Tucson Group “Polices” the Police on Immigration

TUCSON, Ariz.— A coalition of community groups in Tuscon is using video to show how readily police are cooperating with Border Patrol, despite local law enforcement’s stated opposition to Arizona’s new immigration law before it took effect.

The “Yo Soy Testigo” ("I’m a witness") campaign, launched by Tucson-based Coalición Derechos Humanos, seeks to shine a light on the practice of police cooperation with Border Patrol in the city.

The group, in partnership with PanLeft Productions and Migra Patrol CopWatch, has been using video cameras to document just how often police officers are detaining Latinos—with or without documents—and turning them over to immigration authorities. The group hopes that the videos will increase community awareness of how police are really treating Latinos, despite their supposed opposition to SB1070, and will pressure law enforcement to change its policies.

“We want to expose this reality and for people in the community to take responsibility,” said Isabel Garcia, director of Coalición de Derechos Humanos. She urges people to call the Yo Soy Testigo hotline to report any incidents so they can be videotaped and documented.

Prior to SB 1070, local police departments and other state agencies already had their own policies to detain undocumented immigrants on a discretionary basis. Had a court allowed the new law to take full effect, such detentions would have become mandatory throughout Arizona.

But the mandatory detention provision of SB 1070 provoked a strong outcry from the state's local law officers.

“We are not interested in enforcing federal immigration law,” said Captain Michael Gillooly, the Tucson Police Department's chief of staff. “The problem with SB 1070 is that it mandated we did that.”

In an interview with the Arizona Daily Star in July, Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said: “Although illegal immigration has undeniable impacts on Arizona, requiring local police already strapped for resources to act as immigration agents is not the answer.”

The Pima County Sheriff's Department and the South Tucson Police Department also opposed SB 1070.

But despite such widespread opposition, videos captured by Jason Aragon of PanLeft and Migra Patrol Copwatch show a different picture.

A recent video posted online, titled “SB 1070 is in full effect,” shows a woman detained by Tucson police and then shortly after taken away by Border Patrol.

Lynda Cruz, a volunteer with Migra Patrol CopWatch, was present that day, and said the woman was pulled over for a minor infraction. The woman, a legal resident, had forgotten her wallet at home and didn’t have any identification, Cruz says.

Volunteers like Cruz advise people who are detained to refuse to speak with their captors and to request the presence of their attorney.

When New America Media asked about this incident, Gillooly said the Tucson Police Department was confident that the officer acted appropriately and was following department policy.

“Our investigation of that revealed that when the Border Patrol arrived, that female refused to answer any questions,” Gillooly said. He said the federal agent was forced to take her to the station to check whether she was an undocumented immigrant.

When asked why the police detained this woman and called the Border Patrol, Gillooly said he wouldn’t provide any more information.

Cruz said similar incidents have occurred in South Tucson, an area that is predominantly Hispanic.

Gillooly said the department has not seen an increase in complaints from community members about possible racial profiling or police abuse.

“People don’t complain? How are they going to complain if they are the ones retaliated against?” responded Garcia of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos.

The situation in Tucson hasn’t attracted nearly as much media attention as the controversial immigration raids in Latino neighborhoods in Phoenix by Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies. But, in many ways, the dynamics at play in Tucson are creating heightened tensions.

About 40 percent of the city’s half-million residents are Latinos. Tucson, located less than two hours from the Mexican border, is also home to a Border Patrol station, which facilitates more direct cooperation between police and U.S. immigration authorities. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has 3,300 Border Patrol agents dedicated to the Tucson sector of the border.

In the past five years, the Border Patrol added 1,000 agents as part of a federal effort to escalate border security.

Unlike Phoenix, it is not uncommon to see Border Patrol cars driving through Tucson. Many of those who work at the Border Patrol station live in the community.

“People are divided over this issue,” said Alex González, a volunteer [or “promotoras”] with Coalición de Derechos Humanos. “Even families are divided on this.”

She said the new “Yo Soy Testigo” hotline has been flooded with calls denouncing police detentions and cooperation with Border Patrol.

One of the calls she took last week came from Gerardo Robles, a heartbroken undocumented immigrant, who sobbed over the phone in desperation. His wife, who was also undocumented, was pulled over by a Tucson police officer in a traffic stop. The officer called the Border Patrol, and now his wife is in a detention center.

Robles and his family have been living in Tucson for six years. He said they considered leaving the state because of SB 1070 but had been hoping for the best— in the past, police had stopped him on several occasions but had never called the Border Patrol. The politics behind SB 1070 might have changed things, he said.

“A criminal that traffics with drugs—those people are in the streets,” he said. “They are the ones that are free. My wife was coming back from work to feed our two children.”

http://newamericamedia.org/2010/09/tucson-group-polices-the-police.php

On ICE, Imprisonment, and White Supremacy

This is a pamphlet that was passed out at the Friday noise demonstration outside the Water St. Jail. We hope to radicalize the dialogue about immigration, and draw lines between the criminalization of migrants and and other marginalized people.

Social Control In Santa Cruz:
ICE, Imprisonment, and White Supremacy

August 2010

In our midst there are humans living in cages: tucked between the San Lorenzo River and Ocean Street over 300 people sit behind bars, serving sentences or awaiting trial. From the drunks in their stupor, caught up on yet another DUI, to the gang members arrested for having the wrong family or tattoos, to the gun-toting killer: our crimes are a product of our society, a response to the everyday violence that capitalism inflicts upon our lives and bodies by the mechanisms of poverty, by the police’s baton, the pesticides in the field and the “accidents” in the factory. Crime and criminals only exist because the law exists to categorize people as such, just like illegal immigration is only a phenomenon because of the existence of nations and borders. To escape the situation we are in we must step back and examine it clearly, and look at the real functions of imprisonment in our society.

Some residents of Santa Cruz have been in an uproar about the supposed crime problem: “Our town is being taken over by illegals!” “If we know who these people are, can’t we just go in their houses and get them?” “How would those anarchists like it if we threw a rock through their windows?” Since the killings of Tyler Tenorio, Carl Reimer, and the May Day property destruction, the police and their allies have needed a scapegoat for their failure to control Santa Cruz and keep out the riff-raff. Of course, the obvious choices were those who the police already wanted locked up: people of color and anarchists. The Santa Cruz Sentinel has only contributed to the hysteria and witchhunt-like atmosphere by publishing misleading articles and pictures of SubRosa collective members. While the death threats seem to be over, the city council has used the riot and recent violence as a justification to fill eight vacant positions in the police force, as well as to begin working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

With neo-nazi and fascist activity in our country on the upswing, we must fight any ICE presence in our area. Immigration control and the militarization of the border are but one more way to divide and conquer the lower classes: racism and fascism go hand in hand. In the guise of national security, the federal government is establishing a system which gives them the ability to detain people of color at will, indefinitely, without access to legal help or medical care. A 2009 article in The Nation reported that ICE has 186 unmarked and unlisted offices they use to detain people, incommunicado. 107 people have died in ICE custody between 2003 and 2009. But we don’t need this proof to know that the whole project of immigration control is fucked. We know it’s just another tool of a white supremacist power structure, another method to control us and keep us in line. We see the effects in our communities, we feel the terror of the situation when ICE is knocking at the doors of friends and family.

Regarding our local situation, it would help us to look at the recent past. In 1982, the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service, ICE’s predecessor) raided the Beach Flats and took kids out of class at Bay View Elementary School. In 1984 INS did sweeps of the Beach Flats twice, snatching 22 people from their homes, a soup kitchen line and the street. Even though the City Council declared Santa Cruz a “sanctuary city”, meaning city employees can’t inquire about or report on someone’s immigration status, the INS raided Beach Flats again in 1993, arresting 6 people. In Watsonville, there were ICE raids in 2006 and 2008, both part of regional sweeps. 107 people were arrested in the 2006 raids, and even though only 19 had warrants for arrest, 90 were swiftly deported. Watsonville also calls itself a sanctuary city: it’s plain to see how meaningless this is.

Now Santa Cruz is taking part in a national Department of Homeland Security program called Secure Communities, or S-Comm. The State of California has agreed to participate in the program, and although technically counties can opt out of the program, California Attorney General Brown denied San Francisco County’s request to opt out. In effect, the program provides funding for local jails to check the immigration status of anyone who is booked into the jail, whether or not they are convicted of a crime. This means police could arrest anyone they think might not be a citizen, for something as petty as jaywalking, take them to jail, and have them deported. This is what’s happening in Phoenix, Arizona right now, under the direction of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. S-Comm is Obama’s version of SB 1070. In Santa Cruz, S-Comm is scheduled to go into effect on August 10th.

This plan plays perfectly into what Santa Cruz has been trying to do for years. Though the city council has opposed S-Comm, they haven’t challenged ICE’s partnership with the SCPD. Besides that, their anti-homeless laws and destruction of community space in favor of creating a sanitized downtown shopping district prove whose side they’re on. The lines are being drawn, clearly. Groups like Take Back Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Neighbors, functioning as eyes and ears for the police, would like to whitewash our town. But there are many more of us, even if it may not seem so. Despite our racial, cultural, and class divides, all who are persecuted and marginalized by the law have some common cause. Some of us are forced into conflict with this society, and some of us have chosen to struggle. Either way, those of us who aren’t directly affected by ICE should do whatever is in our power to resist and show solidarity with affected individuals and communities.

But what we need isn’t immigration reform, it’s the destruction of all borders and detention centers. The first step is kicking ICE out of Santa Cruz, but this isn’t the end. Santa Cruz’ neo-colonial relationship to Watsonville and the other nearby Hispanic populations needs to be challenged also: it’s just one node of the economic system that coerces people into picking strawberries to support a family back home or working in the dining halls at UCSC. While of course immigration reforms make a huge difference in the lives of families and workers across the country, we can’t stop there. The roots of the problem lie much deeper.

To challenge imprisonment in general, we can start with the specific facts. Santa Cruz’ downtown jail is already 114% over capacity, and the minimum security wing of the Rountree Lane Facility outside Watsonville was recently closed due to budget constraints. On July 21st the downtown jail had two fights in one day, to which Sheriff’s Office Lt. Shea Johnson responded with an apt criticism of incarceration: “I don’t know what the fight was over. No one’s talking, but when you have people locked up in a facility 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there’s tension sometimes.” Whatever the conditions may be, imprisonment is unacceptable, and won’t solve our society’s problems. The law doesn’t provide justice or safety for everyone: rather, it maintains the current order and hierarchy, enforcing our social roles and defending the moneyed classes. Prisons are a huge source of profit: especially ICE detention centers, which are run by private corporations such as the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group (which Wells Fargo Bank is invested in). While Santa Cruz may not see the effects as clearly as, say, Oakland, police repression and violence still reverberate in our communities. The same system that kills and imprisons black youth in the ghetto also raids the homes of Central American immigrants and tears apart families, the same mechanisms that allow suburban white kids to attend a UC and get a respectable job force others to sell drugs or their bodies to survive.

Those who want to defend capitalism and white supremacy in Santa Cruz are getting organized: so should we. While some talk to their neighbors to support police power, we can talk to our neighbors to subvert their power.

Spread information, show up in the streets, find each other and build collective power. Resistance is gathering around the country. Along with many other actions on July 29th in Arizona, when SB 1070 went into effect, protestors blocked the entrance to the Maricopa County Jail, delaying Sherrif Arpaio’s immigration sweep. If we struggle together we stand a better chance than if we let each group, culture or demonized minority get repressed individually. California is headed down the same path as Arizona, and our position as immigrants, workers and dissidents gets more precarious every day. The net of social control is drawn tighter with each new law, budget cut and layoff, and only we can choose what our response will be.

yours truly,
some local anarchists

comments, critique, or ideas? email serfcityrevolt@gawab.com

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/08/07/18655578.php

Joe Arpaio's Deputies Faced Down by Anti-SB 1070 Protesters in Guadalupe

Demonstrators await the MCSO's response last night in Guadalupe

Chanting, "We will not comply," and, "Whose streets? Our streets," a group of about 70 protesters took over one of the entrances to the square-mile town of Guadalupe Wednesday night, facing down Maricopa County sheriff's deputies in a tense standoff that lasted a little over an hour.

From 11:45 p.m. till a little past 1 a.m., demonstrators blocked traffic going into or out of Guadalupe via Avenida del Yaqui, not far from Arizona Mills Mall. City buses and other vehicles were forced to turn back or take a route around the line of Guadalupe residents and other activists.

MCSO deputies, befuddled by the late night protest

The protesters said they were against the enactment of SB 1070 and opposed to the abuses of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose deputies are contracted by the town for law enforcement services.

Early Wednesday, federal Judge Susan R. Bolton enjoined the most significant provisions of SB 1070, leaving other aspects of it to take effect today, July 29. But the protesters insisted this was not enough.

"We do understand that not all of SB 1070 was passed," said Guadalupe resident Diane Sanchez-Alvarado. "But that doesn't mean it's all right. Regardless of what the law says, we're all human beings. We shouldn't be treated as something else."

"We will not comply," the theme of the event

Regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his boys in beige, who have patrolled the town for years, Sanchez-Alvarado and others complained of a litany of abuses perpetrated by the MCSO in the town, which is half Mexican-American, and half Yaqui Indian.

"We're always being harassed by him," Sanchez-Alvarado said of Arpaio. "He thinks he can do whatever he wants with us."

The postage-stamp size municipality has been the subject of numerous complaints by residents who say they are routinely harassed by MCSO officers. Guadalupanos report that deputies unnecessarily pull guns on them and enter their homes without warrants.

Guadalupe residents Veronica Vargas (left) and Diane Sanchez-Alvarado

In 2008, Arpaio conducted one of his controversial anti-immigrant sweeps of the town, terrorizing people whose families have lived in Guadalupe for generations. Relations between the MCSO and residents have been especially strained since then.

Of the sheriff's deputies, Sanchez-Alvarado stated, "They're vicious with us. They're what we would consider savages."

Savages or not, last night, Arpaio's minions seemed perplexed by the situation, and unsure of what to do.

Around eight MCSO patrol cars responded to the scene, and deputies with the MCSO's gang unit stood around being taunted by the protesters as they contemplated a response.

Andrew Sanchez, organizer of the midnight demonstration

"You're the real gang here," protesters yelled at them.

Eventually one of the deputies approached the double-line of demonstrators, some of them activists from nearby Tempe and Phoenix. Members of a local anarchist group also reinforced the crowd.

The deputy, who declined comment to reporters, asked the demonstrators to leave the street. He was met with stony silence from protesters who had locked arms in preparation for a showdown. Many had stated earlier that they were willing to be arrested.

It seemed as if the protesters and the deputies were fated to butt heads. But a little after 1 a.m., protest organizer Andrew Sanchez told the crowd that he'd spoken with the mayor of Guadalupe and that they'd made their point about MCSO police abuses and SB 1070.

Demonstrators withdrew to the sidewalks, and the deputies drove away to the cheers of those present.

"It was peaceful, it was successful, and we managed to get the cops' attention," Sanchez told me afterward. "We had said previously that we were only going to hold the street for an hour, and we did."

The MCSO was outnumbered last night, and deputies looked worried at the prospect of having to wade in to the crowd and arrest people. The issue now will be, what sort of retaliation, if any, Guadalupe residents will endure from the MCSO.

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2010/07/anti-sb_1070_protesters_face_d.php

Chandler: Coalition asks city to oppose implementation of SB 1070

A group that calls itself Coalition for Immigration Reform - East Valley asked the Chandler City Council to pass a resolution opposing Senate Bill B1070 and vowed to take the campaign to Mesa, Tempe and Gilbert.

But after the council's brief response to their plea Thursday night, members said they were not hopeful that a resolution would ever come up for a vote.

"I didn't see any great openness on their faces. It's not in their political interest," said retired teacher and longtime Chandler resident Brian Barabe, who made the presentation.

SB 1070 takes effect July 29 and makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally. Barabe argued that enforcement will be a financial burden. "Has the city calculated the losses to tax-paying constituents in terms of lost rentals, lost mortgage payments and lost sales in general as breadwinners are arrested or families flee the city out of fear of arrest," he asked the council.

Two other members of the group said even though they are longtime Chandler residents and U.S. citizens, their Hispanic heritage and appearance makes them fearful. "I still remember what happened in 1997; I was here," said Ana Cabrera.

Chandler drew widespread criticism for a roundup of suspected illegal immigrants in 1997. For four days police and federal agents set out to arrest undocumented immigrants in downtown neighborhoods, and they arrested 340. But some of those taken into custody were legal residents, and Hispanic community leaders were outraged. The city was sued and paid more than $500,000 in out-of-court settlements.

Raquel Leyva serves on a city commission but said she is worried what would happen to her adult mentally disabled son if he is confronted by police. He carries no identification and is fearful of strangers, she said.

After the three spoke, Mayor Boyd Dunn said Chandler will make certain the law is followed carefully and without racial profiling. Councilwoman Trinity Donovan encouraged them to meet with the city's Human Relations Commission. Neither addressed the request for a resolution.

Police Chief Sherry Kiyler told the speakers outside the meeting that officers would not engage in racial profiling and police departments across the Valley are working to understand the law and how to enforce it. "I think the fear is greater than the reality," she said.

Barabe said his organization is an informal group of about 30 longtime friends and many are supporters of local Latino arts and culture. They will appear before the other East Valley city councils and meet with municipal officials in coming weeks, arguing the economic bill's negative economic impacts, he said.

Barabe, a former high school Spanish and English teacher, questioned whether enough of the city's police officers can are fluent enough in Spanish to make arrests and read suspects their Miranda warnings.

"Have the city and police department calculated the human costs with an eye toward the distrust of police and damage to the spirit of cooperation with police in the Latino community that will result from enforcement of this law?" Barabe asked the council. "Has the police department been able to assure the council that racial profiling will not occur during traffic stops and criminal investigations?"

Earlier this month in Tempe an activist group pushed that city to defy the state's new immigration law, but municipal spokesman Nikki Ripley said the city will enforce the law when it goes into effect next month.

Refusing to enforce the state law could subject a city to lawsuits, said Paul Bender, an Arizona State University law professor.

Tolleson, Flagstaff, San Luis and Somerton have joined a lawsuit to block the bill from taking effect.

http://www.azcentral.com/community/chandler/articles/2010/06/25/20100625chandler-coalition-resolution-against-immigration-law.html

Phoenix: La Comunidad Resiste Contra SB 1070

Gathering + Demonstration

Games+Music (Haymarket Squares and Others to be announced!)+Speakers+Rally

Food Not Bombs will be providing things to fill your bellies!

Bring: Games, Beverages, Blankets, Chairs, Chairs, Instruments, Crafts, Art Supplies, Friends, Literature, Things for Shade, and anything else you might like!!

Date:	Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Time:	7:00pm - 11:30pm
Location:	Civic Space Park

No SB 1070 in Tempe!