Gaby Pacheco, Dream Act student, tells her story.

by Erin Rosa, Media Consortium blogger

President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday that he would be deploying 1,200 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to beef up security along the Río Bravo. This surprise move has garnered criticism from immigrant rights supporters, who argue that it will dehumanize and endanger immigrant and Latino communities.

A family leaps to its death off the fifteenth story of an apartment building in Scotland. The immediate cause — their asylum application was denied, and they were about to be kicked out of government housing. Thousands of torture victims languish in UK and US prisons, waiting for their day in court to prove their asylum claims. But their waits grow longer, and their conditions more desperate.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security tried to pressure undocumented alien informants to provide intel on terrorism. If they didn’t they’d be deported. Now ICE is following through on its demands, and the government frenzy to manufacture terrorist threat appears to be out of control.

What’s the best way to help workers form a union in a workplace where managers have spent years wantonly violating labor laws by threatening and intimidating workers into resisting unionization? If you’re the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the answer would seem to be “get rid of the workers.” At least, that is one of the main recommendations contained within a rather confusing new CIS report on the aftermath of the January 2007 immigration raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Holding up Smithfield as a prototype for the nation, the CIS report vaguely suggests that destructive immigration raids and a flawed electronic employment-verification system will not only succeed in draining millions of unauthorized immigrants from the United States, but bolster unionization for American workers, too. These are fanciful notions at best.

Last Friday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano announced changes to the controversial 287(g) program—a program which allows state and local police agencies to partner with ICE to enforce federal immigration laws. DHS also announced that, rather than waiting for the new policies to be implemented and tested, it has expanded the problematic 287(g) program with 11 new Memoranda of Agreement (MOAs).