Why American immigration policy is in chaos

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By Alan Bean

It is difficult to make sense of American immigration policy because our immigration policy makes no sense.  The Obama administration swept to victory in 2008 on promises of comprehensive immigration reform.  When efforts to follow through on this promise were met with hysterical references to amnesty and calls for wholesale deportation, Obama ramped up a Secure Communities program ostensibly designed to identify and deport undocumented residents with criminal records.  Secure Communities (also know as S-Comm) led to record levels of deportation (upwards of 400,000 per year) as the number of people entering the country, legally and illegally, dropped to a 40-year low.  Mass deportation did little to silence Obama’s critics on the right but sparked claims from the Latino community that the spike in deportation was separating undocumented parents from their  citizen children while targeting people who posed no threat to public safety.

In response to criticism from a sector Obama can’t afford to ignore, ICE officials were ordered to focus on keeping families together while deporting only “the worst of the worst”.  In December, immigration prosecutors initiated an extensive review of the nearly 300,000 deportation cases pending in the nation’s 58 Immigration Courts to ensure that the new policy was being carried out.  As a result, the deportation machinery has slowed considerably. 

Conservatives are calling Obama’s new policy a de facto amnesty for illegal aliens; Latino critics complain that thousands of harmless people are languishing in immigration prisons while public officials dither.

Now, according to this article in the Tucson Citizen, some are alleging that the judicial logjam in the nation’s immigration courts has been caused by conservative officials within the Homeland Security establishment who take their cue from conservative Republicans demanding that every undocumented person must be deported regardless of criminal history or family circumstances. 

In other words, as the President attempts to arbitrate the contradictory demands of conservative Republicans and Latino activists there is no sign that a coherent immigration policy will emerge any time soon.  By nature, Obama is a conciliator eager to meet his opponents in the middle.  As the fall election approaches at freight train speed, however, no one is in the mood for cutting pragmatic deals.  If Obama doesn’t go to the wall to back up his kinder-gentler version of Secure Communities he could lose the enthusiastic support of the Latino community.

New policy slow to clear deportation backlog

on Jun. 09, 2012

Tucson Citizen

Federal immigration officials have closed less than 2 percent of the more than 230,000 cases they have reviewed in the past six months in their effort to reduce backlogged immigration courts and focus more attention on deporting serious criminals. (more…)

FBI hears from critics of controversial deportation program

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The controversy over the federal government’s Secure Communities program is heating up.  If this briefing from “Uncover the Truth” (a website dedicated to monitoring Secure Communities), the FBI community is split on the issue, with one group upset over the federal mandates that have been imposed on local law enforcement, and the another group supporting the status quo.  Is Secure Communities a legitimate program or a classic example of mission creep and Big Brother bureaucracy?  This issue has created an interesting coalition between civil rights advocates and small government, privacy rights people. AGB

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Contact: Jessica Karp, NDLON: jkarp@ndlon.org , 917-855-7682

Controversy Over “Secure Communities” Deportation Program Widens as FBI Role is Scrutinized At Bi-Annual oversight meeting, Advocates Call on FBI to alter program to protect public safety

Buffalo, New York–Today, immigrants’ rights and privacy advocates are addressing the bi-annual meeting of the FBI group charged with managing the nation’s criminal databases. Their topic is the controversial “Secure Communities” deportation program. The advocates say the FBI makes the program possible by automatically forwarding all arrest fingerprints to DHS for an immigration background check. And they say the FBI should change that policy in response to growing calls from governors, police chiefs, and communities across the country–including New York City, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, and Vermont, where Secure Communities was recently activated over strong local opposition.

Said Jessica Karp, Staff Attorney and Soros Fellow with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network: “We know from documents received through the Freedom of Information Act that Secure Communities has generated fierce debate within the FBI between those who support states’ right to opt out and those who want to keep the program mandatory. Top FBI officials have described their position as ‘being caught in a nuclear war,’ saying, ‘[a]ny way we go will contradict one of our partners.’ We hope today’s meeting will show the FBI that the right way forward is clear—it must end its facilitation of this ill-conceived and mismanaged deportation program.”

Sonia Lin, Attorney and Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Cardozo School of Law Immigration Justice Clinic, says: “The FBI is supposed to partner with state and local police to promote public safety. But Secure Communities was imposed on states and local agencies without their consent. It undermines community policing, diverts local resources, and turns local law enforcement agencies into gateways to deportation. The FBI has the authority—and the obligation—to rethink its involvement in this deportation dragnet.”

Travis Hall, a PhD candidate at New York University studying biometric programs, said: “There are many ways to set up biometric databases–they can either increase detrimental forms of surveillance and encroach upon privacy rights, or they can be used to bolster security and be privacy enhancing. This depends a great deal on the values embedded into the technologies during their design and application. Right now the Secure Communities program is a textbook case of ‘function creep’, when information collected for one purpose is inappropriately used for another. It is my hope that the FBI will take into consideration the concerns of privacy and immigration rights activists in setting the standards and policies that structure their collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information.”

How many innocent people have we sent to prison?

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I can’t read stories like this without thinking of the Tulia defendants, the Colomb family, Alvin Clay, Curtis Flowers and Ramsey Muniz, innocent people Friends of Justice has featured in narrative campaigns.  Some of these people are now in the free world; others are still locked up.  This story in The Nation asks the obvious question: If so many people can prove their innocence, how many innocent people are still locked up?  Can it possibly be as high as the 136,000 suggested below?  And how did they come up with that number?  Read on.  AGB

How many innocent people have we sent to prison?

By Liz Webster
The Nation

When Beverly Monroe met her new neighbors in the free world after spending seven years in a Virginia prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she spoke candidly about her past. “I said I’d been through a crisis,” she says. “People immediately think a divorce or you lost your husband or something like that, which is all terrible enough.” (more…)

Would God kill homosexuals if he had the chance?

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By Alan Bean

Pastor Curtis Knapp is probably a great guy. I have been a Baptist pastor in Kansas and I know the type: kind, gentle, fun-loving, infinitely polite. In a recent sermon, Pastor Knapp suggested that the government, if it understood its divine mandate aright, would put gay people to death. He wasn’t advocating vigilante violence, mind you; only the government is authorized for this kind of malice.

Now he says he was misquoted. Or quoted out of context. Or quoted by people who, were they as drenched in the biblical world view as his congregants, would have realized he loves gay people and wants them saved, not slaughtered.

On the other hand, Pastor Knapp still thinks God, if he had his way in this wicked world, would have gays massacred en masse. The Almighty said as much in plain black and white in the 20th chapter of Leviticus.

That passage (I call it the ‘killin’ chapter) also calls for the summary execution of adulterers, idolators, father-cursers, and sinners engaged in various kinds of incestuous coupling. Even sex with a menstruating woman is liable to punishment–for the man and the woman.

When people talk about “the angry God of the Old Testament” this is what they have in mind. You could spend a lifetime in most churches and never hear a single sermonic reference to Leviticus 20; but pastor Knapp ain’t no kangaroo preacher who bounces over the tough texts.

How should Christians interpret this kind of passage? The normal practice is to pretend the “texts of terror” don’t exist. If you don’t get around in the Bible much, that works pretty well.

But there are always folks intent on reading the Bible clear through. Some of them even make it to Leviticus 20. “Oh my God,” they say, “I’ll have to talk to the preacher about this.”

But the conversation rarely takes place. Parishioners fear, rightly, that the preacher won’t have a comforting or enlightening answer, so they try to forget about it.

Creative exegetes find clever ways to domesticate passages like Leviticus 20. Perhaps this is just hyperbole, the intentional overstatement of the truth. God doesn’t want us to kill homosexuals; He just wants us to know he hates them (and idolators, and adulterers and father-cursers, and . . .)

I’m not sure this helps much. If God thinks homosexuals are an abomination, why shouldn’t there be open season on the non-straight?

And if sexual orientation isn’t a choice, it must express the creative will of God. Does God make people gay and then hate them for it? Is this commendable, or even logical?

In all likelihood, the author of Leviticus believed that everybody is born straight because that’s the way God planned it. The perverse insistence on going against your natural inclinations constitutes a conscious rejection of God which must not be tolerated. This view of creation is then attributed to the Creator.

Unfortunately for adherents of the “biblical worldview,” this understanding of sexual orientation is just plain wrong. If some people are born gay, either God messed up, God isn’t in control, or God wants it that way. Either way, God must bear the ultimate responsibility.

This issue comes down to the character of God. Is God the perfection of love, as the Bible insists, or is God a weird alloy of love and hate, good and evil who must be obeyed even if he doesn’t make sense because . . . he’s God?

A proper understanding of incarnation is helpful here. According to the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), Jesus was fully God and fully human, even if we can’t understand how that could be so. To be fully human, Jesus had to be born into a specific culture at a specific time, and the tenor of his teaching would reflect that fact. Jesus spoke and acted as a first century, Second Temple, Palestinian Jewish peasant because that’s what it means for God to empty himself of divinity and take on human flesh.

God speaks to us through the Scriptures. But here too the logic of Chalcedon applies. The Bible is utterly of God and utterly human. Being human, the Bible reflects the perceptions and thought processes of the epoch in which it was written. It is the product of a pre-scientific world. As an inescapable consequence, the Bible doesn’t give us a scientific take on creation.

To say that the Bible must be right because it is God-breathed is like saying that Jesus, although he appeared to be human, was really God wearing a clever disguise. We can’t have it both ways. Incarnation and inspiration are both self-limiting realities. God comes to us clothed in human limitation and yet is never less than God.

You aren’t suppose to understand this, and you certainly don’t have to believe it; but that’s what orthodox Christian teaching boils down to.

So, what if the scientists speak of evolution over billions of years and the Bible speaks of fiat creation over a six-day period? Which is right? Almost half of the American population believes that buying into evolution means giving up on God. But evolution is just another form of incarnation; a completely natural process that is entirely the work of God. God doesn’t just give the evolutionary process a nudge now and then; God inhabits the evolutionary process.

Which brings us back to texts of terror like Leviticus 20. A Christocentric (Christ-centered) interpretation of Scripture means reading Leviticus through the mind of Christ. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality. Jesus counseled his disciples to forgive their enemies and wouldn’t back down from the hard implications of this teaching even when nailed to the rough wood of a Roman cross: “Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Jesus didn’t reference Leviticus 20 either, but he did address the death penalty.

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:21-22)

How would Jesus respond to Pastor Knapp and the twentieth chapter of Leviticus? “You have heard that it was said in ancient times, ‘hate the homosexual’, and ‘when a man lies with a male as with a woman they shall be put to death.’ But I say to you, love everyone. If you look down on your homosexual brother or sister, you are liable to judgment, and if you call your brother a ‘fag’, a ‘fairy’ or a ‘dyke’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Did Jesus really believe in hell? I don’t know, but he talked about it all the time and, inevitably, the hell-bound are the unforgiving, the uncompassionate, and the hard of heart. If the biblical worldview is the vision of Jesus (and I believe it is) there can be no place for sermons that pander to the worst impulses of the people in the pew.

God is good all the time. We are all helpless sinners, even the best of us. We are all saved by the infinite grace revealed in the eyes of Christ the Savior. Thanks be to God.

DC says no to “secure communities” immigration checks

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By Alan Bean

If you’re wondering what this “secure communities” business is all about, you probably aren’t Latino.  If so, you have nothing to worry about.  Forget about it.  This doesn’t apply to you.  Unless you believe in equal justice.  In that case, read on.

Secure Communities began as a pilot program in late 2007.  The idea was to hold criminal suspects in detention until their fingerprints could be checked against FBI and DHS records.  In case of a match, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) puts a detainer on the individual until immigration status can be verified and a preliminary decision made about deportation. 

In theory, only serious criminals are selected for deportation, but the rules governing the Secure Communities program are vague and susceptible to multiple interpretations.  Public officials who want to use Secure Communities as a cover for racial profiling and the harassment of heavily Latino neighborhoods are free to do so.

Secure Communities was voluntary at first, but the Obama administration, eager to dodge the impression that it is soft on illegal immigration, has become increasingly enamored of the program.  Safe Communities is now mandatory and universal compliance will be demanded by 2013.

US immigration policy lurched in a conservative direction in 1981 when Ronald Reagan took a strong stand against Haitian asylum seekers.  But the real change came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1996.  The implementation of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) made deportation much easier while shifting decision-making authority from the judiciary to petty government officials.  The post 9-11 creation of ICE as a component of Homeland Security set the stage for Secure Communities.  The United States now deports seven times as many people as we did in 1994, just prior to AEDPA and IIRAIRA.

Although half of the roughly 400,000 people deported annually in recent years have criminal records, many are guilty of nothing more than driving without a driver’s license (an understandable violation if you are documented). 

How safe has Safe Communities made America?  Deporting bad actors will always be a popular idea, but when entire communities are transformed into virtual police states, community trust is seriously eroded.  Nobody wants to talk to the police, even the victims of violent crime or potential eyewitnesses.

Secure Communities policies were softened slightly earlier this year, but critics were uniformly unimpressed with the miniscule changes.

As this story suggests, the erosion of community trust is emerging as the major reason people across the nation are fighting mad about Secure Communities. 

Secure Communities Immigration Checks Resisted In District Of Columbia

Elise Foley
Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — District of Columbia council members said they plan to act swiftly on Tuesday to defy a federal immigration enforcement program the city will be forced to join the same day. (more…)

Southern Baptist Leader Loses Radio Show following Tirade

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This story was originally published by the Associated Baptist Press and requires no editorial comment.  AGB

Richard Land Signs Off Radio Show

Richard Land

By Bob Allen
Associated Baptist Press

Southern Baptists top moral-concerns spokesman told listeners June 2 was his final appearance on the weekly call-in show that sparked recent controversy.

The head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission signed off without fanfare for the last time on the Richard Land Live! weekly radio show June 2.

Land, Southern Baptists’ top spokesman for moral and religious-liberty concerns since 1988, didn’t go into detail about the controversy over recent comments about Trayvon Martin and a plagiarism investigation that brought rebuke and a decision to cancel the program by the executive committee of his trustee board. (more…)

Coming Out Black and Brown

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Pierre Berastain

Pierre Berastain was a Harvard Undergrad when he worked as a Friends of Justice intern in the summer of 2010.  Pierre completed his first year at the Harvard Divinity School last week and we are thrilled to announce that he will once again be working with us as an intern.

When Pierre and I got together at Starbucks this Saturday morning to talk over the details of his work this summer, we talked about the shaping power of narrative–the stories we grow up listening to.  To live in America is to grow up listening to demeaning narratives about homosexuals and homosexuality.

Canada wasn’t much different.  Just before the sixth grade (or Grade 6 as we Canadians called it) my family moved from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories to Edmonton where I was enrolled in Queen Alexandra elementary.  All the boys were calling each other “homos” or just “mo’s”.  I had no idea what you had to do to qualify as a “mo” but I knew it had to be shameful . . . and funny.

I was wrong on both counts; but since this was the only narrative I was exposed to, what was I supposed to think.  Admit it, you grew up in the same cramped and fearful world.

GLBT people grow up with these toxic narratives too, and the damage can be dreadful.  For people of color, the trauma is compounded. (more…)

Will Obama Deliver on Comprehensive Immigration Reform?

· 3 Comments ·
Viviana Hurtado

By Alan Bean

Viviana Hurtado learned about immigration issues while working as a journalist in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.  She understands the desperation that drives men and women across the River and how tenuous the existence of the undocumented can be.  She understands that many extended families contain both the documented and the undocumented.  President Obama’s delay in pushing for meaningful immigration reform means that “many of the estimated 12 million people who live and contribute millions of dollar to the economy will continue to live in fear that at any moment, La migra may pick up and deport a mom or dad, often times of a U.S. citizen”. During my recent trip to “the Valley” I was disturbed by the militarization of the area (I can’t think of a better word).  There was a time when Mexican citizens entered the United States on a seasonal basis, worked a few months in the fields, then headed back to Mexico.  Or they might live on the Mexican side of the border and work as a maid in a Texas border town.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  Once you are in the country, you stay in the country, even if that means being confined to virtual house arrest while documented members of the family venture out of the home to buy groceries.  If your child is picked up by La Migra and transferred to a county jail, you aren’t able to visit; you can’t leave the Rio Grande Valley without passing through the checkpoints that are located within 100 miles of the border on every highway.  Between 1994 and 2008, the overall number of individuals detained i the United States each year swelled from approximately 81,000 to around 380,000.  Thanks to the federal Secure Communities program that has spread to virtually every part of the United States, local law enforcement must put an “Ice Hold” on every person they detain if there is any chance they might be illegal.  At least 400,000 people are deported from the United States every year.

With these policies in place, it is hardly surprising that as many people now cross the border from the United States to Mexico as enter the US from the South.  When I hear critics of the Obama administration insisting that the federal government “get serious” about border security, I wonder what they are talking about.  The President is desperate to prove that he can be as punitive as any Tea Party Republican on the immigration issue; he certainly puts the relatively balanced policies of his predecessor to shame.

Former priest Michael Seifert
Mike Seifert, Equal Voice Network

Mike Seifert, head of the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, took me for a guided tour of the border fence.  “What do people who don’t live here need to know about the life experience of the undocumented?” I asked. Mike thought a moment.  “To tell the story of the world people live in down here,” he said at last, “you would need to invent a new vocabulary.”  (more…)

Zimmerman’s bond revoked

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George Zimmerman, the man accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, is likely on his way back to the slammer after a judge concluded that he and his family lied about the family finances.  Your can read the New York Times story here.

California bill would make simple possession a misdemeanor

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A bill filed by California State Senator Mark Leno would shift the mere possession of small amounts of illegal drugs from felony to misdemeanor status.  This article in Capitol Weekly by Michelle Alexander and Alice Huffman summarize the argument against mass incarceration and explains why Senator Leno’s bill is a step in the right direction. AGB

Teeming Prisons Create a Permanent Underclass

It is no secret that our nation’s prison population has skyrocketed during the last forty years, thanks largely to the failed War on Drugs. The race to incarcerate has led to a quintupling of our prison population since 1980; more than two million people are behind bars today. What’s less well known, however, is that millions more are locked in invisible cages for which there is no key. These cages are not made of steel but of laws, policies, and practices that permanently relegate everyone labeled “felon” to an inferior second-class status. (more…)