United States anti-immigrant outrage

The American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups have filed a lawsuit in San Francisco’s federal court seeking to stop a practice in which alleged undocumented migrants are shackled at the feet, waist and wrists while appearing in immigration court: here.

Last night in Chicago, the controversy over the immigration enforcement program called Secure Communities reached a dramatic standoff when six undocumented students were arrested protesting a meeting to discuss the program: here.

Foreign exchange students employed by subcontractors of US confectionary giant Hershey rallied today against dire working conditions and low pay in Pennsylvania: here.

Border Patrol Abuses on the Rise. Valeria Fernandez, New America Media: “The number of apprehensions of undocumented immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped, but reports of abuses against immigrants are on the rise. Those are the findings of a new report released by the Arizona humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths. The report, ‘A Culture of Cruelty,’ documents 30,000 incidents of human rights abuses against undocumented immigrants in short-term detention between fall 2008 and spring 2011. Nearly 13,000 people were interviewed in the Mexican border towns of Naco, Nogales and Agua Prieta”: here.

Limitless Space: Computerized Dataveillance Since 9/11. Chris Walsh, Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the “Homeland”: “Hundreds of state, local and federal databases clog our nation’s digital infrastructure, collecting, sharing and hoarding inconceivable amounts of information about ordinary people. From DHS to the DOJ to the DOE, from the state and local police all the way up to the military and CIA, our government is increasingly relying on a data-driven model of social control. Below is only a tiny sampling of the many hundreds of government databases containing personally identifiable information about hundreds of millions of people”: here.

Borrowed Hands. David Bacon, California Lawyer: “In Susanville, more than a thousand miles from the Mexican border, ‘we were given documents to fill out and sign…. In addition, I was given a new copy of the employment contract,’ Valle stated. ‘There were significant differences between the information we received in Mexico when we were recruited and the employment contract we were forced to sign at that time.’ The big difference was that workers had to meet a production quota: processing 1,025 plants per hour. ‘I was told by Mr. Memmott,’ Valle said, ‘that the new provisions were [due to] clerical errors … and that I had to sign the documents – otherwise I would be sent back to Mexico'”: here.

A federal judge’s decision last week to allow several aspects of Alabama’s draconian new anti-immigration law to go into effect is having a devastating impact on the state’s immigrant families: here.

US deports a record 400,000 immigrants: here.

It Could Be You: The Sad Story of Jose Padilla, Tortured and Denied Justice. Andy Worthington, Truthout: “For nine and a half years – almost as long as the ‘war on terror’ has been providing an excuse for paranoia about Muslims in general – the case of US citizen Jose Padilla has demonstrated, to those wiling to pay attention, that something has gone horribly wrong in the United States of America. A former gang member and a convert to Islam, Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, in connection with an alleged ‘dirty bomb plot’ that never existed”: here.

“It is hard to conceive of a more profound constitutional violation than the torture of a US citizen on US soil,” wrote lawyers for Jose Padilla, who was illegally “disappeared,” imprisoned and tortured by the US government for four years: here.

The Border Wall: The Last Stand at Making the US a White Gated Community. Mark Karlin, Truthout: “The construction of the ‘barrier’ wall – accompanying large-scale militarization (the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, the military etc.) – is on America’s southern border, and there is meaning in that. Its location is prima facie evidence that the ‘immigration issue’ is really a euphemism for keeping poor brown-skinned people out of the US – as well as creating a ‘practice’ zone for protecting American economic and political interests in Mexico and Central America”: here.

Three Canadian women filed lawsuits Tuesday alleging “sexual molestation” by U.S. female border guards at the Canada-U.S. border near Windsor, Ont.: here.