Thread: DC:Day labor center foes plan Saturday protest

Day labor center foes plan Saturday protest
Kathleen Miller, The Examiner
2007-07-16 19:23:36.0
Current rank: # 128 of 4,698

WASHINGTON -
Opponents of Montgomery County day labor centers say they will photograph people who employ day laborers and ask the Internal Revenue Service to investigate their businesses, as part of a Saturday morning protest at the day labor facility just outside Gaithersburg.

Labor center foes say they are angry that tax dollars are being spent on day labor centers while the state considers cuts to other community facilities.

“[Governor] O'Malley has put out a list of pending budget cuts for libraries, schools, care for the elderly and hospitals, but we have money for illegal aliens?,â€

“I think one of the things our recent report showed is that since the newest center opened there have been no incidents of any kind, which is quite in contrast with the inflammatory rhetoric that some folks, including these groups, throw out to try and scare people.â€

Critics of day-laborer center in Derwood spar with backers


July 22, 2007


By Tom LoBianco - A protest outside a day-laborer center in Montgomery County yesterday morning drew dozens of demonstrators who clashed over whether county officials should use taxpayer funds to provide services to illegal aliens.

Separated by a line of police officers, the demonstrators taunted each other, often with profanity-laced insults, from across a street for several hours outside the county-owned center in Derwood beginning at around 8 a.m.

"This trailer is in better condition than our schools," said Brad Botwin, director of Help Save Maryland, an offshoot of the Help Save Virginia group that was formed to lobby local officials for tougher enforcement of immigration laws.

Protesters said they are angry elected officials in Montgomery County are supporting illegal aliens and the contractors who hire them with a new laborer center.

"I don't want to do what I'm doing here today, but there are times when the government is corrupt," said Ken Aldrich, operations director for the Maryland Minutemen Civil Defense Corps.

Mr. Aldrich wore a T-shirt with the message: "Be a patriot, not a criminal/Hire only legal workers."

More than 30 members of the Maryland Minutemen and American Border Patrol gathered at the laborer center and were met by a similar-sized group of counterprotesters from the D.C. Committee for Immigrant Rights, the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Salvadoran political party FMLN.

Counterprotesters said immigrants should be free to pursue freedom and happiness the same as other Americans whose families came here as immigrants.

"We are here to support the workers," said Sonia Umanzor, a counterprotester who said she came to the U.S. from El Salvador 25 years ago to escape a dictatorship.

The often-contentious debate over the center began more than two years ago, when Gaithersburg city officials tried to find a permanent site for a day-laborer center. After deals for several sites fell through, the city abandoned its plans late last year.

Montgomery County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett announced in January that he would set aside a half-acre parcel on an industrial stretch of county-owned land off Crabbs Branch Way just outside Gaithersburg to build the center, which opened on April 16.

Two weeks later, a deliberately set fire slightly damaged the double-wide trailer that houses the center. Police are investigating the fire as a hate crime.

Organizers yesterday said they wanted to remind Mr. Leggett that some residents still oppose the center, one of three in the county operated by the group Casa of Maryland.

Demonstrators said they hope to duplicate the success of similar grass-roots efforts in Northern Virginia, where officials in Prince William and Loudoun counties recently adopted resolutions that restrict public services for illegal aliens.

Officials in those counties said grass-roots groups were instrumental in drumming up support for the resolutions.

Police stood by, but the protest outside the Derwood center yesterday produced no incidents or arrests, and about 20 laborers visited the center undisturbed by demonstrators.

Fernando Garavito, who manages the center, said small bands of protesters routinely show up during the week.

"That is a good thing in this country, that you have freedom of speech," he said.

Mr. Garavito said that although the center does not check the immigration status of the immigrants who come looking for work, they all pay taxes, like every other American.

"It's a free country. They have all the right to protest," said Tona Cravioto, an employment specialist at the center. "It doesn't bother us."


http://washingtontimes.com/article/2007 ... 20052/1001

Day-Laborer Center Draws Protest
Group Against Illegal Immigration Wants County to Stop Funding Facility

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; C04



A group opposed to illegal immigration held a two-hour protest yesterday in front of a day-laborer center in Montgomery County, calling on elected officials to stop funding the center that the county set up near Gaithersburg.

"Other counties are pushing legislation to stop this," Brad Botwin, one of the organizers, said at the protest yesterday morning. "We're becoming a sanctuary."

Botwin, a federal employee who started Help Save Maryland last year to advocate cutting benefits for illegal immigrants, said he has been hearing from more people who have joined his cause.

"You're seeing PTA members, government workers saying enough is enough," Botwin said. "I'm getting e-mails from across the county, across the state."

Gaithersburg officials, faced with considerable political resistance, had rejected several sites for a center where day laborers could gather to meet employers. In April, the county set up the site just outside the city limits.

One of the protesters who attended yesterday's rally, Gretta Patten, 41, of Rockville used her dachshund, Schroeder, in what she said was her debut as an activist against illegal immigration. The pet, which scurried around protesters who were waving flags and signs looking for spots of shadow, wore two signs fastened to a vest.

One said: "I've got a bone to pick with Ike," referring to County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), who supports the day-laborer center and has said Montgomery will not follow in the footsteps of Prince William and Loudoun counties, where ordinances against illegal immigration have been enacted recently. The dog's other sign said: "This hotdog's got a beef with illegal immigration."

Patten, 41, said her main gripe is about the county's financial support for groups such as Casa de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy group that operates the day-laborer center.

"It's knowing my tax dollars go to people who are breaking the law," she said.

The protest drew members of the Minutemen, a national group founded in Arizona to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border and limit immigration. While the group of about 20 protesters waved to passing motorists near the Shady Grove Metro station, day laborers planted flowers on an unkempt patch of land in front of the center, which operates in a trailer.

Across the street, a slightly larger group of counter-protesters challenged and at times taunted Botwin's group.

"Minutemen, KKK, racist bigots, go away!" the immigrant activists yelled.

Gustavo Torres, executive director of Casa de Maryland, said the anti-illegal immigration protesters represent the view of a "small minority." He said that the center has been a success and that he thinks most people in the county support it and acknowledge the need for it.

"Any organization doing the type of work we do is going to become a target," he said.

Sara Pellecer, an immigrant from Guatemala who was with the day laborers yesterday, said she and other immigrants worry about the anti-immigrant sentiment that appears to be spreading in the region, especially in the wake of the new ordinances in Virginia.

"The measures aren't wise," she said. "They push people toward poverty and despair."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01243.html

Hey people in Maryland, vote those fools out of office