Migrant Justice
Protesters march to the Federal Building in Burlington in November 2018, on the day a lawsuit is filed claiming violations of Constitutional rights.
Enrique Balcazar Sanchez and Zully Palacios Rodriguez had every reason to believe they were under surveillance by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. They even knew that an informant had infiltrated their organization, Migrant Justice, in Burlington, Vermont.
On March 17, 2017, ICE agents in three unmarked cars surrounded their vehicle and arrested them on immigration charges. Balcazar and Palacios say the agents—in mocking familiarity—referred to them by their nicknames, “Kike” (pronounced Kee-Kay) and “Vicki.” Later, in an internal ICE document, agents described them as “high-profile cases.”
But Balcazar and Palacios, now in deportation proceedings, are fighting back. They have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Burlington against the United States government, along with top officials in the Department of Homeland Security and the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles. Migrant Justice and another of its activists facing deportation, Victor Garcia Diaz, are also plaintiffs.
‘The machinery of government is being used to silence freedom of speech and freedom to petition the government.’
The lawsuit claims all plaintiffs were singled out because of their political activism. As a result, First Amendment guarantees and Fourteenth Amendment protections against discriminatory treatment were violated. “We ought not be a police state,” says Marc Cohan, director of litigation for the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, one of several groups representing the plaintiffs.
As Cohan puts it, “The machinery of government is being used to silence freedom of speech and freedom to petition the government.”
Another challenge to ICE’s disregard for Constitutional rights surfaced in Tennessee in February. Seven Latinx employees of the Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant, in an eastern corner of the state, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Knoxville against ICE and other Homeland Security officials who conducted a raid on the plant in April 2018.
“Honestly, I don’t know why this has happened to us,” says Martha Pulido, speaking to reporters as one of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages for illegal searches and seizures, excessive use of force, and violations of equal protection guarantees. The warrant for the raid was only to look at financial records of the plant’s owners.
Pulido was one of about 100 Latinx workers confronted by armed ICE agents, who stormed the plant. She tells of having a gun pointed in her face and seeing her co-workers punched in the face and shoved to the ground. Only Latinx workers were taken to a National Guard Armory for questioning. There she was detained, she said, for almost fourteen hours.
These lawsuits are part of the growing resistance to President Donald Trump’s deportation apparatus. Not only are activists mounting legal challenges to immigration arrests, but also localities are taking stands against the Big Brotherism of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. And communities have rallied in support of those detained.
One major prong of resistance to Trump’s immigration policies is the sanctuary movement, in which local officials are limited or sometimes prohibited from cooperating with ICE. The effort has been successful—but only to a point.
While there is no set definition for “sanctuary,” it typically entails noncompliance with ICE at some level. A 2018 report by the Migration Policy Institute, “Revving Up the Deportation Machinery: Enforcement Under Trump and the Pushback,” shows that California, which was unwelcoming to ICE, did not initially bear the brunt of Trump’s immigration crackdown and that limitations on cooperation with ICE by municipalities such as New York City and Chicago had an effect.
More than 300 jurisdictions throughout the United States, according to the report, have restrictions on cooperating with ICE—usually limiting agents’ access to questioning people in state or local custody.
The Trump Administration has doubled down by singling out sanctuary cities for heightened enforcement. But that has prompted pushback, as when Oakland, California, Mayor Libby Schaaf issued a warning in advance of an imminent ICE raid in February 2018.
Brian Hofer, chair of the city of Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, has been on the forefront of efforts in the San Francisco Bay area to enact protections against ICE. He even drafted a model statute for localities wanting to ban doing business with companies that provide data or services to ICE. It appears on the website #DeportICE.
The Bay Area city of Richmond passed such an ordinance in June 2018. According to Hofer, the Berkeley City Council is considering one, and Oakland is expected to take the issue up this spring. And a similar proposal was recently introduced in the California State Assembly.
Oakland also passed a resolution calling for the abolition of ICE. Berkeley voted not to do business with companies involved in building Trump’s wall. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, the Alameda City Council rejected a proposed $500,000 contract to purchase Vigilant’s automatic license plate readers.
Hofer, the forty-one-year-old son of a minister, has become a full-time political activist. He recently formed a nonprofit, Secure Justice, to promote the causes he believes in, most notably the threat of the surveillance state.
“Let’s make sanctuary work,” he says in an interview. “Let’s give it some teeth.”
After having bounced around, with jobs at law firms, banks, and as a contract worker, Hofer was taken aback when, in early 2014, he learned that Oakland was adopting a sweeping surveillance proposal, Domain Awareness Center. The plan included facial recognition software, automated license plate readers, and more than 700 police cameras in schools and public housing.
Hofer had already been compelled by the 2013 disclosures by national security whistleblower Edward Snowden. He says these “made me realize how little oversight there was of our intelligence agencies.” To drive the point home, the original contractor for Domain Awareness was Science Applications International Corporation, a company with the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security as major clients.
Hofer joined a local privacy group that believed public involvement could make a difference. And, in Oakland, it did. The concerns that Hofer raised about Domain Awareness led to it being significantly scaled back. Oakland also withdrew from an ICE task force and formed the Privacy Advisory Commission he now chairs.
But it’s an uphill battle to contain what the National Immigration Law Center has called “a complex and opaque web of databases.” The surveillance state includes fusion centers around the nation that originally were supposed to share anti-terrorism intelligence but now link to all sorts of public and private sector data.
“We’re using 9/11 as an excuse to do a lot of things that were not permitted before,” says Berkeley City Councilmember Kate Harrison.
The annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the umbrella agency created in the aftermath of 9/11 that includes ICE and Customs and Border Protection—has mushroomed to $49.4 billion, with such initiatives as the establishment of a National Vetting Center to serve as a hub for Homeland Security’s intelligence and enforcement.
“DHS is growing very quickly, very rapidly, a fairly large surveillance and monitoring database,” says Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.
The Immigration Project teamed up with two other groups, Mijente and the Immigrant Defense Project, to produce a recent report, “Who’s Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations,” which details how private companies—especially those in Silicon Valley—are providing ICE with data-collection services.
The February budget deal averted another shutdown but gave Trump a still stronger enforcement hand, with an additional $511 million for ICE, $942 million more for Customs and Border Protection, and $1.375 billion for his wall obsession.
Trump’s national emergency declaration—a pretext to tap into $6.7 billion appropriated for other purposes—is another affront to civil liberties and would drive border crossers to more precarious routes. As it is, ICE and Border Patrol agents have been running roughshod over rights and instilling fear in communities.
In Wisconsin, four days of ICE raids last September resulted in eighty-three arrests in fourteen counties. ICE’s news release says those targeted included “criminal aliens” and “public safety threats,” though sixteen of those detained had no criminal history and twenty-one others were detained for illegal reentry.
“The problem is that these raids are being publicized as ‘rounding up criminals’ when the majority of people detained either were not guilty of a crime or the offense was minor and restitution was made,” says Sister Melanie Maczka, executive director of Casa ALBA Melanie, a Hispanic resource center in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The raids of recent years go beyond the workplace, reaching into homes and public places. Immigration officers, Maczka says, failed to forewarn public officials, did not wear uniforms, drove in unmarked cars, and identified themselves as “police” rather than as immigration officers. And she said people often didn’t have the opportunity to see if they had a warrant.
A priority for Wisconsin activists is to get drivers’ authorization legislation back on the books for undocumented persons, so that they can come out of isolation—go to work and do basic errands—without the constant threat of being stopped, ticketed, and turned over to ICE.
And Maczka’s group has created an alert system for ICE.
“As soon as we hear that ICE is in town,” she relates, “we post messages reminding people of their rights and the precautions they should be taking. We put people in touch immediately with immigration attorneys.”
Casa ALBA has also assisted almost 100 families in filling out “Power of Attorney Delegating Parental Authority” forms so that decisions can be made about children if their parents are detained.
The main consequence of Trump’s stepped-up immigration crackdown is not fewer immigrants, but heightened anxiety.
“There is a lot of fear in the community,” says Hillary Scholten, a lawyer with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center in Grand Rapids. “People are afraid to go out. Afraid to drive their kids to school.”
Michigan United, a statewide group protecting immigrant rights, has worked to establish a sanctuary network. That has been a big help to Ded Rranxburgaj, who since January 2018 has lived with family members in the Central United Methodist Church in Detroit and is challenging ICE’s efforts to deport him to Albania, the homeland he fled. He is the primary caregiver for his wife, Flora, who suffers from multiple sclerosis.
“How can I leave my wife?” Rranxburgaj says. “My wife has been sick for twelve years. She can’t walk.”
The couple came here eighteen years ago. After their requests for asylum failed, they were granted stays of deportation that were renewed annually because of her health. In the fall of 2017, ICE granted his wife another stay but, according to the family’s lawyer, George Mann, the husband was told to get a ticket to Albania.
Sanctuary became his only option. To make matters worse, after he sought safe haven in the church, ICE declared him a fugitive and denied his request to renew a stay of deportation, even though Rranxburgaj insists, “I didn’t have any problems—nothing.” Mann is trying to get a federal judge to remove his unwarranted fugitive status.
An ICE that knows no boundaries is also what Migrant Justice is facing in Vermont.
“We have been organizing our community,” says Balcazar, in a recent interview with The Progressive (along with Palacios) at the Migrant Justice office in Burlington, where protest posters decorate the walls. “Our rights are being violated, whether it’s on the farm, by the police, or by immigration agencies. And when we come out in public and denounce these injustices and violations of rights, we are doing this to improve the lives of our community that has been living in the shadows.”
Migrant Justice was established in 2009 after the accidental death of a twenty-year-old dairy farmworker, José Obeth Santiz Cruz, who got caught in a manure removal conveyor. The group set out to improve conditions on the state’s dairy farms, which now number around 750, according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.
Balcazar, who is twenty-six, crossed the border from Mexico in 2011 to join his father, José, who was working on a dairy farm in Vermont. When Balcazar got a job on a dairy farm, he put in at least seventy hours a week and was paid well below minimum wage. He was angered by what he saw.
“What he got didn’t seem fair,” Balcazar says. “Then, when I went to work on my farm, I got even angrier—how little our work was valued. And when I went to farm assemblies I heard others tell the same stories. That pushed me to want to change the situation.”
He eventually teamed up with Palacios, who is twenty-five and came to Vermont on a visa from Peru in 2015. They make visits to farms and organize protests.
Neither Balcazar nor Palacios have criminal records, but that didn’t keep them out of ICE’s crosshairs. He faces deportation for being undocumented. She faces the same for overstaying her visa.
Over the years, Migrant Justice rallied support to make Vermont one of twelve states that allow undocumented workers to drive. And its Milk with Dignity Campaign tries to get dairy farms that sell milk to Ben & Jerry’s to pay minimum wage and provide more humane conditions.
But with the intensified activism, many more Migrant Justice members have been arrested by ICE—twenty since 2016, with many of them being deported, says Will Lambek, a spokesperson for the group.
Esau Peche Ventura and Yesenia Hernández Ramos were arrested by Customs and Border Protection on June 17, 2017, the day they participated in the thirteen-mile march from Montpelier to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream facility in Waterbury, Vermont.
They were handed over to ICE, which, according to the lawsuit, urged an unnamed official to contact Border Patrol “to see if there is anything they can do to give us legally sufficient cases so we can move forward.”
The lawsuit alleges that text messages reveal that a civilian informant ingratiated herself with Migrant Justice, attended nonpublic meetings, and was in regular contact with ICE. Lambek notes that a woman who knows Migrant Justice members learned of the informant and saw text messages between the informant and ICE. Balcazar and Palacios then became the focus of surveillance. Even on the morning of their arrest, Palacios received a notification from Microsoft that someone had attempted to hack into her email.
The extent of ICE’s surveillance today is unknown, but a climate of fear persists. “Trump has made things harder for all communities, and we are all being attacked,” Palacios says. “People don’t want to organize, [they] are more fearful of retaliation.”
Soon after the 2013 law allowing undocumented immigrants to drive with a Driver’s Privilege Card in Vermont took effect, a Jordanian national, Abdel Rababah, found himself in a deportation proceeding as a result of his application for a driver’s card. He subsequently filed a complaint with the Vermont Human Rights Commission, which found “reasonable grounds” that he was discriminated against.
Vermont’s impartial policing policy does not allow it to dedicate time and resources for federal immigration law enforcement if the only violation is being undocumented. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles eventually awarded Rababah $40,000 to settle the case.
Since the 2016 settlement, says Lambek, records obtained by Migrant Justice from the Vermont DMV show that the agency continues to provide information to immigration officials about Migrant Justice members when requested; one email suggests the DMV is communicating more with ICE by telephone.
In New York, a statewide Green Light NY: Driving Together coalition is pushing for legislation that would provide driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. The bills introduced seek to guard against the problems of ICE collaborating with the Department of Motor Vehicles by requiring a warrant.
The need for such a law, now pending in the state legislature, was highlighted last August with the arrest of Carlos Cardona, a member of Alianza Agrícola, an independent group of immigrant farmworkers supported by the Worker Justice Center of New York in Rochester.
Cardona, who was pulled over for speeding on his daughter’s third birthday, took his case public with an op-ed in the New York Daily News, calling on state lawmakers to enact legislation allowing driver’s licenses to be issued to undocumented immigrants. “And now I sit facing deportation all because New York, which is supposed to be a state that’s friendly to immigrants, would not grant me a driver’s license,” he wrote.
The Worker Justice Center and the Workers’ Center of Central New York in Syracuse—both members of the Green Light coalition—have also established rapid response networks, with Facebook pages, to arrive at the scene in support of those being detained and have rallied in support of those facing deportation.
In Seattle, support has been strong for Maru Mora Villalpando, who as a founding member of the Northwest Detention Center Resistance became a voice for immigrant rights.
Mora Villalpando, forty-eight, came to the United States on a visa in 1996 and lives in Bellingham, north of Seattle. She was put in a deportation proceeding in December 2017 after telling a local web publication that she was “undocumented.”
But it’s not that ICE wasn’t keeping tabs on her. The document initiating her deportation proceeding cites her “extensive involvement in anti-ICE protests and Latino advocacy programs.”
Mora Villalpando is now expected to be spared deportation because her daughter, Josefina Alanis Mora, who was born in the United States, turned twenty-one last year and has filed for a visa that would allow her mother to eventually get a green card.
The Seattle City Council issued a statement praising Mora Villalpando as a “courageous advocate for social justice.” It goes on to say: “The U.S. Constitution guarantees rights for everyone, regardless of status, and this includes the First Amendment.”