Anti-racism advocate alleges collusion between DHS union leaders, anti-immigrant groups

San Antonio Express News (Texas) 

By Aaron Nelsen

June 30, 2015

Anti-racism advocate alleges collusion between DHS union leaders, anti-immigrant groups 

A Chicago-based nonprofit that fights racism said Tuesday organizations that support a hard-line approach on immigration have conspired with some border enforcement union leaders to inject an anti-immigrant bias into the immigration discussion.

The Center for New Community asserts in its report “Blurring Borders: Collusion between Anti-Immigrant Groups and Immigration Enforcement Agents” that relationships between union leaders and advocacy groups raise serious questions about whether law enforcement agencies, tasked with carrying out immigration policies while appearing to be neutral, should also be involved in shaping policy.

“That seems absolutely antithetical to the basic ideas of democracy,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spoke about the report during a news conference. “It is affecting public policy in real and substantial ways … it ought to be stopped.”

The report claims that union leaders from the National Border Patrol Council and the National ICE Council have, at times, adopted the same uncompromising script in testimony before Congress as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA, especially when calling for the end to prosecutorial discretion that allows for undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.

“I categorically deny that there’s collusion amongst groups such as FAIR and CIS when it comes to the National Border Patrol Council,” said Shawn Moran, vice president and spokesman for the NBPC, the union that represents Border Patrol agents. “We don’t like prosecutorial discretion and the reason is because it puts our agents in danger.”

Moran said prosecutorial discretion conveys that the federal government is not serious about border enforcement, and that the union will speak out against any policy it believes negatively affects agents or undermines the work of rank-and-file agents to stop illegal immigration.

Still, the Center for New Community argues these groups are actively developing sources within agencies and unions, enabling them to organize Border Patrol-led tours along the Southwest border, and possibly to secure confidential information.

Among the key findings in the report was that a source within Border Patrol had allegedly leaked to a border militia group the scheduled arrival last summer of immigrant mothers and children to a Border Patrol station in Murrieta, California. The information allowed groups to organize in advance, spurring hundreds to show up at the station to protest the immigrants and push for them to return to Central America.

In another example, the report notes that Breitbart, a conservative news outlet, obtained and published leaked photographs of overcrowded Border Patrol facilities where children and families were detained. Those areas were off limits to the media and the public.

The suggestion that certain groups are cultivating agents to echo their policy goals is absurd, according to Dan Stein, president of FAIR.

“The idea that organizations work on issues and communicate with government employees is hardly a news flash,” Stein said. “But unions make their own decisions about commenting on policy, and frankly I’m surprised they haven’t commented more on immigration policy.”

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