The Durham BORDC meeting yesterday focused mainly on local police agencies that have joined the Federal 287g program and strategizing to support the human and Constitutional rights of immigrants. It was a large meeting and had representatives from other groups and Orange and Wake counties. Below is the situation according to the speakers and my notes, but I have not verified everything.
287g was created in 1996 and apparently deputizes local law enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants, and provides a 4 week training course and funding for this. There are two models for this, detention, in which trained officers look for undocumented immigrants, and field, in which officers begin the deportation process against people who have already been arrested. The Durham Police have one anonymous trained officer, and use the field model. The Durham Sheriff has apparently joined the program also, but no deputies have been trained yet.
There have been two cases in Orange County, which is not part of 287g, only one case involving Latinos. In one case people were held in Alamance County because of lack of space or specifically to get them deported. I think it was also said that Durham sends people to Alamance to be deported. Another person overstayed a student visa, and she was arrested after being found in a background check for paperwork of some kind, and it fell to neighbors to tell her 11-year-old daughter where her mother was. The mother was held for 4 months.
Wake County recently trained 14 officers and I think Wake County is one of the places that sets up supposed DWI Sunday checkpoints near churches with Latino parishioners.
In 2007 the General Assembly (I think recommended by a committee which current Democratic candidate for US Senate, Kay Hagan, was a member of, and the Democrats control the legislature) gave $270,000 dollars to the non-governmental Sheriff Association. Despite this amount not being completely spent, the Assembly gave them another million dollars recently!
After discussing the whys of the issue, we discussed actions to take, but I don't think this is the place to speak about preliminary plans. If you want to get involved, the next meeting will be at one of the libraries at 3pm on August 23rd.
Because of the heat around this issue, it is one of the main points where the right has to be opposed. As the country gets into worsening economic and international crises, immigrants, especially Latinos, are being scapegoated as the cause of problems, not the system or those in power. Many capitalists and their politicians in various parties want to split the working class by telling native-born workers that getting rid of immigrants will improve their lot, or that the immigrants are trying to replace them, and telling immigrants that they will be deported if they stand up for their rights. There is a battle going on in the dominant media, with some villifying immigrants (like talk radio, where it would apparently be a "revolution" if paramilitary vigilantes go patrol the border with Mexico) and others being less radical right or in the middle (like local news media), but not defending human rights. The Democrats won't fix the immigration problem. David Price apparently only wants to deport felons, but I wonder if that means they will escape their sentences and it legitimizes the idea of 287g, and Price has not opposed building a wall along the southern border. As with making Bush-Cheney accountable for their crimes, Price puts up some resistance, but is against a full progressive counterattack.
People think that something like the Nazis attacking the Jews, leftists, homosexuals, Roma, etc. as the source of Germany's problems or the detention of Japanese-Americans and expropriation of their property during WWII can't happen in 21st century America, but the villification of immigrants is well underway and who knows how bad it could become if the economy gets much worse and the people are too divided or to fight back effectively.
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