Coleman’s bill pits local law enforcement against feds

BY DENNIS GEISINGER

About a dozen demonstrators showed up at the Minnesota office of U.S. Senator Norm Coleman yesterday to protest the most recent U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) raid, this one in Austin, Minn., and to oppose Coleman’s proposed amendment to congressional immigration legislation that would nullify the right of local communities to choose whether or not they want to join in the enforcement of federal immigration law.

Of the 20 arrests made during the May 31 raids in Austin, eight were undocumented aliens with criminal convictions—five with previous drunk driving arrests, two with previous immigration violations and one who had been convicted of identity theft in Iowa. One of the five DWI offenders, Gilberto Alejo-Ubaldo, 20, a citizen of Mexico, had convictions for “aggravated forgery, driving without a license, indecent exposure and interference with privacy/surreptitious intrusion,” according to an ICE press release.

The remaining 12 were arrested after ICE agents knocked on doors in Austin and were given permission to enter residences thought to be housing targeted offenders, according to ICE spokesman Tim Counts.
“The arrests in Austin were part of our ‘Operation Secure Streets,’” said Counts. Operation Secure Streets is a national initiative targeting immigrants with prior DUI convictions.

“That’s what they were securing us from—drunk drivers?” said Kristen Melby, a regional organizer for Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Coalition (MIRA), whose members put together Monday’s protest. “Did they go house to house and roust white drunk drivers?”

Charting inroads into racial profiling has cost some authorities dearly. A July 1998 story in The Arizona Republic said that “American-born Hispanics and legal residents charge[d] that their civil rights were violated when they were randomly stopped by police without cause. A group of them filed a $35 million federal lawsuit against the city [of Chandler, Ariz.] and another group followed with a second lawsuit.”

After an Arizona Attorney General’s “searing critique” of the police operation, the bill for the city of Chandler’s own investigation into the matter surpassed $87,000.
Senator Norm Coleman’s amendment to proposed federal immigration law is “an effort to strengthen national security,” according to a press release. Coleman says cities are using “a loophole” to keep their employees from questioning or detaining people about their immigration status, and he wants to change that.
City ordinances passed in Minneapolis in 2003 and St. Paul in 2004 that prohibit their involvement in immigration enforcement are two such “loopholes.”

“These aren’t sanctuary ordinances; they are public health and safety ordinances,” said Alberto Monserrate, President of Latino Communications Network, in a prepared statement. “The Coleman amendment say[s] that Congress knows better than local governments what best protects their residents. People who look or sound foreign will be the ones whose citizenship or immigration status will be questioned,” he said.

In recent news archives, former police chiefs in both Minneapolis and St. Paul have said that the use of their officers as agents of federal immigration policy would both aggravate the difficulty in getting immigrants to report crime and to work with the police and would add a large burden to already strained resources.
At least 68 state or local governmental entities have adopted similar non-involvement ordinances, according to Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.
“What kind of climate do these immigration policies create for people?” asked MIRA’s Kristen Melby. “When things like these police raids happen, people are afraid to go outside or send their children to school,” she said.

A large-scaled photo book illustrating the work of Mexican architect Jose Luis Ezquerra, who invented the “lejanista” style of architecture, sits on a shelf in Coleman’s University Avenue headquarters. Lejanista is an artist’s blend of distinct cultures. The book is inscribed from 2003, “Apreciado, Senor Norm Coleman, con todo respecto.”