[statecom-discuss] State fails immigrants

[Kim Lampereur]

"According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Patrick and
Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence were alerted
in advance to plans to storm the factory"

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http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/03/11/state_fails_immigrants?p1=email_to_a_friend

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EILEEN MCNAMARA

State fails immigrants

March 11, 2007

It is no small irony that the Spanish-speaking grandmothers and
nursing mothers rounded up as national security threats in an
immigration raid on a New Bedford leather factory were stitching
safety vests and backpacks for the US military.

The government's  multimillion-dollar contract with the owners of the
factory where hundreds of low-wage earners were led away in shackles
after an immigration sweep last week underscores the absurd
contradictions inherent in our  immigration policy. One federal
bureaucracy is trying to deport the same undocumented workers whose
cheap labor another federal bureaucracy is content to exploit.

The agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who carried out the
raid  work for an administration in Washington that has acknowledged
that these sweeps are meaningless without comprehensive reform of
national immigration policy. "The system we have in place has caused
people to rely upon smugglers and forgers in order to do the work
Americans aren't doing," President Bush said last December after a
series of high-profile immigration sweeps across the nation. "It is a
system that frankly leads to inhumane treatment of people."

Why, then, does the White House not call for an immediate cessation of
these raids in favor of a long-promised and long-overdue overhaul of a
broken system?

The bungled raid on the Michael Bianco factory served to provoke what
Governor Deval Patrick rightly called "a humanitarian crisis" by
shipping hundreds of workers, most of them women, to federal detention
facilities in Texas, thousands of miles away from their families. Now,
at considerable taxpayer expense, federal officials are trying to
remedy their precipitous separation of mothers from their children.
But, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Patrick and
Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence were alerted
in advance to plans to storm the factory. What responsibility then
does the state bear for the mess that ensued? How did five of the
eight minors picked up in the sweep wind up in a Miami detention
facility without DSS knowledge?

Did state officials ask what was to happen to those detained? Did they
insist that immigration officials provide legal counsel to detainees
before they bundled them onto planes bound for Texas? Did they ask
what imminent threat required that these women be removed from
Massachusetts for deportation hearings that could be held here just as
easily?

Decrying the consequences of inept federal action is a poor substitute
for taking the precautions necessary to protect the basic human rights
of Massachusetts residents, legal or undocumented.

Carolyn Newberger is a child psychologist in Brookline who has earned
a national reputation for her work with neglected and abused children.
The abrupt separation of mothers and children precipitated by this
raid "is child neglect by any definition I know," she said in an
e-mail.   "If, as the US Department of Homeland Security claims, the
Massachusetts Department of Social Services 'worked closely' with them
prior to the raid on the Bianco clothing factory in New Bedford, then
our state agency charged with the protection of children has itself
actively collaborated in children's abandonment, starvation, and
traumatic psychological injury. The damage to the children left behind
is inevitable and incalculable, and the leadership of DSS must be held
to account for their roles in this travesty."

Soon after taking office, Patrick wisely rescinded Mitt Romney's plan
to deputize State Police as immigration agents. Romney's proposal was
political pandering of the most craven kind, designed to fuel the
anti-immigrant hysteria that is the red meat of the far right. Real
leadership requires more, however. By stepping aside for the storm
trooper tactics of the ICE agents, the Patrick administration is
complicit in the results.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
mcnamara at globe.com .

(c)Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company