Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Same Day Deportation

I came across an article on the WW4 Report about recent ICE raids in the LA area. It's also on Free Speech Radio here. Angélica Salas from the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights in LA (CHIRLA) said it "seemed strange" that recent detainees were "deported so quickly, because that doesn't happen unless they have final orders of deportation, and none of these people even had the chance to talk to a lawyer." The pace of deportation is becoming faster and faster, in accordance with Homeland Security's End Game plan to oust all illegal immigrants by 2012.

The phrase I'm using--"same day deportation"--characterizes these raids perfectly. That is exactly what had happened in these more recent cases. (If this becomes a popular phrase then I want my blog to get the credit for it.) At any rate, I'm going to use the phrase freely to talk about the new kinds of raids that are going on.

There's a very dry blog (Immigration News Briefs) that tries to document as many ICE raids it can. However, there should be a better resource out there in order to keep pace with End Game, especially when ICE's website (ice.gov) is in no way transparent. As should be expected, it is very unsatisfactory as a source for whistle-blowing. ICE itself prefers to publish selected events and topics which they presumably believe to be Homeland Security victories, leaving out the sorts of human rights failures that happen on a day-to-day basis. It is also worth noting that the larger project, End Game, cannot be found on their website. Or if it is there it's been buried so well it does not come up in any searches.

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