BREAKING [video]: A Call for Help Led to Deportation Proceedings: Domestic Violence Victim Confronts Director of Secure Communities

Dear friends,

One week away from being in Cancún with an amazing crew of people of color (including youth, women and Indigenous Peoples from all over Turtle Island), where I will be writing and reporting on these delegations and their goals.

In the meantime, news from the migrant justice frontlines: friends at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (http://www.nnirr.org) have documented that over the last several years that women have been targeted in particular ways under the increasing dragnet of immigration enforcement and deportations. This year's report will be released the week of December 10.

This press release and video demonstrates exactly the reasons that sheriff's departments all over the country have refused to participate in the Secure Communities program, or similar 287(g) poli-migra programs: if victims of crimes calling for help have legitimate fears of being deported for calling for help, then the police and sheriff are unable to fulfill their mandates to protect the public good.

In my understanding, under the law there are different kinds of infractions: things that are criminal - like murder and rape - and acts that are civil infractions - like parking tickets. While I also have critiques of the ways that we think about criminality in the U.S., the distinction is a big one. Immigration-related infractions have always been considered civil infractions, not criminal ones. That's why using the police as ICE (migra) is so dangerous - it is mixing and confusing two categories of law that are supposed to be separate.

In the meantime, please watch and think about this. What are the effects of this system on our families, in all the ways that we are family?

Luv,
Diana

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PRESS RELEASE

~ Please forward widely ~

contact: B. Loewe, NDLON. 773.791.4668

Domestic Violence Victim Confronts Director of "Secure Communities"

A Call for Help Led to Deportation Proceedings.

http://pitch.pe/102558, watch the video at

11.18.2010– Maria Bolanos, a domestic violence victim who's call for help led to deportation proceedings, confronted David Venturella, director of the immigration enforcement program, "Secure Communities," at today's Woodrow Wilson Center panel discussion.

Bolanos demanded the program be ended and that her case be dropped immediately. "I do not want to be separated from my child. I am not a criminal. I ask that you terminate my case and all those under secure communities."

Watch the dramatic video here

Her case and others like it highlight the dangers of the rapidly expanding federal program that matches fingerprints of those taken into police custody with the federal immigration database.

ICE is forcing the program upon and refusing to honor at least three counties who have voted to not participate in the program due to its secretive nature and evidence of its damage to community and police relations. Those counties (Santa Clara, CA, San Francisco, and Arlington, VA) cite examples like Bolanos as reason for opting out of participation.

Like when Michelle Obama had to answer to an elementary school student who asked why the president is sending families without papers away, this is another instant where the administration's policies are confronted face-to-face with the broken families their policies create.

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Posted via email from Decolonizing Environmentalism