Three Teenage Boys To Be Deported To Mexico Alone

“Give me your tired, your poor/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus’ words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty are undeniably optimistic; our doors are not open to all comers and they never have been.

Sergio Gonzalez, 17, Carlos Gonzalez, 16, and Ruben Tarango, 17, felt Lady Liberty’s door slam shut in their young faces earlier this month. The boys, children of parents who brought them here from Chihuahua, Mexico a decade ago, were apprehended outside of their high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They were standing outside of a fence on the high school’s property when a passing police officer thought the students looked suspicious because they were passing something through the fence. The officer asked the boys for identification; he suspected that their cards were false and turned them over to the U.S. Border Patrol. The Border Patrol then took the three unaccompanied minors from Albuquerque, New Mexico to El Paso, Texas to deport them. The parents did not dare accompany their children or raise a fuss: they are illegal too and eligible for deportation. Now Sergio, Carlos and Ruben have one hundred and twenty days to remain in the country before they must return, without parents, to Chihuahua, Mexico.

The deportation order could have been appealed due to the U.S. Border Patrol’s policy not to enforce immigration laws at schools, churches, funerals, and religious ceremonies. However, the boys’ attorneys (one of whom is a good friend of mine from law school—yes, another acquaintance that makes me cool) counseled the families to consider that the appeal would most likely have been unsuccessful – they are undocumented – and that an appeal might have encouraged the Border Patrol to widen its net to deport all undocumented members of both families. By volunteering to leave the country and waiving their right to appeal, the boys protect their families and gain the 120-day reprieve, enough to allow them to finish the current school year, and the right to immediately apply for a visa to re-enter the United States.

Too often the stories of homeless and tempest-tossed immigrants end in tragedy: death in the desert, in a cargo box in a U.S. port or on a raft in the sea. By contrast, this case seems far less tragic. However, it is a prime example of how our immigration policy is too haphazardly applied to be fair to the large numbers of people who desire to live, work and learn legally in our great nation.

For example, the policy to leave immigrants alone in familial, religious or educational settings serves a humane purpose. Such kindness contrasts with the unofficial policy regarding immigrant work that leaves immigrant workers unprotected in unsafe and exploitative working conditions. As people who live in towns with a population of undocumented workers can attest, the Border Patrol also rarely enforces immigration laws in the thousands of places where undocumented workers are known to work for less than market wages (please see e.g., agricultural work and outside of Home Depot) to make our consumer goods and food cheaper, our pools, lawns and houses clean, and to facilitate our busy lifestyles by taking care of our children. All people who work in these positions are not here illegally, but a good many of them are. All of the undocumented workers are not of Hispanic heritage, but Hispanic immigrants are in greater danger of apprehension because a Spanish accent raises more suspicion than does an accent from anywhere else in the world. The economic and leisure-time gains of illegal labor are enjoyed by millions of Americans, while the terror of “la migra” is suffered by few.

The boys are not looking forward to packing up and heading back to Mexico alone. Says Ruben, who has been in the U.S. for ten years, “I like playing games and am into sports, especially boxing and the Philadelphia Eagles. I’m as American as any other teenage boy in the United States.” Unfortunately, he’s not. "What’s particularly frustrating about this case,” says Chamiza Atencio-Pacheco, one of the attorneys representing the boys, “is that in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruled that once a public education system is in place, the state has a duty to educate all children, regardless of nationality. This is a duty that Board members, administrators, and teachers here in Albuquerque take very seriously. The actions of the Border Patrol make this duty, and the rights of children to receive an education, meaningless and profoundly disempowers educators and families." The Albuquerque Public Schools Board President was more blunt. She pointed out that the Border Patrol should never have been called because the officer would not have approached the boys had they been Anglo.

The School Board President’s accusation may or may not be true. The police officer who apprehended the kids claimed that he wasn’t aware that the area just on the other side of the school fence was school property. His explanation sounds disingenuous, but the officer was only doing his job and in these times, one cannot be too angry with the INS for shuffling off people who are here in contravention of the law back to their home countries. Yet, I cannot support an immigration policy that looks the other way when it is convenient to support decadent middle-class lifestyles, but coldly rips apart families at all other times. I don’t have any answers to the conundrum, nor do I have anyone at whom I can point a finger of blame, which is frustrating. I’d like for first-generation immigrants to have the opportunity to bask in the reflected light of liberty’s golden door. On the other hand, I don’t know how to balance the staggering number of people who want to be admitted in this country with America’s real constraints on resources, security concerns, and the pace at which immigrants can be effectively absorbed into the system.

The attorneys for the boys are optimistic about their clients’ chances of making it back to the United States legally. Civil Rights Watch wishes them the best. We’ll leave the light on for them.

Jackson, MS Airport Gets A New Name

On Tuesday, February 8, 2005, the Jackson (MS) City Council voted to change the name of the Jackson International Airport to the Jackson-Evers International Airport, honoring Medgar Evers, the first field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. Evers worked fearlessly for equality, racial reconciliation, and most importantly, the right to vote, in Mississippi. For his efforts he was slain, shot in the back in his driveway. He was 37 years old.

The airport's new name feels like a particularly personal development because on our civil rights road trip in 2003 we were hard-pressed to find evidence of Mississippi's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Where were the statues? The museums? The parks? Anything? We eventually made it to Evers' house, now a historic landmark, and touched the driveway where he fell.

The naming of the airport is also a lovely testament to the American South's evolving history. The city of Jackson is of course named for Andrew Jackson, who was a friend of the common white man, but no lover of Native Americans or Blacks. Now Jackson and Evers share the honor of representing the capital of the state, bearing witness to the slow but steady progress of history. As an example of layered and juxtaposed history, the new Jackson-Evers International Airport is almost as delicious as the intersection of Jefferson Davis Drive and Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Selma, Alabama. Almost, but not quite.

Congratulations and kudos the city of Jackson, Mississippi! Check out the full story on the Clarion-Ledger.

Brief aside: My mother was Medgar Evers' niece's roommate in college. Does that make me cool by association? You bet it does.

ROAD TRIP!!: Introduction part 2--by YGandB

I don’t remember this first lunch tete a tete that Shannon describes.

My first vivid memory of Shannon is of her blowing into the College Government office one night when I was holding office hours and catching up on homework. She plopped down on the office couch and asked me, “Do you think your college experience is more segregated than your high school experience?” Oh boy. An analysis of El Mio Cid for Prof. Gascon-Vera would have to wait. But I enjoyed having these discussions with Shannon. I told her once that she is one of six white people in the world who gets it. Race, that is. She’s not a celebrated expert, but she approaches the conversations with a rare combination of humor, sensitivity, a willingness to engage and a fearlessness about putting her own thoughts and beliefs on the line. She does not hesitate to tell me when she thinks I’m mistaken and she can admit when I present a different perspective that she might need to consider. Our conversations cover the intersection of poverty, culture, privilege, self-hate and Shakespearian hubris. We don’t apologize for saying things like, “Well you know how your people are…” because we are making jokes or because the point requires a broad brush before being narrowed down to specifics. In short, we are honest, if not always right. And that honesty has created a safe space for dialogue that could not occur on a Presidential commission, in a report or in symposiums. Though we are good friends, the sources of our racial knowledge and drive for social justice spring from different founts. Shannon and I both went to high school in the suburbs of large cities and we have both lived in majority white neighborhoods for most of our lives. But as she is white and I am black, we came to racial recognition in different ways.

I learned that I was black and that that fact set me apart from others who were not when I was six and injuries my mother sustained in a car accident led us to move from New Jersey to Kentucky. There, my black friends made it known to me that there were certain things that separated blacks from whites: the way we spoke, the way we dressed, the way we interacted with our parents and the fact that we did not go around barefoot outdoors. My black girlfriends and I would spend hours playing hand-clapping games. Some, like “Rockin’ Robin” were common to most little girls. Others, I am sure friends from my Catholic private school boasting only 5 black students did not play…“I like coffee, I like tea. I like a colored boy and he likes me. Get out of here white boy, you don’t shine. I’ll get my colored boy to kick your behind. A boom boom.” That was a fun one. It didn’t occur to me until Shannon and I were on the trip what the lyrics of that ditty were. And I still don’t know why a group of little girls in the mid-1980’s were using the term “colored.”

We may have used colored because our grandmothers did. At least my grandmother did. She was what is called in highly-charged intra-racial parlance “high yellow.” She was as light as any white person and had long straight hair to match. She had been a teacher, as had been all of the women on my mother’s side of the family, at least as far back as my great-grandmother. Although my grandmother prized her civil rights, she was never, ever to be called “black.” Or even “Negro.” “Colored” suited her just fine, thank you and that was that. I did not even know what a “Negro” was. When I was about eight, I asked my mother what a “negro” was after listening to a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech on television during Black History Month. She was horrified. But as a teacher of English, Speech and Drama, instead of just coming out and saying, “You are,” and moving along with it, she instead pointed me toward a wealth of literature by and about Negroes through the ages. I read from Frederick Douglass to the Harlem Renaissance to the writings of the movement and beyond. That was when I started to understand black Americans as a people distinct from others. The distinctness rose not from our hair, or speech patterns, but from a shared history that had created a culture of which I was very proud. It wasn’t a pride that sought superiority; I didn’t actually want a colored boy to kick a white boy’s behind on my account. I can remember having crushes on white boys, black boys and one really cute Iranian boy who belonged to what might have been the only Iranian family in our Kentucky town. Rather, because I felt more firmly rooted in my own history and culture, I could have a healthy appreciation for those who were not like me without feeling diminished or threatened by difference.

Despite my racial awakening, I still went to an almost all-white school, and like most kids, a lot of my friends were my classmates. One of my grandmother’s friends, a black woman in her eighties who lived on our street used to shake her head in wonderment when my white girlfriends would come over for sleepovers or dinner and say, “Lawd have mercy, time sho’ brings about a change.”

In the fall of 2003, Shannon and I decided to finally set out to explore that time in which segregation and inequality was the de jure rule, mandated by law and openly supported by the nation’s leaders. We went specifically in search of the places where a clash of perspectives on the innate value of all humanity had produced moments of violence, compassion, desperation and faith. People asked us what we expected to learn, but we weren’t focused on learning new bits of history. We both trace our moral awakenings to the moments when we first began to learn about the people who strove to turn the tide of history by daring to demand full equality. Therefore, it wasn’t a history field trip; for us, it was a pilgrimage. It was our own private Hajj.

ROAD TRIP!!: Introduction 1--by Daisy Bates

The first time I ever heard of her was when she won the college government presidential election.

I think I knew she was on the ballot, but the conventional wisdom was that the reigning vice-president would win handily. As a staff member on the student newspaper, which has a symbiotic relationship with student government much like that between the professional press and government, I knew the VP and figured she was a lock. This other girl had been studying in Costa Rica for several months; who even knew who she was? Lots of people, it turned out. So it came that Mijha, newly elected college government president of our New England women’s college, and I, newly minted news editor, sat down for our first power lunch in the spring of her junior year, my sophomore. We ate off trays in the dorm dining hall. We were both dressed in what passes for College Chic in cold states: jeans and fleece pullovers. She had braids, I had a ponytail; neither of us wore makeup. I don’t remember what we talked about, although I’m sure we both had an agenda. We were twenty years old.

Over the next year, I spent a lot of time hanging out in her office, sprawled in a chair, ostensibly news-gathering but more often killing time and being funny; we could make each other laugh, the first indicator that this might become a real friendship and not just a working relationship. We both had a penchant for finishing papers at 4 a.m. the day they were due, so we often emailed back and forth when we were two of the only people awake on campus. A lot of our talk was banter. But it was a year of racial tension on campus, and I was writing about it and she was dealing with it as leader of the student body, so we talked at length about the issues that arose out of that as well: what racism really looks like in its more genteel forms, how it reared its head in privileged environments like ours, how to improve race relations on campus. I had spent the previous summer as an intern at a homeless shelter where almost all of the residents were black, and had come out of it with a sense, for the first time, that it means something to be white, that it carries a privilege and a passport I had not reckoned with. Mijha became a sounding board for my questions and musings, and rapidly distinguished herself as someone I could trust to ask the hard questions and tell me I was full of shit without making me feel like she thought I was a hopeless case.

She graduated, and by a stroke of luck took a job in Austin, just three hours from my hometown of Houston. We talked constantly by phone and email. When I graduated, I moved back to Texas to work at a newspaper. We bonded over our classic lack of enthusiasm for our first jobs: I was writing stories in East Texas about how you couldn’t burn your trash outside and thinking for the first time that maybe daily journalism wasn’t for me; she was cooling her heels at an Internet start-up in the halcyon days when that paid good money for not much work. As far as I could tell, she mostly drank Shiner Bock and downloaded music off the Internet; I called her constantly on the newspaper’s dime under the auspices of seeking her legal expertise, despite the fact that she was not yet in law school (thank you, Beaumont Enterprise, for not looking too closely into that). We talked about Diana Ross’ fashion faux pas (I answered the desk phone one day to hear her drawl, “Did you see they picked your girl up for possession? If they hadn’t, the fashion police would have gotten her for wearing lilac boots. I would have turned her in myself”) and how much more we liked Britney Spears than Christina Aguilera. But it was the year of Bill and Monica and the trials of the three men who dragged James Byrd Jr. to death in Jasper, a small East Texas town in my newspaper’s circulation area. So the intense conversations continued as well. We cheered together when Cheryl Mills masterfully defended President Clinton against the impeachment charges, staying on the phone for hours while we watched the hearings and critiqued them; Mij was the person I called in hysterics after attending one of the Jasper trials. What was evolving was a friendship I think is rare for its honesty. It is based, as all good friendships are, on commonalities. We love Janet Jackson. We both think eggs and toast is a perfectly appropriate meal no matter what time of day it is. We like margaritas and mint juleps. We wish Bill Clinton could serve a third term and if Hillary ever runs, we’ll quit whatever jobs we’re working at to work for her campaign. We still like Britney more than Christina. We are committed, conflicted Christians in search of the perfect church, which we know doesn’t exist. We wish P.Diddy would stick to producing dance music and leave Broadway and politics to the people who know what they are doing. We both have intellectual crushes on Cornel West (although I was the only one sufficiently devoted to buy his spoken-word CD. Mijha is fairly fickle). We think gel bras rival air-conditioning as the great invention of the 20th century.

But we also talk openly and frequently about race, not always in long, weighty discussions, but as a reality that informs our world and worldviews and weaves itself through the fabric of our lives and our conversations about those lives. This, I believe, is rare. I find that interracial friendships tend to be predicated on the unspoken assumption that the participants will not talk about race, or if they do it will only be jokingly and in passing; they will instead insist that race doesn’t matter, that indeed they just don’t see it.

Race matters, as our boy Cornel once said. We don’t try to pretend that it doesn’t; we also don’t believe it defines or circumscribes us. We try to be authentic as we navigate lives in which race invariably muddies the water. And we are aware of the ironies: I now work at the homeless shelter I once interned at, and she finished law school and practices at a corporate firm. I live, work and worship in a historically black community; she lives in the great melting pot of New York and probably interacts with more white people than I do on any given day. We are living lives across the boundaries.

That is the context against which our trip, a sort of pilgrimage, took place. I think it was my idea; she thinks it was hers. The truth is neither of us really remembers because we bandied it around for so long before we ever did it. The timing was never right: she was working, then I was working, then she was in law school. Then we finally realized that this was something worth doing, if only as a way of honoring a past that has so shaped us both and to have a story to tell our grandchildren about a time that is already beginning to feel like moldy, dusty history. A student of the civil rights movement since childhood, the movement is what inspired Mijha to practice law. I discovered it later in life, and credit it with keeping me in the church when I was thoroughly disgusted with the church’s hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement with all the self-righteous disgust one can only muster at 18. The idea that the church was the vehicle to mobilize an oppressed people and help them articulate a vision and a way to practice that vision caught my imagination and refused to allow me to give up on the church. So we started shooting around emails just after our 25th birthdays: are we really going to do it? Can we afford it? How long would it take? When can you go? We settled on a three-week period in the fall, after the kids I cared for at the shelter went back to school and after Mijha had taken the bar but before she had to start work. Once we had a date, we built an itinerary. Then, as only obsessive-compulsive students can do, we prepared: we read biographies of movement leaders, histories of the movement, newspaper accounts from the time. We watched Eyes on the Prize. We ordered maps from AAA and pored over routes. We called friends of friends to find places to stay. What follows is an account of the trip: part travelogue, part reflection on the past and the present, part final hurrah of two girls who are, finally, growing up and growing into the legacy of race in America.

ROAD TRIP!!

Sometimes the struggle for human dignity has a happy ending and when that happens, it deserves wild and unrestrained celebration. One form of celebrating the triumph of the good guys is to pay homage to what they did in the places where they did it. And so it was with a mixed sense of celebration and curiosity that I set out with Shannon (a.k.a. Daisy Bates), fellow civil rights junkie and close friend, for our self-styled Civil Rights Road Trip in September of 2003. We set out our itinerary: three weeks, seven states, over 5000 miles and hundreds of years of history (we visited a former slave plantation in Louisville, KY). Along the way, Shannon and I silently thanked the activists who secured our modern opportunities. We walked where they marched and knelt where they were slain. In the series that follows, entitled "ROAD TRIP!!", Shannon and I will share with you our adventures and our thoughts.

If you ever find yourself in these places, or in other triumphant locations from the Civil Rights Movement that we didn't get a chance to visit, I hope that you'll stop to take a moment to reflect on what happened there. Today, as in all times, there is an overabundance of hatred and cruelty in the world. Yet, standing in the places where self-confidence, faith and love stared down misunderstanding, fear and loathing renews the fighting spirit. As the old folks used to say, "we're not where we ought to be, but thank G-d, we're not where we were."

Sixtieth Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

January 27, 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the day the Red Army (Russia) marched through Poland, liberating the survivors of Auschwitz, an infamous and cruelly efficient Nazi concentration camp. Over one million people were killed at Auschwitz within five years. The majority were Jews, but Poles, Russian prisoners of war, suspected homosexuals and Roma (Gypsies), were also imprisoned there. I'd have written about it earlier, but I've been completely wrapped up in news coverage about the event. My favorite (or should I say favourite) source is the BBC's in-depth coverage of Auschwitz, its history, its creators, victims and survivors.

Great Britain also deserves belated props for its honest take on humanity's progress since the end of the Holocaust. The theme of last year's Holocaust Memorial Day was '"From the Holocaust to Rwanda: Lessons learned, lessons still to learn."

Coincidentally, also on January 27, 2005, the United Nations commission appointed to investigate charges of genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan submitted its report to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Horrific atrocities notwithstanding, the commission's report revealed that they could find "no genocidal intent" in Darfur. I hope that 10 years from now we won't be making the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day: "From the Holocaust to Sudan: We've got the books out, but we still can't get that lesson."

Props to the US Department of State for defying the UN and standing by its determination that genocide was, and perhaps still is, occurring in the Darfur region. Not that the US did anything about the genocide, but one must take what narrow scraps one gets and try to build a house.

--YG&B

Civil Rights Watch Presents the Retail Wil’ Out Award to Dillard’s Department Store

The Wil’ Out Award is presented to people or organizations who have gone beyond simple discrimination and malice into outrageous, inexcusable behavior. The phrase “wilding” became known to the greater American public in the wake of the Central Park Jogger attack. Her attack was initially blamed on a group of young black boys from Harlem who were “wilding,” the news reports tell us, through Central Park, yelling, cavorting and intentionally frightening other park goers. (Note: No one says “wilding” but news reporters. All of us who use this phrase in our daily vocabulary pronounce it without the audible ‘d’. Therefore, one does not “wild out”, one “wiles out.”)

Dillard’s

Many big-box retail stores have come under fire lately for treating their minority customers in a discriminatory fashion. For instance, Macy’s East was sued by the State of New York for discrimination in the form of racial profiling in its New York stores. On January 14, 2005, Macy’s reached a settlement with the state, agreeing to pay a fine in the amount of $600,000 and to retrain its security forces to avoid racial profiling in the future.

However, next to Dillard’s, Macy’s looks like Jesse Jackson’s Shirts ‘n More. Since 1994, six people have been killed in Dillard’s. Five of them were minorities. The deaths occurred in Houston, San Antonio, Memphis, Arlington (TX), Cleveland and El Paso. None of the victims had weapons. Some were accused of shoplifting; some had the temerity to argue with Dillard’s security officers about unfair treatment and paid with their lives. Two of the victims had, in fact, stolen goods from Dillard’s (one stole a box of sunglasses, the other stole a beard trimmer). Those two people were shot in the parking lot, after having made it out of the store. Though criminal behavior, shoplifting is not a capital crime in the United States and security officers are not empowered to act as judge, jury and executioner. Furthermore, alleged shoplifting does not give the officer-cum-cowboy the right to endanger the lives of all the other people in the mall parking lot as he shoots at his suspect-bad guy.

Dillard’s employs off-duty and retired police officers as its security guards. Because Dillard’s views these officers as independent contractors, the company does not offer them any training or guidelines, they are not monitored and Dillard’s does not conduct any checks into their personal or professional backgrounds. These are the security guards who harass, beat, strip search and kill Dillard’s customers. Dillard’s stands alone as the only major department chain to use off-duty police officers. The company still maintains that using armed off-duty or retired officers for security is the best way to ensure the safety of its shoppers. You be the judge.

The killings that have taken place in Dillard’s stores are too numerous for me to describe in this brief column. However, I would like to elaborate on one of the most spectacular killings, that of Darryl Robinson, of Houston, Texas.

On June 1, 1994, Darryl Robinson went to a Dillard’s in Houston, Texas. Darryl was not suspected of shoplifting. A clerk accused Darryl of demanding $1 million from her and she called in Dillard’s security officers. Other witnesses and family members say Darryl asked for a $50 advance on his Dillard’s credit card. Instead of escorting Darryl out of the store for causing a disturbance, the security officers took him into a back room and beat him. The officers, however, were not finished with Darryl Robinson; after beating him, the officers hog-tied him. The security guards had already handcuffed Darryl’s wrists and his ankles. But that was not restraint enough. The officers bent Darryl in half and linked the wrist and ankle restraints behind his back. He was tied like a hog. Witnesses say an assistant manager was seen riding Darryl like a “bucking bronco” when he was tied up. Darryl died, in the hog-tied position, on a rolling flatbed dolly used to move boxes. There were two possible causes of his death: either Darryl died of a heart attack or of what is called “positional asphyxiation,” meaning he suffocated due to the hog-tying, fear, and the weight of the officers sitting on him.

Minority shoppers at Dillard’s are not always killed, most of the time the complaints come from people who have been harassed and humiliated. The law firm of Chargois & Ernster in Houston represents over 100 plaintiffs across the country who allege they were subjected to discriminatory treatment at Dillard’s stores. For information on the most recent cases, please see this article in HispanicBusiness.com.

Finally, it is apparently as difficult to be an employee of color at Dillard’s as it is to be a shopper. For a class action filed in 1999, Dillard’s reached a $5.6 million settlement on behalf of African-American employees in their Kansas and Missouri stores.

Dillard’s is as dangerous for minorities as Iraq is for, well, everybody. For this, Dillard’s is the reprehensible first recipient of Civil Rights Watch’s first Retail Wil’ Out Award. I urge you to read the full story on the Houston Press about the retail catastrophe that Dillard’s has allowed itself to become.

--Fannie Lou Too