Two weeks ago, Arizona passed the nation's strictest immigration law, SB 1070, which requires local police to demand proof of citizenship if they suspect a person is undocumented. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton condemned the measure, saying it would get in the way of federal programs designed to target, "identify, and remove criminal aliens."
One of these programs, Secure Communities, is already in place in seven Arizona counties and more than 150 other jurisdictions nationwide. It operates by enlisting states to run arrest data from local jails against a federal database of immigration records. ICE agents then use the system to deport people living in the country illegally and legal residents with criminal convictions.
The program has been expanding -- in just the past year, 20 states have signed on -- but on Tuesday it hit a roadblock in the nation's capital. D.C. City Council members voted unanimously to introduce a bill that would make the District the first jurisdiction in the country to ban Secure Communities.
"This is like something out of George Orwell. This is really 'insecure communities,'" argues District Council member Jim Graham, who represents an area that is home to many of the District's immigrants. Several Council members said the program could lead to more laws like the one passed in Arizona, which they described as "horrific."
Washington, D.C., has a long history of resisting collaboration with federal immigration officials. A 1984 memorandum from Mayor Marion Barry Jr. forbids city agencies, officers, and employees from asking about citizenship or residency. So when the District's police chief quietly signed on to the program last November without consulting the City Council, Graham was outraged. "This is the type of thing that there are so many questions about, so many suspicions about, that it's best that we just not do it," he said during a committee meeting in March.
One of the main objections to the program is that it targets undocumented immigrants charged with minor offenses -- such as disorderly conduct -- and longtime legal residents with criminal records who have become productive members of society. ICE claims the program focuses on dangerous felons, but its own data suggest otherwise. Fewer than 15 percent of the immigrants it identified last year were "level one" offenders. Most were arrested and deported for smaller crimes, like minor traffic violations.
By opening the door to police-ICE collaboration, the program has also affected how local communities interact with local law enforcement. Critics point out that in cities that have adopted the program, fewer immigrants report crimes or are willing to help with other investigations. The prospect of similar problems in D.C. is especially galling for Ron Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association. He spent 25 years on the District's police force and helped develop its community-policing strategy as a way to prevent crime. "One of the top foundations of community policing is developing trust," he says. "Now this program stands to reverse all of that."
Opponents of the program also point out that the program shares data of people charged with crimes even if they have not been convicted. In North Carolina, one of the first states to adopt the program, civil-liberties advocates say immigrants never get their day in court. "We have a drawer full of cases of people who were deported before their criminal case ever came up," says Marty Rosenbluth, a staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice based in Durham.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier insists she is listening to her critics and learning from problems that have surfaced in other states. She promised Council members she would not implement the program until she had a plan that addressed some of their concerns, such as the need to protect victims of domestic violence who fear arrest if they report abuse. Still, she stands by her push to eventually participate in the program. "If there's something I can do to reduce violent crime in the city, I certainly want to look into that," she told the Council.
The Council wants no part of it. The bill to "prohibit the District of Columbia to transmit arrest data" to ICE still has to work its way through the committee process and then back to the Council. Ultimately, it will be reviewed by Congress, and ICE has said there is no way to opt out of the program except to stop fingerprinting people, so it is unclear how successful a ban on it will be. But it had unanimous backing from the Council, and a diverse cross section of the city's immigrant, faith, and civil-liberties groups have embraced the measure.
Buoyed by backlash against the Arizona law, they say the bill signals the beginning of a national push against increased collaboration between police and immigration officials. "What we're doing in D.C. is setting a precedent," says Sarahi Uribe, a D.C.-based organizer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and coordinator of UncoverTheTruth.org, a national campaign against Secure Communities. The campaign's motto is "No More Arizonas."
Renee Feltz and Stokely Baksh are supported in part by a Soros Justice Media Fellowship. Their previous collaboration is online at BusinessofDetention.com.
Take a stroll through Durham civil and human rights activism (past and present) on the Pauli Murray Project’s ever growing website.
Through audio interviews and text embedded in an interactive map you can see the layered stories behind the new pedestrian bridge lowered over the Durham Freeway/147. This bridge re-connects a neighborhood, home to mostly African-American working-class families, bisected when highway 147 was routed through it twenty years ago.
You might have known about the 1957 protests in front of the Royal Ice Cream Parlor on Roxboro Road, just north of downtown, long before the historical marker was erected this year, but do you know this site is a few blocks away from a central locale on W. Main St. where human rights activists fight healthcare injustices within the offices of the organization El Centro Hispano?
Durham is a city with a rich history of struggle for racial and economic justice, for human and civil rights, and this interactive map is the start of reclaiming the specific and complex histories of Durham. Take, for example, the West Village Apartment Buildings—formerly the Liggett Myers Tobacco Factory, closed in 1999. When you click on the link, you see a photo of workers walking under the covered bridge that is now a corridor from one apartment building to another. This older photo is placed between current pictures of a pristine blue swimming pool and a spacious hardwood floored apartment of West Village. An audio clip narrates a worker’s memory of work in the building when black and white women workers were segregated.
Current marketing of downtown Durham feature the famous tobacco warehouses-turned-studio-apartments/faux-revolution-restaurants that are the revamped darlings of this city. To a visitor or new resident, these buildings may hint at a story of gritty work and harder times, without really knowing the specific story of working conditions, or the multi-racial anti-segregation activist organization housed down the street from this segregated workplace.
For many downtown visitors and loft-dwellers, the ambiguous stories of harder times embodied within the structures of the high-ceiling brick-walled tobacco buildings somehow sweeten the food in the farm-to-fork restaurants. The walls that were constructed to facilitate an industry reliant upon monoculture farming, sharecropping, and racially and economically stratified industry are now filled with food from small, local farms and a ‘clean’ restaurant industry.
However, these buildings are more than testaments of the tobacco industry in Durham and the city’s re-emergence as a city fueled by research, education and pharmaceuticals. They house stories of stratification that still linger in Durham’s under-invested and segregated neighborhoods, displacing processes of gentrification, and trials of low-wage restaurant, farm-worker, service, and healthcare workers.
This map is a way to explore past struggles and triumphs of Durham as they intertwine with the present. Check it out and re-engage with the struggles of Durham as you travel to work, the farmer’s market, or settle in at home.
Mapping Civil and Human Activism—
http://paulimurrayproject.org/mapping-civil-human-activism-live-now/
Making sure every person counts in the 
Remarkable UNC Chapel Hill first year student and activist Wooten Gough will be missing finals this year. Gough has arranged with his professors to leave school early — in order to go for a very long walk.
After meeting 
Associated Neighborhood Development (AND) is an organization based in New Orleans, LA, established to address the affordable housing needs of New Orleans residents. Currently they are focusing on pairing new advocates with those who are more experienced to get the word out about the 2010 Census.
In collaboration with the