July 28, 2009 3:15 PM
This is the first installment in a three-part series examining the climate of fear within the immigrant community in Suffolk County.
When a report was released last Wednesday detailing widespread misconduct by immigration agents during raids in Long Island and New Jersey*, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy--who never publicly opposed the operations--gave his take on the findings. As you might have guessed from Levy's anti-immigrant reputation, he didn't issue an apology or commiserate with those who were subjected to raids. He sided with the agents. "It is a sad day when law enforcement officers who are merely seeking to enforce the law are characterized as 'bad guys,'" Levy said.
Keep that statement in mind as we go over some of the facts from the report, which found that the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were inappropriately executed, leading to gross civil rights violations. Stats were draw from raids between January 2006 and April 2008. Here are some of the key points of the report:
--Although the objective of the immigration home raids was to seek out high-priority targets that posed a threat to society, roughly two-thirds of those arrested by agents weren't dangerous targets. For the majority of those picked up during these operations, it was a problem of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the report says. At its most basic level, this undertaking was flawed, since it disregarded it's mission and sought to lock up immigrants, regardless of criminal background.
--The report found "a pattern of ICE agents physically pushing and breaking their way into private homes in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution." The immigration enforcement agency does not obtain judicial warrants for their home operations, so who knows how indiscriminate these break-ins actually were. Imagine if someone knocked down the door of your house without a warrant because you lived in a certain neighborhood, and how violated and terrorized you would feel. What makes this type of violation worse is that, as we stated above, this operation went after a much broader range of people than the criminal targets the agents were supposed to be pursuing.
--Once inside homes, immigration agents abandoned their predetermined targets and seized residents "in an apparent effort to meet inflated arrest expectations." So someone breaks down the door of your home, cuffs you or your loved ones, and then takes you away--against the objective of the whole operation--just to fill a quota? How would you feel?
--In the raids, Latinos were disproportionally likely to get arrested without the agents articulating a reason. "Indeed, approximately 90% of the collateral arrest records reviewed, where ICE officers did not note any basis for seizing and questioning the individual, were of Latino men and women - though Latinos represented only 66% of target arrests." These agents were fishing for illegal immigrants by violating the rights of hundreds of Latinos, not to mention the fact that those actions exceed the focus of the operation.
Now consider all the instances of misconduct mentioned in the report, and weigh them against Steve Levy's reaction. He chastised the press and the public for considering these immigration agents "bad guys." But how else would you consider someone who breaks into your home? Someone who hunts you down because of your complexion, because of the neighborhood you live in, because you speak a certain language? Someone who would be willing to defy the sanctioned objectives of their operation--which was to find a select group of dangerous people--throw civil liberties out the door, and disregard the rights of area Latinos to satisfy their hunt for undocumented immigrants.
No one would endorse this sort of behavior if it was happening in their house or in their neighborhood. And it's easy to see how this type of state-sanctioned harassment could lead immigrants and Latinos in Suffolk to fear the local government, especially when the person who should be denouncing these incidents the loudest seems to be giving them his full support.
In my next installment, I'll look at what happens when residents are fearful of their own community government.
*The report was release by the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and funded by the Hagedorn Foundation.