Public Terror: Escalating the War on Migrants

Public Terror: Escalating the War on Migrants

By Juan Santos and Leslie Radford

“War is nothing but a continuation of politics by other means.” – von Clausewitz

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“Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.” – Mao

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(LOS ANGELES) Immigration activist Roberto Lovato was there when the Los Angeles Police Department launched its brutal assault on a park full of migrant families with children last week in LA, and this is what he saw and understood. “I saw the LAPD,” he wrote “dragging the immigrants and the entire country into dangerous terrain, a new threshold in the . . . immigration war raging around the country.”

What he saw was more than an Iraq-style surge; this was an all out escalation, a new strategic plateau in the US government’s War on Migrants.

Javier Rodriguez, an immigration activist with L.A’s March 25^th Coalition, called it a “political decision” to “dismantle this [immigrant rights] movement.”

Last year, in 2006, millions of migrant and their allies – their familia – took the streets, giving birth to the most powerful mass movement in the U.S. since the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s.

The new movement stunned the US ruling class, drove the deepest of wedges straight into the heart of a seemingly unstoppable neo–con drive toward fascism, exposed the essential brutality and racism at the core of the Republican, neo–con agenda, began the public unraveling of the Bush regime, and opened the door to the stunning exposure, repudiation and defeat of the neo-cons in the House and Senate, who had led the racist charge to make felons of all undocumented migrants – and of anyone who so much as gave a ride to someone undocumented.

And like their counterparts in the 60s era, the reactionaries of today saw the unmistakable outlines of the threat presented by brown resistance to their power and their drive toward a fascistic state. Like the reactionaries of that era, they moved to kill the movement with mass arrests and state intimidation. Only this time, it wasn’t the FBI, COINTELPRO, the murders or imprisonment of Black leaders, or the mass incarceration of Black and other peoples of color that the State relied on. This time, it was the department of Homeland Security, ICE, and a strategy of direct vengeance – the deliberate terrorization of the millions who had taken the streets and who had precipitated the collapse of the neo-fascist juggernaut.

The methodology was not the one the reactionaries used to crush AIM on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in the 70s, or in Guatemala and El Salvador, nations from which many of today’s migrants fled – no death squads yet this year.

Now, rather, the weapons include mass raids on meat packing plants, pre-dawn raids by ICE agents on people’s homes, incarceration in prisons thousands of miles away from lawyers, families and friends, and the terrorization of small children whose parents had been locked away, or who were themselves taken into custody and locked up like felons in federal prisons with their mothers and fathers.

That this year’s pro-migrant demonstrations were dramatically smaller than those last year came as no surprise to the movement’s leadership. Shortly before the pro–migrant demonstrations on May Day this year, Panama Alba, an immigrants’ rights activist with New York’s May 1^st Coalition, , spoke plainly of the impact of the government’s effort to crush the new movement. “In light of the raids, any migrant who steps into the streets is a hero or heroine," he said.

But the signal-sending, intimidation and terrorization didn’t stop with secretive raids on people’s homes in the dead of night or on isolated factories and packing plants.

Chicago, the city that set the pace for last year’s massive protests, faced a new reality this year, when, a week before the scheduled mass protests of May 1, ICE carried out its first mass raid in a public place, a shopping mall in the heart of the Mexican American district La Villita, marching into the mall with bullet proof vests and carrying M-16 military assault rifles, shutting down the mall, and holding brown employees and customers alike for questioning at gunpoint, while letting whites go free. A Chicago immigrants rights activist said, “They sat people down on the ground and busted down bathroom doors…Only 12 people were arrested in Chicago, but there were 250 people being held. But people didn’t run away. They were furious and we started protesting immediately.”

And, in Los Angeles, the storm center of the national struggle for migrant’s rights, the LAPD, under the leadership of the nation’s “top cop,” Republican police chief William Bratton, made another strategic intervention aimed at nationwide intimidation of the new movement; a brutal, no holds barred, clearly premeditated, tight and highly disciplined police assault on an entirely peaceful gathering of migrant families with children – hundreds of children – in MacArthur Park – an assault involving some 600 cops who struck pedestrians with moving motorcycles, and who, while marching in close formation, fired uncounted volumes of tear gas and volley after volley of rubber bullets from “less lethal weapons,” shooting indiscriminately into the crowd, waiting on cue and in unison for the crowd before them to retreat, while viciously clubbing journalists, smashing cameras, and striking anyone else they could strike with repeated blows from batons. Seventy people were injured and sent to hospitals. Despite LAPD claims that the attack was in reaction to having been pelted with plastic water bottles and rocks by young “agitators”, and despite the hundreds of police present, not a single arrest was made. While the young people did, very bravely, hold a protective line between the cops and the families under attack – taking the brunt of police violence on their own bodies, the assault on the migrant families was in no way “provoked,” any more than the ICE raid in the Chicago mall was provoked.

The LAPD assault has been compared to the infamous and racist repression unleashed by police chief Bull Conner of Birmingham, Alabama against the Civil Rights movement when the Old South was still the Old South. African American writer Anthony Abdullah Samad says of Bratton, “He'll never be able to explain away the rubber bullets hitting women and children. No more than Bull Connor could justify turning fire hoses and dogs on women and children in Birmingham in 1963.”

But the whole point was to incite widespread terror and intimidation - that’s precisely why no one – not children, not journalists, not pregnant women, was spared from the onslaught. Far from the LAPD being once again “exposed” as the nation’s most brutal pigs, the worldwide media coverage, especially and intensely concentrated on Spanish language TV in the U.S., was a public relations coup of a high order for those bent on striking fear and crushing any further resistance to pre-dawn raids, the plans for massive construction of new immigration prisons, the further incarceration of children in a Texas-style Guantanamo, or the even more massive raids and mass deportations to come.

The powers that be could not have picked a more chilling place from which to have signaled their brutal message to the pro migrant movement. LA has the largest population of migrants in the nation, and a Chican@ mayor and political establishment with a level of power unrivalled by Brown people anywhere in the nation – no where else in the US can migrant populations expect the kind of sympathy and support that is ostensibly available in LA. But LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a “rising star” of the Democratic Party, rode last year in a Pacific Palisades parade that included in its official entourage a contingent from the “Minuteman Project,” and kept his political distance as police stormed the South Central Farm, brutally uprooting supporters of the many migrant families who had grown their food there until faced with eviction in a shady deal that involved secret deals and City Council improprieties.

The Mayor, after facing intense criticism for his appearance at last year’s million- plus march in downtown LA, arranged to be out of town for this year’s march.

This year, it was only after criticism of the LAPD reached a red hot crescendo that the Mayor returned from a trip abroad on “city business” to denounce the LAPD attack as a human rights violation, and to attempt to quell any mass “unrest” that might be brewing.

LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, in the meantime, is having none of the Mayor’s human rights rhetoric. Two high ranking LAPD officers have been reassigned, while Bratton has pointed to “tactical errors,” falsely implying the cops were “out of control” rather than fulfilling a strategic political imperative of the Bush regime. But the cops were not out of control, this was no police riot; the police were acting with discipline on direct orders from Bratton’s Deputy Chiefs, making it clear that the planning for the police assault occurred at the highest levels, in all probability in meetings with Bratton himself, who has strong ties to the Department of “Homeland Security,” and who has been mentioned as a potential candidate to head the DHS under George W. Bush.

Were Bratton to land that post, he would not only head up the government’s internal spying program, but would be the ultimate head of ICE, and responsible for carrying out Homeland Security’s “Operation Endgame”, with its objective of raiding, rounding up, imprisoning and deporting millions of migrants.

On May 1, at MacArthur Park, Bratton may have proven himself “fit” for just such a vile job.

In the meantime, if legislation now before Congress is approved, local police, including the LAPD, would have the authority, and funding from the Department of Homeland Security to carry out public raids in areas where migrants concentrate; to act as local enforcers of national laws on immigration, to help carry out the mass deportations of brown people that Operation Endgame implies. That’s the plan. That’s the trajectory. Conversely, if no legislation is passed this year, and no moratorium on raids is declared, Operation Endgame remains the official policy of the DHS and ICE. In the absence of any other plan, Bush’s raids can only intensify, and do so with the aim of fulfilling the goals of Endgame; it will be the only policy on the books.

The attacks in LA and Chicago were by no means random, and by no means local in their meaning or impact. The neo-con powers that be brought forth their latest “surge” in the War on Migrants and the Chican@ community, and signaled with unmistakable clarity their intent to crush the movement that has cost them so much and that has threatened the stability of their rule.

The Bush escalation of the War on Migrants, and the plan to bring police into the battle at a national level – a move backed by Republicans and Democrats alike – means that from the standpoint of the white power elite of the US– despite the rhetoric of one wing of the pro migrant movement – “we are not America.” – que ”NO somos America.” It means that the white power elite views migrants as a dangerous force for political instability and for undermining the white cultural dominance of the US. It means that migrants and the pro migrant movement are the targets of America, no matter how many US flags are waved, how much English is spoken, or how much profit is provided for the exploiters.

And the vulnerability of the system- its open embarrassment at being exposed for it brutal machinations, its efforts to cover its tracks, means that it is only resistance and exposure that the system fears, and that only resistance and exposure will cause it to back down from draconian measures, just as it sought to distance itself from the openly fascistic Sensenbrenner bill in 2006.

The resistance can take many forms – barrio Migra Watch/ Ojo a la Migra committees, the continuing establishment of Sanctuary cities and Sanctuary churches, the planning of escape routes and the setting up of defense committees in factories and other workplaces – and marches, many more marches, to demand the end of raids and deportations, the firing of LAPD Chief Bratton, full legalization of all, and the end to the exploitation of Latin American and other third world economies by US finance capital. Without such open and defiant resistance, the system will concede nothing, and the future will hold nothing other than more brutality, more raids, more vigilantes like the Minutemen, more destroyed families, and a more openly racist culture ruled with the iron fist from the Right.

Leslie Radford is a correspondent for Aztlan Electronic News and L.A. Indymedia. She can be reached at leslie@radiojustice.net.

Juan Santos is Los Angeles based writer and editor. His work can be read at The Fourth World. He can be reached at Juan_Santos@Mexica.net

The Hate Equation: Targeting Migrant Children

The Hate Equation: Targeting Migrant Children

By Juan Santos

Even the mayor of Los Angeles admits "Nobody, nobody should be victimized in a way we saw women, children and families victimized just a few days ago."

He was referring to the openly brutal assault by the LAPD on a peaceful rally of migrant families and their supporters on May 1 in LA’s MacArthur Park, where dozens of pigs in riot gear viciously and repeatedly fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of Brown families with children and babies, even before a helicopter hovered overhead announcing – in English only – that the Park must be vacated. The rally had a permit until 9 P.M. But, according to eyewitness accounts collected by the National Immigrant Solidarity Network, hundreds of cops arrived at 6, a mere hour after the event started, and, unprovoked, immediately began harassing a crowd watching Mexica/ Azteca danzantes, driving their motorcycles straight into the onlookers and sending a wedge of riot clad cops into their midst. More people gathered in the area to denounce this outrage, as waves of cops shot their way into the crowd of ten thousand nearby. The LAPD tried to blame “agitators” and “anarchists” for their attack, but this as a straight up lie.

Reporter Ernesto Arce of LA’s KPFK told Democracy Now!, “they were trying to clear the Alvarado Street for ongoing traffic, and there was a gathering, a large gathering, a circle of people that were gathered around Aztec danzantes, or pre-Columbian Mexican dancers, and they were holding a ceremony. And police on motorcade decided to forcibly break that up, and they drove their motorcycles through this crowd.”

A reporter for Telemundo said “One minute I was on live, the next minute I was running for my life. It was excessive force. They basically hit women, children, and journalists.”

Another reporter wrote, “Television news crews captured images of the police swinging their batons at an arm’s length of a frightened child who cried as he stood frozen in the chaos.

Let’s be clear. This would never happen to a gathering of white suburban families. No one would tolerate it for a moment if white babies were fired on by pigs using “less than lethal” weapons” that have been known to kill, hurling projectiles with the force of a 95 mile per hour baseball. Is a 95 mile per hour baseball “less than lethal” when hurled at an infants’s skull? If it strikes a baby’s eye? About 600 cops, including 100 from the ultra elite Metro Division, fired hundreds of rubber bullets and tear gas canisters and systematically beat Brown mothers, fathers, youth, and members of the news media with batons. Tear gas projectiles have long been known to have lethal potential. LA Times writer Ruben Salazar was killed by the LAPD with a tear gas canister during the police riot against the anti-war Chicano Moratorium as far back as 1970.

But Brown children are expendable in Los Angeles, and migrants are the new scapegoats for a nation steeped in a deep tradition of white racism.

The race equation, the hate equation, is that simple. The Conservative voice website called the families “criminals” taking to the streets, and, in an effort to justify the LAPD attack, launched a racist war of words on the children themselves ,saying ”the children of illegals, who are themselves illegal (sic), do not share their parents’ work ethic or docility. The children are often lazy, are predominantly hateful, and commit crimes at rates far above the American statistical norm. Imitating the worst qualities of American blacks, they refuse to patiently work their way up the ladder of social mobility, and despise everything that America stands for. Meanwhile, they demand that everything that law-abiding Americans have worked so hard for be taken from them and given to the second-generation illegals.”

The website called the families “Thugs hiding behind children, and backs the claim with a citation from the virulently racist website VDARE:

I wonder if the plan to Boycott America also includes not giving birth to their 'jackpot' babies, not driving while drunk, not accepting welfare payments, not using food stamps, not dealing drugs, not murdering, stealing or raping, not attending government schools, not buying homes using government financing, not clogging our court system, not sending remittances to Mexico, not breaking our laws by being here and not insisting that we speak Spanish?

The essay concludes that white “Americans” should “begin exercising their legal right (sic) to effect citizens’ arrests of illegals.” What the Right wants is for even more intense brutality to be unleashed on the Brown community, by police and vigilantes alike. “The Americans, writes the Voice,” will need to break into march lines, make citizens’ arrests, and force policemen to choose their allegiances: To America’s laws and citizens, or to foreign criminals and their American accomplices.”

The Hate Equation is so simple and so transparent that the nation’s most brutal police chief, William Bratton, was forced to apologize- but his early efforts were apologies were to the brutalized news media, and to the cops themselves, for “what happened” to them - not to the families who were attacked.

Bratton finally admitted, “ “I'm not going to defend the indefensible. Things were done that shouldn't have been done."

But the outrage over the police riot grew so intense that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was forced to return from a trip abroad to calm the troubled waters- and prevent any potential rebellion- by promising justice at home.

But we’ve seen the kind of “justice” the system offers. Just the week before the May Day police riot, LAPD shut down a protest by the parents of children from L.A.’s Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a charter school that teaches indigenous Mexican culture – and that has been targeted by Minuteman- style racist talk jocks at Disney-owned KABC, who have claimed the children are being taught cannibalism and trained as terrorists. The school recently filed a suit against the station, noting on- air racist attacks on the children and a bomb threat against the children that resulted from the station’s hate talk.

When the children’s parents picketed peacefully on the sidewalk outside KABC, Los Angeles police moved in to “disperse” them.

A counter-demonstration against the Minutemen in Hollywood was also viciously attacked by riot squads without provocation. See the video here.

Bratton is the king of “zero tolerance” police tactics, a cop whose policies have led to a record of brutal police murders in both New York and LA.

But street level thuggery on the part of police, Minutemen and radio hate talkers is only the beginning. The physical targeting of Brown children only mirrors the orientation of politicians and the extreme Christian Right, which is mobilizing to strip our children of the birthright citizenship provided by the 14^th Amendment, creating a permanent under- caste of not –quite- human, non-white workers of indeterminate legal status, who will lack the rights afforded the children of the generations of white Christian colonizers who brought genocide and slavery with them when they came here. The Minutemen call these children “Anchor babies”; the Conservative Voice calls them “Second generation illegals,” - which is to say, permanent, ready made scapegoats.

In the meantime families are being split apart by the thousands by intensified ICE raids and deportations, even as children are being locked in immigration prisons in Texas.

Carol Lloyd writes in Salon “…we are treating children of all ages (many of whom are U.S. citizens) essentially as prisoners. Initial findings by the ACLU found that the children wore prison garb, received one hour of recreation a day and no formal education, and were kept in small cells 11 to 12 hours each day without food or toys. Other complaints involve psychological abuse, including guards telling children they would be separated from their families if they didn't stop crying. (For a great Q&A with ACLU's Lisa Graybill, click here.)”

Protesting these attacks on families was one of the major focal points of the May Day demonstrations across the US, and in Los Angeles, the answer of the capitalist state to these protests was clear and concise – another brutal, merciless - and racist - attack on Brown parents and their children.

Juan Santos is Los Angeles based writer and editor. His work can be read at

The Fourth World

How the pro-Migrant Movement Stopped Fascism and How to Finish the Job

How the pro-Migrant Movement Stopped Fascism and How to Finish the Job

by Juan Santos

2006 marked a sea change in US politics, but the decisive moment was not election day, it was March 25^th, the day that over a million Mexican and Central America migrants and their Chicana/o allies marched in the streets of Los Angeles, following a march of similar magnitude in Chicago.

The movement was on – someone – millions of someones - sent a shocking message to the ruling elites of the most powerful empire in world history: The Republican juggernaut toward Fascism would stop at our door, and it would not take a single step further. Brown people throughout the US were on red alert: the racists behind the rise of the shock troops called the Cazamigrantes (the Minutemen) were moving in Congress to make every migrant in the nation – everyone without papers, and everyone who “assisted” them – a felon.

They would have unleashed a new wave of mass repression in the nation’s barrios, repression like the Zoot Suit Riots and Operation Wetback, making everyone with Brown skin an automatic target, a suspect in a felony, vulnerable to mass roundups and detention camps. Brown skin would become the new yellow star, one worn by every person of native decent in the country. The “Americans” – who are not “Americans” at all, but the descendants of foreign colonizers and conquerors, meant to declare this land off limits to the descendants of its original inhabitants, who knew no borders.

We knew this much: Fascism always targets the Other; the dominant group, the “Aryans” or “Good Germans” would remain oblivious; for them, everything would seem normal.

Police state conditions in the ghetto, the barrio and on the reservations had already become “normal.” The system had crushed the rebellions of the 60s and replaced Jim Crow segregation with 25 years of mass incarceration for Red, Black and Brown people. The white response was silence. Even after the mass rebellion in Los Angeles that spread across the nation, the silence surrounding our deepening oppression was thick as death.

Here in the “land of the ‘free’” with its “free press,” almost no one could have told you that our rates of incarceration are the highest in the world. No one even knew; they weren’t supposed to know that, just like no one was supposed to know – or care - about the concentration camps in Germany. The “War on Drugs” was the first giant step toward a police state in the US. Hardly anyone breathed a word. White people were not the target, after all. The target was the old, comfortable target: us. Millions were felonized and incarcerated.

Sensenbrenner’s bill targeting migrants was round two of a massive effort to felonize peoples of color in the US. This time the target was the most vulnerable of the vulnerable – people who had carried the slur “illegal” on their backs for decades, people without papers, whose most fundamental rights could be violated with impunity, who, according to the colonizer, had no “legal” right to even be here. The Nazi state had done just the same thing; their first targets were not Jews or Gypsies or Slavs, they were so-called “stateless people.” They wore the blue triangle in the German camps.

In 2006 it was up to us to act, to defend ourselves, and we knew it. No one was coming to our rescue. And no one, not even the mainstream Spanish language media, had any illusions about it.

And act we did, in city after city across the nation, in our millions, tens and hundreds of thousands – everywhere. The “Sleeping Giant,” it was said, had awakened, and had sent an unmistakable message, one that even redneck liberals like talk show host Ed Schultz could understand. “They can make trouble,” he said.

The struggle of the Chicana/o people against the Minutemen proved the point.

We proved it in Los Angeles, in showdowns like the Battle of Baldwin Park, where Chicana/o protestors drove the Minutemen from the street, outnumbering them six to one; in the violent standoff in Garden Grove, where a Minuteman supporter ran down several Chicana/os with his car, to be met by a hail of stones, and in the desert outside Campo, California, where scores of resistors walked boldly and empty handed into a Minutemen encampment, facing down an armed throng of racists and disrupting their efforts to hunt down migrants on the border - all showed clearly what the system might face if Chicana/os and migrants forged a united front of resistance in the face of escalating mass repression.

Plans were afoot to organize migrant defense committees, and to get ready for mass civil disobedience.

These early fighters set the stage for the mass marches to come, and the tone of resistance they set is what the ruling elites most feared – not the promise that we would organize ourselves to ”vote.”

Many called it a “New Civil Rights Movement” – and they were both right and wrong about that. They were right, because of the massive outpourings and the spirit of determination to be free. Wrong, because our history is different from that of the Black nation in the US, and most of all, because the conditions we faced, and are still facing, are very different indeed.

The fifties and sixties were a time of worldwide anti-colonial rebellion and rising expectations around the globe; people expected to be free. The US and other colonial and neo-colonial powers were on the defensive around the world. Today, the US has its hands on the throat of the world, and with the Sensenbrenner bill they put their hands at our throats, too. War and repression abroad were mirrored by a growing mass repression at home: the nation was heading rapidly toward fascism. No one had a dream. The dreams had all been crushed, and the extreme Right was looking to make a decisive breakthrough in establishing a new kind of fascism here in the US.

We stopped them cold. This is very important to get. No one else had stood up, and once we were down, no one else would have or even could have stood up: the drive toward fascism would have all been downhill from there.

But the fascist juggernaut slammed into a Brown wall of resistance. Republican unity shattered, and the silence shattered with it. The Christian fascists had gone too far, and the nation turned on them, the way that school kids will turn on a bully when someone – finally – gives him a bloody nose.

Now, the Democrats – the Republican's silent partners in the “War on Drugs” and in fascistic legislation like the Patriot Act - have turned their gaze back our way, promising “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Their first priorities are a border sealed with guns, more raids like the recent attacks on Swift packing plants, and a “guest worker” program much like the infamous guest worker program in racist South Africa under Apartheid.

No matter what the Democrats say, no matter what they “promise,” this is no time to play by the rules. The whole premise of playing by the rules is drenched in racism and can lead nowhere but to a deepening oppression. Let’s look at the covert racism, and the openly imperialist perspective, in these remarks by liberal icon Ted Kenney:

“Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said opponents ‘misleadingly categorize our efforts as an 'amnesty.' Legal status, he continued, "must be earned by proving past work contributions, making a substantial future work commitment, and paying monetary penalties. It is not a guarantee of citizenship, but an opportunity to continue working hard, start playing by the rules, and earn permanent residency."

Kennedy, here, would have us believe that migrants must “earn” the right to be here – he implies that migrants are freeloaders without a substantial commitment to work, that migrants are people who don’t “play by the rules,” and that they should be fined for failing to play by the rules.

But the rules are made by and for the ruler’s benefit, not ours. Kennedy is clearly in a position to know that millions of people in Mexico have been driven from the land in the vast capitalist conspiracy called NAFTA; he surely knows that the main beneficiaries of their dispossession have been the capitalist elites of the US, he surely knows that these people have been and continue to be driven here so that Kennedy’s own class might profit. He knows that the whole set up of the Mexican economy is rigged to maximize foreign profit and to minimize the ability of the Mexican people to accumulate capital within the borders of Mexico itself.

Kennedy cannot be ignorant of the recent history of his own government in sponsoring death squad regimes in El Salvador, or the US backed genocide in Guatemala, both of which produced waves of refugees heading North.

But Kennedy’s logic is to blame the migrants themselves for the causes and the effects of capitalist globalization and for mass state terror sponsored by the USA.

From Mexico to Panama to Venezuela to Guatemala to Nicaragua, Iraq and Iran, US capital and power routinely crosses third world borders to steal resources, gut economies, undermine or overthrow governments, and sponsor death squads and regimes of torture. Those responsible have the audacity to call someone crossing their border in search of something so innocent as a job “illegals” and “criminals” who must pay a price for their “crimes” and “rule breaking.”

This is where the scapegoating of migrants starts. It is meant to paper over the real crimes of the real criminals, while further persecuting their victims.

Kennedy’s logic is the same fundamental logic of racism and empire that permeates the arguments of extreme right wing elements like Congressmen Tom Tancredo, Jim Sensenbrenner, and their shock troops in the Minutemen and other racist vigilante groups like Southern California’s “Save Our State.” The problem isn’t – it “can’t be” - oppression – it’s Mexican and Central American “rule breakers,” an image that ultimately rests in the stereotype of the lawless, “savage,” brutal and drunken Mexican “bandito” and the “savage Indian.”

To acquiesce at any level to this base line logic is to surrender the battlefield to our enemies, and to turn ourselves into beggars, begging a heartless system – one that recognizes no “rules” or limits at all in the pursuit of profit - for our most basic human rights.

No: we are not in a situation analogous to the Civil Rights movement; our situation would be better compared to the onset of Jim Crow than to the period of its formal demise. It is better compared to the period of the Weimar Republic in pre-Nazi Germany than to the situation of the US in the 1960s.

In today’s atmosphere we cannot allow the system free reign to reinforce racist stereotypes against our people at any level, much less to enforce them against us at the point of the gun called law, however “comprehensive” their aim.

In the wake of our victory in 2006, the terrain has changed, new balances are being struck, and powerful elements are seeking to gain as much ground as they can in an effort to keep the door open for more measures like the Sensenbrenner bill in the future. Our strategic imperative is to slam that door on them, once and for all.

The Christian Right has regrouped in an anti-migrant coalition that is “bigger and broader than the Secure Border Coalition that dominated the debate on the right in the last go round” and they are now proposing their own “grand compromise” on migrants. Right Wing Watch notes that a coalition of 150 Christian Right groups “will support legalization of those already in this country – but only in exchange for doing away with the guarantee of birthright citizenship granted under the 14th Amendment.”

The Washington Times writes "Out of concern for keeping families together [sic], the religious leaders propose granting citizenship to any illegal aliens in the country who are related to U.S. citizens. This would include anyone who has had a child born here, often referred to as an 'anchor baby,'" the Washington Times reported. "In return, the federal government would end birthright citizenship, which automatically grants U.S. citizenship to anyone born here, regardless of his parents' legal status. The 14th Amendment says 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States."

The 14^th amendment also overturned the infamous Dred Scott decision, which had held that people of African descent could never be citizens of the US. Chief “Justice” Roger B. Taney wrote in the decision that Black people are "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The 14^th Amendment also includes the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Amendment is so fundamental to the rights of peoples of color in the US that Supreme Court Justice David Souter called it "the most significant structural provision adopted since the original framing" of the Constitution. It was the foundation on which Brown vs. Board of Education was determined, the decision that ended formal segregation in the US.

And now they want to uproot it, and use us – to use any spirit of “compromise” with racism on our part – advance their cause. There is at best a fine line between “sub-citizen” and sub-human. But however fine the line, it cuts just as deep, even deeper, than Sensenbrenner’s effort to declare us all “felons.”

Ostensibly, without the 14^th amendment and the birthright of citizenship – the much-ignored provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo aside – there would be no such thing as a Chicana/ o in the US: that’s how deep this could cut.

Our enemies will, of necessity, take advantage of anything that advances developments in the direction of an openly fascist state that targets and scapegoats the Other.

Nothing sets that tone like mass incarceration of peoples of color in the US, and the cutting edge of such potentials today is the continued militarization of the border, the mass detention camps being built for migrants by Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, and open, public roundups like the recent Swift raids. Democrats and Republicans alike promise more of the same. Even the so-called “guest worker” programs create a race- based subclass of workers without rights, workers held utterly hostage to their employers.

The “guest worker” program is being coupled with stiffening workplace repression and raids. Tonight in his 2006 State of the Union Address, President Bush bragged that workplace arrests are up 700% over their number in 2002. Even as Bush prepared to deliver his speech tonight, mass raids in Santa Ana California rounded up over 700 people from their homes and places of business. This is a clear cut example of what Bush really meant when he spoke this evening of targeting migrants “without animosity and without amnesty.”

Every one of us is needed now to stand strong. We are not sub-humans and must utterly refuse any scheme that might tend, however “benignly,” in that direction.

We should cut no deals now with powerful racists of any stripe. Each of us should support the calls for another Gran Boicot in May – and no matter what the mainstream Spanish speaking media does or fails to do to back us, we should march under four banners this Spring, banners that shatter the terms of the debate, that unfurl the truth of the matter and put that truth square in the sights of our oppressors, that reclaim our humanity in the face of all the ugly and vicious stereotypes:

“We came to Work”!

“We fled the Death Squads!”

“We fled Starvation!”

“No Human Being is “Illegal!”

Swallowing the Blue Pill: frank talk on race and fascism in the US

Swallowing the Blue Pill:

frank talk on race and fascism in the US

by Juan Santos

“You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.” – Morpheus, The Matrix

As the US veers on a radical course toward fascism, the Democrats, who are riding high on a national wave of revulsion against the Bush regime, breathe not a word about reversing the legalization of torture or restoring habeas corpus; they say nothing about reversing the Patriot Act, nothing about averting war in Iran, and nothing of substance about pulling out of Iraq.

Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi speaks coyly about not knowing where investigations of Republican abuses might lead, but has no intention whatsoever of “endangering” Democrat’s chances of winning the White House in 2008 with a move, like impeachment, that might appear “radical” to swing voters.

That’s the excuse, at least. The reality is that Pelosi knows the simple truth: to indict Bush is to indict the entire US government before the eyes of the world – including the Democrats, who are up to their throats in complicity in the Iraq war and in fascistic legislation like the Patriot Act. Besides, to indict Bush over Iraq would mean the Democrats would undercut their own plans to blow the bloody hell out of Iran.

With the leadership – or the stalemate - of the empire “safely” in Democrat hands, white left-liberals may well revert to the guilty stupor they embraced during the Clinton years, at least until war is unleashed against Iran.

They may even sleep through that – or offer the kind of dull and creepily cautious pro-forma “opposition” that typifies the activism of the anti-war group “United for Peace and Justice.”

Just about the time US nukes rain down on Iran and martial law is declared, they’ll be busy congratulating themselves for having stopped fascism with their latest petition drive and get out the vote campaign.

But really, they’ll have had little to do with it one way or another.

And that’s the problem. Real oppression – and just as importantly the consciousness of one’s own oppression in the US - has next to nothing to do with the white left, except for radical, conscious white lesbians or a smattering of anti-racist and property-less white women.

There’s a reason for that. Marxist fantasies on the matter aside, there is no white working class movement in the US, much less is there a white working class that can unite with the struggles of peoples of color. The US lacks even a pathetic, reformist, British style “Labor Party,” precisely because there is no base for even that.

There is no white working class movement because in the US real oppression – overt violent oppression - is based primarily on nationality, color, culture and gender – not class.

After all, occupiers don’t, as a rule, unite with those they occupy.

Like the South Africa of Apartheid infamy, the US is a white colonial settler state. It has no multicultural proletariat, any more than working class Israelis and Palestinians make up a multicultural working class with common interests.

No one in the US, after all, was subjected to genocide or slavery because of their class. There were no lynch mobs hunting down working class people if they didn’t keep their gaze downcast. No one burned down working class towns, no one targeted the working class for pogroms like the so-called Zoot-Suit Riots.

Questions of women’s relative vulnerability aside, no one is raped because they’re working class. There are no “Joe bashers” one could equate to Gay bashers. And there are no white working class ghettos, barrios or reservations where the police act like night riders or an occupying army.

Where are the no-fly-racially-profiled white “terrorists”? Where are white people required to prove their citizenship to rent an apartment? Where do whites come under instant suspicion for deportation? How many European whites are subject to the conditions in Guantanamo? How many have been tortured? How many whites have been stripped of the writ of habeas corpus, held without charges, without access to a lawyer?

How many whites are among the native Indians, Blacks and Chicanos in the US, who together comprise the single group most targeted for incarceration in the world?

Obviously, there are none.

That’s why there is no mass movement against fascism in the US.

Because fascism targets the Other, and everyone damn well knows it.

Without the war in Viet Nam – actually, without a draft that impacted young white men, there’d have been no mass resistance among white people in the 60s. Peoples of color were unquestionably the leading edge of the rebellions of those years.

That’s because of one of the social guarantees of whiteness. Even if it’s never spoken aloud, everyone knows in their bones that white people are exempt, that white people as a group are not the target of overt violent oppression in the US, and that they never have been and never will be. Guaranteed.

That guarantee is their blue pill, what makes them sleep.

And that’s why, in The Matrix, it’s Morpheus, a Black man, who has to offer the white man, Neo, the choice: red pill or blue; wake up to the full reality around you or stay asleep. That’s also why The Oracle had to be a woman of color, and was. Doubly oppressed, doubly wise.

Now then, a white woman – not just any white woman but a radical lesbian feminist (it’s that double oppression thing) – pointed out a striking truth to me tonight.

The only people who’ve stood up en masse against the recent rapid escalation toward fascism in the US have been Brown people. Migrants and Chican@s stood up in our millions against the fascistic Sensenbrenner bill, a race law which would have rendered every migrant a felon, and every Chican@ a suspect in a felony. The Sensenbrenner bill would have made the barrio every bit as much a zone of official terror as the ghetto – even more so.

We were all that stood between the status quo and outright universalized fascism in the US.

But almost nothing and no one stood between colonized peoples of color and fascism in the US.

Black, Red and Brown have lived under virtual fascism - mass terror, police occupation and mass incarceration - for a generation now, since the War on Drugs and mass incarceration took the place of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

But it wasn’t the white US-er who was targeted, just like it wasn’t the German, but the Gypsy, Slav and Jew.

Everyone damn well knew Aryans weren’t the target. It didn’t affect them.

Why, then should we be surprised at white silence today?

Nonetheless, virtually by ourselves, we’ve rocked the white colonial settler elite – the US rulers – back on their heels. We’ve done so twice now.

Most recently, it was the resistance of millions of Mexicans and other Indigenous Spanish speaking people that knocked the white Christian fascists and their plans for mass roundups down. We split the Republican Party wide open. Our protests – with their implicit threats of mass resistance and rebellion - began the process of the Republican Party’s recent disintegration and unraveling.

Fourteen years ago in LA we rocked them even harder, with a series of rebellions that spread from here all across the nation, as Black and Brown rose up in defiance of the imposition of police state conditions in the ghetto and barrio.

As for a truly mass resistance to US style fascism, that’s all there’s been.

There is still a choice, of course, between the red pill and the blue pill. White people could still wake up; they could still learn to resist the fascism that their culture has programmed them to accept.

But it will take a new understanding; they will have to start seeing themselves as a group like any other, not as a “white nation,” and not as “individuals,” and they will need to begin to understand and to break with the Inquisitorial fear of being different that permeates their culture to its very core. They will have to learn to see their culture’s depth of suspicion, its rigid obedience to the “rules” of the white middle class game, and to experience first hand the depth of violence it reserves for those who betray it.

They will have to stand strong against it, understanding that their own culture and its agents are their mortal enemy.

Most of all they will have to learn that their apparent “privilege” makes them no different at all: that in the long run they are not exempt or superior. That’s what Morpheus tells Neo when he offers him the Red Pill.

“…you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.

“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

“The First Nazi City in America”

“The First Nazi City in America”
by Juan Santos


Everyone will have to register their nationality with the government. No one will be exempt. People of certain nationalities will be targeted for removal. Those who look like they might be from those nations will be marked as suspects, constantly subject to harassment, official and unofficial.

Certain people, based on their nationality, will not be allowed to work. They will not be allowed to live in this place. They will be denied access to hospitals, to doctors. They will not be allowed to purchase medicine or food. Their children will be driven from the schools.

Every store clerk will become a race cop, compelled by law to check the papers of every customer they find “suspect.” Everyone who isn’t white will be challenged at the point of sale for any commodity they might need or want. The official language will be English: only. Those who try to shelter, clothe, feed, or give gainful employment or medical assistance to the targeted population will be punished.

According to the LA Times, when the law passed, white citizens burst into applause. The Times reported the reaction of one white woman to the news: "The only ones who are against it are the Hispanics," she said, "and that's because it's against them."

This isn’t South Africa under Apartheid; it’s not the Deep South under Jim Crow. It’s not Nazi Germany, or 1984 . It’s Hazleton Pennsylvania, USA- population 31,000. The year is 2006 in the Common Era: 514 years since the white invasion of the Americas.

Let’s make one thing clear; none of this is about “illegal immigration.” It’s not even about immigration. Before it passed, Anna Arias spoke at the Hazelton council meeting against the ordinance, warning that its approval would make Hazleton "the first Nazi city in the country." When she asked the crowd if they would deport the children of undocumented workers – utterly “legal” US citizens - the crowd shouted “Yes!”
There’s only one thing the “immigration debate” is about: It’s about white nationalism.
The law recently passed by the Hazelton City Council in a 4-1 vote wasn’t the brain child of anyone in Hazleton. It’s a copycat measure based on a design by a xenophobe from San Bernardino, California by the name of Joe Turner.

Turner, age 27, is an angry young white man with a sneering manner who heads up a group of Minutemen-style thugs called Save Our State (SOS.) He was the author of the original Hazleton-style measure, one that recently failed to get on the ballot in his home town.

Turner’s group has appeared publicly with members of the neo-Nazi organization Stormfront in tow; he says California is being turned into a “Third World Cesspool” by migrants, that Mexican culture is “inferior” to white European culture and that being a white nationalist “doesn’t make you a racist.”
“Americans,” Turner says, “are tired of watching their great American culture disappear, only to watch it be replaced by other cultures that are inferior and contradictory to everything this country was built upon.”

Turner says, “Gone are the days when we allowed our opponents to define the terminology of the debate.” In an SOS email thread entitled “Racism Redefined,” SOS members show what he means:
One writes: “I say: "Racist and proud of it" when they hurl their slime at me.”
Everyone who hates migrants and wants them gone or under lockdown denies their feelings in the matter have anything to do with race – even Turner, when he’s pressed.
That goes for Hazleton mayor Louis Barletta as well; having copied the persecutorial legislation advanced by Turner, he denies being "racist, intolerant and unfair," claiming that "illegal is illegal" and that the Hazleton ordinance doesn’t "target any particular race."
But demographic trends show that the nation as a whole will be half peoples of color by 2050, a fact that causes no small unease among white cultural conservatives across the country, especially in the “Red States” which are largely white, and whose populations have recently shifted in both culture and color.
Barletta is no exception. The very presence of non-white people disturbs him.
"There's no place for me to hide in a small city," he said, according to the Times. "I get it in the grocery store, I get it at the lunch counter, when I get my morning coffee, when I'm pumping gas.

"People are begging me, because we are losing the one asset that this city has to offer — our quality of life."

That’s the same complaint Joe Turner and overt white nationalist groups raise when they say US cities are turning into “Third World Cesspools.”
"It's about time," said Francis X. Tucci, a white business owner and lifelong resident of Hazleton. "We were a nice community," she added. Now the “nice” community is 30% Brown. One anti-migrant commentator wrote that the new law would frighten migrants. “The only people it will scare Christian,” he wrote, “are those here illegally and they should be scared.”
“The city's population has shot from 5% Hispanic to 30% Hispanic in only 6 years,” he wrote. “While not all are illegal aliens, there is suspicion that a large majority are.”
Hazleton will hunt down its suspects through every “legal” means, using police, health and code officers. “It could be a routine traffic stop or a code violation,” Barletta said. “When we do come across someone here illegally, we will find their place of employment if there is one and where they live. We would be the first city that would be going after businesses where they work and the place where they sleep.”
In a Freudian slip, he added "The illegal citizens, I would recommend they leave."
The Hazleton Illegal Immigration Relief Act forces anyone seeking to rent a dwelling in the city to apply to the city for a residency license and to submit to an investigation of their citizenship status.

Landlords who rent to people without a residency license will be fined $1,000 for each undocumented tenant on their premises and $100 per day the renter remains there without a permit.

Business owners who hire, rent property to, or provide either goods or services to migrants will lose their business permit for five years on a first offense and 10 years on a second, and find themselves ineligible for city contracts.

Barletta sites crime and economic stressors as among the principal reasons for targeting the brown population of the city. But the reality is that migrants have been an immense boon to the Hazleton economy, creating 60 new businesses and markedly boosting the value of real estate. Only a year ago Barletta was bragging that the economy was going through an unprecedented boom, due to migration. Today he says, "Illegal aliens are a drain on our resources, and they are not welcome here.”

In the meantime total arrests are down and violent crimes of all descriptions are down since the influx of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans began, while, predictably in any community of color, drug related arrests are up.

Barletta says "we are arresting illegal individuals much more often than we ever have." He doesn’t specify if the arrests are proportional to the population growth in the community, whether there is a differential in the rate of arrests for brown and white people, nor what role racial profiling might play in arrest figures.

Barletta admits the figures don’t back him up. But that’s not the point. The point is that the stereotypes about “crime” and “poverty” are so widespread and deeply entrenched that, even when unequivocally contradicted by hard data, they can be used to stir up a fear driven racist backlash against communities of color – and that is just what Barletta has done.

He knows what his white constituents want.

The white people of Hazleton want to be separate, apart: That’s what Apartheid means. It’s Afrikaans for "Separateness.” Under international law, Apartheid is a Crime Against Humanity.

The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines the following acts as criminal:

Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association…

No one in Hazleton will ever be tried – much less convicted – under the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. The US is one of a handful of nations that – through Democrat and Republican administrations alike – has refused to sign the treaty.

Besides, official white Amerika will never admit that the Chican@ and Mexican@ people, for example, are one people: inseparable; they will never admit that to attack one segment of the community is to attack the whole; they will never admit that Chican@s, Mexican@s and Native Americans are a single group of indigenous descent, an ethnic and racial group that is being singled out for attack.

A Hazleton ophthalmologist – a Puerto Rican – said, "We are family. If you insult part of the family, you insult the whole family."

Official Amerika will never admit that the matter of “national origin” and “immigration status” is little more than a thin excuse for ethnic suppression and ethnic cleansing.

A passage from Ellen Barry’s report on Hazleton in the LA Times makes the point:

“White people feel free to speak openly about their annoyance with immigrants, said Jessica Cruz, who waits tables in two local diners.

“Cruz sputtered with anger recalling a recent day when she greeted three friends in Spanish, and a customer looked up from his seat, pointed his finger at her and told her to speak English. Another customer looked into the kitchen and said he couldn't wait until Immigration came to take away the Mexicans.”

Faced with a trio of oppressions – Apartheid style banishment, deportation and racial profiling, brown people are already leaving Hazleton. “They feel like this is racism,” said the publisher of El Mensajero – the community’s newspaper.

They may have no place to go.

What awaits them is a nation poised to give birth to a new Jim Crow, poised at the edge of fascism; a Congress that wants to deport millions and a string of localities poised to make the nation a patchwork of little Nurembergs, like the place where the Nazi laws on citizenship and race were forged in 1935.

It has come this far. The national movement for migrant’s rights must act now and bring all its resources to bear to wipe the Hazleton law clean from the slate.

While there’s still time.

Brown Skin / Yellow Star

Brown Skin / Yellow Star
by Juan Santos

We won't need a yellow star.

The color of our skin will mark us as suspects, as felons, as threats to "the homeland." Any cop will be free to stop us at any time, under any pretext, to check -- not for dope -- but for our “papers.”

At first it won't seem like much. Quietly, at first, a few of us will begin to disappear, just like some 60 thousand immigrants of Muslim and Arabic descent have disappeared since the onset of the Patriot Act; without a word. Like them, we will become targets of the so-called “war on terror.”

First it will be dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.

Mothers will disappear walking to the corner store. Fathers will never come home from work. Children will be left behind, sobbing in apartments empty of food, warmth, money and life. The neighbors will be afraid. The tens of thousands could readily become millions.

The picture painted above is nothing but hard headed realism. Legislation now before the US Senate would make every undocumented person in the US a felon and authorize every police department in the country to arrest people on immigration charges.

The size of the Border Patrol would, in effect, increase by 60 times, from the current 11,000 Migra agents to 663,546 enforcers. If each authorized officer in the US arrested one undocumented migrant once every three months, within five years over 11 million migrants would be gone – an ethnic cleansing without parallel in US history.

This is the future they have planned. Certain neighborhoods -- the Gulfton District or the North Side in Houston, Pico Union and Boyle Heights in LA, the San Francisco Mission District -- will be targeted. Almost everyone in them will be considered a "felon," or someone who has aided the "felons." They won't be able to be able to tell us apart. "A Mexican is a Mexican," is what they will say.

In certain neighborhoods concrete barriers will block the streets. Police and La Migra will arrange themselves in hunting parties together. Like clockwork, a police cruiser will turn the corner near your place, once every 60 seconds. No one will breathe. The children will have nightmares.

This isn’t just emotional rhetoric. It’s happened before; in the Gulfton District in Houston in 1990 and ‘95, and in Pico Union in LA in 1990. This is how it’s done. The barrio will be besieged, taken over from within.

They want to build detention camps for us. They are debating it now. They want to label us felons, but deny us a trial. They’re debating it now. They want to build a wall -- they want us to die, tongue swollen and hallucinating, without water in the desert. They are debating it now.

These are the human impacts of planning already underway. New border fences are an integral part of current legislative initiatives.

On Feb. 6, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget would allocate over $400 million to add 6,700 additional detention beds for migrants, part of a10-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named ENDGAME.

According to a Homeland Security document on the plan, ENDGAME aims to carry out goals “articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798." Homeland Security is seeking the ability to "remove all removable aliens," including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers or potential terrorists."

Mr. Bush and the Christian fascists in power have found their scapegoat – and it is us. We are the new Jews in a new Germany in a new century. They call it the New American Century, a New World Order, a “unipolar” Reich – a White America over all.

E Pluribus Unum: the many eradicated; reduced to One. White. Nation.

This is the pretext. They call us "invaders." We represent a "destabilizing factor" for the "nation." They say we are dirty, just like they said the Jews were dirty -- and disease ridden.

They say our neighborhoods and our culture are "cesspools." They want to keep their culture “pure.” They say we “steal” the jobs that they have in fact shipped overseas, and that are nowhere to be found. And now they're calling us "terrorists,” just like they called our ancestors “savages.”

After decades the nation’s long-suppressed racism is finding an open voice once more, and they are openly strategizing about how to best appeal to the unconscious racist sentiments just beneath the surface among a broader public.

US Congressman Tom Tancredo warns about us: we (Mexicans and migrant peoples) "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren."

It’s a matter of “spin.” One strategist on the right wing web site RedState.org tells them how to spin it. He says that to deal effectively with us our enemies must “focus on terminology.”

“People who are in this country without proper documentation,” he writes “are foreign infiltrators. These foreign infiltrators operate clandestinely within our country. They are no different than the foreign infiltrators who destroyed the world trade center and attacked the Pentagon. Except that they haven't done anything yet.”

“…Once you have the terminology correct,” he continues, “it is easy to define a solution to discourage foreign infiltration. First, treat any foreign infiltrator as a prisoner of war. Turn them over to the military… No hearings, no public defenders, no backlogged courts, no squandering of American tax dollars protecting the non-existent civil rights of foreign infiltrators.”

The strategizing isn’t empty: these Minutemen fantasies are on the verge of becoming national reality.

Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Sensenbrenner’s HR 4437, The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, recently passed the US House of Representatives. Its most extreme and punitive provisions are being upheld by the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.

This legislation would do just what the RedState strategist ordered.

Key elements of the Sensenbrenner bill include:

~Making it a felony to be in the U.S. without legal documents. Under current law this is a simple civil violation. Millions of us would be classified as "felons" and subject to immediate detention and deportation, often without so much as a hearing. Access to the courts will be severely restricted if legislation currently under consideration is approved.

How can they tell who’s a felon? The felons will have brown skin. Fifty million of us. All of us will be suspects. What will they stop us for? Anything they please. After all, they already stop us for anything they please.

~ Making it a federal crime to “assist” our people who are without documents. Those who leave water in the desert to save the lives of migrants would become felons. Millions of teachers, doctors, priests, nurses, attorneys and others who give any kind of help or services to undocumented people will also become felons – overnight - and could face five years in prison and have their assets seized by the government.

Giving a ride to someone without the proper “papers” could lead to felony charges. It remains unclear if renting an apartment or selling a car to someone without “papers” would become a felony.

Cardinal Mahoney of the 5 million member Los Angeles Diocese of the Catholic Church has declared he will order his priests to defy this law, if it is passed.

~Expanding police powers over immigrants. Police departments would be granted greater power to check legal status, a move that would increase the number of immigration enforcement agents by 60 times the current number. Local law enforcement agencies would be paid for detaining our people and turning us over to federal authorities.

These provisions will turn police into bounty hunters, the moral equivalent of Cazamigrantes, and highlight their role as a modern version of the Night Riders that once terrorized communities of color.

~ The construction of five double-layer border fences--totaling 698 miles--in California and Arizona.

Over 4,000 people have died trying to cross the US/ Mexican border since fences in California forced people to cross at points in the Sonora desert into Arizona.

~ Requiring employers to collect Social Security numbers and other data on workers and turn it over to the Department of Homeland Security, which would then verify worker’s "legal status" and store the data. All workers would, in effect, need a government clearance before they could have a job, any job.

~ In a related development, the U.S. government announced in February 2006 that it plans to pay Halliburton $385 million to build new “detention centers” to imprison us.

This is a chilling and potentially deadly development in a nation that kidnaps and spirits captives to secret prisons in Europe and which runs torture centers in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo – torture centers which are condemned and denounced the world over.

In concert with the specter of mass deportations, pogroms, and widespread, race-based scapegoating, new “detention centers” strikes a chord eerily close to concentration camp.
As one writer questioned “Just what will happen in these detention centers, built to lock away undocumented people whose legal rights have been disappeared, and who have been cast as "hordes," "invaders," and a threat to national security? “

On the ultra-Right, anti-Mexican shock groups such as the National Policy Institute, Minutemen leaders, and others are calling for our mass deportation.

The Minutemen’s Jim Gilchrist has called for the National Guard to be deployed at the Mexican / US border. Gilchrist’s partner and rival in the Minutemen, Chris Simcox, makes the agenda clear, saying, "Oh, Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

While there is no mention of using the National Guard under the federal legislation currently under consideration, clear steps leading toward a police state for people of indigenous descent are being advanced – and the record shows that when the Euro-colonialist leadership of the US chooses to attack us, mass deportation of migrants and Chicanos alike is the weapon of choice. It can happen here. In fact, it has.

Over 1 million of us were deported during the racist “Operation Wetback” in the year 1954, alone.

Before the mass deportations during the Great Depression a Congressman from Texas testified in formal hearings that a strict quota system should be imposed on Mexicans because we are "germ-carriers, inassimilable, a people who are with us but not of us, and not for us." We are, he said "… incapable of development away from” a condition of “moral and financial pauperism,” and that our influence was causing “the breaking down of [the] social fabric...."
If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. It is the unchanging rhetoric of white nationalism.

That such rhetoric is being used again by the highest authorities in the US should be cause for deep alarm, especially in the context of the Patriot Act and other dramatic moves toward legalized fascism in the US.

That the State is acting on this rhetoric to create a felonized, legally scapegoated racial and cultural under-caste calls for uncompromising action aimed at our self defense as a People.