This is a story that can bring tears to your eyes. A man who came to the US legally and has lived in this country for most of his life missed a meeting with immigration officials because they sent the notice to a non-existent address. When he didn’t show up to the meeting he didn’t know about, a judge ordered him deported. Years later, in the process of obtaining a green card, he went to a meeting with immigration officials – and was detained on the old deportation order.

While in detention he complained of back pain and was not only told to stop malingering, he was dragged from place to place and refused both treatment and a wheelchair. A judge finally intervened and ordered that he receive immediate medical treatment. Turned out he had a fractured spine and was so riddled with cancer that he died five days later.

Still, immigration authorities wouldn’t let his family visit until he was nearly dead. And when they finally were allowed to see him, he was under guard. Our tax dollars at work.

And it all started with a letter sent to a non-existent address. These people should be prosecuted.

This is just one of many cases of unnecessary and cruel deaths in detention reported by The New York Times. And it’s a good illustration of why we need a strong press. These stories need to be told. And we need to change things. Now.

I wasn’t sure if it was a typo or not, but it seems an apt term for the goings-on in Hazelton, PA, Waukegan, IL, the state of Oklahoma, and other localities that want to enforce immigration laws locally. The BBC reports -

We travelled to the sleepy former mining town of Hazleton because it too has been thrust into the heart of the immigration debate.

In 2006, tired of what he saw as the lack of action on the part of the federal authorities in dealing with the issue of illegal immigration, the town’s mayor, Lou Barletta, decided to take matters into his own, and the town’s, hands.

He proposed – and the town council approved – a bye-law giving the local authorities extraordinary powers to crack down on illegal immigrants and those offering them employment and housing.

The reporter/commentator, Emilio San Pedro, also spent time in Chicago where he met Flor Crisostomo, who remains in the Aldalberto United Methodist Church on Division Street, resisting deportation by taking sanctuary in a church (a concept that has only moral, not sturdy legal standing in the US). Though San Pedro calls her “an immigration rights activist of the highest order,” her story has gone virtually unreported by the US mainstream press.

A US Marshall has some practical advice in the Arizona Republic for local law enforcement: concentrate your limited resources on criminals who commit crimes that hurt people, not on undocumented immigrants.

Local law enforcement should work closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in sharing intelligence and investigating illegal aliens who are committing crimes. Local law enforcement simply does not have the time and resources to take on the additional duties of an immigration officer who is trained for 18 weeks on immigration law.

I ask you, as a citizen who pays our salaries and expect police leaders to make critical decisions on your safety, would you want your police departments chasing down illegal aliens or would you rather they spend their time cuffing fugitives, gangsters, burglars, thieves, armed robbers and child molesters?

The illegal-immigration problem cannot be fixed by putting every illegal alien in jail.

Predictably, a commenter says “Illegal aliens are criminals, one and all. The need to be ferreted out, rounded up, and deported immediately” – totally ignoring the author’s argument that it’s irresponsible to act as if priorities are irrelevant and that millions of people can be deported without cost.

We had a great “teach-in” on immigration at my college where faculty from history, political science, sociology, geography, education, and religion spoke, along with students who work with immigrants in Minnesota. I just wish some people were willing to listen.

Hat tip to Immigration Prof Blog

What’s up with the WSJ? I keep reading the most amazing stories from that bastion of conservatism. First, the excellent coverage of TIA, the undead surveillance program from the Black Lagoon. Now, this story about the angel of New Bedford, a financier who put up $200,000 in bail for families whose husbands and wives were taken from their workplace, sent to a Texas detention center, and were facing hasty deportation.

The payments, which until now haven’t become public despite extensive news coverage of the raid itself, came from Bob Hildreth, a Boston financier who made his millions trading Latin American debt. He was “infuriated” at the televised images of workers being shipped to Texas, he says. Helping them make bail is “payback.”

The raid broke families apart,” says the diminutive 57-year-old, who once taught high-school history. “This was extremely un-American.”

Each of the families involved paid a large chunk of the bail – as much as they could afford. When the bail money comes back, he plans to set it aside for future philanthropy, helping others in a similar situation.

Lyglenson Lemorin, a legal US resident from Haiti who has been living in Miami may be deported for supporting terrorism even though he was tried and acquitted on those charges. Uh, is that legal? Well, immigration courts are civil, not criminal courts, so technically it’s not double jeopardy. Further, an administrative judge can make a deportation decision without much evidence and without having to be convinced “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The fact that Lemorin was acquitted of the charges that he supported a scheme to blow up the Sears Tower doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty. I mean, what do jurors know?

Oh, and because he may be called as a witness in a related trial, he’s subject to a gag order, as well.  The only thing he can say publicly is “I’m innocent.”

Another woman facing deportation has taken shelter at the Adalberto United Methodist Church on Division Street in Chicago. Last year, Elvira Arellano spend many months there with her eight-year-old son (a US citizen) to dramatize the way deportations affect families. ICE avoided the bad press of raiding a church, but snapped her up and deported her as soon as she went to speak at a public event in LA.

Flor Crisostomo does not have her children with her in the church. They are in Mexico, where she could not find work; she left them so she could provide for them.

In July 2000 she paid a smuggler to take her across the border and spent three days lost in desert-like conditions before making it to Los Angeles, she said. A month later she arrived in Chicago, where she worked 10 hours a day, six days a week in an IFCO Systems site that made packing materials.

By last year, she earned about $360 a week, sending $300 to her children for food, clothes and school books, she said. To keep her own costs down, she lived with four other women in a two-bedroom Chicago apartment.

“My children’s lives improve a lot as a result,” she said. “It wasn’t luxury. But it meant they could survive.”

The New Sanctuary Movement (like the old one during the Reagan years) is a church-based attempt to help people who are caught in a huge problem that politicians by and large don’t want to touch, apart from general platitudes. Whatever they say, they’ll lose somebody’s votes. So it goes. And pressure groups will tell Homeland Security to walk their secure borders talk by raiding the church.

Meanwhile, you’ll be hard put to find any subject on which comments at newspapers and other web sites are more polarized. (So far the ones at Chicagoist aren’t quite as full of sputtering, inarticulate rage as others.) I don’t recall any issue in recent years attracting such deep-seated, personal anger as this one, and it frightens me.

The AP reports -

WASHINGTON – U.S. admissions of Iraqi refugees are nose-diving amid bureaucratic infighting despite the Bush administration’s pledge to boost them to roughly 1,000 per month, according to State Department statistics.

For the third month, since the United States said it would improve processing and resettle 12,000 Iraqis by the end of the current budget year on Sept. 30, the number admitted has actually slid. The steady decline – from 450 in October to 362 in November and 245 last month…

Meanwhile, the appalling backlog in processing naturalization petitions – 16-18 months now, after an increase in fees predictably nudged many potential applicants to take the plunge – could affect the election. How convenient is that? I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and attribute this to incompetence as usual, but these times give thriller writers a run for their money.

Funny – one of my favorite books of 2007 was about a criminal voting for the first (and probably last) time and it was oddly inspiring. This situation is not.