Justice Dept. Seeks to Intimidate Alabama School Districts

[Tampa_Two]

Tue May 08 2012 08:31


In its relentless quest to prevent state and local officials from enforcing immigration laws, the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week sent another letter of intimidation to the Alabama State Department of Education. In the letter, Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez drops a thinly veiled threat of litigation to persuade Alabama officials to back away from its immigration enforcement law, HB 56, and specifically the provision that requires schools to collect immigration data on its students.

To-date, Perez writes, the DOJ investigation shows that "H.B. 56 has had significant and measurable impacts on Alabama’s school children." These impacts, Perez states, have weighed most heavily on Hispanic and English language learner students.

Perez states these findings are based on local school data and anecdotal evidence. The local school data, which Perez says raises "significant concern," shows that between the start of the school year and February 2012, 13.4 percent of Alabama’s Hispanic schoolchildren withdrew from school. Remarkably, however, Perez appears unable to explain whether those school children re-enrolled in the same school district, re-enrolled in another Alabama school district, or left the state. He also does not specify what the normal withdrawal rate is in any given year to provide context.

Perez cites no other data given to him by the Alabama Department of Education to support his conclusions. Instead, he writes that anecdotal evidence backs up his claim that HB 56 is unlawfully impacting Hispanics residing in Alabama. Writing with deliberate vagueness, Perez states that "many" Hispanic students reported staying home from school or withdrawing out of fear and that "many students" conveyed that HB 56 made them "feel unwelcome in the schools they had attended for years." "Hispanic children," he adds, "reported increased anxiety and diminished concentration in school, deteriorating grades, and increased hostility, bullying, and intimidation."

This letter from the DOJ to the Alabama Department of Education is not the first. In November 2011, Perez sent a letter to Alabama demanding its schools provide data about student absenteeism since the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. Legislative Update, Nov. 7, 2011) At first, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange balked at the request for local school data, but later the state agreed to cooperate with the DOJ investigation. However, it appears that the local school data, which Alabama sent to the DOJ in early April, did not provide the DOJ with the evidence of discrimination it sought as the most recent letter focused almost entirely on anecdotal reports and recitations of existing federal law.

The timing of this last DOJ letter was also unmistakable. It was sent to Alabama officials the very week the state legislature was scheduled to debate and vote on changes to HB 56. As it turns out, however, the Alabama Senate postponed debate on the legislation to amend HB 56 (HB 65 to this week.

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[Newmexican]

Open-borders DOJ vs. America


By Michelle Malkin • July 7, 2010 09:43 AM

My column today looks at one of the champions of illegal immigration inside the DOJ: Civil Rights Division chief/assistant attorney general Thomas E. Perez.

Related read: Doug Ross spotlights another member of the Sue Arizona team – Tony West. Know your enemies.


Open-borders DOJ vs. America
by Michelle Malkin

The Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona, officially unveiled on Tuesday, is an affront to all law-abiding Americans. It is a threatening salvo aimed at all local, county, or state governments that dare to take care control of the immigration chaos in their own backyards. And it is being driven by open-borders extremists who have dedicated their political careers to subverting homeland security policies in the name of compassion and diversity.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, headed by Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, took the lead in prepping the legal brief against Arizona. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez is a far Left lawyer and activist who worked for the late mass illegal alien amnesty champion Teddy Kennedy and served in the Clinton administration DOJ. While holding down a key government position there in which he was entrusted to abide by the rule of law, Perez volunteered for Casa de Maryland – a notorious illegal alien advocacy group funded through a combination of taxpayer-subsidized grants and radical liberal philanthropy, including billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Institute (not to mention more than $1 million showered on the group by Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez’s regime-owned oil company, CITGO).

Perez rose from Casa de Maryland volunteer to president of the group’s board of directors. Under the guise of enhancing the “multicultural” experience, he crusaded for an ever-expanding set of illegal alienbenefits from in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students to driver’s licenses.

Casa de Maryland opposes enforcement of deportation orders, has protested post-9/11 coordination of local, state, and
national criminal databases, and produced a “know your rights” propaganda pamphlet for illegal alien depicting federal immigration agents as armed bullies making babies cry.

In 2006, Casa de Maryland threatened to protest at the schools of children whose parents belonged to the pro-immigration enforcement group, the Minutemen – and then headed into the Montgomery County,Md., public schools to recruit junior amnesty protesters who were offered school credits for traveling with Casa de Maryland to march on Washington.

As a former Maryland resident, I got to see Perez’s militant friends and colleagues in action. I watched Casa de Maryland president Gustavo Torres (who met with President Obama last week) complain that motor
vehicle administration officials have “absolutely no right to ask for people’s Social Security number or immigration status to get a driver’s license.” I stood among Casa de Maryland grievance-mongers
who shouted “No license, no justice! No justice, no peace!” while playing the race card against naturalized Americans and legal immigrants who opposed the illegal alien welfare state.

Perez himself derided secure-borders citizen activists as “xenophobes,” but denied painting the grass-roots immigration enforcement movement as racist. Questioned by GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions during his Obama DOJ confirmation hearing last year about the illegal alien rights guide produced by Casa de Maryland, Perez grudgingly stated that “the Civil Rights Division must not act in contravention to valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration laws.”

But “act[ing] in contravention” is exactly, of course, what the Civil Rights Division is doing in spearheading the challenge to Arizona’s valid enforcement actions of our federal immigration law.

Perez, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the rest of the open-borders DOJ team have invoked “preemption” doctrine based on the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause to attack Arizona’s anti-illegal
immigration measure and oppose local and state enforcement of federal immigration laws. Never mind that the Arizona law was drafted scrupulously to comply with all federal statutes and the Constitution.
You gotta love Obama’s fair-weather friends of the Constitution. When a state acts to do the job the feds won’t do, Obama’s legal eagles run to the Founding Fathers for protection. When, on the other hand,
left-wing cities across the country pass illegal alien sanctuary policies that flagrantly defy national immigration laws and hamper cross-jurisdiction enforcement, the newfound federal preemption advocates are nowhere in sight.

The Obama DOJ’s lawsuit against Arizona is sabotage of the people’s will and the government’s fundamental responsibility to provide for the common defense.

No border enforcement, no security. No security,
no peace.

Michelle Malkin » Open-borders DOJ vs. America