Thursday, September 27, 2012

Border Crossers Land In Private Prisons, Sparking Riots Over Conditions

Border Crossers Land In Private Prisons, Sparking Riots Over Conditions


Private Prisons: Immigration Convictions In Record Numbers Fueling Corporate Profits

Posted: Updated: 09/27/2012 1:40 pm EDT
This spring, a group of inmates at a privately operated federal prison in Mississippi -- most of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico -- rose up against their guards, setting fires, taking hostages and ultimately killing one correctional officer.
The riot, the latest in a string of uprisings at low-security private prisons housing undocumented immigrants, came after complaints from prisoners about "substandard food, medical conditions and disrespectful staff members," according to a federal court affidavit filed by the FBI.
The inmates incarcerated in the Mississippi prison and more than a dozen private facilities across the country are not awaiting deportation in the immigrant detention system. Instead, many are serving prison time for the crime of crossing the border, a federal offense that prosecutors are filing in record numbers as part of a government crackdown on illegal immigration.
For three years in a row, more people have been convicted of immigration offenses than of any other type of federal crime, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. Illegal re-entry into the United States was the most commonly filed federal charge last year, marking a dramatic shift in the makeup of the U.S. criminal justice system, which has been dominated by drug crimes in recent decades.
caseloadimmigration
Credit: Bureau of Justice Statistics
As a surge of new immigration offenders flow into the federal prison system, they are being held primarily in private prisons operated by multibillion-dollar corporations that contract with the government. Federal prison officials argue that privatization saves money and frees up space for more violent criminals in government-run prisons.
But critics contend that the expanding web of privatized prisons for undocumented immigrants is substandard, where prisoner uprisings have become common due to poor conditions and inadequate medical care.
"These are basically second-class prisoners," said Judith Greene, the director of Justice Strategies, who has researched the rise of private prisons over nearly three decades and recently wrote a report on federal prisons for undocumented immigrants. "They're hiring cheap labor, and they're not putting dollars into the things that keep prisoners relatively content: medical care and food."
Congress is on the verge of appropriating more than $25 million for another 1,000 contracted private prison beds to hold more undocumented immigrant offenders, and the offer from the federal Bureau of Prisons contains a 90 percent occupancy guarantee. Nearly 100 civil and human rights groups wrote a letter this month urging prominent members of the Senate and House appropriations committees to vote against additional expansion.
"We call upon you to redirect funding from the wasteful prosecution and incarceration of low-level immigration violations and focus resources instead on correctional programs that will better prepare federal prisoners for constructive lives when they are released," read the letter.
Representatives for the private prison industry argue that they are providing an essential service to taxpayers as state and federal budgets are tightening. Steve Owen, a spokesman for Corrections Corporation of America, which operates the Mississippi prison where a riot erupted in May, questioned why advocacy groups "would spend so much time, effort and money attacking a company that provides such a vital public service by housing inmates safely and humanely at a savings to taxpayers."
A spokesman for the GEO Group Inc., another major for-profit prison operator, wrote in a statement: "All correctional, detention and residential facilities in the world, public or private, face operational challenges that are inherent in the management of offender and mental health populations." He added that the company has "a commitment to providing high-quality services and adhering to industry-leading standards."
But a series of academic reports, including studies performed by Federal Bureau of Prisons researchers, have found minimal cost savings at private prisons. Other reports have found that conditions inside private federal prisons are comparatively worse than in government-run facilities, with more overall prisoner misconduct occurring inside private prisons.
Beginning in 1999, the Federal Bureau of Prisons began looking to the private sector to run facilities housing so-called criminal aliens, or non-citizens serving time for federal crimes.
Over the years, the Bureau of Prisons has provided a steady source of revenue to private prison companies. Corrections Corporation of America took in $205 million from Bureau of Prisons contracts at the end of 2011, up from $132 million at the end of 2002, according to company financial statements. The GEO Group took in $258 million from federal prison contracts at the end of 2011, up from $64 million at the end of 2004, according to securities filings.
The growth has come after a slate of new border security initiatives over the past decade.
In 2005, the Bush administration started a program called "Operation Streamline" along the border in Texas. The plan was aimed at arresting and prosecuting those found crossing the border, instead of simply deporting them or placing them in the traditional civil immigration detention system.
Offenders were charged with misdemeanors for illegal entry, or felonies for re-entering the country after a past deportation. The average sentence for illegal re-entry is between one and two years, though those convicted of the crime can be held up to 10 years if the offender has a criminal history in the U.S., according to a recent report from Grassroots Leadership, a criminal justice advocacy group.
For private prisons, according to the group's report, "The threat of a 100 percent criminal referral rate at the border presents an enormous opportunity to expand."
Federal immigration arrests have doubled since 2005, and the number of criminal immigration suspects referred to U.S. attorneys' offices has jumped from fewer than 40,000 in 2006 to more than 84,000 in 2010, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released this summer.
private prisons immigration
The number of immigration convictions has now surpassed drug convictions.
In 2001, only about 18 percent of federal criminal offenders were sentenced for immigration-related crimes, whereas more than 41 percent were sentenced for drug crimes. Over the past decade those numbers have flipped: Now 34 percent of all offenders are sentenced for immigration-related crimes, whereas drug crimes make up only 29 percent of cases, according to reports from the United States Sentencing Commission.
"This is like the War on Drugs, part two," said Alexis Mazon, a researcher with Justice Strategies.
Critics of the federal immigrant prison expansion say that a series of uprisings -- including the deadly May riot at CCA's Natchez, Miss., facility -- point to problematic conditions inside prisons housing mostly nonviolent offenders.
There have been at least five major disturbances in the last five years at privately run, low-security facilities for immigrants, many of which are in Texas. Two riots in the span of a month rocked the Reeves County Detention Center in the desert of west Texas in late 2008 and early 2009, after a series of suicides and inmate deaths.
During the first riot, in December 2008, inmates at the prison managed by the GEO Group Inc. set fires and armed themselves with hammers, box cutters and horseshoes they found in the recreation building. According to police reports obtained by the Texas Observer, they demanded a meeting with the Mexican consulate, the warden and the FBI after seeing a fellow prisoner carried out in a body bag -- an epileptic man named Jesus Manuel Galindo, who had been left alone for weeks in isolation despite repeated pleas for medical attention.
Galindo had more than a half-dozen seizures over the course of six months in 2008, and he continually asked doctors to put him on a different medication that had controlled his condition in the past, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In a note to prison medical officials months before his death, Galindo had sounded desperate alarms: "My mouth and [tongue] hurt from falling on my face ... Please help me before something really bad happens."
In November 2008, prison officials placed him in isolation as a form of discipline, saying he wasn't taking the medication as instructed, according to the lawsuit. He suffered more seizures while alone in his cell, often waking up bleeding from falls. And on the morning of Dec. 12, 2008, guards found him dead, with blood dried around his mouth and nose.
Paez, a GEO spokesman, said the company cannot comment on specific inmate incidents, saying only that "all incidents are thoroughly reviewed by our client, law enforcement and our company."
Families of inmates at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, where the May riot occurred, also complained of inadequate medical care.
Last fall, Juan Villanueva-Vasquez was complaining of a nagging cough to nurses inside the prison, according to his sister, Angelica Moreno, who lives in Los Angeles.
Moreno said her brother, sentenced to three years for illegally re-entering the country, was examined several times late last year. Prison medical officials told him it was the flu. But the cough persisted, keeping him up at night, and he continued to ask for a second opinion. Months later, he was coughing up blood, Moreno said.
Eventually, in March, prison staff took him to an outside hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer after doing an X-ray. His condition worsened, and he died in July at a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. "They should have done the X-ray in the beginning," Moreno said. "My brother could still be alive."
Owen, the CCA spokesman, wrote in a statement that the company cannot comment on individual medical cases, but continued, "Our dedicated and professional team is firmly committed to the health and safety of the inmates entrusted to our care."
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Families on the Front Lines | First Focus

Families on the Front Lines | First Focus

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September 27, 2012
By Lindsay Marshall, Executive Director, The Florence Project Download this Resource
Increased rates of immigration enforcement and record numbers of parents of U.S. citizen children being deported have resulted in more children entering the foster care system. Based on work undertaken by The Florence Project in Arizona, this paper outlines strategies for building bridges between the immigration and child welfare systems at the local level in order to better inform frontline workers and improve the chances of children ultimately reunifying with their parents.
This paper is part of the Big Ideas: Children in the Southwest series. The complete publication will be released in the fall, but individual papers are now available. Sign up online to ensure that you receive each Big Ideas paper as it is released.
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New Report via @streetactionNPA & @PrisonDivest on @WellsFargo & Immigrant Detention « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

New Report via @streetactionNPA & @PrisonDivest on @WellsFargo & Immigrant Detention « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

New Report via @streetactionNPA & @PrisonDivest on @WellsFargo & Immigrant Detention

September 26, 2012

Check out the new report by National People’s Action, released as part of the National Prison Divestment Campaign, documenting the many ways Wells Fargo helps prop up the private prison industry and immigration detention.
To listen to the press conference, click on the black arrow below (or here to download):
Download: 9673456.mp3

There are three quick things you can do to help:

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Report: Invisible in Isolation: The Use of Segregation and Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention | National Immigrant Justice Center

Report: Invisible in Isolation: The Use of Segregation and Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention | National Immigrant Justice Center

Report: Invisible in Isolation: The Use of Segregation and Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention

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September 2012 — Immigrants in detention facilities around the United States often are subjected to punitive and long-term solitary confinement and denied meaningful avenues of appeal, according to an investigation by Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). The two human rights groups surveyed conditions in more than a dozen detention centers and county jails that contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The result is the first comprehensive examination of the effects of solitary confinement on immigration detainees.
While the harm caused by solitary confinement to inmates in prisons and jails has been well documented, Invisible in Isolation: The Use of Segregation and Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention shows that solitary confinement of immigrants in detention is often arbitrarily applied, inadequately monitored, harmful to their health, and a violation of their due process rights. NIJC and PHR uncovered numerous cases in which detention facilities placed mentally ill immigrants in solitary confinement rather than treating them, or separated sexual minorities against their wishes from the general inmate population. Many immigration detainees in solitary confinement had strict limits placed on such “privileges” as outdoor recreation, reading material, and even access to legal counsel. Overall, investigators found, ICE has failed to hold detention centers and jails accountable for their abusive use of solitary confinement.
In the report, NIJC and PHR call on ICE and Congress to end solitary confinement in immigration detention, severely limit other forms of segregation, and implement stricter oversight of the detention system.
Download a PDF of the report:

Friday, September 21, 2012

(2) Organizational Sign-On Letter Against 287(g) Renewals

Organizational Sign-On Letter Against 287(g) Renewals


  • "Please consider signing on to the attached letter to DHS Secretary Napolitano and ICE Director Morton asking them to end all ICE’s 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements with state and local police. This is a vital time to register our views, because all existing 287(g) agreements are imminently up for renewal. As this week’s U.S. Department of Justice investigative findings of wide-ranging discriminatory policing and immigration enforcement practices by the Alamance County (NC) Sheriff’s Office make
    clear, 287(g) jurisdictions like Alamance County call into serious question the integrity of ICE’s enforcement operations in all 287(g) jurisdictions (see http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/September/12-crt-1125.html) (see list of agreements here: http://www.ice.gov/news/library/factsheets/287g.htm#signed-moa). The letter emphasizes 287(g)’s history of critical government and NGO reports, as well as the program’s irremediable failings of transparency, oversight, and accountability.

    Join us in telling DHS/ICE that 287(g) must be terminated now: by COB on Tuesday September 25 please send your organization’s sign-on name and location to Karen Siciliano Lucas, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., at KLucas@cliniclegal.org. Thank you for your support."

    This is from an e-mail which our office received from CLINIC. We strongly urge you to get your or other organizations to sign on to this letter!

    ____________________________________________________


    For more on CLINIC, you can look here:

    http://cliniclegal.org/
    http://www.facebook.com/cliniclegal
    https://twitter.com/cliniclegal

    ____________________________________________________

Immigrant Detention and the Private Prison Industry » Immigration Impact

Immigrant Detention and the Private Prison Industry » Immigration Impact

Sep 21

Immigrant Detention and the Private Prison Industry

The latest data on immigration enforcement show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a record high of 429,247 noncitizens in the 2011 fiscal year, an increase of 18 percent over 2010. Immigration detention has been steadily increasing over the last two decades.  A new report by Justice Strategies suggests this increase is largely due to the efforts of private prison companies.

The report, titled, “Privately Operated Federal Prisons for Immigrants: Expensive. Unsafe. Unnecessary,” documents the history of prison privatization in the U.S.  Political initiatives and legislative reforms aimed at getting tough on crime led to an explosion in the prison population.  Between 1980 and 2010, the federal prison population increased by 761 percent.  Private prison corporations took advantage of the situation to contract out their services to the federal government, particularly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now part of the Department of Homeland Security).
They were also able to capitalize on the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  In October 2001, Wall Street investors were told about the favorable post-9/11 business conditions:
It’s clear that since September 11 there’s a heightened focus on detention, both on the borders and in the U.S… The federal business is the best business for us.  It’s the most consistent business for us – and the events of September 11 is [sic] increasing that level of business.
These federal contracts are controlled by two corporations.  The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) incarcerates more than 80,000 people in more than 60 facilities with 90,000 beds, and the GEO group operates 109 facilities with approximately 75,000 beds.  These companies charge ICE approximately $90 per day for each detainee, extracting a huge profit.
However, there is a great deal of evidence that there are serious problems within these private prisons, including high staff turnover, deficient security, inadequate food and services, and substandard medical care.  According to Justice Strategies, “While the nation’s public prisons are plagued with problems, the record shows that the private prison industry is fraught with a higher level of serious operational deficiencies than the public prison system.”
In recent years there have been multiple reports of inadequate medical care for immigrant detainees, and multiple deaths resulting from the lack of medical attention.  Reports of mistreatment, abuse, and sexual harassment have also made the news and have been the subject of numerous reports, inquiries, and Congressional hearings.  The Justice Strategies report details several stories of mistreatment and neglect within immigration detention facilities.
Most of the noncitizens held in these facilities are not serious or violent criminals. They are being detained for civil immigration charges, or for illegally re-entering the U.S. after being deported, and some are detained in prison conditions while awaiting their asylum hearing.  While the Obama administration made civil immigration detention a priority and has initiated some important reforms, it hasn’t been enough.  While improving conditions and medical care within detention facilities is an absolute necessity, Congress must re-think the wisdom of decades of immigration laws designed to increase detention numbers, and to line the pockets of private corporations who are all too willing to take on new business.
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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Widespread Denial of Justice for New Yorkers Facing Detention and Deportation, New Report Finds US Immigration Authorities Seen Terrorizing City’s Immigrant Community | Families for Freedom

Widespread Denial of Justice for New Yorkers Facing Detention and Deportation, New Report Finds US Immigration Authorities Seen Terrorizing City’s Immigrant Community | Families for Freedom


Widespread Denial of Justice for New Yorkers Facing Detention and Deportation, New Report Finds US Immigration Authorities Seen Terrorizing City’s Immigrant Community

Insecure Communities, Devastated Families: New Data on Immigrant Detention and Deportation Practices in New York City
New York City is home to over three million foreign-born residents. Yet, immigrant New Yorkers have been forced to struggle with the harsh realities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) operations in their city for years—families broken apart by midnight raids, parents of U.S. citizen children sent to far-away detention facilities in Texas and Louisiana and held without bond, immigrants arrested after a “stop-and-frisk” encounter with the NYPD, only to find themselves thrown into a pipeline that sends thousands of New Yorkers from Rikers Island to ICE detention every year. This report compiles comprehensive data obtained by a FOIA request filed by Families for Freedom and Immigrant Defense Project. It reveals the devastating affects that ICE's enforcement operations have had on the city and their widespread terrorization of immigrant communities.

Immigrants Are Losing the Policy Fight. But That’s Beside the Point - COLORLINES

Immigrants Are Losing the Policy Fight. But That’s Beside the Point - COLORLINES

Immigrants Are Losing the Policy Fight. But That’s Beside the Point

Anti-immigration rally on the front steps of the Alabama state capitol. Photo: Creative Commons/bamakodaker
Monday, September 17 2012, 9:50 AM EST Tags: Immigration Enforcement, Immigration reform
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Like many others, I’ve worked for years to get Americans to think expansively and compassionately about immigration. In a decade dominated by the push for what’s been dubbed “comprehensive immigration reform,” I’ve argued that immigrants drive economic growth, pay taxes, add value to the culture, and don’t take jobs from native-born people.  Although I wasn’t thrilled with the enforcement elements of the policy—that fence, beefing up the Border Patrol, growing detention and deportation—it seemed amazing that Congress was even considering changing the status of as many as 12 million undocumented people. Most of the immigrant rights movement focused on winning that policy, and for a time, it really seemed possible.  
That was then. In the spring of 2007, the last decent bill authored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy died in Congress. There have been other bills since, each with more enforcement and less legalization. President Obama’s election seemed a hopeful sign, but he refused to move forward without Republicans and then deported record numbers. The moderate Republican on this issue has become scarce; by 2011, even McCain was claiming that border crossers had started wildfires in the Arizona desert. Democrats too have moved to the right, adopting harsher language and stressing enforcement. The immigrant rights movement, for all its vibrancy and depth, has been losing the policy fight.
That’s because the movement has also been losing the profoundly racialized cultural fight over the nation’s identity, limiting our ability to frame the debate.
I watch lots of TV, where Hollywood tells the same story again and again: beleaguered Americans and their law enforcers confront hordes of “criminal aliens” rushing our borders. As a cultural event, September 11 became a gift to xenophobes, giving the show “24” its reason for being, and helping to make South Asians, Arabs and Muslims subjects of suspicion wherever they went. Battles over the building of mosques have been carried out with epic heat in Murfreesboro, TN., and New York City, during the same period that a Florida preacher threatened to burn a Quran. These “swarthy” communities have endured a relentless barrage of attacks, long predating the August massacre at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisc.
Reality TV has been inspired by immigration enforcement. Sherriff Joe Arpaio, who at age 80 doesn’t seem done winning elections in Maricopa County, Ariz., had a three-episode pilot on the Fox Reality Channel. “Border Wars,” “Law on the Border,” “Homeland Security USA,” and “Border Battles,” all aired on channels like National Geographic and Animal Planet. It was exciting to see a meaningful storyline about an undocumented father on “Ugly Betty,” but that was hardly enough to compete with the volume of material glorifying the other perspective.
The image of the unwanted, unscrupulous, immoral immigrant permeates television, talk radio, and movie screens, yet pro-immigrant organizations have largely neglected even to pick a cultural fight, until recently. That fact has started to change since 2007, as the movement took up a cultural strategy to tell the modern immigrant’s story in as many ways as we can find.
DREAMers—the youth who have advocated for and come to embody legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for some people brought to the U.S. as children—are making art and creating new words. Organizers are adding programs designed simply to put native-born and immigrant Americans in contact. Documentary and fiction films about undocumented people are finding audiences. And thousands of people are raising questions about the language of “illegality” in immigration talk. These are the activities that reframe the debate by establishing immigrants as full human beings—not just workers—who are exercising the core human urge to seek brighter conditions.
If the death of hope on a comprehensive reform policy has a positive spin, we can find it in the space that has opened up for cultural work on the issue. Only the thoughtful integration of these tactics with traditional policy pushes can get us out of a period dominated by bad news for immigrants.
The Roots of Failure
In 2005, the Minute Man Civil Defense Corps Project set up to do what the federal government supposedly wouldn’t. Frank Sharry, then director of the National Immigration Forum, sees this event as a key volley in the culture war, noting the massive press attention on Project founder Chris Simcox.
“Prior to this,” Sharry said, “racism in the anti-immigration movement was latent but not activated. The Minute Man Civil Defense Corps Project was a grassroots white nationalist movement. Not that everyone who showed up was a white nationalist, but the idea was to keep those brown people out.” Even Jim Gilchrist, the founder of a financial investigation outfit The Minute Man Project, which targets employers of undocumented workers, has spoken out against the racist tone of vigilantes. He told the Atlantic that they were “nothing but a bunch of skinheads.”
That same year, conservative communications guru Frank Luntz wrote a strategy memo for  restrictionists, stressing the law-and-order frame. He instructed the movement to use “illegal immigrant” always, but never “illegals” because the noun was too dehumanizing and would drive away Latinos. The Associated Press blessed that phrasing with its style book, calling the adjective a neutral term while warning people never to use the noun. All this parsing out of nouns and adjectives indicates a great faith in the average American’s knowledge of grammar, a faith that hasn’t been borne out by a reality in which everyday people, pundits and politicians regularly refer to immigrants as “illegals.”
Leaders of D.C.-based immigrant rights organizations are now self critical about their slow response to a changing climate. Deepak Bhargava, director of the Center for Community Change, which maintains a national network of state and local immigrant organizations, said, “Prior to ‘07, and I don’t consider myself innocent in this regard, there was a squeamishness, an uncertainty, a tentativeness that people projected about framing immigration in terms of the racial debate.”
Those people woke up after the fall of the McCain-Kennedy bill. Republicans were clearly conflicted, with longtime supporters like Sam Brownback turning tail, while Trent Lott, of all people, berated his party for voting against reform because of racism. “We were naïve enough to think we were in a public policy fight,” said Sharry, acknowledging that he was directly criticized for years by colleagues who warned him this was the inevitable outcome of a limited strategy. “When even a right-leaning, back-room reform was defeated, it showed the right was not interested in policy debate.”
The question is, how does a society grapple with choices that touch on our deepest racial divides?
In one intervention, the pro-immigrant movement exposed the ties between restrictionist organizations and white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, documented the role of eugenicist John Tanton in founding FAIR, Numbers USA and Center for Immigration Studies—all crucial groups in the restrictionist movement. Those connections have been well covered now in the mainstream and independent press, yet it has had little effect on the credibility of these organizations. There are two reasons for that fact: Who sits on what board of directors is of little concern to most people, and the accusation of white supremacy is a blunt instrument in a nuanced racial situation. As Bhargava put it, “You can’t just call all the people who resist reform white supremacists and be done with it.”
By 2010, mainstream communications advice for immigrant rights leaned toward giving Americans what they seemed to want: tougher enforcement with a little compassion. The cognitive psychologist Drew Westen released research in partnership with America’s Voice, Sharry’s organization, and the Center for American Progress that supported using “illegal immigrant” to signal a tough stance on immigration. Westen said the phrase opened up people who were ambivalent about immigration to the idea of legalization. “When [voters] hear ‘undocumented worker,’ they hear a liberal euphemism, it sounds to them like a liberal code,” Westen told Politico in 2010.  In a later study for the Center for Social Inclusion, Westen confirmed that saying “illegal immigrant” was key to convincing white people to support immigrant inclusion in health care reform and other policies. Democrats largely adopted this advice, but advocates have refused to do so, including Bhargava and Sharry, who is effectively ignoring the research he commissioned.
Yet, Westen is not wrong. People do use “illegal” automatically—precisely because it is so ubiquitous, having been made so by Frank Luntz’s strategy. To win in the short term, one has to find a way to get into what’s called the audience’s circle of concern—or, that group of people that viewers, readers, listeners and voters are willing to protect. The circle of concern is entirely shaped by our subjective and mostly unconscious thoughts about who belongs and who doesn’t, which are in turn triggered by the constant repetition of frames like law-and-order.  Getting in the circle is less likely if you signal that you’re talking about outsiders from the start. This is why Westen tells immigration reform advocates that they can avoid “illegal” if they want, but they should be prepared to deal with less support. Entirely correct, in the short term.
Winning in the long term, though, requires getting people to think of the “other” as being inside their circles. That is entirely possible to do, as the abolition, civil rights, feminist, sexual liberation and many other movements have proven. But it takes a complement of cultural interventions alongside the political ones, advanced over five, 10, even 30 years. The cultural project has to establish the stories, images, and archetypes that prime a person to expand rather than shrink the circle of concern. That project requires us to deal with how race is lived in America, not just how it is legislated.
A Different Kind of Organizing
Storytelling is central to a cultural strategy. Ever since linguist George Lakoff gave the Democrats hell for losing the 2004 presidential election by talking technicalities instead of values, politicos apply the word “narrative” to everything from policy platforms to budget proposals. But real narratives are dynamic, with characters, settings and actions that move things along. Storytelling has its own structural demands—a protagonist that isn’t an organization, an antagonist that will turn out to be wrong in the end, a conflict that creates obstacles the protagonist must overcome. Most political messages, even if they describe a problem in some detail, don’t reach storytelling standards because they lack these other elements.
As Lakoff writes, the human brain holds competing worldviews, known as frames, that are shaped by thousands of years of repetition. A person’s dominant frame might be “bootstraps” because that’s what she heard the most growing up. But “love thy neighbor” is in there somewhere, too. Numbers and facts can’t trigger “love thy neighbor,” but stories can.
In his book “The Storytelling Animal,” Jonathan Gottschall notes that our brains engaged in story take us through the protagonist’s reactions. We flinch when the serial killer jumps out and cry when the heroine’s father dies. Gotschall writes that, “when we experience a story—whether it is in a book, a film, or a song—we allow ourselves to be invaded by the teller.” If this is true, then it’s hard to imagine any political movement succeeding without the strongest possible ability to tell stories. Tell the story first, and you get to frame the issue.
This might be the central difference between the DREAMers’ strategy and that of the traditional immigrant rights movement. Young, savvy with social media, and artistically inclined, DREAMers have compensated for their lack of political power by telling their stories in many forms and venues. The Trail of Dreams, the route from Florida to D.C. that four DREAMers walked in 2010, had characters and plot built in. They took on a heroic quest, encountered the Ku Klux Klan along the way and their completion of the journey reinforced what might be considered old-fashioned American perseverance.
Favianna Rodriguez is a printmaker and visual artist, a mentor of young undocumented artists and a founder of Culture Strike, which brings together musicians, writers and artists to support immigrants. Rodriguez says that organizers initially saw artists as amplifiers of the message, but the messaging itself was often uninspiring (i.e., “states don’t have the right to set immigration policy”) or inconsistent. Artists knew that had to change. “Whatever work was produced, we had to think of it not as a communications track but on the track of changing people’s hearts,” said Rodriguez.
She was inspired by the DREAMers moving on from comprehensive immigration reform with the slogan Undocumented and Unafraid, and she has since hosted Undocunation and numerous other visual galleries featuring the work of young immigrants. Julio Salgado, a 29-year-old artist whose family came to the States from Mexico because his sister needed a kidney transplant and stayed because she would have died without ongoing treatment, produced one of my favorite prints. It features a young immigrant saying, “My parents are responsible and loving and that’s why I’m here,” a much-needed counter to the bad parent, innocent child characterization that undergirds so many DREAM Act messages.
These artists, like Rodriguez, have fans who are in it for the art, taking the politics on the side. “People come and say I never knew DREAMers went through this, “said Rodriguez. “Not because they’re bigoted, just because of lack of information. They came for the way we were delivering the stories.”
In 2006, while Leo Morales was door-knocking a community on immigration reform in Canyon County, Idaho, he quickly discovered that people were either against it or afraid to engage in a public discussion. The Idaho Community Action Network had a 15-year history of bringing together white, Native and Latino working people to fight for policy changes of all sorts, but on this issue, they couldn’t get enough traction to do anything.
So they backed up a step. Through the Main Street Alliance, which provides small business owners an alternative to the Chamber of Commerce, ICAN members asked local businesses to put up a simple sign in their windows. “Immigration is an American tradition. Acceptance is an American value,” the sign read, under a picture of the Statue of Liberty. A year later, ICAN started Welcoming Idaho and bought ads on bus benches and billboards. That’s unusual for a group whose go-to tactic is a raucous demonstration, but Morales said, “We had to do something different to lower the heat level and get people talking.”
 Morales’ group is the Idaho chapter of Welcoming America, which started in Tennessee and went national in 2004. Their approach hinges on getting native-born and foreign-born Americans in direct contact with each other. The model is straightforward: local leaders declare themselves a welcoming committee, and host programs in which people can ask any kind of question without fear of judgment. Eventually, they may get local authorities to adopt a resolution declaring themselves a welcoming community. The groups use videos that spark conversation, as well as “Welcome to Shelbyville,” a documentary about Somalis and other immigrants in a small town near Nashville that aired on PBS.
“When someone sees a community changing with lots of new people in it, they can feel like ‘this isn’t my place anymore,’ ” says David Lubell, Welcoming Tennessee’s executive director. “You have to give people a chance to see the racial dynamic for themselves without beating them over the head with it. So they can see hey, we don’t have this kind of reaction to Russian immigrants.” Stories are key to that process, Lubell says, because if native-born people can hear an immigrant tell her story in a way that resonates with their own experience, then there’s an opening. In 2009, Nashville voters rejected an English-only ordinance; Welcoming America ran the cultural campaign to accompany the policy campaign led by others in that instance. Welcoming America now has 21 affiliates, including many in the South and West.
Drop the I-Word, Save the Kids
At the Applied Research Center, our recent interventions in the immigration discourse have been generated by stories and centralized stories in their strategy. The first is the Drop the I-word campaign, which urges residents, politicians and journalists to stop using the language of illegality in immigration. Second, our Shattered Families investigation exposed the permanent severing of family ties between parents who have been deported and children who are in the child welfare system.
In 2008, I traveled around promoting The Accidental American, my book about the founding of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York. At Powell’s Books in Portland, OR, I kept seeing a young man walk back and forth behind the audience. When all the people had left, the young man made contact.  He’d been browsing the architecture books and overheard our discussion. He’d graduated high school and wanted to be an architect but couldn’t afford college and couldn’t get a job. Should he turn himself in and ask for mercy? I still remember the way he whispered, “I’m illegal.”
We launched Drop the I-word in September 2010 with a video and pledge drive. Many immigrant rights activists ignored us, and we were certainly on the opposite end of Drew Westen’s approach. But when our microsite was shared 20,000 times on Facebook within 48 hours, an unprecedented response to an ARC release, we knew we were onto something. This was a story people wanted to tell and hear. We started with a series called “I Am…”—people without papers and their allies talking about how they define themselves and how they live with that word hanging over them. We’ve heard from students, activists, army wives, white fourth graders from Idaho, Native Americans, and numerous journalists who had decided to drop the i-word.
Last year, the Society of Professional Journalists adopted a resolution denouncing “illegal alien” and urging reporters to rethink “illegal immigrant,” too. When José Antonio Vargas came out as undocumented in the New York Times Magazine last year, his became the outlet’s most emailed story that week and “undocumented” trended on Twitter for a day. DREAMers have taken “undocumented,” a word Gloria Steinem told me would be a problem because it had no poetry,  and used it to create  UndocuNation and UndocuBus memes. New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz apologized for using “illegal” as the answer to the clue “One Caught by Border Patrol.” Shortz wrote, “At the time I wrote this clue … I had no idea that use of the word ‘illegal’ in this sense (as a noun) was controversial…It’s in widespread use by ordinary people and publications. Still, language changes, and I understand how the use of ‘illegal’ as a noun has taken on an offensive connotation.”
Also last year, we released the first-ever report on the interaction of child welfare, immigration and criminal justice systems, illuminating how the shaming device of “illegal” plays out.  When these systems converge, it is astonishingly easy for parents to lose their parental rights because they cannot do the things required to get their kids back. We estimated, very conservatively, that some 5,000 children across the country are in danger of never seeing their detained or deported parents again. We hoped the report would fuel policy and practice changes, but we also wanted to disrupt the “they deserve what they get” message that dominates so much of the immigration debate. We framed the problem as a matter of what happens when we allow bias to replace all we know about what is best for children. The clearest evidence that the frame worked was the utter lack of pushback from conservative immigration organizations.
In the course of the projects, we broke the story of Felipe Montes and his family. Montes, father of three boys, was deported from Allegheny County, NC in 2010. He’d been the primary caretaker, financially and otherwise, so when his wife was unable to maintain the family without him, the kids were taken into the child welfare system. Child welfare soon stopped efforts to reunify the boys with their mother and moved to terminate Montes’s parental rights as well. Just before his family court hearing, which he couldn’t come back to to the U.S. to attend, Presente.org built a petition asking officials to reunify the family; 20,000 people signed it. The Mexican Consulate got involved; ICE granted Montes a rare parole to return for 90 days, and he’s been having substantial visits with his boys. The hearing is set for next week, and numerous press outlets are waiting to report on the outcome.
From DREAMers creating prints to journalists picking the right words, our storytelling skill is key to framing and reframing immigration issues. People who want real immigration reform can regain control of the debate by  recasting the immigrant as agent rather than victim, and as human being rather than a robotic worker. We need to tell that person’s story everywhere and as often as possible. That’s our only chance—our best chance— at creating the public will required to make the vast policy changes immigrant communities need.  

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Amalia Ayala3 days ago
I agree with his emphasis on the importance of the struggle, but I find his narrative of the movement problematic on at least two key counts:
1) a description of the movement as hesitant to frame the immigrant debate as something racial. He may be accurately describing some national organization(s) but it is not an accurate reflection of what many grassroots organizations, activists and scholars have been doing for many years, including questioning the use of the term "illegal" even before the media campaign "Drop the i-word started"
2) the description of the youth movement that emphasizes the storytelling and the cultural production without mentioning the political "teeth" of the movement, which is bases on the risks taking by coming out and engaging in so many actions, sit-ins, civil disobedience as well as the national anti-deportatio­n campaigns. Without minimizing the work of the Trail of Tears or the art of Julio Salgado and other wonderful artists of the movement, I doubt that we would have gotten deferred action on that basis alone. Hundreds of youth have risked deportation for this struggle and faced charges in this struggle. Many still have court dates to deal with. Cultural production is important and matters but it's also important to honest and thorough in our narratives.
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Rinku Sen3 days ago
Agreed on all counts.
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María Torres3 days ago
Agree! Also, narratives are important, and so is the representative struggle in the decision making process
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MikhailBenoit23 hours ago
Look at the slogan they hold. Since when the US became your country? You invaded this land, took this land from Native Indians by force and claiming to be yours? Sometimes, I really wish to take away American citizenship from all those people who claim this land as their own and deport them back to the lands of their ancestors who immigrated to the United States as any other immigrant, and return this land back to Native Indians. Before they open their nasty mouths they should learn their own history, their own constitution by heart from point A to point B.
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Gregory Butler3 days ago
"Narratives" are nice, but struggles are won in the streets.

If the immigrants rights movement hadn't abandoned the nationwide boycott/strike tactic that was so successful in 2006 for the dead end of voting for Democrats, we might have amnesty now..

We need a second edition of the Great American Boycott, not "narratives".

Story time isn't going to win amnesty, strikes and protests are.
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María Torres3 days ago
@Gregory: what about long term change? Didn't we already have an amnesty? If our cultural perception of what is right and what is wrong does not change, amnesty or not, 30 years from now there will still be hatred and unfair treatment of undocumented immigrants
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Rinku Sen3 days ago
I could have named many other organizations that do great cultural work in this area, like Breakthrough and Not in Our Town. Who's on your list?
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Viridiana Martinez3 days ago
This is a horrible, horrible article. Then again, I reckon with the established non-profit/advo­cacy organizations and undocu sell outs you mention, I'd also say immigrants are losing the political fight. Fail, fail, fail on your end, Rinku. But the biggest fail comes from being so disconnected from the grassroots and the efforts of those of us who refuse to tie ourselves to foundation money that you have the audacity to make such a statement (the title of this article) to the cybersphere.
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LavMenace3 days ago
Mufreesboro is in TN, not KY. That is where I live. The mosque has been built and has received the certificate of occupancy and have been holding services there for a few weeks now. There are still those that are legally challengig the Mosque.
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Rinku Sen3 days ago
Thanks.
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