Massachusetts and ICE are facing the one-year anniversary of the New Bedford raids in March 2007. What have we learned?
By Emily Schaffer
On December 10, 2007, the world celebrated International Human Rights Day. Yet here in the United States and within Massachusetts, our communities are served with constant reminders of myriad ways in which the United States has earned, and continues to uphold, its reputation as a renegade among industrialized nations for its failure to guarantee certain fundamental human rights. Indeed, the United States declines to recognize many international instruments whose purpose is to ensure respect for the most basic human rights that inure to every man, woman and child.
On March 6, 2007, the community of New Bedford witnessed a poignant illustration of our nation’s recalcitrance when hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents descended en masse upon the Michael Bianco leather factory. The now infamous workplace raid resulted in the immediate arrest of hundreds of workers. Within 48 hours, many of these workers were whisked off to remote detention centers in Texas and New Mexico before having an opportunity to meet with counsel, leaving family, friends, and community leaders scrambling for information and resources to care for “shell-shocked” family members abruptly left behind. Witnesses, media reports, and political leaders condemned the humanitarian disaster that ensued: nursing infants separated from their mothers; sleepless children wracked with fear, unable to understand why their parents disappeared without warning; and husbands and wives desperately searching for information on the whereabouts of one another. These images belie ICE’s insistence that “extreme” care was taken to ensure that families and children were not unduly traumatized by the operation. Senator Ted Kennedy told the New Bedford Standard Times “These workers may lack documents, but they do not lack dignity.”
Just one month after the raid, Julie Meyers, Assistant Secretary of ICE, in her remarks to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), used the raid as an example of ICE’s success. “I can assure you that we at ICE never forget that our operations often have a profound and unsettling effect on the families of those aliens apprehended and detained by our agents,” said Meyers. “And even though some in the media would have you believe otherwise, we go to extraordinary lengths to be certain that sole caregivers are not separated from their children and that adequate and proper counsel is available to anyone we detain and arrest … I believe our enforcement operations have been successful and demonstrated our immense commitment to human dignity. For example, the recent worksite enforcement operation at the Michael Bianco, Inc. textile company in New Bedford, Massachusetts is a great example of this commitment.”
As election politics take hold of the country, rarely a day goes by without a media report on the nation’s looming immigration crisis. Yet the public and political debates largely sidestep the human element of the problem, prompting one legal commentator, author Saby Ghoshray to ask “Is there a human-rights dimension to immigration? (Saby Ghoshray, Is There a Human-Rights Dimension to Immigration? Seeking Clarity Through the Prism of Morality and Human Survival, DENV. U. L. REV. 1151 (2007)). And in an editorial titled “Legal system only hears some babies’ cries,” a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer reflected on recent media reports of an ICE raid conducted in Ohio, whose cruel approach and devastating consequences were similar to those witnessed in New Bedford (Connie Shultz, Cleveland Plain Dealer (op ed), Nov. 20, 2007). Writing just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, when “we’re supposed to be particularly mindful of the bounty in our lives,” the author lamented, “it’s embarrassing, really, having everyone see just how mean you can be just because the law lets you.”
Until a few weeks ago, the extent to which the law-at least as it is interpreted here in Massachusetts-would sanction such affronts to human dignity was, perhaps, still an open question. In the aftermath of the New Bedford raid, renowned immigration attorneys and respected members of the Boston bar swiftly challenged the draconian manner in which the raid was conducted, filing a law suit in the United States District of Massachusetts. The Boston legal community applauded their efforts. In fact, the Women’s Bar Association singled out Nancy Kelly, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, by awarding her one of its coveted Lelia J. Robinson awards in recognition of her ongoing commitment to protecting and preserving immigrants’ rights. The outpouring of support for these attorneys and their clients can be viewed as a testament to our collective sense that respect for basic human dignity precludes such ruthless inattention to human needs as marked by the New Bedford ICE raid, and that our nation’s laws should do the same.
But the courts held otherwise.
After the U.S. District Court dispensed with the plaintiffs’ constitutional and statutory claims on jurisdictional grounds, the First Circuit again denied relief, citing both procedural and substantive grounds. In so doing, however, the First Circuit also accepted allegations “that ICE gave social welfare agencies insufficient notice of the raid, that caseworkers were denied access to detainees until after the first group had been transferred, and that various ICE actions temporarily thwarted any effective investigation into the detainees’ needs.”
While the First Circuit’s twenty-one page analysis does not lend itself to quick summary, its essential holdings give substance to the lay observation of how “mean” the law can be, and illustrate how easy it can be to justify compromising individual rights, even when those rights are borne of the most primal human needs.
Because they are “aliens”, the First Circuit affirmed, and because removal proceedings are of a civil nature, the New Bedford detainees have no constitutional right to counsel. No matter that the detainees are likely to be deprived-possibly for many months-of the sacrosanct right to personal freedom. And no matter that the detainees were “carted away unceremoniously” in a manner that prevented parents from making adequate arrangements for their children. In spite of these facts, the court held that, while “callous,” such measures are reasonable in light of ICE’s lawful mission, and reflected, at most, “misordered priorities” on the agency’s part.
For reasons that include, but are not limited to, the humanitarian issues outlined above, this writer is convinced that the illogical constellation of laws and practices that constitute our nation’s immigration policy is at the heart of our current immigration woes, and that the brutal enforcement tactics ICE has adopted are not a viable solution to the problem. Comprehensive immigration reform is critical, and it is urgent. Idealistic, economic, and pragmatic interests all demand reforms worthy of our nation and its highest principles. Such reforms should, on the one hand, legalize the millions of undocumented immigrants who live in the shadows of America, but who nonetheless contribute richly to the cultural fabric of our nation. On the other, reforms should liberalize the restrictive laws that prevent American businesses from gaining reliable and organized access to an available, foreign-born labor supply, whose participation in the U.S. economy would inure to the collective benefit of America. Scholars renowned in not only immigration law, but also law and economics, and law and philosophy have debunked myth after xenophobic myth about the perils of immigration, and they have demonstrated the salutary effects of immigration.
It is hard to make sense of a system in which the statutory imperative of expelling workers whose presence, in fact, benefits our nation (including, in this case, by providing manufacturing gear for American soldiers) is a “priority” that prevails over the preservation of human dignity. If our current legal framework gives precedence to documents-however irrational their allocation criteria-over the protection of human dignity, then it is a framework we must change. Let us rise to the challenge of creating and enforcing immigration laws that protect, rather than threaten, our fundamental human rights. WBR
The views stated herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the WBA.