[Dryerase] Alarm!--anti-immigrant violence and gov't repression

[The Alarm!Newswire]

Anti-immigrant racism and government repression

By Michael Novick
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor

On August 24, the latest in a series of nazi rallies in DC drew over 
500 swastika-clad marchers protesting Jews and immigrants to the steps 
of the US Capitol building, protected by thousands of DC and US police. 
The rally by the West Virginia-based National Alliance—the fastest 
growing and most influential racist group in the US—followed on the 
heels of a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic violence across the 
southeast. Hate crimes have increased four-fold in Fairfax County, 
Virginia since last September 11. Similarly, hate incidents jumped 
seventy-six percent in Montgomery County, Maryland. “Since September 
11, the majority of hate violence and terrorism within this country has 
been committed against people of color and religious minorities by 
white racists,” says Douglas Calvin, Executive Director of the Youth 
Leadership Support Network in the DC area.

In July, a Beckley, West Virginia anti-immigration rally was sponsored 
by David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White 
People (NAAWP). In Martinsville, Virginia the Rebel Brigade of the 
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held their second cross-burning and white 
unity rally of the year. In Herndon, Virginia the Ahmadiyya Muslim 
Community Center suffered repeated vandalism, while anti-Semitic flyers 
promoting the neo-nazi National Alliance were distributed after an 
event at Beth Emeth Synagogue. In Alexandria Virginia, a man was 
charged with a hate crime after he tossed a brick through the window of 
an Afghan man’s car, striking a passenger. The World Church of the 
Creator led an anti-immigrant march in rural Georgia earlier in the 
summer.

Such attacks have not been limited to the southeast. In June in Tulsa, 
Oklahoma, a homeless Black man was chained to a fence and set on fire 
by a man with white supremacist tattoos. In July, two white 
supremacists were found guilty of plotting to blow up Jewish and Black 
landmarks around Boston in what prosecutors said was a scheme to foment 
“racial holy war.” In the San Francisco Bay Area in May, arson fires 
struck both an Oakland synagogue that had received an anti-Semitic 
letter, and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, which serves a largely Arab 
American congregation. In Joliet, Illinois, three white supremacists 
were charged with arson and a hate crime in connection with the 
torching of a garage and two vehicles belonging to a predominantly 
black church.

Attacks on Jewish synagogues and racial profiling of Arabs are signs of 
a resurgence of racism worldwide, according to a July report by the UN 
Commission on Human Rights. The UN report attributes this resurgence to 
the rise of nationalist parties calling for reduced immigration, the 
September 11 attacks and rising tensions in the Middle East. The report 
did not identify any countries by name, but referred to frequent 
instances of racial profiling at airports and more than 200 racist 
propaganda internet sites as other examples of discrimination. 
“Combined with the security measures designed to combat terrorism, the 
measures against immigration now give the impression that an iron 
curtain is falling between the North and the South of the planet,” the 
report said.

The US context for such bigoted violence has been established by the 
repressive actions of the government directed against immigrants and 
people of color. Consider that in August 2001, police accountability 
activists had forced the issue of racial profiling onto the front 
burner politically and forced police departments across the country to 
acknowledge the problem and begin to propose solutions. At the same 
time, immigrants rights advocates and organized labor were pressing for 
a new amnesty, and even the right wing Bush administration was 
considering legalization for millions of undocumented Mexicans. After 
9/11, the situation changed dramatically in the direction of 
anti-immigrant governmental racism and repression. Peter Kirsanow, a 
Bush appointee to the US Civil Rights Commission, raised the 
possibility in July of internment camps for the mass detention of Arab 
Americans. Kirsanow told a Commission hearing in Detroit on July 19 
that if there was another terrorist attack on the United States “and 
they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade 
Center, you can forget about civil rights.” He said that “not too many 
people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more 
stops, more profiling, there will be a groundswell of public opinion to 
banish civil rights.” Meanwhile Attorney General John Ashcroft is 
pressing not only for making mass internment a practical possibility, 
but also for incorporating all local police forces in immigration 
enforcement. Anti-immigrant groups have seized on such government 
rhetoric and measures to push their agenda.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has seized on the 
post 9/11 security situation to call for greater cooperation between 
local police and federal immigration. “It is critical that federal 
immigration authorities enlist the assistance of tens of thousands of 
local police departments who are in the best position to spot illegal 
or suspicious behavior in their own communities.” The State of Florida 
and the Justice Department agreed July 2 that thirty-five “experienced, 
seasoned law enforcement personnel” could receive formal training from 
the INS on various aspects of federal immigration laws and the 
enforcement of those laws. After completion of that training, which 
began July 9, the officers will be assigned to seven regional “domestic 
security” task forces across Florida. Rules for using police to enforce 
federal immigration laws in certain situations went into effect August 
23. The rule defining when local police agencies would be asked to 
enforce immigration laws, which refers to a “mass influx of aliens,” 
has intentionally been left vague, according to Ronald W. Dodson, a 
supervisory special agent with the INS. This was to allow local and 
federal authorities the flexibility to respond to an immigration 
emergency, not “the routine traffic across the southern border by those 
people trying to enter without inspection,” he said.

Another way local agencies have been incorporated into stepped up 
anti-immigrant repression is in incarceration. According to Alisa 
Johnson, writing for the Village Voice, the INS is desperate for more 
cells for its ever-expanding population of detainees. Nearly 900 
facilities around the country provide “beds” for the INS, and in 
interviews over the years, according to Johnson, several county 
sheriffs and wardens have described such detainees as a “cash crop.”

The number of INS detainees—people being held administratively as they 
await the outcome of deportation proceedings—tripled since 1994, from 
an average daily population of 5532 to nearly 20,000 last year. The 
proposed $6.3 billion INS budget for fiscal 2003 slates more than $50 
million for the “construction of detention facilities.” This new wave 
of detainees is in addition to people prosecuted, convicted and sent to 
federal prison for breaking immigration laws. Last week the Justice 
Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that the number of 
people prosecuted for immigration offenses in federal courts more than 
doubled from 1996 to 2000, growing from 6605 defendants to 15,613.

Yet this “routine” mass incarceration may be supplanted by something 
more drastic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was 
charged by President Reagan to practice for the imposition of martial 
law and the internment of so-called aliens and radicals. Bush has 
returned FEMA (headed by former campaign manager Joe Allbaugh) to the 
forefront of national security, in May 2001 designating it as the 
agency in charge of terrorism response. Bush’s “National Strategy for 
Homeland Security” places FEMA under the Office of Homeland Security. 
In August, the Los Angeles Times reported Attorney General John 
Ashcroft’s announced desire to create “camps for US citizens he deems 
to be ‘enemy combatants’”. According to Ritt Goldstein in the Sydney 
Morning Herald, a right wing web-site, NewsMax.com, has reported that 
FEMA is pursuing a “crash effort” to build “temporary cities to handle 
millions,” supposedly those fleeing weapons of mass destruction. It 
added that FEMA had been given a deadline of having the cities “ready 
to go by January 2003.’’ And in a subsequent posting to the NewsMax.com 
website, a copy of FEMA’s project particulars noted that those 
contractors seeking to participate in the program ``must demonstrate 
capability of establishing group housing developments (designing, 
developing, constructing, and acquisition of property) and maintenance 
of complex(es) for periods exceeding two years.”

Such threats must be taken seriously because the government has been 
abandoning the rule of law and judicial oversight in its anti-immigrant 
and anti-terrorist actions. In June, responding to a court order 
requesting the figures, the Justice Department admitted it is still 
holding at least 147 people rounded up as part of the investigation 
into the September 11 terrorist attacks, and that eighteen are not 
represented by lawyers. The government did not reveal how many people 
had been detained or are still being held without being charged. A 
Justice Department official said the government can hold people as 
material witnesses to a crime without ever charging them with an 
offense. In July, the Justice Department inspector general’s office 
reported that 458 complaints had been received under the USA PATRIOT 
Act in which the sender suggested a connection to possible civil rights 
abuses.  Eighty-seven of the complaints were judged to be under the 
office’s jurisdiction. Of these, the Inspector General opened only nine 
formal investigations.

The case of US citizen José Padilla, the suspect in an alleged 
radioactive “dirty bomb” plot, shows that such extra-judicial measures 
are not restricted to immigrants. “The last time I looked at the 
Constitution, he still had constitutional rights,” his court-appointed 
attorney Donna Newman told CNN. The Padilla case should be a 
“constitutional concern for everybody,” Newman said. “He was taken and 
will now be detained in a military prison.” While US District Court 
Judge Michael Mukasey said he would consider Newman’s motion, it was 
unclear what jurisdiction, if any, the court has in the case now that 
Padilla is in the custody of the US military. Defense Secretary Donald 
Rumsfeld said that Padilla—who also goes by the name of Abdullah Al 
Muhajir—may never face trial. “Our interest is not in trying him and 
punishing him,” Rumsfeld said. “Our interest is in finding out what he 
knows.” In a meeting in his Cabinet room, Bush said, “This guy 
Padilla’s one of many who we’ve arrested…. The coalition we’ve put 
together has hauled in 2,400 people. And you can call it 2,401 now. 
There’s just a full-scale manhunt on…. We will run down every lead, 
every hint. This guy Padilla’s a bad guy and he is where he needs to 
be: detained.”

If Bush succeeds in launching a full-scale war on Iraq, such repressive 
acts, as well as racist attacks against immigrants, are certain to 
increase, as they did dramatically during his father’s Gulf War, when 
attacks against Jews, Arabs, and those mistaken for them, were 
widespread. The need for an assertive defense of immigrant rights, 
civil liberties and peace has never been greater.

Endnote:  Michael Novick is author of White Lies, White Power 
(http://www.commoncouragepress.com/novick_white.html link for website) 
and publisher of Turning the Tide, a periodical magazine of People 
Against Racist Terror in Culver City, California.  He is also a member 
of Los Angeles Anti-Racist Action, Anti-Racist Action is an 
international movement of people committed to exposing, opposing and 
confronting racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry.  To 
find an ARA chapter near you, visit 
http://www.antiracistaction.ca/contactinfo.html.

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