A Canadian Immigration Officer posed as a Lawyer.

A man hiding in Toronto after he was ordered deported to Brazil claims a border services agent arrested him after posing as his lawyer using the Terrorism bill to identify, persecute, prosecute, convict and punish undocumented Immigrants as Terrorists but also Canada's widely known values of fairness and respect for human rights. Hmmmmm?
.

Fabricio Campos's lawyer, Guidy Mamann, said the failed refugee claimant was arrested Tuesday outside his friend's west-end apartment by an immigration enforcement officer who had called Campos's cellphone that morning identifying himself as one of his lawyers and offering to take him to meet his wife.

"This is not about (my client) but about people who get a call from a lawyer, who ends up being a law enforcement officer impersonating and interfering (in) one's rights to legal counsel," Mamann said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Campos, a drywaller, is being detained at an immigration holding centre. He's due for deportation to Brazil on Tuesday.

In a statement issued yesterday, the Canada Border Services Agency would not comment specifically on Campos's claims, but it did say "our information conflicts with the complainant's."

The release said all allegations of employee misconduct are taken seriously, and management reviews and investigates all complaints.

In an affidavit not yet filed in court, Campos claimed he had a call on his cellphone Tuesday morning from a man claiming to be a lawyer "Joel" from Mamann's law firm.

"Naturally when the caller identified himself as `Joel,' I believed he was referring to Mr. Sandaluk. The caller told me that he wanted to take me to see my wife in detention," Campos said in the affidavit. "He asked me if I was at 75 Emmett Ave. I told him, no, I'm at a friend's house at Trethewey and Black Creek. I told him the address."

Campos said he asked the caller twice if it was safe to see his wife since immigration authorities were out looking for him. "He assured me that I wouldn't be detained," he said. Ten minutes later he was arrested by two immigration enforcement officers in the lobby.

Mamann said Campos's phone displayed the caller's number – the same as that used by one of the officers. "Why would someone in hiding tell an arresting officer where he was?" the lawyer asked.

Campos has been in Canada since 2002. His wife, Marta Sousa, was arrested with their Canadian-born daughter a day earlier when officers arrived at their home looking for him. Sousa and the girl were released after Campos's arrest.

Mamann plans to complain to the Canadian Bar Association, the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Civil Liberties Association about the officer's alleged conduct

The Neglected Continent and Implication from U.S.

Read Congressman Jose Serrano's speech on a resolution linking Latin America to the overblown war rhetoric against Iran here The neglected Latin America.

Immigrants died in ICE Custody violating their Human and Civil Rights.

The family of a Salvadoran immigrant who died in the Franklin County jail last month while awaiting deportation says they will ask a former chief state medical examiner to give them a second opinion on how she died. The list continue going on and on and No one including myself has brought out an effective and energetic pro active action against ICE, Politicians, and Governments for the continuous deaths of Innocent Human beings.

Louisville attorney Matthew Pippin said the family of of Ana Romero decided last week to seek the opinion of George Nichols II because they are concerned that officials are not aggressively investigating the case. Romero, 44, died Aug. 21, but it’s not yet clear how she died.

The office of Tracey Corey, the current chief state medical examiner, has not released a preliminary cause of death. Kentucky State Police announced last week it is investigating the death as a suicide by hanging.

Nichols said Sunday that he had not received the family’s request yet, but that he routinely reviews cases at the request of families, attorneys and officials. The state police investigation comes after Romero’s family began inquiring about the circumstances surrounding her death. It also comes at a time when, nationwide, scant information is being released about deaths in jails and prisons of people awaiting deportation.

Congress has recently demanded that more details be made public. The New York Times recently reported that at least 71 people scheduled for deportation died in custody from 2004 to May 2008. Advocates say the detainees should have improved health care and suicide prevention measures. Pippin said Franklin County Coroner Will Harrod told him Romero was found Aug. 21 with a sheet around her neck.

Romero’s brother-in-law Mario Aguilar and other family members do not think Romero committed suicide. They want to hire Nichols to conduct a second autopsy if he finds it necessary. Nichols said that often he can make a determination by reviewing the results of the first autopsy.

“The police haven’t asked me or my wife any questions.” Aguilar said Sunday.

Romero, who came to Kentucky from El Salvador three years ago, was arrested on Jan. 14 by state police after giving federal immigration officials a false identification card. Aguilar said officers were looking for another suspect when they knocked on Romero’s door.

As a result of the January charges, Romero spent five months in the Shelby County jail and was transferred to the Franklin County Regional Jail in May, where she stayed the last four months. Romero entered a guilty plea Aug. 7. She was required to pay a $100 fine, but did not receive additional jail time. Family members say shortly before she died, Romero was placed in isolation for refusing to eat. Aguilar said Romero had telephoned several times from the jail saying her stomach hurt and she was vomiting. She said the food smelled bad and that something was wrong with it.

Suicide, the family said, did not appear to be on her mind. Romero did not appear to be depressed and her religious convictions would have prevented her from committing suicide, her family says.

In the days before her death, Romero was not upset about the deportation; she was looking forward to going home to see her elderly mother and two sons. Romero helped support her family by working in Shelbyville cleaning houses, Aguilar said.

“We usually talked to her at least once a day,” he said.

Aguilar said his wife – Romero’s sister Blanca Aguilar –mailed Romero’s clothes and other belongings to San Salvador in preparation for the deportation. “Ana talked to her son recently,” Aguilar recalled. “He said: ‘Everything is waiting for you.’”

Ana told her son, “I’ll be there.”

“She was hoping,” said Aguilar, “that it would only be a few days.”

And the list goes on,and on and in August 7, Edimar Alves Araujo, a Brazilian national residing in Milford, Massachusetts, died while in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Araujo, a worker at a gas station and a painter, had been detained and turned over to ICE when Rhode Island police made a traffic stop and discovered Araujo had an open deportation warrant on his record.

Araujo, an epileptic, required medication for the control of his seizures. When he was taken into custody, Araujo’s sister Irene attempted to bring his medication to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, police headquarters, but says officials refused to accept it. Within an hour of his handover to agents of the ICE office in Providence, Araujo began to show signs of distress. He was then taken to Rhode Island Hospital where he died.

Araujo’s death was the third incident in which a detainee died in ICE custody in less than three weeks.

The first incident came on July 20, when Victoria Arellano, a transgender person living with AIDS, died while in the custody of the San Pedro, California, detention center. Her family and fellow detainees say that she was badly neglected in prison, her medication not provided. As Arellano’s health rapidly deteriorated, other detainees did what they could to help, keeping the sick woman cool with towels soaked in water and carrying her to and from the bathroom.

So outrageous were the conditions and so desperate Ms. Arellano’s needs, 80 of her fellow detainees reportedly staged a protest on her behalf shouting “Hospital” until detention center officials took her for treatment. She would die in Little Company of Mary Hospital, shackled to a bed, even though she had been too weak to move, for several days.

The second incident involved Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez. She was seven weeks pregnant when she died on August 1 while in custody of the ICE in El Paso, Texas. Contreras suffered from blood clots and had been complaining of pains in her leg. She lost consciousness at the detention facility in El Paso and was then taken to a local hospital, where she died.

The deaths of Arellano, Contreras and Araujo have exposed the horrific and inhumane conditions prevailing in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention system.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Since 2004, more than 60 detainees have died while in US custody.

Abdoullai Sall died in West Virginia’s Piedmont Regional Jail on December 2, 2006. Sall, who required medication for kidney problems, had complained of inadequate medical care for weeks until he collapsed and died that December morning, a fellow detainee calling 911 on his behalf.

Young Sook Kim died in September 2006. Held at Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Regional Correctional Center, Kim suffered two weeks with stomach problems until she could no longer eat. In spite of pleas from other detainees, she was not sent to a hospital until her eyes turned yellow. By then it was too late.

Maria Filomena Inamagua Merchan was taken into custody on February 24, 2006. Held at St. Paul, Minnesota’s Ramsey County Jail, she often complained of headaches. For treatment, she was given over-the-counter painkillers such as Tylenol. On April 3, she lost consciousness and was finally taken to a hospital, where it was discovered that her brain had been attacked by parasites. Ms. Merchan died 10 days later.

The list, tragically, goes on.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was established on March 1, 2003, and is the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security. According to its Fiscal Year 2006 Annual Report, it receives a budget of $4.2 billion annually, with $98 million said to be devoted to the medical needs of detainees. Close to 1 million people have been detained by the ICE since 2004, with a daily average of 27,500 people being held at any given time.

The ICE retains the services of at least 16 detention facilities in the United States, some operated by the agency itself, while others are Contract Detention Facilities run by for-profit companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit prison company in the country.

Claiming to take the medical needs of detainees seriously, the ICE has stated in one of several “fact sheets” available on its official web site that “Approximately one quarter of detainees examined at ICE facilities have been identified as having chronic conditions, mostly hypertension or diabetes. Many of these detainees would not have identified their medical ailment or received medical care and treatment were it not for the screening.”

Absurd attempts to portray itself as the health caretaker of the detainees notwithstanding, the ICE has drawn criticism from a number of sources.

The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security released a report in December reviewing conditions at five facilities used to hold detainees, including Berks County Prison in Leesport, Pennsylvania; Corrections Corporation of America Facility in San Diego, California; Hudson County Correction Center in Kearny, New Jersey; Krome Service Processing Center in Miami, Florida; and Passaic County Jail in Paterson, New Jersey.

The report, which focused its attention on health care, environmental health and safety, general conditions of confinement and reporting of abuse, found “instances of non-compliance with ICE Detention Standards” at all five facilities. With regards to healthcare specifically, the report identified “instances of non-compliance at four of the five detention facilities, including timely initial and responsive medical care.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), acting on behalf of detainees in the San Diego Correctional Facility, a contract facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America, filed a class-action lawsuit on June 13 naming, among others, Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of ICE, and John P. Torres, director of the Office of Detention and Removal Operations for ICE, as defendants. The lawsuit cites “grossly deficient” health care and states that the “Defendant’s actions...deny basic human needs, inflict unnecessary pain and suffering, and put plaintiffs at substantial risk of physical injury, illness, and premature death.”

Another report entitled Conditions of Confinement in Immigration Detention Facilities made available on the ACLU web site provides even more details of widespread neglect: “Among the most common complaint from detainees across the country is inadequate access to medical care. Detainees and NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] have documented severe and widespread problems with access to chronic and emergency medical care, including long delays prior to medically necessary surgical procedures; unresponsiveness to requests for medical care (often termed ‘sick calls’); and dental extraction-only policies.” (The full report is available as a pdf file here: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/prison/unsr_briefing_materials.pdf.)

Jorge Bustamante, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, who had been invited by the US State Department to investigate the US immigrant detention system earlier this year, was denied access to the ICE’s Monmouth Detention Center in New Jersey, as well as its notorious Hutto Detention Center in Texas in which the children of detainees and people seeking asylum are held.

Expressing his disappointment in the lack of access to these facilities and his concerns over secrecy within the immigration system, Bustamante released a statement on May 17, 2007, that stated, “The Special Rapporteur especially noted his concern that there is no centralized system in the United States to obtain information regarding those arrested by immigration officials or where individuals are detained. Families may spend prolonged periods without information as to the whereabouts of detained relatives. Transfers of individuals in custody also may occur without notice to families or attorneys and may result in detention in remote locations, far from families and access to legal support.”

A June 26 article in the New York Times noted that 62 people at that time had died in ICE administrative custody since 2004 and that “no government body is charged with accounting for deaths in immigration detention.” The Department of Homeland Security has resisted efforts by the American Bar Association to turn ICE’s detention standards, adopted by the agency in 2000, into legally enforceable regulations, asserting “that rulemaking would reduce the agency’s flexibility.”

The Times noted that sharp criticism of the system has come from officials at one of the largest detention centers in the country, York County Prison in Pennsylvania. “The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care,” York County Prison’s warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year.

Far from a case of “bad apples”, or merely a few “instances of non-compliance” within an otherwise well-managed system, a picture has emerged of the ICE as a secretive and sinister network of prisons in clear violation of the most basic human rights. The brutality of the policy is not accidental, but deliberate. The aims are to establish the principle that detainees have no rights and are at the mercy of the authorities and to intimidate and terrorize prospective immigrants, documented or otherwise.

We will not tolerate illegals in this county. Said John R, Leopold. Shame on you Mr. Juan Roberto Leopoldo. I said so Proinmigrant



As I always said Tolerance has been crucial assessment on the Immigration Debate. There is not tolerance to the other, The Undocumented Immigrant, even we see in every raid that ICE feel so proud to caught undocumented Immigrants when many of them do not have any criminal record but real criminals are loose on the streets.
I said Enough is Enough.. What really bothers me is that their punishment will not fit their crime.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are causing so much pain to children's torn apart from their parents; Why choose Children's to suffer?


The cousin of the one of the 46 illegal immigrants arrested Monday in Anne Arundel said his relative was not a criminal, but he was in the country illegally.

“His baby will have no daddy. It’s like so many Spanish children with no mother and father,” said Melsar, who gave his first name because he too is wanted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE executed warrants at 16 properties, owned by Robert Bontempo, including his company Annapolis Painting Services, arresting undocumented people, including Melsar’s cousin, Jose Ruiz, and seizing documents, computers and property.

Several of the 36 men and 10 women, many of whom worked for Annapolis Painting Services, will be deported to their home countries, which include Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nigeria, officials said.

We prioritize our cases based on how egregious they are in nature, and this one was very egregious,” said Scot Rittenberg, assistant special agent for ICE in Baltimore City, referring to the large number of arrests.

Some detainees were released because of certain circumstances, such as being a caregiver, Rittenberg said.

ICE worked with Anne Arundel police, which has an officer permanently posted at ICE’s Baltimore City office, during the 18-month operation.

“We will not tolerate illegals in this county,” said County Executive John R. Leopold, who has taken a hard stance against illegal immigration through policies, such as voiding contracts with companies that hire illegals.

Rittenberg said the arrests came after an investigation sparked by a tip that Bontempo was employing undocumented workers. Surveillance revealed that Bontempo was housing the illegals, officials said.

The Anne Arundel Health Department, which monitors residential occupancy compliance, said it received no complaints from the three Annapolis addresses released to the media and raided by law enforcement.

Record of business

Annapolis Painting Services has done work for the Maryland State House and U.S. Naval Academy, as well as Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold and Rams Head Tavern and Chick and Ruth’s Deli, both in Annapolis.

Bontempo is licensed through the Maryland Home Improvement Commission, a division of the state Department of Labor Licensing and Regulation.

His license is set to expire in January, according to the commission.

ICE — not the commission — regulates the use of illegal immigrants by licensed contractors, said commission Executive Director Steve Smitson.

But contractors are informed of state and federal immigration law as part of the licensing process.

“It’s one of the subjects tested on the licensing exam,” Smitson said.

Bontempo has had no reported complaints against his license, officials said.

Bontempo, who is known to own several properties in the Annapolis area, has not been arrested, but could face felony charges, said county Police Chief James Teare Sr.

Bontempo could not be reached for comment.

At three houses where search warrants were executed, the residents wouldn’t speak to reporters.

One of the houses on Carrs Road, where an Annapolis Painting Services truck was parked, had a “No Trespassing” sign posted.

At another house on Harbor Drive, the doors showed evidence of being kicked in during the raid.

Pro-immigration groups, including CASA de Maryland, are holding a rally against the raids today at Hopkins Plaza in Baltimore City.

“Community and religious leaders will condemn the separation of families and call on ... Leopold to cease celebrating the division of families,” said Jaime Contreras, district director for Service Employees International Union Local 32.

SHAMEFUL IMMIGRATION POLICIES IN FRANCE AND AROUND EUROPEAN UNION.




Prime Minister Francois Fillon said It will not change government policy. Laws are to be respected, and one shouldn't be on French territory if one does not have the authorization. Where THE U.N., Amnesty International, Human and Civil rights advocates stand on this shameful Policy?
When the Undocumented committed suicide in detention centers, mutilations, torn apart from families, handcuffed like the worst criminal, persecuted them. Why so much intolerance against the Undocumented? Being without a document will their punsihment fit their crime?
I will said know days the Law goes beyond any Human Values.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hypocrisy, and Inhumane is not Family Value. that's sad and ashamed.

Foudel Rahrah spent 10 days last year in the immigrant-detention center on the edge of Paris that inmates set ablaze this week. It was ``hell,'' he said.

``We were crammed four to a cell; the guards would barge in at all hours of the night to count the number of inmates,'' the 38-year-old Algerian mason said. ``People in there are willing to die to stay in France.''

Immigrants awaiting deportation burned down the center in Vincennes on June 22 after a two-day riot following the death of a 41-year-old Tunisian detainee. The flames reignited debate over government targets for the number of undocumented foreigners expelled each year and the conditions in which they're held.

The opposition Socialist Party and Cimade, a government- funded organization that provides legal assistance to immigrants, say the rush to meet deportation goals has led to overcrowding as the dragnet sweeps in even people who have been in France for decades. This year's target is 26,000, up from 25,000 last year. President Nicolas Sarkozy's government says it's doing what it was elected to do: control illegal immigration.

``This was a criminal fire set after the natural death of an inmate,'' Prime Minister Francois Fillon said June 24. ``It will not change government policy. Laws are to be respected, and one shouldn't be on French territory if one does not have the authorization.''

The Tunisian detainee died of a heart attack, police said.

On the day that Fillon spoke, the afternoon daily Le Monde said the fire incident gave France a ``shameful image.''

Desperation

Sarkozy just has a ``policy of hitting targets,'' said Stephane Le Foll, a spokesman for the Socialist Party. ``The government must change its immigration policy to respect the rights of foreigners.''

The fire was the second major blaze at Vincennes in a year, according to Cimade.

Suicides, self-mutilations, fights and hunger strikes are common at France's 31 detention centers, where foreigners are held while authorities decide if they are to be deported, Cimade said. An inmate committed suicide at a center near Marseille in December 2006, another in June 2007 near Bordeaux.

``When people who feel they have committed no crime are handcuffed and led to a prison; when they are threatened with a rupture from their life, their families, and are threatened with expulsion that they see as an end to a life, it's not surprising that we see acts of desperation,'' said Damien Nantes, the head of Cimade's service for migrants threatened with deportation.

Running from Police

In September 2007, a Chinese woman died after jumping out of a window when police arrived at her tenement. A 20-year-old Kenyan hung himself in February after he was refused papers. A Malian drowned when he jumped into a river to avoid a police check in April.

A 2005 government decree set a maximum capacity of 140 inmates per detention center. The Vincennes center had 250, skirting the limit by officially splitting the camp into two separate units under the same management, according to Cimade.

The government says an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 foreigners are illegally in France, which has a population of 61 million. The number of people passing through the detention centers rose to 35,008 last year, from 30,923 in 2006 and 25,849 in 2004, Cimade's annual report says. In 2007, the detainees included 242 children, one three weeks old.

In the year to May 31, 29,729 foreigners were deported, up 31 percent from the previous 12 months.

`Humane Measures'

Brice Hortefeux, minister for immigration, said those numbers prove the government's policy is working. The expulsions are ``a sign that, conforming to the wishes of our citizens, France is controlling its immigration,'' he said at a June 19 press conference. Questioned in Parliament this week, Hortefeux said detention centers in France -- compared with those elsewhere in Europe -- are better than most.

Le Monde chided him for failing to address the treatment of immigrants awaiting a decision on their fate.

``No responsible government can be inactive faced with illegal immigration,'' Le Monde said in an editorial. ``But rather than rejoicing in the success of his policy of hitting targets, Brice Hortefeux should demand an audit of the detention centers in France and take humane measures to avoid a repetition of this drama.''

European Challenge

Countries across the European Union are struggling with how to handle immigration. The European Parliament on June 18 set a limit of six months in detention, extendable in certain cases to 12 months, for its 27 member countries.

Previously, the Netherlands and Britain had no time limits, while in Germany it was 18 months, an EU report in January found. The worst detention centers were in ``gateway'' countries facing boatloads of migrants, including Spain, Italy and Greece. Dutch centers, some based on former offshore oil-drilling platforms, are ``harsh' and ``excessively severe,'' the report said.

At 32 days, France had the shortest maximum detention time. The report said migrants in France also had more access to legal help than in Britain, Germany and Italy.

Rahrah, the Algerian mason, said he was arrested last August after two policemen asked for his identity papers as he walked to work in Paris. He was released from the Vincennes center when his pro-bono lawyer argued he'd been held 28 hours at a police station before being sent there, longer than the 24- hour limit.

He's lived in France for 10 years and is still waiting for a decision on his request to regularize his situation.

Another Republican Lawmaker exposed his Anti Latino sentiment.


A recent comment by a North Carolina lawmaker comparing Undocumented immigrants to prostitutes and drug dealers first inflamed his local Latino community, and now the anger has spilled into Mexico.

Mexican politicians and residents are calling Mecklenburg County commissioner Bill James' statements -- printed Friday in one of Mexico City's leading newspapers -- an example of growing hostility against Latinos in the United States.

James, a Republican, made the comments during an April 15 commissioners meeting while discussing government contracts and whether illegal immigrants pay taxes. Near the end of the talk, Commissioner Norman Mitchell, a Democrat, mentioned a recent Charlotte Observer article reporting that illegal immigrants paid taxes.
James interjected that prostitutes and drug dealers also pay taxes. ''Al Capone paid taxes,'' he said.

James said Thursday his comments were meant to show that immigrants, prostitutes and drug dealers all engage in illegal activity.

''You're breaking the law, you need to get right with the law,'' James said. ``It doesn't have anything to do with whether your hair is blond, brown or black. It doesn't matter what your skin color is, your eyes, whatever.''

The controversy over James' comments reached Mexico at a time of growing concern about anti-immigrant feelings damaging U.S.-Mexico relations. Mexican President Felipe Calderón in February denounced sentiments in the United States that he said characterize ``Mexicans as the enemy.''

José Jacques Medina, a member of Mexico's lower house of Congress, said this is not the first time he has heard about James. He also said he's aware of the commissioner's proposals to deny county services to undocumented immigrants.

''This is just racism, comparing us to prostitutes and narcotraffickers, in order win votes,'' said Jacques Medina, secretary of the commission on Population, Border and Migratory Affairs.

Oscar Avila, a 19-year-old pen salesman in Mexico City, struggled to understand James' feelings. He said he's aware of opposition to undocumented workers in the United States but said he had never heard such ''strong'' comments that compare an entire community to criminals.

''He's just discriminating against the people,'' said Avila. ``He's calling people, who are just trying to make a better life for themselves, narcotraffickers. That's not right.''

The controversy took hold this week in Charlotte's Latino community and has been the focus of most reports and stories on local Spanish language radio and newspapers.

''No one has been talking about anything else but Bill James,'' said Rafael Prieto, editor of Mi Gente Spanish language newspaper in Charlotte. An image of Mi Gente's front-page story on James' comments was reproduced in Mexico City's El Universal Newspaper -- featured prominently next to stories about the U.S. presidential campaign.

German De Castro, chair of the Hispanic Democrats of Mecklenburg County, has demanded that James apologize for making blanket statements that inflame feelings against the immigrant community.

''What if you had two girls, 16 and 19 years old, and he called them prostitutes?'' asked De Castro. ``That's what he did. He said all the women were prostitutes. And all the men were drug dealers. How are you going feel? You're going to be irate.''

James said had no intention of issuing an apology.

''Why would I owe someone an apology for telling the truth?'' James said. ``I think that America needs to get a backbone. We have become a country of wimps. I'm not going to apologize for stating the truth. Period.''

While James' comments anger the Hispanic community, they likely will win support within his conservative base, said Ted Arrington, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. James represents one of the most conservative areas of Mecklenburg County.

''For them,'' Arrington said, ``this is red meat.''

The undesirables in U.S.
God bless America.




I ask you as a Citizen and Hispanic origin, when is enough, is enough?.”


A century ago; the Irish and Chinese were feasting together on poor, unsuspecting Uncle Sam. Immigrants - Jews, Russian and Italians - were treated as a rats infesting the nation. Today, it’s the Mexicans who are infecting the U.S. with “unbounded levels of immigration labeled them as the worse criminals, rapists, drug addicts, and the list goes on and on. The Target change but the fear remain the same.

The same anti-immigrant sentiment vitrol of a century ago — only the country of origin and the color of skin have changed.

As a result, the poisonous residue of immigrant scapegoating has accumulated in the margins, fueling the rise of hate groups setting their sights on Latinos, regardless of citizenship status.

We must change the direction of this Anti Immigrant sentiment know. Unfortunately we do not have a political voice either government representation as a minority group at any level. When the Anti Immigrants has been incorporated into every level of government, the number of raids, detentions and deportations has skyrocketed.
We have been ignored and in such a polarized and ugly environment we need to stand and raise our voices for Human and Civil rights. Otherwise we will be marginized from America.

from Cable-TV pundits and radio shock-jocks to partisan "research" organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies - has crafted in the public mind the archetype of the undocumented immigrant as Latino, as criminal, and as a threat to the "American way of life." This has opened the gates for the re-emergence of traditional hate groups, and fertilized the soil for the growth of new ones.
They continue scapegoating Latinos just for ignorance, and because we have a different color of skin.

It's time to said enough is enough. Basta, abbastanza è abbastanza, bastante é bastante, genug sein genug, asse'est assez,genoeg is genoeg.

It's time to embrace our family and personal values, dignity, support, tolerance and build our leadership amongst ourselves. Latinos, Hispanics we are a majority minority group who can make the difference, the change.

We need to stop being used as a tool of propaganda for political purpose, economic failure, Natural disasters and individual paranoid interest.

Basta I will raise my voice until someone hear me and God Bless America.


MANASSAS, Va. (AP) - Federal immigration authorities have arrested 34 Latin American nationals at a Prince William County construction company for being in the U.S. illegally.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says the workers are from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica and El Salvador. They are in ICE custody undergoing deportation proceedings.
The arrests occurred Monday at work sites for CMC Concrete Construction in the Manassas area.

ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs could not discuss why the construction company drew federal attention, saying two search warrants executed in connection with the operation were under seal.

Anti-illegal immigrant group CCFIILE likened to neo-Nazis. By Peter Reuell/Daily News staff.



FRAMINGHAM — Local Anti Immigration group CCFIILE is an extremist, nativist group that has attracted a number of hard-core racists and neo-Nazis, an investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center has found.

The investigation, published yesterday in the group's quarterly magazine, found CCFIILE, or Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement, has targeted Brazilians throughout the region.

Co-founder Jim Rizoli yesterday dismissed the report.

"It's not true," he said. "I read what the SPLC wrote, and it's laughable. It's laughable what they wrote."

The report details links between CCFIILE and other extremist groups.

"There are ties between the CCFIILE membership and blatantly white supremacist and anti-black groups," the report reads.

At least two prominent CCFIILE members Kevin O'Neil and John Kennedy are also members of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the SPLC report found.

Among the platforms of the Council of Conservative Citizens is "oppos(ition to ) all efforts to mix the races of mankind." The group has also called blacks "a retrograde species of humanity," according to statements in the SPLC report. O'Neil is the leader of the CCC's regional New England Council.

CCFIILE's Web site has also apparently been a frequent destination for Mark Martin, head of the Ohio division of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.

Posting under an alias on a site maintained by the group, Martin advocated violence against minorities, even suggesting putting a bounty on their heads and "shooting them for sport," according to the SPLC report

Rizoli yesterday insisted he quickly removes such offensive postings from the group's site.

"First of all, my list is an open list," he said. "I don't even know some of the people on that list. One day someone posted something about killing or hurting illegal immigrants. I said, 'That's absolutely wrong.'

"I took him off the list immediately. I will not tolerate violence to anybody on my list. I will not tolerate anything like that."

Electronic records, though, suggest otherwise.

Martin's message suggesting shooting minorities for sport was posted to the CCFIILE site in November 2007, but was not downloaded by SPLC investigators until mid-January, records show, meaning Rizoli allowed it to remain on the site for at least two months.

In another case, a flier created by the National Socialist Movement was posted on the CCFIILE site. Typically such files can only be posted by site administrators, according to SPLC investigators.

Rizoli, for his part, said he merely maintains the list, and simply cannot monitor every message as it is posted.

"I'm probably looking at that list a good hour a day," he said. "My list is a place where people can have freedom of speech, and I let them have freedom of speech. When I see it's of a violent nature, I take it down, that's all I can say."

While he insisted he removed the offensive postings from the site, Rizoli also suggested many of the statements may have been posted by SPLC staff hoping to bait CCFIILE members into making racist statements.

"They were posting things to cause people to react," he said. "I get this (investigation) and then all of the sudden everybody knows what's going on on the site."

It was a charge SPLC editor Mark Potok rejected out of hand.

"That is utter and complete hogwash," Potok said yesterday. "Rizoli can think of any conspiracy he wants to think of to explain the posting in his own group. We didn't do that. This is what CCFIILE is, we're merely trying to show the world."
To read Southern Poverty Law Center's report, go to www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=882

Thousands Giving Up Their American Dream. There is no such a Country of hope anymore either an small light at the end of the tunnel. You can’t spend your entire life waiting to be legal. Is this worth it, being illegal, being scared? “I’m worried my kids will grow up and ask me, ‘Why did left America?

Like hundreds of thousands of middle-class Brazilians who moved to the United States over the last two decades, Jose Osvandir Borges and his wife, Elisabeth, came on tourist visas and stayed as illegal immigrants, putting down roots in ways they never expected.

After packing up their plasma-screen TV, scholastic trophies and other fruits of 12 prosperous years in the Ironbound in Newark, the couple and their American-born daughter, Marianna, 10, were scheduled to fly back to Brazil for good this morning. They expect their son, Thiago, 21, to follow in a year or two, despite his reluctance to leave the only land that feels like home.

“You can’t spend your entire life waiting to be legal,” said Mr. Borges, 42, reflecting on a hard decision born of lost hopes, new fears and changing economies in both countries since he arrived in 1996. By law, the couple faces a 10-year bar on re-entering the United States, even as visitors.

That decision — to give up on life in the United States — is being made by more and more Brazilians across the country, according to consular officials, travel agencies swamped by one-way ticket bookings, and community leaders in the neighborhoods that Brazilian immigrants have transformed, from Boston to Pompano Beach, Fla.

No one can say how many are leaving. But in the last half year, the reverse migration has become unmistakable among Brazilians in the United States, a population estimated at 1.1 million by Brazil’s government — four to five times the official census figures.

To explain an often wrenching decision to pull up stakes, homeward-bound Brazilians point to a rising fear of deportation and a slumping American economy. Many cite the expiration of driver’s licenses that can no longer be renewed under tougher rules, coupled with the steep drop in the value of the dollar against the currency of Brazil, where the economy has improved.

“You put it all together, and why should you stay in an environment like that if you have a place like Brazil, where there’s hope, a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not a train to run you over?” said Pedro Coelho, a businessman in Mount Vernon, N.Y., who is known as the mayor of Brazilians in Westchester County. “Are they leaving? Yes, by the hundreds.”

In Massachusetts, says Fausto da Rocha, the founder of the Boston-area Brazilian Immigrant Center, his compatriots — many here illegally — are leaving by the thousands, some after losing homes in the subprime mortgage crisis. In New York and New Jersey, travel agents and others who sell airline seats say that one-way bookings to Brazil have more than doubled since last year, to about 150 daily from Kennedy International Airport, and that flights are sold out through February.

And at Brazil’s consulate in Miami, which serves Brazilians in five Southeastern states, officials said a recent survey of moving companies and travel agencies confirmed what they had already surmised from their foot traffic: More Brazilians are leaving the region than arriving — the reversal of an upward curve that seemed unstoppable as recently as 2005, when Brazilians unable to meet tightened visa requirements were sneaking across the United States-Mexico border in record numbers.

It is too soon to say whether the reverse migration of Brazilians puts them in the vanguard of a larger trend among immigrants, or underscores their distinctiveness. Like Mr. Borges, who said he was poorly paid as a university teacher of religious studies in his native city of Curitiba, they generally come from more urban and educated classes than other major groups of illegal immigrants from Latin America, studies show. Many returning now have been investing their American earnings in Brazilian property.

But their own explanation for the surge back to Brazil contradicts conventional wisdom on both sides of the immigration debate.

For years, advocates of giving people like the Borgeses a chance to earn legal status have argued that illegal immigrants will only be driven further underground by enforcement measures like raids or denying them driver’s licenses. Advocates of harsher restrictions and penalties have argued that illegal immigration is now growing independently of the ebb and flow of the American economy. Returning Brazilians defy both contentions.

Faced with diminishing rewards and rising expenses in the United States, long separated from aging relatives in Brazil, “people say, ‘Is this worth it, being illegal, being scared?’“ said Maxine L. Margolis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville who has written extensively on Brazilians in the United States

There are regional variations, but the pattern is consistent. In South Florida, the expiration of a driver’s license is often a turning point for families already caught short by the slump in housing construction, said Sister Judi Clemens, a pastoral assistant with Our Lady Aparecida Mission,
which serves five different Brazilian communities in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami.
She noted that until seven years ago, Brazilians with tourist visas could get Florida licenses valid for eight years, but they are all expiring now and cannot be renewed.

“There’s no public transportation here in Florida, so people drive to work in fear and trembling,” worried that a traffic stop could mean months in immigration detention, she said. “A lot of people have just simply said, ‘I’ve had enough.’“

In Massachusetts, where there is more public transportation, a spate of high-profile immigration raids, coupled with home foreclosures, have played a key role in the exodus, said community leaders like Mr. da Rocha, a legal resident who came in 1989. “I believe we lost 5,000 Brazilians only this year,” he said. “The landlords are going to face a crisis soon.”

While Brazil does not yet offer the job opportunities of Ireland, which has drawn back emigrants in droves, neither is it an economically bleak or war-torn country. And like Italian immigrants early in the 20th century, who typically planned to return to Italy — half of them eventually doing so — many Brazilians arrived with the intention of going back as soon as they met their financial goals.

But like the Borges family, they soon changed their timetable.

“We came here to save enough money to buy a house” in Brazil, Mr. Borges said, recalling the early weeks when the family slept in a friend’s basement and he worked in construction for the first time. They expected to return to Brazil after two years.

Instead, he found his inner entrepreneur. He started a plumbing and construction business that soon employed upward of seven compatriots, paid taxes and helped build name-brand hotels in three states.

But in 2005, as the construction boom began to go bust, larger companies, prompted by labor unions, started to demand working papers, he said. And when his crew could not produce them, they were let go.

As the housing market faltered, weekly earnings in his business shrank from a high of $6,000 to barely $2,000, he said. Expenses like gas and rent rose, making it harder for him and Ms. Borges, who cleaned houses in New York, to pay off loans for the farm they were buying in Brazil.

The dollar, which once bought four Brazilian reals, dropped to a historic low of 1.7 reals in May. Then in June came their personal tipping point: the collapse of the bipartisan bill in Congress that would have offered them, and millions of other illegal residents, a path to legal status.

“After the law didn’t pass, it was like all the hope went away at once,” said Mr. Borges, who had traveled, with other members of St. James Catholic Church in Newark, to rallies supporting the bill in Trenton and Washington.

In past years, he allowed, he spent $26,000 on dubious and doomed efforts to secure a green card. Now, he hopes to make a living by processing sugar cane for ethanol on his Brazilian farm. “If we had papers, we’d stay forever,” said Ms. Borges, 41, who has been active in their children’s public schools. “We love this community.”

Proudly, they showed off the trophy that Marianna won in third grade in an anti-littering poster contest, for a design that is now featured in shop windows throughout the Ironbound.

It is in such neighborhoods, where Brazilians brought fresh bustle to faded storefronts or abandoned factories, that the departures are being felt most keenly.

“I’m scared,” said Francine Melo, the owner of the travel agency in Newark where Mr. Borges bought three one-way tickets for $1,708. “I make my living through these people.”

Another of her last-time customers, Norma dos Santos, a former house cleaner, said she felt she had no choice. Seven years after overstaying her visa, she said, she does not drive to work or pick up her children at school for fear that a traffic stop could put her in immigration detention.

“It’s just getting harder and harder to stay here without documents,” she said.

Still, she is uncertain that she is doing right by her American-born children, a newborn and a 2-year old boy.

“I’m worried they’ll grow up and ask me, ‘How could you have left America?’“ she said