Al Jazeera America
By Renee Lewis
June 30, 2015
Some
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees and union leaders have
been colluding with white nationalist, anti-immigrant groups, lending
credibility to hate groups
and giving them an outsized influence on federal immigration policy,
according to a report released Monday.
Many
of the same DHS employees have testified at congressional hearings and
made statements to the press as “credible” and “neutral” experts on the
topic of immigration
— making the collusion more troubling, said the report by Center for
New Community, a group that tracks social and racial injustice.
“Do
we really want law enforcement agents colluding with people who seek a
European-American majority?” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which
tracks hate groups, said in a conference call on Monday. “Do we really
want our law enforcement officers cooperating with people who are
friends with (hate groups) who call all Latino people 'dumb' and
circulate conspiracy theories about Jewish power?”
The
report, titled “Blurring Borders: Collusion between Anti-Immigrant
Groups and Immigration Enforcement Agents," identified three
anti-immigrant groups with close ties
to DHS members.
Those
organizations — Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA — can be traced to a
white nationalist named
John Tanton, the report said, who has "advocated drastically reducing,
if not altogether halting, all avenues of immigration."
FAIR,
a non-profit public interest group aimed at increasing border security,
is defined as a hate group by The Southern Poverty Law Center, and has
hired people from
white supremacist and other hate groups, Potok said.
Tanton
has publicly stated the importance of maintaining a European-American
majority in the U.S., and FAIR’s current leadership shares a similar
mindset, Potok added.
The
anti-immigrant groups do not seem to officially work with DHS, but they
develop sources within the organization that leak information to them,
the report said.
The
report says that the anti-immigrant movement has worked with leaders of
the unions representing a majority of employees at Customs and Border
Protection and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement: the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) and
the National ICE Council.
"Instead
of fulfilling organized labor’s traditional role of advocating for
respectable wages and working conditions, leaders of these particular
unions appear more focused
on coordinating with special interest groups in the Beltway to advance
anti-immigrant policy goals," the report said.
CIS
organizes annual tours of the U.S.-Mexico border for its members and in
March 2014 NBPC Local 1613 based in Southern California thanked two of
its current agents,
Manny Bayon and Chris Bauder, on Twitter for "showing the truth on the
southern border" during a "border tour for CIS," the report said.
The
two are elected union representatives, while Bauder is currently
executive vice president of the NBPC, according to the report.
As
a result of this influence and that the groups themselves have
testified to Congress "hundreds and hundreds of times," the
anti-immigrant movement has been “very effective”
in killing comprehensive immigration reform, Potok said.
Evidence
of collusion, according to the report, includes the fact many union
leaders within DHS have advocated for immigration policy identical to
those advocated by the
anti-immigration movement — specifically that of CIS, said Anush Joshi
of Center for New Community.
In
August 2012 after the deportation relief program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was announced by President Barack Obama, 10
ICE agents filed a lawsuit
against then DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, ICE directors and United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Christopher Crane,
president of the National ICE Council, was lead plaintiff.
Despite
the lawsuit's dismissal, the case allowed anti-immigrant groups like
NumbersUSA to "construct a platform from which Crane could act as a
prominent spokesperson,"
the report said. The group announced it would cover all legal fees in
the case and Kris Kobach — an attorney for the FAIR's legal project,
Immigration Reform Law Institute — was recruited to represent Crane and
his colleagues.
Kobach
has worked with FAIR in the past to draft some of the country’s most
anti-immigrant bills including Arizona's notorious SB 1070, which
required police to determine
the immigration status of anyone arrested or detained if there was
"reasonable suspicion" that they were in the U.S. illegally.
Another
example of collusion, according to Monday’s report, surfaced last July
at a protest organized by far-right activists with ties to white
nationalists in Murietta,
California. The protesters blocked buses of children and their parents
who had fled Central American violence, chanting, “Go back home!” and
“We don’t want you here!,” Joshi said.
“The
real question is how did they know when and where the buses were going?
The answer lies in the long-standing relationship between DHS and
leaders of the anti-immigration
movement,” Joshi said during the conference call.
Media
outlets reported NBPC Local 1613 health and safety director Ron Zermeno
as the source of leaked details regarding the migrants' transportation,
the report said.
Zermeno had also taken part in a conference call on July 23, 2014 with
organizers of a nine-day border convoy aimed at stopping the "invasion,"
according to the report.
Zermeno
told organizers, "I'm here to help you guys," the report said, adding
that he offered to coordinate with border patrol agents the routes for
the protest.
The
DHS has said it is looking into the issue of this alleged cases of
collusion. In the meantime, the groups behind the report say they will
continue to raise awareness
to spur federal action.
“What
we’re planning to do is continuing to raise awareness of impacts of
collusion and applying pressure on Congress and the administration to
stop this from happening,”
Joshi said.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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