The Texas Observer

You can’t say that Arizona Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva is a quitter. He’s been trying to get traction on a sane legislative approach to border security ever since Congress passed legislation in 2006 to construct a 700-mile wall along our southern border. This time around he has filed the Border Security and Responsibility Act of 2009.

Today, the Texas Border Coalition, a group of border mayors, county judges and business leaders sent out their endorsement of the legislation. Sierra Club is also endorsing the bill. The legislation would repeal the Homeland Security Secretary’s authority to waive any law that would slow or impede construction of border fencing. It would also require Homeland  Security to consult with land owners and other local, state and federal agencies before building.

Grijalva’s district is Tucson along the Arizona-Mexico border. The Observer has interviewed the Congressman several times. He seems to be one of the only congressional leaders who listens to border communities. Last year, Grijalva brought his Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands to Brownsville to hear from land owners who were having their land seized by Homeland Security for the construction of the border wall.

Let’s hope Grijalva’s bill fares better under the Obama Administration than it did under George W’s reign.

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.

Listen:
Click here to download the interview

“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.

Updated below

Just how crazy is the tea party movement? Crazy enough that elected GOP officials are now openly calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government because they don’t like Obama’s policies. Here’s an excerpt of a commentary by Daryl Fowler, the chairman of the DeWitt County (Texas) Republican Party. The commentary is currently posted on the main page of the DeWitt GOP website:

His [Obama’s] reign ends in less than four years, but the party could be over before then. If enough Americans stand up and reassert their God-given rights to institute governments and overturn those that are unjust. The movement in Texas and several other state legislatures regarding the 10th Amendment rights of the States is welcome on this page.

To put it as bluntly as possible: Republicans like Fowler don’t believe in democracy.

Update: Fowler responded to an email I sent him asking whether he was in fact advocating a government overthrow. He said (I think) that he wasn’t.

“I would say you are mistaken. The party may be over on November 2, 2010, but his term won’t end for another 1360 days.”

Fowler seems to be saying that he was just talking about the mid-term elections. Meanwhile, this whole 10th Amendment push, which Fowler welcomes, has taken on a reactionary, if not revolutionary tone. Just ask your friendly white supremacists over at Stormfront.

Apparently Homeland Security worked all night to put up an 18-foot wall on Eloisa Tamez’s land. The wall is already done less than one week after Brownsville U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled in favor of the government.

A story today in the Brownsville Herald says contractors for Homeland Security had piled up materials on her property shortly after Hanen made his verdict. Tamez filed a temporary restraining order but it was too late. As of yesterday, DHS had already built the wall through her three-acre property as well as through other properties in the small town of El Calaboz.

So much for democracy…The government takes your land whether you agree to it or not.

A jury trial will be held next October to decide what monetary compensation Tamez and other landowners in El Calaboz will receive for their land.

For a city that likes to advertise its quirkiness, it’s fitting the candidates vying to be its leader include two city councilmen, a fast-talking former mayor and statewide officeholder eyeing her comeback, a real-estate investor who thinks business knows best and sounds a bit like Ron Paul, and a wiry hotel employee who claims he just received his high-school diploma. What: Is Leslie, Austin’s cross-dressing icon and past office seeker, tied up with a ballot initiative or something this year?

The five candidates—council members Lee Leffingwell and Brewster McCracken, former Mayor and State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, David Buttross and Josiah Ingalls—discussed the city’s budget shortfall, traffic woes, and preserving the city’s spirit and status as the Live Music Capital of the World at an April 22 debate at the LBJ library. The race is close, according to a just-released KXAN/Constituent Dynamics poll, which has Leffingwell, McCracken and Strayhorn in a statistical dead heat. The election is May 9, and a runoff appears likely.Front and center: what would each do with a city in the red and a tech sector headed elsewhere? Leffingwell favors “structural” reforms, such as consolidating government departments. McCracken believes City Hall either needs a pay freeze or a pay cut, while Strayhorn said “nothing’s off limits.” She’s ready to fire the city’s consultants and lobbyists and march to the Capitol by herself if need be.

Leffingwell and McCracken stressed different approaches to renewing Austin’s economy. A favorite of Austin’s progressive activists and civic groups, Leffingwell, a veteran and past commercial pilot, wants to diversify Austin’s economy. McCracken, a Princeton-educated Corpus Christi native and former prosecutor, said after the debate, “I don’t know what Lee’s vision is.” Austin’s losing its foundation, he said, and he wants to boost “creative class” industries like biotechnology, green energy, and film production, sectors he claims Leffingwell only mentioned recently.

Ingalls and Buttross lack support but not passionate ideas. Ingalls, if short on specifics, adamantly expressed his desire to return government to the people, “even if I have to work on weekends.” He is still irritated that Congressman Lloyd Doggett hasn’t returned his calls, and that current Mayor Will Wynn won’t meet with him. His rocky, winding life, however, has given him an appreciation for struggling workers.Buttross also wants to rid the special interests from government. “A businessman is not going to throw you under the bus,” he said. He favors no-government, no-nonsense solutions such as flex time to reduce traffic. “I solve problems today, and the city of Austin does not,” Buttross stated.

No stranger to debate podiums, Strayhorn came armed with talking points, alleging the two councilmen were guilty of mismanaging Capital Metro, the cash-strapped transit system. “The bus isn’t going to be there,” she quipped. Austin’s first female mayor refuted claims she’ll build a Bridge to the Past, saying young people “energize her.” She downplayed an early hope that she might turn out 100,000 voters in May, about 40,000 more than showed up for the last open seat election.

Amid new fears Austin is becoming the noise ordinance, not live-music, capital of the world, candidates expressed reforms to keep the music playing. Leffingwell supports “structural” solutions like moving stages to minimize noise. Buttross wants to create “music friendly” apartments, while Ingalls offered a more dramatic answer: move those pesky residents out of downtown. McCracken said the real issue is taking care of local musicians. “Live music is what makes Austin, Austin,” Strayhorn added. True, but so do the curious field of Austinites who aspire to be its next mayor.

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.

The revolving door between government and the private sector is a time-worn tradition in Texas. But here’s a case that on its bare facts is particularly egregious.

In January, six months after stepping down as the executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Glenn Shankle signed on as a lobbyist for Waste Control Specialists, the company recently licensed by TCEQ to build a massive radioactive waste dump in West Texas. His lobby contract is worth between $100,000 and $150,000, according to the Texas Ethics Commission.

When Shankle left TCEQ in June 2008, the agency was readying, per Shankle’s orders, two licenses authorizing Waste Control to bury millions of cubic feet of radioactive waste. The four-year license review process had been one of the most time-consuming and contentious in agency history.

Shankle’s own technical staff, geologists and engineers had concluded definitively that the dump could not legally be permitted. An Aug. 14, 2007, memo drafted by two geologists and two engineers bluntly stated that the landfill’s proximity to two aquifers made it “highly likely” that radioactive waste would leak into the groundwater. The site, they wrote, “cannot be improved through special license conditions.” They recommended denying the license. With little explanation, Shankle overruled them. His only sop to the staff were license conditions requiring additional studies before construction.

Amazingly, Shankle said in a brief telephone interview yesterday—one of the few times he has ever spoken to the press—that he had never heard of any of this.

“I was not aware of that,” Shankle said of his own technical staff’s recommendations. If true, that’s stunning. According to the Houston Chronicle:

When WCS President Rodney Baltzer learned of the [August 14] memo, he immediately sought out meetings with the agency’s executive director, Glenn Shankle, who decided in December [2007] to begin drafting the license.

In fact, records from TCEQ, previously discussed in the Observer, show that during the time period after the staff’s recommendation, Shankle was frequently meeting with Waste Control officials, attorneys and lobbyists. Waste Control is owned by Harold Simmons, the Dallas billionaire and major Republican donor who helped bankroll Swift Boat ads attacking John Kerry in 2004 and television ads in 2008 linking Barack Obama to Bill Ayers.

Baltzer left nine messages for Shankle and four for [Deputy Executive Director Dan] Eden between July 2007 and January 2008, according to phone logs that reflect only missed calls. Eden met with Waste Control officials at least five times during that period. Former Republican Congressman Kent Hance, a Waste Control investor and chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, paid a visit to Shankle’s office in early November.

Cliff Johnson, a principal in Textilis Strategies, an Austin-based firm that lobbies for Waste Control, visited with Shankle in September. Shankle also met with Giblin, Baltzer, and Mike Woodward, a Waste Control lobbyist and attorney with Hance’s law firm, during that period.

The outcome of this full-court press was the Shankle-ordered drafting of the coveted disposal licenses, permits that are worth untold millions to the company. In fact, without these licenses Waste Control is a losing venture. Last year, Waste Control lost $21.5 million, according to SEC filings for Valhi, Waste Control’s parent company. In other words, Shankle had done a very big favor for Waste Control.

The move so upset his staff that three of them quit in protest. One of them, Glenn Lewis, who coordinated one of the license review teams, reacted with disgust and anger when told yesterday that Shankle was lobbying for Waste Control.

“Even the Mafia was more circumspect than this,” Lewis said. “To find out now that Mr. Shankle—who was in constant communication with WCS throughout this ordeal—now is on retainer for [WCS] is shocking in that it is so brazen and such an insult to everybody who worked on that application. It just shows that any objective appraisal by the TCEQ was from its inception a fantasy and that big money and a lot of political power won once again. … They should have just issued the license the day after it was received and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

When it was suggested to Shankle that there was at least the appearance of a quid pro quo, he responded: “The freedom of the press can go so far. You’re making some very serious allegations.” Then he hung up.