Thread: 9 deportees arrested, DREAM Act protest moves to DeConcini

Dream 9 Get Support Of 35 Congress Members, With Letters To Obama Asking For Release

The Huffington Post Posted: 07/30/2013 11:36 am EDT


The Dream 9 march in the streets of the Mexican city of Nogales, across from the sister city of the same name on the Arizona border.

The “Dream 9” have found support in Congress.

A letter signed by 33 Congress members asks President Barack Obama to use his authority to release from detention nine undocumented immigrants who entered the country through a legal port of entry at Nogales, as a form of protest against the administration’s deportation policies.

The letter, released Monday and signed by Reps. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), and Ruben Hinojosa (D-Texas), among others, describes the detained youths -- three of whom crossed the border voluntarily to organize the protest -- as “courageous.”

“These youth are victims of our broken immigration policy,” the letter reads. [A]nd they deserve to come home to the United States, where they can continue to work towards fulfilling their dreams of higher education. We respectfully request that you exercise your discretion to allow these ‘DREAMers’ to come home.”

U.S. Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.) signed a separate letter last week asking President Obama to “act with all possible speed” to “release the DREAMers detained on the U.S. border in Arizona and allow them to rejoin their families.”

Three undocumented immigrants -- Lizbeth Mateo, Marcos Saavedra and Lulu Martinez -- crossed into Mexico voluntarily earlier this month to reunite with family members. They left with the intention of returning through a legal port of entry and openly declaring their status to officials. They were joined in Mexico by six sympathizers, who had either left the United States voluntarily or been deported.

U.S. immigration authorities put the nine activists in detention at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona when they crossed into the United States at Nogales. Eloy Detention Center is owned and operated by private prison contractor Corrections Corporation of America.

The protest amounts to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance’s most audacious protest against the Obama administration’s roughly 1.7 million deportations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/30/dream-9-congress-letter_n_3676618.html

Posted: 6:13 PM
Last Updated: 1 hour and 29 minutes ago

By: Associated Press

PHOENIX - Nine activists in federal custody in Arizona for more than a week after attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. in protest of American immigration policy are awaiting word on whether they'll be granted asylum after interviews with authorities, organizers said Thursday.

Domenic Powell, a spokesman with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, said the group is awaiting formal notification on their applications for humanitarian parole but is also seeking asylum based on "credible fear" of persecution should they return to Mexico.

Powell initially said earlier Thursday the parole requests had been denied, but later indicated the group's attorney had not yet received official word from U.S. authorities.

Should asylum be considered, the group may be released into the U.S. temporarily pending hearings before an immigration judge on their ability to remain.

The group, referring to themselves as the Dream9, is trying to call attention to hundreds of thousands who have been deported during President Barack Obama's time in the White House.

Tucson-based attorney Margo Cowan, who is representing the detainees, said she was asking that they be allowed to remain in the United States on what's known as humanitarian parole, essentially to permit admission to the country because "their presence in America will serve an important public interest."

Cowan didn't respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

Organizers of the protest with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance said Thursday that more than 70 women in the Eloy Detention Center where the activists are held have joined a hunger strike in solidarity. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials denied the reports and say all individuals at the facility are eating three meals a day.

The office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is considering the group's request for asylum. Due to federal privacy laws, U.S. government officials declined to comment on the status.

The activists are pushing for legislation being considered in Congress to offer eventual citizenship to some immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children.

House Republicans recently took a tentative step toward offering citizenship to some unauthorized immigrants this week who fit into this category, but they hit resistance from the White House on down as Democrats said it wasn't enough.

The dismissive reaction to the Republican proposal underscored the difficulties of finding any immigration reform compromise in the Republican-led House.

The so-called DREAM Act, which aimed to provide just such a path to citizenship for those children, passed the House in 2010 when it was controlled by Democrats, but was blocked by Senate Republicans.

The nine activists spent portions of their lives in the U.S. Some returned voluntarily to Mexico years ago, while others had been deported. Three of them were raised in the U.S. and left the country for Mexico expressly to participate in the protest when they attempted to cross the border last week in Nogales.

Powell, the immigrant group spokesman, said that the federal government should release the nine activists and approve their requests.

The White House declined to comment.

Meanwhile, immigrant rights advocates disagree over whether the group's tactics are helping or hurting the cause.

David Leopold, an Ohio immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called the move a "publicity stunt" that distracts from ongoing discussion of immigration reform in Washington.

He called the group a "radical fringe of the Dreamers movement."

"I admire the passion of these people even though I don't agree with them," Leopold said, adding their movement could have been more effective if staged in Washington instead of putting themselves at risk of not being able to return to the U.S.

"When you walk outside the United States, that's the end of the ballgame," he said.

Requests for asylum may be tough to prove for at least the three activists who voluntarily left the U.S. as an act of civil disobedience, one of whom was set to begin law school in California this fall.

"It generally requires either a showing of past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of race, religion, nationality or membership in a particular social group," Leopold said.

Brent Wilkes, the national executive director of the League of Latin American Citizens, disagrees that the group's move is a distraction, and says it instead puts human faces on the cause.

"I think they've pushed the envelope. Their aggressiveness on this front has really forced the issue," Wilkes said Thursday. "I just think they're really reframing this whole debate, whether we want it or not, and I think that's a good thing."

However, Wilkes said his group doesn't endorse such actions, and suggested many national organizations would likely be hesitant to support them, as well.

"We don't want to be seen as encouraging these folks to put their futures at risk and their opportunities to stay in the U.S.," Wilkes said.

http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/state/...word-on-parole

by Terry Greene Sterling Aug 4, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
The Daily Beast

The nine undocumented immigrants who tried to enter the US as an act of civil disobedience may have sucker-punched immigration reform. Terry Greene Sterling on the backlash.

Nearly two weeks after staging what is now widely viewed in immigration circles as either a heroic act of selfless civil disobedience or a foolhardy monkey-wrenching escapade, a group of nine undocumented immigrants, aged 19 to 37 and known as the “Dream 9,” sit in an Arizona detention center awaiting their uncertain fates.

The Dream 9 crossed the border from Mexico to Arizona on July 22, and were immediately arrested by federal officials for violating immigration law and detained at a center in Eloy, Arizona.

Two of them are in solitary confinement, says their Tucson lawyer Margo Cowan. She’s seeking the parole of all nine on humanitarian grounds, or, alternatively, a release via political asylum. In the meantime, Dream 9 strategists have pressured members of congress to badger the Obama administration into springing the immigrants. They’ve launched fasts, prayer vigils, sit-ins, and demonstrations to bring attention to the plight of the Dream 9. They’ve also lashed back, viciously, on social media against those who have questioned the Dream 9 strategy.

So far, nothing’s worked.

At the center of the fray is a smart, charismatic activist named Mohammad Abdollahi, a 27-year-old undocumented immigrant from Iran who belongs to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group that some mainstream immigration-reform advocates view as radicalized.

Like thousands of other “Dreamers,” Abdollahi was brought to the United States as a child. And like thousands of other Dreamers, he became disenchanted with the Obama administration for not living up to what they viewed as a first-term campaign promise to pass the federal Dream Act. (The act would have given legal status to law-abiding, educated undocumented immigrants like Abdollahi who were brought to the U.S. as kids.) Disenchantment with the president strengthened after he deported 1.7 million immigrants.

The Dream 9 move may force the president’s hand at the very time comprehensive immigration reform is languishing in the House. If the Obama administration sets the Dream 9 free, conservatives will say he’s too lax. If the Dream 9 stay in detention or get deported, the administration will be viewed by liberals as hypocritical after its vow to boot out only immigrants who break the law.

“People think this strategy is going to hurt Obama,” says Abdollahi, tongue in cheek. “But it won’t do anything more than prop up the wonderful work Obama is doing or the bad work Obama is doing.”

Abdollahi does not self-identify as either American or Iranian—he’s in a sort of identity limbo. Unlike many Dreamers, he hasn’t applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which would give him temporary legal presence in the United States. He doesn’t know why. “I have no good reason,” he says. “No political reason.”

He’s gay, and he’s come out about his sexual identity as well as his undocumented status. He’s a full-time activist and, he says, “My family is not okay with any of it.”

In 2010, Abdollahi and four other undocumented immigrants staged a sit-in at Sen. John McCain’s Tucson office, a brave move at the time considering the racial animus in Arizona. “We thought that was really crazy extreme,” he says. “We never, ever thought we could do something crazier than that. But the longer we organize and the more frustration we have, the more we realize we have to keep stepping it up.”

Last year, he orchestrated the infiltration of a Florida immigration detention center. Then he and his friends spent six months strategizing the current action, a plan loosely called #bringthemhome, which has resulted in the detention of the Dream 9 in Eloy.

Six of the Dream 9 were already in Mexico because they’d been deported or had returned to their native country to join family members or get schooling. The other three live in the United States but crossed the border into Mexico for the Dream 9 action.

Among the three is Lizbeth Mateo, who had participated in the 2010 McCain sit-in and is reportedly enrolled in Santa Clara University School of Law. In a video released by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, Mateo acknowledges the risk. She says she entered Mexico “knowing that the U.S. government might not allow me to go back.”

Mateo and her two counterparts are “leverage” for the six others, says Abdollahi. It’s the way civil disobedience works, he says, likening the border-crossing action to protests during the Civil Rights era. “Sometimes we have to use our bodies to make points.”

The group has used a lot of bodies to make a lot of points. For instance, last week one Dream 9 mom staged a sit-in at the office of Rep. Luis Gutierrez, one of the most dedicated advocates for immigration reform. Abdollahi says Gutierrez had ignored the group’s “urgent requests” to help the Dream 9 get sprung. Members of Congress “need to understand” that “the community we work with is not afraid to go sit in your office. And if you’re going to arrest us for doing that, it is going to reflect on what you actually believe and how you treat the community.”

In a statement emailed to The Daily Beast, Gutierrez says, in part: “I do not agree with the actions taken by the DREAM 9 because current immigration law is not on their side. But even having said that, I am working with their attorney and trying to get them out of detention.” Gutierrez wrote a letter to the president seeking the release of the Dream 9 and spoke in their favor on the House floor.

His spokesman, Douglas Rivlin, maintains the Dream 9’s “most avid supporters” are generally groups opposed to compromise in immigration legislation. “I don’t think they will be effective in stopping sensible reform moving forward any more than the restrictionists will be,” he wrote in an email.

The rationale of the Dream 9 strategy was first publicly called into question by immigration attorney David Leopold. This triggered a social-media feeding frenzy, during which a few Dream 9 advocates blasted Leopold, who is white, for his race and for profiteering on the backs of immigrants. “I’m not the issue, Leopold says, “the issue is a dysfunctional immigration system.” He admires the “courage of the Dream 9” but calls it an “ill-conceived protest.”

A Florida immigration lawyer, Susan Pai, faced the online wrath of a few Dream 9 supporters as well after she began taking screen shots of their social-media comments and posting them to her Twitter account. She tells The Daily Beast she views some of the comments as “hate speech” against whites. (One screen-shot comment involved eating white people.) The racist screed is “just as wrong as what Steve King is doing” and is aimed at derailing passage of immigration reform legislation, she says.

Abdollahi contends he “has no intentions to sabotage immigration reform” and will be happy with any change in the law that improves life for the undocumented. But on August 1, he posted on Facebook that “I am going to kill immigration reform in the most productive way this summer. y’all have seen nothing just yet.”

“We are being very timid,” he says of the Dream 9 action. The group, he explains, came to the border and asked to come into the United States for humanitarian reasons. They carried papers explaining their cases. “I mean, we’re following the law,” he says. “I don’t think we’re going far enough. In my perfect world, we’d have 2,000 or 3,000 people at the border waiting to come home and I would like to see the administration’s response to that.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...le-effect.html

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