Ending Worksite Raids

Immigration is one issue we haven't heard much about in the Obama Administration, for various reasons. But advocates have not stopped their push to take the undocumented out of the shadows and provide them a path to citizenship. The President has said little publicly on the issue since Inauguration Day, though he promised the Congressional Hispanic Caucus a statement of support in the spring. However, today's Washington Post reports on a policy shift toward punishing the businesses who hire the undocumented rather than the individual workers themselves.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has delayed a series of proposed immigration raids and other enforcement actions at U.S. workplaces in recent weeks, asking agents in her department to apply more scrutiny to the selection and investigation of targets as well as the timing of raids, federal officials said.

A senior department official said the delays signal a pending change in whom agents at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement choose to prosecute -- increasing the focus on businesses and executives instead of ordinary workers.

"ICE is now scrutinizing these cases more thoroughly to ensure that [targets] are being taken down when they should be taken down, and that the employer is being targeted and the surveillance and the investigation is being done how it should be done," said the official, discussing Napolitano's views about sensitive law enforcement matters on the condition of anonymity.

"There will be a change in policy, but in the interim, you've got to scrutinize the cases coming up," the senior DHS official said, noting Napolitano's expectations as a former federal prosecutor and state attorney general.

Worksite raids, particularly as they were used in the Bush Administration, were unnecessarily harsh, separated families and in some cases violated due process and other civil liberties. The employers are just as responsible for breaking the law, yet during the Bush years they were almost never charged. This shift in operations at DHS and ICE not only makes sense on a moral and ethical level, but is likely to be more successful in deterring companies from hiring and exploiting undocumented labor.

I know immigration isn't a front-burner issue right now, but there are better priorities than the government operating like commandos and taking workers away from their families, and the only way to truly solve the problem is through comprehensive reform.

Zombies Still Afoot

I think we have to be somewhat careful characterizing actions by federal agencies as actions by "the Obama Administration" at this point, unless they are carried out by the cabinet secretaries themselves. We are only a month into their tenure, and not nearly enough of the decision-makers from the past regime have been winnowed out. A case in point is the ICE raid in Bellingham, Washington this week.

After federal agents raided Yamato Engine Specialists Ltd. and detained 28 employees Tuesday, Feb. 24, company officials expressed dismay about how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers handled the matter.

"They arrived in force," said Asiff Dhanani, a co-owner of the company at 2020 E. Bakerview Road. "They surrounded the whole perimeter."

Most of the workers detained were taken off in handcuffs, Dhanani said, except for three women who apparently were processed and released because they had children in local schools or daycare centers. The 28 made up about one-third of the engine remanufacturing company's production force.

"Some of these guys have been with us a long time," Dhanani said, adding that at least two of the workers detained Tuesday had been cleared by an earlier federal immigration audit that began in 2005 and was competed in 2006.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was on Capitol Hill yesterday, and was questioned about this in a hearing, and she claimed she didn't know about it until after the fact:

Workplace raids involving the arrests of hundreds of illegal immigrants at a time became almost routine in the last years of the Bush administration, but Napolitano's response to Tuesday's raid at a Bellingham, Wash., manufacturing plant highlighted the Obama administration's much different approach to a hot-button issue.

Napolitano told lawmakers during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that she did not know about the raid before it happened and was briefed on it early Wednesday morning. She has asked U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which arrested 28 illegal immigrants in the raid, for answers.

"I want to get to the bottom of this as well," she said. She said work-site enforcement needs to be focused on the employers.

This doesn't appear to be the policy of the Administration. But it takes some time to filter that down to the local level of enforcement agents. If this is still happening next year, I wouldn't be so lenient. But at this point, I'm willing to understand that there is going to be some lag as the new Administration comes in.

On DREAMs, Intimidation, and Nativist Jerks

The federal version of the DREAM Act comes up for vote today in the US Senate. The bill would set on a path to legal status those children of immigrants who enlist in the military or enroll in college. Yesterday, college students who would benefit from this program were on Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress for passage. Tom Tancredo, noted jerk, called for the arrest of the students.

Democrats were planning to hold a press conference today featuring three college students whose parents came to the United States illegally in order to promote the DREAM Act. But the event was postponed after anti-immigrant Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to arrest the three students:

“I call on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain any illegal aliens at this press conference,” said Tancredo, who claims to have alerted federal authorities about the well publicized press confrence. “Just because these illegal aliens are being used for political gain doesn’t mean they get immunity from the law. If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?”

They eventually held the press conference anyway and nobody was arrested. Tancredo is not only being callous here, he's being ignorant. One of the students has permanent residency status, and another cannot be deported because she exists in a kind of legal limbo. Her name is Tam Tran.

Tam Tran, whose Vietnamese parents came illegally to the US from Germany, has lived in the US since she was ten, is a UCLA graduate who wants to pursue a PhD at USC, but can't because she can't afford further schooling without federal student loans. The government can't deport her family back to Vietnam because her father was persecuted by the communist government there, but the German government won't take them back either. Tran said today she is in "permanent legal limbo."

The last time Tran spoke out in support of the DREAM Act, in an article in USA Today on October 8, her family was detained by the ICE.

Just three days after the article appeared, federal officers entered her home in the middle of the night and forcibly arrested her family. Tran’s family was detained on a “years-old deportation order,” even though they have been in regular communication with immigration officials for almost 20 years since arriving in the United States.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chair of the immigration subcommitee, equated the family’s arrest to “witness intimidation” and accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials of targeting the Tran family because Tam “testified before Lofgren’s panel earlier this spring.” Earlier this week, USA Today spoke with Lofgren about the Tran family’s arrest:

“Would she and her family have been arrested if she hadn’t spoken out?” Lofgren said of Tran, who was not at home for the raid but has been asked to report to Immigration and Customs officials next week. “I don’t think so.“

This is shocking behavior for the ICE to undertake, and not only does it show the price for dissent in Bush's America, but it shows how convoluted our immigration system is in the absence of a comprehensive solution. You can punish immigrants, who have no political power, or you can punish companies who hire the undocumented, who have loads of political power. In this case, the solution is clear; allow students who have known no other home to contribute to the country in which they were raised. Brian has the numbers; light 'em up.