(im)migration

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Man Savagely Beaten By Police On Video May Now Be Deported [VIDEO]

 

“A man brutally beaten by police in June after he surrendered and lay down on the ground is now at risk of being deported.

Police officers in Santa Ana, California, beat Edgar Vargas Arzate on June 20, according to surveillance video of the incident and interviews with Arzate’s attorney. Arzate, who has struggled with addiction and mental health issues, went to visit the house of a friend, apparently not realizing that the friend no longer lived there, according to his attorney, public defender Frank Bittar. The new residents saw Arzate mumbling incoherently outside their house and called police.

Arzate ran when he saw the officers, leading them on a roughly four-block chase before he surrendered in the front yard of a neighbor’s home, Bittar said. In the video, Arzate can be seen lying facedown on the ground. The officers then begin to savagely beat Arzate, punching, kicking and swinging a flashlight at him.


In the video, two officers on the opposite side of the fence look up and appear to notice the surveillance camera, then say something to the officers beating Arzate, who quickly move him out of view of the camera.

“He’s lucky he wasn’t put in a wheelchair,” Bittar told HuffPost.

Once he was taken into custody, Arzate was charged with assaulting a police officer. The charge was then enhanced to a higher-level felony when police accused him of having “personally inflicted great bodily injury” on one particular officer who claimed to have broken his hand, according to the charging document.

On Monday, Arzate, 27, who came to the U.S. without documentation as a teenager, was riding with family members to a preliminary hearing to face the charges. Suddenly, three unmarked cars pulled the family over and Arzate was quickly taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“They stopped them and made everyone get out of the car and then arrested my brother,” said Araceli Vargas, Arzate’s younger sister. “Right now he’s under immigration hold and we’re just waiting on a bail so we can get him out of jail again. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, honestly.”

“My mom told me that the ICE agents made her feel less than human,” Vargas continued. “My dad was so disappointed in the system. My grandpa was so scared, he’s been in bed since. My aunt started crying. Nothing had happened since June, he was just living his normal life, but we have cameras here and we saw the cars that stopped my brother yesterday morning — it was a gray Chevy Impala — they didn’t have markings, but they had been spying on us. They passed by the house at least four times that morning, so they knew what they were doing. Why did they wait until we were leaving the house and going to court?””

 

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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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Ousted chief accuses border agency of shooting cover-ups, corruption

 

 

James F. Tomsheck, seen in 2009, was chief of internal affairs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection for eight years. He was removed in June.


Credit: Alex Brandon/Associated Press

 

More than two dozen people have died in violent clashes with U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2010. Despite public outrage over some of the killings, no agent or officer has faced criminal charges – or public reprimand – to date.

Yet at least a quarter of the 28 deaths were “highly suspect,” said James F. Tomsheck, the agency’s recently removed head of internal affairs. In a sweeping and unauthorized interview with The Center for Investigative Reporting, he said the deaths raised serious questions about whether the use of lethal force was appropriate.

Instead, Tomsheck said, Border Patrol officials have consistently tried to change or distort facts to make fatal shootings by agents appear to be “a good shoot” and cover up any wrongdoing.

“In nearly every instance, there was an effort by Border Patrol leadership to make a case to justify the shooting versus doing a genuine, appropriate review of the information and the facts at hand,” he said.

Those comments and others represent the most scathing public criticism ever lodged against Customs and Border Protection from a high-ranking official at the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. Although Tomsheck was removed from the internal affairs office, he is assigned to the Border Patrol as its executive director for national programs.

 

Source: beta.cironline.org

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Judge Ashley Tabaddor Files Suit against Department of Justice for Violating First Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1964

 

August 12, 2014, Los Angeles, CA – The Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) was today informed of a suit filed against the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) by Judge Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge for the U.S. Immigration Court. In this suit, Judge Tabaddor challenges an order that indefinitely recuses her from hearing cases involving Iranian nationals, citing that the order violates her First Amendment rights of free speech and association. The suit also notes that the order is racially discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The suit, Tabaddor v. Holder et al., charges that the DOJ based its disqualification order on racially-motivated and discriminatory criteria, specifically Judge Tabaddor’s Iranian heritage and her leadership role within the Iranian American community.

 

Source: www.payvand.com

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Who’s Illegal? – Jasiri X Ft Rhymefest

 

In response to repressive anti-Immigration legislation SB1070 and HB56, Jasiri X, Rhymefest, and Paradise Gray traveled to Arizona and Alabama courtesy of the Sound Strike to see first hand how these unjust laws break up families, fracture communities and destroy lives.

“Who’s Illegal?” asks the question, can a nation on stolen land, built by stolen people define another group of human beings as illegal? “Who’s Illegal?” was produced by GM3 and directed by Paradise Gray.

 

Source: www.youtube.com

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The Real Death Valley: The Untold Story of Mass Graves and Migrant Deaths in South Texas

 

Video: Graphic Warning

A Weather Channel Original Documentary

Producer’s Note, by Solly Granatstein

In “The Real Death Valley,” we tell the story of Fernando Palomo, a 22-year-old Salvadoran who happened to be a talented artist, and who was beaten within a centimeter of his life when he refused to design a gang’s tattoos. He and his older brother, like tens of thousands of others, fled their homeland and journeyed north to what they saw as the relative safety of the United States. They made it across the Rio Grande into Texas, but that hardly put an end to their troubles.

 

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Source: soboco.org

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Beyond the border: the US’s deadly immigration crisis

 

Texas has become the deadliest state in the US for undocumented immigrants. This four-part series from the Guardian and The Texas Observer looks at the lives affected by the humanitarian crisis.

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In Brooks County alone, the bodies of at least 294 people who died trying to hike around the Border Patrol checkpoint were recovered from February 2011 to March 2014.

 

Source: www.theguardian.com

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Child Migrants Report Freezing In ‘Icebox’ U.S. Border Patrol Centers

 

“My little sister’s lips even turned blue,” said Mayeli Hernandez, a 12-year-old girl from Honduras who testified to the panel on Tuesday through a translator. “We were shivering the whole time that we were there. We were there for four very cold days.”

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“My time in the icebox was the worst experience of my life,” he said.

 

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Source: www.ibtimes.com

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To Fix the Child Refugee Crisis, End the War on Drugs

America’s anti-drug policies didn’t stop the production of narcotics, they just shifted it overseas.

Source: www.businessweek.com

 

The war on drugs is really a war on people. There can not be a war on inanimate objects. 

 

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KKK calls for ‘shoot to kill’ policy against undocumented immigrants [VIDEO]

Hate group voices concern and anger over the growing number of migrants illegally crossing into the United States

Source: america.aljazeera.com

 

These KKK people are real. It only takes a couple bad apples to cause massive harm. And there are others who think like them but don’t wear the hood.

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps track of how many hate groups there are in the U.S. – it’s a lot.