The Texas Observer

The Houston Chronicle is reporting today that President Obama won’t keep shoveling money into the Border Wall boondoggle. Finally some good news out of Washington.  At least taxpayers won’t be spending billions on an 18-foot steel and concrete wall which won’t solve an iota of the United State’s immigration issues.

Border landowners have been praying for this ever since Obama took office. The bad news is the government is going to finish the remaining miles of fence near Brownsville. The Obama Administration is going to fulfill the 670 miles of fence required by Congress under George W.’s reign.  Cameron County gets the tail-end of a raw deal — the poorly crafted and politicized public policies incorporated in the Secure Fence Act and the Real ID Act.

No one feels this more acutely than Brownsville Landowner Eloisa Tamez who has been fighting the Department of Homeland Security for two years over the construction of fence in her backyard. She recently lost her court battle and DHS threw up the wall almost overnight on her land. In a recent conversation with Tamez she said she plans to turn her home into a border and human rights center where academics can study immigration and border policy. What better place than 20 feet from the border wall — one of the worst government experiments in immigration policy to date.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 detainees at the sprawling Port Isabel Processing Center near Brownsville stopped eating last Wednesday in an effort to draw attention to extended detention that they say violates their right to due process.

One of the detainees on hunger strike - Rama Carty - spoke to the Observer by phone on Friday about how he has been detained by ICE for more than 13 months.

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“It’s unconstitutional. It’s unjust,” Carty said. “We’re held well past any reasonable time under the law, or just any reasonable time, period.”

Carty fell under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008 after he served two years in prison for what he says is a wrongful drug conviction. He spent time in detention centers in Maine and New Hampshire before being sent to Texas in December. In March, he came across an article in USA Today about a new Amnesty International report on how thousands of immigrants are detained for months or years without any meaningful judicial review of whether they should be released.

“If immigration removal is not reasonably foreseeable at all, then detention, in essence, shouldn’t exist,” Carty said, citing a Supreme Court precedent for cases like his.

Carty turns 39 next week and has lived in the United States since he was a year old. His parents are Haitian, but he was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo while they were working there. Neither country will accept him, so he languishes in detention in the country he calls home.

“I am a U.S. citizen from a cultural standpoint,” Carty told the Observer.

He wants a chance to argue he is a citizen from a legal standpoint as well. He said ICE mishandled his mother’s application for naturalization, and he should be given an opportunity to be considered a citizen. But, like many in the 1,200-bed facility, he said he lacks access to legal assistance.

“We are told we have lawyers available thru pro-bono associations but that’s not the truth,” Carty said of the overwhelmed legal aid offices that mostly focus on political asylum cases. “The amount of effective assistance of counsel is grossly insufficient,” he said.

Carty says he thinks the hunger strike will continue to grow. The strikers’ demands include a meeting with Dora Schriro, the newly appointed special advisor on detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security.

Some sad news today coming out of Brownsville. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled in favor of Homeland Security. Eloisa Tamez and several other landowners who were fighting the construction of an 18-foot border wall on their land must allow the government to start building.

Tamez, 73, has been one of the most spirited and outspoken opponents of the border wall. Her legal battle with DHS galvanized many other border residents to stand up for their Constitutional rights. The Observer has chronicled her struggle over the past year with the bureaucratic nightmare that is Homeland Security.

Tamez’ land which ranges north from the Rio Grande for about 3 acres has been in her family’s possession since the King of Spain granted it to them centuries ago. Now it will be marred by an unsightly 18-foot concrete and steel wall. A wall that will serve as nothing more than a symbol of ignorance and Washington D.C. political pandering. At an approximate price of $3 million up to $12 million a mile it will also continue to bleed the U.S. treasury dry.

Tamez was not at court today in Brownsville. She is in Albuquerque attending a conference with other concerned landowners and lawyers who are strategizing on how to fight the border wall’s construction. No word yet on what she plans to do next and whether Hanen’s ruling can be challenged in court.

Some U.S. Senators (Lieberman) and Texas’ own Governor Goodhair say that President Obama is not doing enough to fight drug cartels with the border security plan he announced yesterday. It should be noted, however, that his plan at least acknowledges that Mexico’s drug problem is our drug problem too. And it emphasizes (gasp) communication with our neighbor to the south which is something our leadership has not engaged in, oh, eight years. Obama’s plan quadruples the number of U.S. liaisons working with Mexico in a binational effort to fight the drug cartels. This is a much needed and — dare I say it — logical step in coordination and communication between the two countries.

The word logical never entered the Bush Administration lexicon which focused on building border walls that cost $12 million a mile.

Obama does two things in his plan that Mexico has been asking for for years: a focus on the reduction in drug use in the United States and a crackdown on guns flowing south into Mexico. It’s not easy living next door to the world’s largest arms dealer. Mexico has often requested help from the U.S. Congress in reducing the number of guns funneled into Mexico. Obama’s plan relocates 100 ATF officers to the border in the next 45 days to fortify ATF’s Project Gunrunner aimed at disrupting arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico.

Finally, it is good to see that the plan focuses on the treatment and prevention of drug addiction.  Several decades of fighting the war on drugs has done little to stem drug use in the United States. It’s time to focus on prevention and treatment rather than building more prison complexes — sorry Geo Group.

And while the border wall boondoggle is not mentioned in Obama’s security plan, there is $100 million set aside for fences and virtual technology along the border in the economic stimulus bill. In a story yesterday by the Rio Grande Guardian, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was quoted as saying that her agency would finish the existing tracts of fencing — bad news for many Brownsville residents. With regards to new areas of fencing she said it would be in combination with technology and manpower. Napolitano seems to be de-emphasizing the use of border fences — another logical step . I’m getting nervous. I’ve used the word logical three times when talking about the federal government.

It is about time someone sued the Department of Homeland Security over breaking the law. The agency acts as if the Freedom of Information Act didn’t exist.  The non-profit consumer advocate group Public Citizen is suing the DHS on behalf of Denise Gilman, a clinical law professor at the University of Texas.

Gilman requested documents from DHS last April showing where the border fence would be built. She requested maps, surveys and appraisals of affected properties along the border. She is also seeking information about the criteria used to determine where the fence will be built. After a year, she’s only received a small portion of the documents she requested and they have been heavily redacted.

Public Citizen claims in the lawsuit that DHS’ delays and denials violate the Freedom of Information Act. Gilman is part of the UT Working Group on Human Rights and the Border Wall which was formed to look at the impact of the border wall on communities and the environment.

I filed similar Freedom of Information Act requests in February 2008 and have been through at least four Freedom of Information Act officers at DHS who were supposedly processing the paperwork. In January, I finally received one of the documents I had requested a year ago. The document was heavily redacted.

It’s unfair that the federal government can seize a person’s home and property to build an eighteen-foot fence, but U.S. citizens are not allowed to see DHS’ decision-making process. I plan to keep calling DHS. If we keep pushing for the information, someday (I hope) the law will make them provide it.

A well-known Austin activist fingered as an FBI informant has acknowledged that he provided information leading to the arrest and felony indictment of two Austin men who participated in protests last September at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN.

“The simple truth is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of investigation [sic],” Brandon Darby said in an open letter he sent this week to friends he has worked with since 2002.

Darby’s activist network stretches from Austin to New Orleans, where he co-founded Common Ground Relief, a grassroots reconstruction effort that drew thousands of volunteers from around the country. In 2004, he helped organize and was arrested during anti-Halliburton protests in Houston. His letter suggests that he disagreed with tactics some members of the Austin Area Affinity Group planned to use to disrupt the Republican Convention. Darby was a member of the group.

“When people act out of anger and hatred, and then claim that their actions were part of a movement or somehow tied into the struggle for social justice only after being caught, it’s damaging to the efforts of those who do give of themselves to better this world,” reads Darby’s letter.

Darby’s fellow activists say they identified him as “CHS 1” – confidential human source 1 – after reviewing an affidavit (PDF) by FBI agent Christopher Langert that was released in discovery in the case against David Guy McKay, 22, and Bradley Neal Crowder, 23. They say information described in the affidavit came from conversations between McKay and Darby.

The informant told Langert that McKay and Crowder fashioned protest shields made from cutting traffic barrels in half. After describing how police seized these items from a trailer the two helped drive from Austin to St. Paul, Langert refers to conversations gathered when the informant wore a wire to record McKay talking about how he and Crowder had made Molotov cocktails, using tampons soaked in lighter fluid for wicks.

The Molotov cocktails were among the items seized in a raid that led to felony indictments of McCay and Crowder, now known as the “Texas Two.” They were charged with possession of unregistered firearms (the cocktails). Information gathered by Darby may have contributed to broader charges against eight others from around the country for conspiracy to riot and conspiracy to damage property in the furtherance of terrorism.

Several of Darby’s friends initially defended him against accusations that he was an informant, but after they acquired additional court documents from sources close to the case against McCay and Crowder, they confronted him days before he went public.

“I don’t feel like I lost my credibility,” says longtime Austin-based activist Scott Crow. “But I staked my credibility defending him, and people backed me up.” Now that Darby has gone public, Crow is ready to go on the offensive.

“While it is not yet clear how long or to what extent Darby has been acting as an informant, the emerging truth about Darby’s malicious involvement in our communities is heart-breaking and utterly ground-shattering to some of us who were closest to him,” says Crow, who in 2005 co-founded Common Ground Relief with Darby.

Activists in St. Paul with the RNC Welcoming Committee posted a video in October 2007 that showed a tongue-in-cheek use of a Molotov cocktail to light a barbeque. Langert’s affidavit states that Darby had been working with the FBI since November 2007.

Crow and another member of the group claim the additional court documents – which the group has so far declined to make public - show Darby actively encouraged, enabled and provoked McKay and Croder to take illegal action. Crow asserts that Darby “hadn’t even met these guys yet” when he began reporting to the FBI. “How can you know they’re going to plan something,” he asks, “if you hadn’t met them yet?”

McCay’s father has previously argued that his son was naïve and gullible.

McCay and Crowder have been denied bail and remain in federal detention in St. Paul. Their trial date has been postponed indefinitely. They each face seven to 10 years in prison.

–Renee Feltz is a fellow at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and an intern with the investigative unit at The New York Times.

Tomorrow Williamson County commissioners will decide whether they want another year of the T. Don Hutto Immigration detention center in their county. The facility — run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America — is infamous for housing families, including young children, in a grim prison-like setting.

The conditions were once so bad at the Hutto facility that the ACLU — along with the ACLU of Texas, the University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic and the international law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP — filed lawsuits on the behalf of children ages 3 to 16 who were being held in the facility. The children were kept in jail cells and not allowed outside. They were also threatened with separation from their parents if they made too much noise. One lawyer in the case told me that “they would have made the infants wear orange jumpsuits if they’d had small enough sizes.” The ACLU was successful in its lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and since then things have improved somewhat at the facility, according to the ACLU.

Still there is no denying that women and children are being kept in jail (a lucrative deal for CCA)  while they await a decision on a non-criminal matter (their immigration status) in court.

Every December advocates for immigrant and humanitarian rights gather for a candlelight vigil outside the facility in Taylor.  They want the facility closed for good. This week they are asking people to call the Williamson County Commissioners Court and persuade them to vote against renewing the contract with CCA. In a recent Austin American-Statesman article, however, many of the commissioners seem to think that $1 dollar a day the county receives from the federal government for each immigrant in the facility is still good business. Each month, the county can rake in as much as $16,000. The prison is funded at a cost of nearly $3 million a month by Immigration and Custom Enforcement.

County Judge Dan Gattis told the Statesman that he planned on voting for a renewal of the contract “unless something jumps up and bites me.”