Privately-run Eloy Detention center in Arizona had the highest number of immigrant detainee deaths of all facilities that house immigrants. The Corrections Corporation of American (CCA) is notorious for bad conditions in their private prisons and other facilities.

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How soon will it be that anyone who refuses to submit to an iris scan will end up in a detention center? Or at least we'll be unemployed...

I mentioned the biometrics as part of immigration reform in my "Freedom Not Reform" article recently, but i didn't even take it as seriously as i think it now needs to be taken.

Some promoters of immigration reform are insisting that biometrics technology will be necessary to keep everyone in line. Man, what a great way to get all those who value civil liberties to unite against giving undocumented immigrants a way to become legal- even those who would like to see legalization. Is Schumer getting kickbacks from the biometrics industry? Someone needs to look into this. And what's the status of the Real ID, anyway?

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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform that is thus far being optimistically put forward stinks of the racism that has been intentionally spread by wealthy and powerful men and other white supremacists. This is a racism that intentionally ignores the root causes of “illegal” immigration, and promotes and excuses the exploitation, imprisonment, and even deaths of migrants. This is certainly not a consensus, and it is not an attitude developed organically, but politically and economically. Another voice must be heard: one that demands freedom, not reform.

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Monday, July 13, 2009

Sixteen people have been cited recently for leaving jugs of water in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. Littering, they call it. Funny, you can purchase litter at a store? You can use litter to save your life? This "litter" is being left in areas that migrants are walking through in this horrid desert heat.

I was told that one No More Deaths member, the first to get cited for this "littering", had come upon the body of a girl who had died migrating. Imagine how he must have felt when an officer was ticketing him the next day for trying to prevent the same sort of death for someone else.

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Sunday, July 12, 2009
Satire for Russell Pearce

No more catch and release of the unwelcome male
(or, what if you took the extremist position of our anti-immigrant Arizona Senator Russell Pearce, and put it in a different context?)
by Senator Valerie Solanas Pearce

I sat ashen as I watched the news reports. Several chiefs of police stood at a press conference and publicly refused to enforce the law. Less than a month after the brutal murder of a police officer at the hands of a male, they snubbed the opportunity to make necessary changes and violated their oaths of office for the sake of political correctness. Meanwhile, people are killed, maimed and raped. Men cost citizens billions to educate, medicate and incarcerate, and they take jobs from women.

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Friday, July 3, 2009

An article in the Arizona Republic yesterday, called ICE audits 32 Arizona companies over hiring describes a new approach to the immigration "problem".

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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

A couple minuteman group members took it upon themselves to murder a man and his nine year old daughter in their home in Arivaca, a border town in Arizona.

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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Just in time for ICE's newest program, "Secure Communities" to be headed Arizona's way, the police in Arizona are talking about how they might not recognize the Matricula Consular, the ID that Mexicans use in place of a driver's license, whether they are legal or not. The article, Police in Ariz. may stop accepting Mexican ID card, discusses how people who show this identification are likely to be, as one presumes, charged with a crime, and brought to jail.

The new program called "Secure Communities" that ICE is implementing will come with a new set of problems. Basically, the program will target "criminal aliens" by linking up various law enforcement and immigration databases to be accessed when a person is in police custody. The new and existing laws and policies would give the police cause to arrest, detain, and check the databases on the suspect, and since undocumented immigrants would then have charges against them that they wouldn't otherwise have had, they will more likely be face the consequences of being labeled "criminal aliens".

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

This flier was passed out by CAROB and associates nearby the Border Security Expo that took place in Phoenix recently. It was handed to passersby- mostly baseball fans, others coming from the light rail station, a few people from the expo itself, and whoever else happened to be walking by...

The same mindset that has brought us freeway cameras is behind a Border Security Expo being held this Tuesday through Thursday at the Phoenix Convention Center. The event is sponsored by Raytheon, a company that manufactured a missile that killed 62 civilians in a Baghdad market in 2003*. Some of these technology companies are raking in millions, even billions of dollars to “secure the homeland”. But where does that leave us?

What does it mean that Homeland Security has nothing to do with making sure we all have homes?

Especially when so many people are losing their homes, security should mean shelter, food, health care, safety… Not more creepy biometrics devices. The government clearly is more concerned about fortifying the military and helping big business than it is about us.

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It is interesting to see how quickly the debate about border security has become dominated by the issue of violence and drugs. I thought i was just hearing more about it because i became interested in the parallels between the drug war and the war on migrants, turning to narco news for information, which also resulted in me getting google news alerts on the merida initiative or plan mexico. I have several articles bookmarked, waiting for me to read so i can better understand the implications of the plan mexico and other responses to the violence and the drug trade.

The drug cartel violence has been in the news in the US more lately because Hillary Clinton went down to Mexico to talk about it, and Obama recently decided to send more agents down to the border. I believe that some people are mainly afraid of the violence touching US citizens. I believe there are other stronger political motivations for getting involved.

What i have made of it so far is that the violence has increased because the drug war in Columbia caused cartels to form or grow in mexico to transport the same cocaine, along with marijuana and other drugs. The political corruption in Mexico is well known. In fact, most people figure that in the war on drugs, it's just that one cartel has been favored over the others, leading to more access to resources and impunity and therefore more war over turf. Of course the mexican government would rather control the cartels, and several within the government probably want there to be no cartels. However, since illicit drugs are the number one source of revenue in Mexico, it's no wonder that so many people, from poor youths to police officers, to the president, and from what i hear even people in the US DEA, are involved in it.