The Bush administration's order to increase the number and scope of arbitrary immigration raids was made for political motives, newly released government documents reported on by the New York Times revealed this week.
As proposed immigration reform legislation moved through the Republican-controlled Congress in 2006, the Bush administration expanded a law enforcement program to find and deport people with criminal records and suspected terrorists who were unlawfully residing in the United States.
According to the New York Times, the Bush administration expanded the program, known as the National Fugitive Operations Program, to provide political cover for itself and congressional Republicans who sought to push the immigration reform proposals. Simply put, Bush wanted to appear to be harsh on immigrants to fend off criticism from the ultra right anti-immigrant faction of his party while the legislation was under consideration.
Harsh anti-immigrant measures soon turned into indiscriminate round-ups and possible Fourth Amendment violations against suspected undocumented persons, the government memos indicated. The procedures of the National Fugitive Operations Program were expanded in 2006, without consulting Congress, and soon immigrants without criminal records were caught and deported in staged raids at workplaces and private homes.
Despite the new orders to change the scope of the program, Bush administration officials in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continued to mislead Congress into believing the program's only focus was to catch criminals and terrorists.
As the New York Times reported, this new scope quickly turned into abuse. 'A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either,' it reported.
Federal documents showed that only about nine percent of those arrested under the program actually fell into the scope of the program's legal mandate. After spending about $625 million since 2006, the program rounded up about 96,000 people (about $6,500 per detainee), three-quarters of whom had no criminal convictions.
In addition, the documents revealed that as part of the National Fugitive Operations Program, ICE teams frequently broke into private homes and arrested people who couldn't immediately prove a legal status. These actions violated the program's mission to focus on criminal fugitives and terrorists. They often conducted such raids without warrants and over the legitimate protests of the occupants of the homes.
Opponents of these indiscriminate raids have argued that they posed new violations of the human rights of workers in the US. The government's expanded anti-immigrant programs were used, labor activists have reported, to threaten immigrant communities and to halt unionization drives.
One such case may have taken place in Laurel, Mississippi when ICE agents swooped down last summer on the electrical equipment factory owned by Howard industries there, arresting and detaining 481 workers for immigration violations.
Howard Industries, like many employers, had hired undocumented workers in order to find the cheapest workforce that would avoid joining the union at the plant and promote dissension among the other native-born workers.
When human rights and labor union activists began to work with those workers, informing them about their right to join the union without harassment or threats, someone called ICE. As labor journalist David Bacon reported, the raid took place during union contract negotiations and helped the company avoid demands from the workers for better pay and benefits.
A similar goal motivated a massive round-up of close to 12,000 workers at various Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in several states in December 2006. According to People's Weekly World labor editor John Wojcik, the Bush administration ordered the mass arrest without warrants on suspicion of being 'illegal immigrants.'
All of the workers were members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, and all were found to be either citizens or legal residents of the country.
In January 2007, ICE agents raided the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Workers, many of whom are immigrants, at Smithfield had fought for many years to organize a union at the plant. Repeatedly, company officials illegally threatened the workers with deportation if they continued to try to join the union.
Despite the threats, workers voted to join the union. Soon after ICE swept through the workplace arresting 21 workers. A spokesperson for the company denied ordering the raid due to the union issues. “This has nothing to do with any kind of struggle. There was no struggle. We weren’t trying to terrorize anybody. We, I mean it [the raid] was all done very professionally and non-threateningly,” he said. Note that in the spokesperson's slip of the tongue, he appeared to identify the company closely with federal agents.
No penalties were lodged against the company for knowingly hiring undocumented workers.
Only after massive publicity about Smithfield's action in this case and its 15 years of threats against its workers did the company finally agree to recognize the union at the Tar Heel plant in late 2008.
It is clear the Bush administration used the immigration issue and its immigration policy as a political ploy and a wedge to divide Americans by race, ethnicity and national origins. The evidence shows that the Bush administration systematically violated human and civil rights to achieve political ends.
All workers who seek to organize themselves or who want an improved standard of living cannot fall prey to the rhetoric of immigrant bashing or fall silent when the government and corporations use anti-immigrant tactics to attack any worker regardless of their race, ethnicity, national origin or status.
