but immigration databases as well.117 In the first year of the Secure Communities program’s implementation in California, it resulted in 19,109 deportations, 25 percent of which occurred without a conviction.118
All of that has meant a great deal more scrutiny on the Latino community, including checkpoints, neighborhood sweeps, and workplace raids—as well as armed vigilante patrols along the U.S./Mexico border.119 Undoubtedly the man who has personified the worst of these practices—or, as he would have it, the “toughest”—is Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. Arpaio, who has served as sheriff since 1993, has always courted controversy and regularly shrugged off concerns about constitutionality. He first came to national notice when he erected an outdoor tent city to hold the county’s prisoners and subjected them to a host of petty deprivations—no cigarettes, no coffee, no movies, no pornography, no hot lunches, no salt. He instituted chain gangs (even for juvenile offenders), dressed inmates in cartoonish black-and-white striped uniforms, and outfitted everything in the men’s prisons—towels, sheets, underwear, handcuffs—in Pepto-Bismol pink.120 (Ostensibly the pink was to deter theft, but Arpaio admits “there was the matter of embarrassing the prisoners.”)121 His jail guards, meanwhile, gained a reputation for strapping inmates into restraint chairs and torturing them with tasers.122
Beginning in 2006, Sheriff Joe (as he likes to be called) turned his attention to immigration. He started arresting immigrants as co-conspirators in human trafficking. He led deputies, as well as his 3,000-strong volunteer posse, on raids of workplaces looking for undocumented immigrants—including an after-hours raid to arrest the cleaning staff at the Mesa City Hall. It’s always the staff, too; in only three cases has he arrested their White employers. And in the City Hall case, the workers turned out to be legal residents. Sometimes his raids target entire towns, as when deputies besieged the hamlet of Guadalupe with mounted patrols, a mobile command center, and helicopter coverage for two days in 2008.123
A 2012 Justice Department investigation found that in Maricopa County “Latino drivers were between four to nine times more likely to be stopped than similarly situated non-Latino drivers,” with 20 percent of traffic stops failing to meet the legal standard of reasonable suspicion. It represented, in the estimation of one consultant, “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States.”124 The Justice Department also expressed concern about the “pervasive culture of discriminatory bias” in the sheriff’s office, including not just racial profiling, but racial slurs and racist jokes.125
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon was blunt in expressing his views on Arpaio:
The sheriff’s method is to profile people with brown skin and to ignore the civil rights we should all be enjoying. It is unconstitutional and wrong.… Citizens are being stopped because they are brown. Immigrants here quite legally, carrying their paperwork, are detained.… These stories have nothing to do with green cards. They have everything to do with brown skin. They were about racism and nothing else.126
Of course, it’s not just Arpaio.127 Police across Arizona search Blacks and Latinos more than twice as often as Whites, and search Native Americans three times as often. Likewise, in 2006, two thirds of the law enforcement agencies in Texas reported searching the vehicles of Latino drivers at a higher rate than those of Whites; more than a quarter searched Latinos at twice the rate of Whites.128 Racial profiling—blessed by the Supreme Court129—is an inevitable result of proactive immigrant-hunting. As Nancy Morawetz and Alina Das observed, writing for the Police Foundation:
Local officers will not be able to “observe” an immigration violation the way they might observe a violation of criminal law. Under such circumstances, there is a serious risk that the grounds for suspicion will in fact be nothing more than a series of assumptions that begin with a profile about people who speak another language or have a particular racial or ethnic profile.… Such tactics may well be ingrained in certain federal immigration enforcement efforts.130
Raymond Dolourtch, a St. Louis attorney, describes a pattern he has seen in recent cases: Police pull over Latino drivers, usually on some pretext. Since undocumented immigrants cannot apply for a driver’s license, they will be arrested for operating a vehicle without one. In jail, then, police will run their prints and check their status—leading to criminal charges or deportation.131 In towns like Waukegan, Illinois and Rogers, Arkansas, police set up checkpoints for the same purpose.132 Obviously traffic safety is just a pretext in these operations, a seemingly race-neutral rationale for rounding up members of a target population. But then, some Rogers cops have dispensed with the pretext altogether, asking people directly about their status without making an arrest.133 Likewise, in Irving, Texas, once the jail started reporting to ICE, the police began arresting greater numbers of Hispanics for low-level public order offenses.134
The Department of Homeland Security (which manages both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection) captured 517,000 foreign nationals in 2010, 83 percent from Mexico. Of those half-million visitors, 363,000 were held in jail while waiting for a hearing.135 That same year, 29,016 were charged with immigration violations in federal court (twelve times the 1994 level, 2,453);136 and immigration violations accounted for 12 percent of the federal prison population—approximately 260,000 people.137 Additionally, 387,000 immigrants were deported under a judicial order, and another 476,000 were “returned” without a hearing.138
The result is that immigrants are increasingly isolated, fearful, and powerless.139 That is likely part of the point. As Christian Parenti argues, American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. The attack on immigrants, therefore, is both “[p]olitically…an organic expression of nativist hostility and a very useful, rational system of elite-inspired class control”—“the primary product” of which “is … fear.”140
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
