Atlanta, Olufolake Olaleye has been a permanent resident since 1990 and has two children who are U.S. citizens. She faces deportation to Nigeria because she applied for citizenship with a shoplifting conviction on her record. In 1993 she was charged with shoplifting $14.99 in merchandise when she tried to return some baby clothes without a receipt. Lacking an attorney, she copped a plea and was given a suspended sentence of one year probation. In 1998 she went to the INS to apply for citizenship. Her application was denied and she was ordered deported.

John Gaul was adopted from Thailand at the age of five by a family in Florida. At 19 he was convicted of writing bad checks and stealing a car. He received a 20-month sentence and was deported to Thailand. Since he grew up in Florida, he does not speak Thai or have any family contacts in Thailand.

After some of the most controversial aspects in the 1996 law began to spark public debate and opposition, they were modified by Supreme Court rulings in 2001. One of these provisions, called "expedited removal," gave INS agents at a point of entry the powers to summarily deport individuals--without the right to a lawyer or the right to appeal before a court--if the cops merely "suspected" their documents were not valid.

Another clause, known as "mandatory detention," allowed for indefinite jailing of immigrants who were slated for deportation but whose home country would not take them back. It was modified to require they be released after six months unless the government presented additional reasons to keep them in jail.

The immigration legislation also mandated the tripling of the immigration police. Today there are 15,000 officers carrying guns and authorized to make arrests--making the INS the largest federal police force today.

The immigration police have also widened their net. With the passage of the USA Patriot Act, signed in October 2001 by President George Bush, the number of border cops along the Canadian border was tripled.

Building on previous legislation, the USA Patriot Act, in the name of pursuing "foreign terrorists," also grants INS agents more powers to wiretap, conduct searches, employ new "monitoring" technology, and detain noncitizens deemed "terrorism suspects" for up to six months without charges.

The Border Patrol has also expanded its random checkpoints, which are already routinely conducted near the U.S.-Mexico border, to northern areas such as state highways in Michigan, where INS cops randomly stop and search cars under the guise of looking for undocumented workers.

The INS has also stepped up its raids at airports, rounding up airport workers accused of posing "security" problems such as a police record.

In addition, the Social Security Administration has so far this year sent 7 million "no match" letters to 800,000 businesses, informing employers that certain employees have Social Security numbers that don’t match official records. An estimated 100,000 workers may have lost their jobs as a result of these intimidation tactics.

The increased number of border cops, security fences, and checkpoints have taken a bloody toll, with record numbers of immigrants dying while trying to enter the country in the past several years. An August report put the death toll at 231 along the U.S. side of the Mexican border for the first eight months of this year alone. At least 2,000 people have died trying to enter the U.S. since 1994.  
 
Increase in immigrants behind bars
With the step-up in INS arrests, the immigrant prison population has rapidly increased, and the construction of immigration prisons has boomed.

According to a Human Rights Watch 2001 report, the number of immigrants held in detention by the INS rose from an average of 6,700 per day in 1995 to a record 20,000 per day in September 2000.

Today the INS operates nine detention centers around the country. It also rents another seven privately run prisons. And because of the overflowing numbers, it is using county jails to hold thousands more who await possible deportation.

The "Houston Processing Center," where Róger Calero is currently being held, is one of these privately operated jails. It is managed by the Corrections Corporation of America, an expanding company that brags of being "the sixth-largest corrections system in the country, just behind Texas, California, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, New York, and Florida."
 
 
Related articles:
Staffs of ‘Perspectiva Mundial’ and the ‘Militant’ fight INS effort to exclude editor
UFCW official: ‘A travesty of justice’
Inside an INS jail in Houston
Facts on INS detention of Róger Calero and the fight to free him
An Appeal to readers
How you can help  
 
 
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