So not kidding…
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office will draw from existing deputies and members of its 3,000-member posse reserve – made up of trained, unpaid volunteers – to form the illegal immigration posse.
The 100-member illegal immigration posse will join 57 other specialized department posses that target specific crimes, including animal cruelty and prostitution.
continued below the fold…
The effort is an attempt to slow the tide of illegal immigrants into the county, Arizona’s most populous, said Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
“It’s important to send the message out to stay in Mexico and don’t come roaming around here hoping you’re going to get amnesty,” Arpaio said. “They ought to stay cool, stay in Mexico and wait until this illegal immigration problem is solved. If they don’t do that and they come to Maricopa County, they’re going straight to jail.”
linkage (emphasis mine)
So let me get this straight, “trained, unpaid volunteers” will be deputized starting this weekend to round-up illegal immigrants and sent to Tent City. And how will they determine the legal status of suspected violators, a.k.a. anyone who looks Mexican? Russell Pearce has an idea in the coffers of the Az State Legislature.
[snip]
Instead of expanding the trespassing law, the new legislation could achieve virtually the same purpose by directing police to ask about legal status when questioning people or taking them into custody for other reasons, Pearce said.
“I’m not asking to charge them with anything. They’re already in violation of the law. I just book them and put a hold on them for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement),” Pearce said.
“Once you’ve determined they’re illegally in this country, you have authority to arrest.”
Pearce noted that Georgia’s governor last month signed a sweeping immigration bill that requires police to check the immigration status of people they arrest.
“I would add it to the Miranda warning (as) the last part of the Miranda warning: are you here illegally?” Pearce said, referring to the statement of rights that police officers recite to arrested suspects.
If Mr. Pearce’s plan moves forward, it will more than likely be met with the veto stamp from Governor Napolitano. If/when it happens, Pearce has a backup plan that will certainly cause some fireworks in the desert come November’s election. He will send all of the most dracionian provisions passed this year by the State Legislature to the ballot box. It worked for the Prop 200 fanatics in 2004 and I fear will become the wingnuts’ method of choice to move the United States further down the road of a police-state.
The biggest hope that human rights and immigration reform advocates can conceive will be dependent upon Democratic Party strategerie over the next few months. An editorial from the U.S. News and World Report elaborates.
Democratic strategists should make clear what is going on in Congress to, for starters, the heavily Latino states of California, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and New York. GOP incumbents and candidates should be pinned down on the issue.
The opportunity this November to awaken the heretofore-sleepy Latino vote isn’t likely to come around again soon.
President Bush sought to pick up more GOP support in the Latino community in the last election and was marginally successful in a few states. But those gains should evaporate if Democrats move aggressively this off year.
They won’t have to look far to get campaign material. I suggest they begin by gauging the reaction between the Minutemen and the African American community. You know, part of the constituency that has traditionally been called the Democratic base.
It’s time to give that part of America some attention. The base has been ignored for far too long.
from my humble blog.
To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here in Arizona from the Republican-controlled State Legislature, check out this entry from Wactivist.com. One of the leading crazies had the audacity to question the citizenship of the mayor of San Luis, who happens to be a Mexican American. Ugly shit.
This is scary shit, ManEe.
How long until they just set up outside polling stations and detain anyone who looks Latino until their citizenship is verified, I wonder?
that’s exactly what the a-holes behind the “Protect Arizona Now“/Prop 200 initiative envisioned; only they didn’t stop there. They also want it to apply to every service offered by the government (including healthcare).
Wow. I can’t believe that they blame nearly every single problem in Arizona on illegal immigrants.
Actually, I can believe it pretty easily.
I don’t think they realize the ramifications of what they’ve bolded and put in red on that page though:
Can you imagine how much better off we’d be if only we had ‘pure’ elections and there were no abuses of the elected franchise? Of course the corporatocracy will never stand for it…
I read this earlier at your blog Manny, and am glad you cross-posted this here, so that more of us will see what’s going on in the name of “protecting our borders.” Great work, as always, my friend!
The highlighted region in yellow is Maricopa County which includes the vast majority of the Phoenix Metro Area.
And what kind of people volunteer for this vigilante shit? Playground bullies and bigots.
I heard the most awful (and probably the most truthful) reason why people don’t want Mexicans here. It was on the local news – they were interviewing a young man who was counter-protesting at the immigration rally last week here in Raleigh. I’m trying to quote him verbatim because I was just shocked that they put it on the news.
“They’re breaking the law. I mean I want to be able to go to Walmart or wherever and not trip over all their kids – man they’re everywhere.!”
because the national debate has been dominated by Rovian tactics of ‘divide and conquer’. The Minutemen, in the article I linked at the end of the diary, have begun a cross-country caravan to fuel a backlash. They are specifically targeting the African American community, telling them that it’s the “illegals” who are responsible for their problems. Luckily, they were met in LA with protests and highlighting of their KKK ties, but the message the vigilantes express is fairly mainstream.
I don’t get it. In the past, these types of groups would be publicly mocked and sidelined. Now they are openly supported by huge swaths of Americans and many Republican lawmakers.
And the support is amazingly widespread. Here in PA, my kids have teachers and school friends with parents who support this garbage. Why are people so easily taken in by the politics of hate?
and I guess when I write about these things, I come at it from a latino perspective in a latino region of the country where immigration reform is about race. I understand that it’s more complex than that, there are huge economic factors at play, but I feel it’s important to ask the people who are opposed to things like guest worker provisions and paths to citizenship “Why?”
I suspect that many of the answers will reveal the remnants of the darkest parts of this country’s past. Issues that as a liberal, I feel obligated to fight against.
But it was heartening that the black community didn’t fall for their garbage. It would be good if more people were as aware that the minutemen are spewing crap. But African Americans know what it means to be marginalized and they know what it means to be seen as a useful political tool without anyone actually caring about their needs so it’s not surprising that they’d see right through this. The rest of the country is not so smart and being fed the scare tactics of Lou Dobbs and company.
I think the political actions like the boycott and the marches are the right thing to do — it’s important to keep this in front of the American people, it’s vital to deliver a countermessage.
resistance is being met because this issue causes everyone to reevaluate what it means to be an American in the 21st century. I wrote abit about it earlier this week.
the wealth is a well-entrenched part of the American psyche and history. The attitude toward every group of new immigrants has been the opposite of the message on the statue of liberty. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the waves of Italians, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, even Germans and Scandinavians immigrants were all greeted with very much un-open arms. And as the generations move away from their past, they forget this and treat each new group the same way. This is the American way — to constantly remake our history as brand new and rewrite that the past into pretty fairy tales.
Heh, I couldn’t resist. But they were a pretty big percentage of the immigrants coming to this country in the Ellis Island period.
And of course there are the immigrants from Asia. I have to admit that they’re the ones I primarily think of when someone talks about immigrants, because there are so many Asian immigrants in Seattle. (This takes on special significance for me. Two of my grandchildren are 1/4 Thai. Their grandfather, who lives over here somewhere now, was born in Bangkok.) There was a rally in Seattle last week that by some reports turned out almost half a million people. I’m willing to bet a lot of them weren’t espanophonex.
Not really since with 19th and early 20th century Jewish immigration I get at the very least Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, and Austria.
Yeah, but not all of the immigrants from those countries were Jewish. The Jews of Latvia had a lot more in common with the Jews of Poland than they did with their nominally fellow Latvians.
That’s probably pretty true for Eastern European Jews, mostly not true for German and Austrian Jews. At any rate, my list could have easily gone on and on; I doubt we can find any non-British ethnic group that’s come to this country and not faced discrimination and often outright hate.
Yeah, pretty much. As I said earlier my comment was about 90% snark. I was just thinking of the Poles because as late as my time in high school it was sometimes the height of hilarity to tell Polish jokes.
(I once saw that turned on its head in a beer commercial where someone — I forget who — was asked what his favorite Polish joke was. He answered with some two-liner, in Polish. The people surrounding him laughed. Given that the guy was about five foot eighty, I would have too.)
pasting in the lyrics of the old Tom Lehrer “National Brotherhood Week” song.
I never forget Polish-my great grandparents on my moms side were from Poland and Bohemia. I think the Polish jokes is where I realized how stupid so called ‘funny’ ethnic jokes were..I’d get told a Polish joke and always thought well that is just dumb and resembles no one I knew(grew up in Wisconsin which had large Polish community). I was also repeatedly told I didn’t have a sense of humor when I didn’t laugh at these stupid jokes. All the people of Polish ancestry that were around where I grew up were Catholic…or at least a large portion were Catholic.
can i volunteer, because i will be arresting every non-brown person i see, I thought they were Canadians or outbound Mennoites from Chihuahua. I thought they were OTM..get my drift.
to point out the hypocrisy a4l. These measures disenfranchise documented and undocumented immigrants in addition to all American citizens who find themselves carrying the appearance of Otherness.
Dangerous associations: When I hear “posse” I think “guns”, “ropes”, “mob rule”. Acting out fantasies that have suddenly become legal, endorsed by the highest authorities. Thrillseekers shoving people along, and asking questions later, if ever.
If no one dies, it will be a miracle.
I think I read somewhere else that illegal immigration is a federal, not state or local criminal offense.
If thats true, then the Maricopa County sheriff has no jurisdiction.
Since 1996 the federal government has taken repeated legal steps to empower and even to coerce local police authorities to enforce federal immigration laws. The bill that passed the House of Representatives last December, HR 4437 has some measures that punish local cops if they don’t cooperate, IIRC.
We are living in a police state.
I’m an immigration lawyer. As I’ve posted elsewhere, it is possible to be in perfectly valid immigration status while having (1) no valid visa stamp, (2) no valid passport, (3) no social security card, (4) no photo ID, (5) no driver’s license, and so forth. For example, one can be in perfectly valid immigration status with nothing except a little white card called an I-94 that says something like “ADM 5/5/06 J-2 D/S” plus a really inscrutable and almost impossible to read form called a DS-2019.
Try explaining that to some ignorant cop (or even worse, to some redneck asshole posse volunteer) if you’re caught driving while brown!
The climate has been getting steadily harsher since 9/11. Every week I have clients who are turned down for things like mortgages or driver’s licenses because some clerk or bureaucrat is too frightened to act. Most common is the irrational insistence that somebody needs a “current valid visa.” That requirement is even written into the law in some states, and even top DHS assholes like Michael Chertoff make this mistake at press conferences. But there is no such requirement. In U.S. law, a visa stamp in the passport does not confer or create status; it merely permits a person to apply for admission at the border; and it is not necessary for the visa stamp to remain currently valid during the time of the person’s lawful stay in the United States. But as I said, try explaining that to some moron cop!
I was in the U.S. for a while on an expired visa, but was in-status because I was doing what I’d gone there to do. I couldn’t leave the country and return without getting a new visa though, and had been advised that if I did apply for a new (non-immigrant) visa under the same status I’d almost certainly be declined. It all got a bit fraught there for a while.
Living in Texas, it has always been a police state – pinche Texas Rangers have always ruled. But hey, nobody will ever know, since it was glorified with Walker, Texas Ranger. But back to the police state, there is something about a police mentalty – they know they are in control and when it comes this, I think they enjoy it.
I’m very happy that we have you here, someone who is an immigration lawyer to give us the real lowdown on just how fucked up this whole system is(what a surprise right) to do with ‘legal’ immigration is-to be able to have answers for the idiots who whine about undocumented workders who just have to play by the rules and come into the country ‘legally’…. From the little reading I’ve done this system has been broken for many many many years and has caused massive havoc on people and families caught up in the ‘legal’ process. And as you say the nuances and guidelines have regular cops completely ignorant of what is required. And I suspect they don’t much care anyway.
Brown is the new black! I don’t mean to be so flippant but throughout history, as Manny has pointed out, the bigots will always find some other group to wail on. The scariest part is that they really won’t be sent back from where they came. They will be sent to detention camps. How much you want to bet they will be told they can “work” their time off. Thus becoming the new generation of slaves. I so HATE what these bigots are doing to our country. Damn them all!
and I have heard rumors that some African Americans in the southern U.S. are really worried about Hispanics taking their underpaid slave wage jobs from them. It would be a really really sad day in America to witness first hand what I have only thusfar heard as a rumor……..that people in my country are now considering violently fighting for the table scraps that fall from Masta’s table! Let Them Eat Cake seems to be playing in my head over and over again today.
Look up the history of the Mormons sometime. Now I grant you they brought a bunch of it on themselves by doing dumb stuff like telling their neighbors in Missouri that they land they were farming was given to them by God and God was going to give them their neighbor’s land too, but their primary crime was being Different From Us, whether it was fears they would steal Our women or make Us give up Our slaves or vote some way We didn’t approve of as a bloc or whatever.
Similar things have happened to Catholics — the KKK hates Catholics almost as bad as they hate people of color. And that’s not even mentioning Jews . . .
This gives me such a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I can only foresee bad things to come from this shitty idea-lets call it what it is-racist idea to make points with the general public. Untrained no doubt macho idiots running around checking for immigrants?….how will they know unless they simply stop everyone who isn’t lily white(as if being white means you can’t be an immigrant also).
As for Joe Arpaio-his name crops up in the news periodically. What I find particularly scary is that article mentioned that the majority of people in Arizona approve of the job he is doing. And the whole idea of a tent city prison you would think would be against some kind of US law for inhumane treatment..yeah all ‘criminals’ that are convicted deserve what they get right?..Tell that to the guy sent there who was sent there for driving with a suspended license and ended up dead due to being denied medical treatment for an easily corrected medical problem.