Pause a moment to remember a few tales about ICE & AZ from recent years

[struggle4progress]

... An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims ...
U.S. citizen's near-deportation not a rarity
A zeal to nab illegal immigrants ensnares many innocent people, including a Minnesota native.
By MARISA TAYLOR, McClatchy News Service
Last update: January 26, 2008 - 8:09 PM
http://www.startribune.com/nation/14456137.html

FLORENCE, Ariz. — Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona. On Thursday, Warziniack finally became a free man. Immigration officials released him after his family, who learned about his predicament from McClatchy, produced a birth certificate and after a U.S. senator demanded his release. "The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes," Warziniack said ...
Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens
Are U.S. citizens being deported to foreign countries?
By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/01/24/25392/immigration-officials-detaining.html

The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months. Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped him track down his father's birth certificate and his own, his parents' marriage certificate, his father's school, military and Social Security records. After nine months, a judge determined that he was a citizen, but immigration authorities appealed the decision. He was detained for five more months before he found legal help and a judge ordered his case dropped. "It was a nightmare," said Veloz, 37, a Los Angeles air conditioning installer ...
U.S. citizens wrongly detained, deported by ICE
Immigration Law
July 27, 2009
By Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-07-27/news/17218849_1_judy-rabinovitz-immigration-laws-illegal-immigrant

... U.S. citizens arrested as illegal immigrants or deportable residents cannot count on the legal system as a safety net. The odds are stacked against them. On the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, The Associated Press has documented more than 55 such cases since 2000, and immigration lawyers count hundreds more ... Rene Saldivar, 41, of Riverbank, Calif., gained citizenship through his father, who was born in Colorado. But he had no way of proving that to immigration officials because he was sent to a jail far from home and had no access to either lawyers or legal documents such as his birth certificate ... Rojas called immigration facilities in Sacramento, San Francisco and Eloy, Ariz., where he knew detainees were regularly sent. No luck. For six months, the family did not know where Saldivar was ... It turned out Saldivar had been in an Eloy federal immigration jail all along, the same one Rojas checked. But immigration officials had recorded his last name as Saldidar, so they couldn't find him ...
No safety net in immigration legal system
Amid crackdown on illegal immigrants, some citizens are being deported
updated 8:10 p.m. ET, Mon., April 13, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198602/

... ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens. If larger trends are consistent with the pattern in Hartzler's caseload, since 2004 ICE has held between 3,500 and 10,000 US citizens in detention facilities and deported about half. US citizens are a small percentage of ICE detentions for this period, which totaled around 1 million, but in absolute terms the figure is staggering. Phone interviews suggest the higher end may be more accurate. I called fifteen private immigration attorneys whose names appear on a Justice Department list of pro bono attorneys in Los Angeles and left messages asking whether they had clients in the past three years who were US citizens held in ICE detention for at least one month. Seven of them called back, each describing one to four clients who meet these criteria. Using these accounts, and those from attorneys at three nonprofit immigration clinics, I documented thirty-one cases from across the country of US citizens, eight born here, incarcerated as aliens for one month to five years. Fourteen were deported. Five remain in detention ...
Thin ICE
By Jacqueline Stevens
This article appeared in the June 23, 2008 edition of The Nation.
June 5, 2008
http://www.lawso.ucsb.edu/faculty/jstevens/113/ICENationArticleStevens

[Xipe Totec]

1. That's why some call ICE La Migra,

and others call it La Mugre (The Filth)

[EFerrari]

2. K&R

[Feron]

3. And here's an entire newspaper series about AZ racial profiling:

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/specialReports/arpaio-racial-profiling-1476917/?page=1

In particular it focuses on Maricopa County which is home to asshole Arpaio.

[struggle4progress]

4. Thank you! What an excellent investigative series! I'll post some excerpts below

[Feron]

9. no problem although..

I have to give credit to a Du'er who posted the link some time ago. I'd give credit, but I forgot the person's handle.

[EFerrari]

5. An AZ facility has more fatalities than any other contract facility.

"Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable."


from



January 10, 2010
Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html?pagewanted=print

[struggle4progress]

10. I wonder how much of the "Eeek! Aliens!" astroturf is funded by the private jail industry

[EFerrari]

11. There's a thought. Greg Pallast and Bobby Kennedy

did some reporting on the current governor running a vote suppression program -- Thom had it on today.

And the prison industry would dovetail nicely, eh?

[struggle4progress]

6. ... Legal Resident Presented Valid Documentation to the MCSO but Was Jailed for 12 Days Anyway

... Sure, Martinez-Villaman was driving without a license, an offense that rarely warrants detention, let alone nearly two weeks behind bars. The fact that he is brown, Martinez-Villaman says, led MCSO deputies to hold him as a possible illegal immigrant while they sorted out his status.

"They didn't recognize my visa," he says. "They thought it was fake" ...

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-11-12/news/a-legal-resident-presented-valid-documentation-to-the-mcso-and-was-jailed-for-12-days-anyway/

[struggle4progress]

7. . MCSO Pointed Guns at . U.S. Citizens, After . Attention Was Drawn to . Spanish-Language Music .

... the brother and sister were on the right track in March 2008, working for their father's business, Manuel's Auto Repair, 14849 North Cave Creek Road. Just as they do today, Nieto Jr. helped fix cars and Meraz was the office assistant.

In the late afternoon of March 28, after working all day, the pair decided to drive over to the Quick Stop & Gas convenience store a few blocks away for soft drinks and cigarettes.

It was Spanish-language music that seemed to have sparked the events that followed, according to interviews and the ACLU complaint.

The siblings pulled into parking place in front of the store, the van's windows rolled down on the nice, spring day. Meraz was singing loudly along with a Spanish tune on the radio ...

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-12-10/news/xxx/

[struggle4progress]

8. . US Citizen . Detained by the MCSO . Testified Before Congress About . Being Racially Profiled

.. efore a raised dais filled with congressmen, the young Mora related the incidents of February 11, 2009, when he and his dad were detained for three hours during a Maricopa County Sheriff's Office immigration raid on H.M.I Landscaping, a firm that, ironically, was contracted with Maricopa County to do clean up around Arpaio's jails.

Mora is an American citizen and was accompanying his father, a legal resident, to his dad's work at H.M.I when two sheriff's SUVs cut them off before they arrived. Without explanation, the pair were zip-tied and brought onto H.M.I.'s property, where they had to endure a long wait.

Julian Mora, a 67-year-old who suffers from diabetes, was refused several requests to use the bathroom. Eventually, sheriff's deputies allowed him to urinate behind a vehicle parked nearby. His son Julio was allowed to go to the bathroom with his hands zip-tied in front of him, as the deputies watched and cracked crude jokes ..

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-12-03/news/he-never-flinched/

[pnorman]

12. K & R for the entire thread.

n/t

[Confusious]

13. Yea F it

Lets blame Arizona every time the federal government makes a mistake.

Fing pile it on!

http://www.ice.gov/

[Soylent Brice]

14. K&R