Big Beat

Despite having the highest deportation record of any American president in recorded history, Barack Obama has managed to achieve a 70 percent approval rating with Latino voters by pandering in the 11th hour.

A new poll conducted by Latino Decisions found that 70 percent of registered Latino voters would vote for Obama, while 22% said they would support Mitt Romney. This is the first time a Latino Decisions survey has shown Obama with 70 percent support in the last 20 months, a change the group attributes to the president voicing opposition to Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law the past 30 days.

Latino Decisions also credits President Obama’s June 15 pro-Dream Act announcement, which, let’s face it, amounts to a lot of election-time feel-good words and no permanent change for undocumented students. (“Now let’s be clear,” Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden, “This is not an amnesty. This is not a path to citizenship. It is not a permanent fix.”)

Here’s the thing: The president seems fond of (very) publicly decreeing liberal immigration policies for his administration without ever doing all that much to help pass liberal immigration legislation.

In June 2011, for example, the Department of Homeland Security issued an official memo instructing Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees to “refrain from pursuing non-citizens with close family, educational, military, or other ties in the U.S. and instead spend the agency’s limited resources on persons who pose a serious threat to public safety or national security.” This was widely circulated in the media and if you are the type of person who keeps up with the government through headlines, you’d think President Obama was pretty soft on immigrants.

In reality, though, the Obama administration arrested more than 150,000 noncriminal immigrants in fiscal year 2011. Two studies cited in a report from the National Association of Social Workers also found that, depending on the jurisdiction, anywhere from 55 percent to 87 percent of “serious criminal” arrests through ICE’s programs stem from misdemeanors such as traffic violations. This is because traffic violations are considered “level 2” crimes by ICE, placing them in the middle of the scale.

If voters would spend a modicum of time studying politicians’ actual records, they’d be a lot less inclined to vote based on campaign talking points and a lot more likely to demand a history of proven legislation that falls in line with their values before handing over their allegiance. Of course, the Democratic Party knows that no self-respecting Latino is going to vote for the Latino-hating Republicans, so they’ve really got us by the cojones. That’s a sad place for Latino voters to be.

It was Texas Justice vs. Federal Law Enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley last week after three U.S. citizens were arrested for shooting a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent they allegedly mistook for a suspicious vehicle casing their rural neighborhood at 3:30 in the morning Tuesday.

Pedro Alvarado, 41, and his 18-year-old son Arnoldo Alvarado were charged last Thursday with assault of a federal officer and knowingly using and carrying a firearm during a violent crime. A second, unnamed, 16 year-old son was charged with attempted capital murder in state juvenile court and was ordered detained pending another hearing later this month after the two sons shot and wounded ICE Special Agent Kelton Harrison. The charges came after the junior Alvarados shot and wounded Harrison while their father drove them in pursuit of the agent who was in an unmarked car near their home in Hargill, 25 miles northeast of McAllen. Harrison required surgery but is expected to fully recover.

There are three interesting parts of this case to me. 1. I didn’t know ICE was involved in drug enforcement to this degree. The court filings say that Harrison was conducting surveillance on an anticipated drug deal at a property near Hargill. 2. What would you do if you lived out in the boonies in an area known for drug trafficking and you saw a suspicious, unmarked car sitting in front of your neighbor’s house at 3:30 in the morning with the lights off? Would you go up to it and knock on the window and ask what they were up to? Me thinks not. I personally wouldn’t go shooting at the car, either. But then again, I’m not the sort of person who lives in the boonies, so I don’t own a gun. 3. Arnoldo Alvarado waived his Miranda Rights and gave a full confession to the police, an act that doesn’t give me the impression the family is hiding anything. According to court testimony, what ensued is out of a Robert Rodriguez film.

The senior Alvarado told his sons to get their guns. The two sons left the house with a 9mm handgun and a .22 caliber rifle. While their father drove with his lights out, the sons shot at Special Agent Harrison who was sitting in an unmarked silver vehicle with his lights out, as well.

Arnoldo ALVARADO stated the minor fired his .22 caliber rifle approximately six (6) times towards the silver vehicle. Arnoldo ALVARADO stated that he then fired two (2) rounds utilizing a 9mm handgun into the air, and fired numerous rounds at the silver vehicle.

That Arnoldo fired shots in the air would also indicate that the Alvarados were trying to scare the driver away. Harrison began driving away and Pedro Alvarado continued in pursuit while his sons continued shooting at the vehicle. Harrison eventually lost control of his vehicle at the intersection of FM 493 and FM 186. Home Security Investigations special agents arrived at the scene and discovered that Special Agent Harrison had been shot. He was transported to a local hospital.

The Alvarados also gave permission for a consent search, further indicating they had nothing to hide from the police. To complicate matters, two undocumented aliens from El Salvador were found there. Those men are being considered material witnesses because they were in the home before and after the Alvarados shot Special Agent Harrison.

The two Alvarado men could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted and the minor Alvarado is being charged with a state crime because the federal law is not set up to prosecute juveniles, but Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño wants the youth certified as an adult “because he has committed an adult crime.”

If, in fact, the Alvarados were doing what they say they were doing—protecting their neighborhood from what they likely thought was a criminal element—this would be a gross misuse of the justice system.

On June 20th, the same day a House panel voted to hold U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over failure to turn over documents concerning the Operation Fast & Furious gun-walking scandal, the parents of slain ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata and injured Special Agent Victor Avila filed notice that they would seek $62.5 million in claims from the U.S. government.  The notice came as President Obama asserted executive privilege involving the Arizona-based gun-walking program. 

Attorneys for Zapata’s family and Avila allege negligence and failure on the part of the government and several federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, regarding the attack against the two agents. Cartel members attacked Zapata and Avila on Feb. 15, 2011 in Mexico.

Gun-walking is when law enforcement agencies allow criminal suspects to “walk” off with guns, without stopping or even necessarily tracking them. In the Fast & Furious case, guns were allowed to cross the Arizona border into Mexico, ostensibly to follow the bad guys. The practice is considered highly irresponsible because the guns almost always end up being used to kill people.  A Fast & Furious gun was found at the murder scene of a U.S. border patrol agent in Arizona. The Zapata case has raised concerns about gun-walking in Texas after federal records showed agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) were watching when the gun that ultimately killed Zapata was sold in a store parking lot in Lancaster, Texas. The agents allowed the gun dealers to drive away and only apprehended them two weeks after Zapata’s highly publicized death.

Zapata’s family and Avila have not been able to obtain answers to many of their questions about the attack in Mexico. Questions such as:  Why were the agents driving a suburban from Mexico City to the U.S. when they could have flown? Why were they traveling without an armed escort of Mexican military or police—as is routine—on a stretch of highway known for narco-gang activity? Why were they traveling in a custom-made, $160,000 high-security vehicle that had locks that would disengage when put in park?  Why was the grand jury testimony of an FBI special agent in the investigation into the attack “accidentally taped over” and not re-recorded?

Attorneys Trey Martinez of Brownsville and Raymond L. Thomas of McAllen allege that “wrongdoing” on the part of the ATF, ICE and the FBI led to the murder and injury of the special agents, according to the Brownsville Herald.

“The struggle to obtain this information and find transparency amidst the massive efforts to deny access to some … of the significant information seems to be the priority at hand, not just for these two families, but for other law enforcement agents, families affected by some of these decisions, as well the legislative branch of our Federal Government,” said the lawyers on June 20.

The attorneys said the claims may be amended.  

Operation Too Hot To Handle, is one of a dozen other gun-walking operations the ATF has run in recent years. According to the ATF website, Too Hot To Handle involved about 300 weapons, mostly assault rifles and automatic pistols that were seized in Arizona, Texas and Mexico.

At the Texas Democratic Convention in Houston in early June, Gilberto Hinojosa of Brownsville, a former Cameron County judge and county Democratic chairman, was elected to lead the state Democratic Party. He’s the first Hispanic to lead either major party in Texas. That his election comes less than two years after the 2010 U.S. census is no surprise to me. This is the era of Tejanos taking back Texas through the power of sheer numbers. But will numbers translate to electoral gains for Democrats? Latinos, historically, have been apathetic about voting. Hinojosa says that’s the result of a flaw in the party’s strategy of late, its focus on so-called independent voters when Democrats should be courting the state’s sleeping demographic giant.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that [Hispanic turnout] is where we’re getting beat,” Hinojosa says. “Anything you want to look at with regards to the Democratic Party, it comes down to that. We’ve got African-Americans, the LGBT community, Asians, women. The one that’s under-performing in greatest numbers and the one that makes up the greatest number of [potential] voters is the Hispanic community.”

Hinojosa decided that his 23 years of living and working in Brownsville—with a population more than 90 percent Hispanic—as well as several years spent working as a legal services attorney for migrants and a member of the Democratic National Convention executive committee in Washington, D.C., was worth something to his party.

After the devastating 2010 elections, Hinojosa spent 18 months traveling around the state and developing what he believes is a winning strategy for Democrats.

That includes illustrating to Latinos just how badly not voting affects their everyday lives, whether through cutbacks in education or separation of families through a broken immigration system or engagement in wars America has no business fighting.

His plan is to tell people that much of what’s wrong in the state is a result of allowing the Republican Party to gain an overwhelming majority.

“People in our community need to understand that we are the party that helps people in a lower socioeconomic status. Public education programs, civil rights, women’s rights, minority students going to college—that was all done by Democrats.”

Hinojosa has walked the walk. The first in his family to go to college, the Rio Grande Valley native went from The University of Texas Pan-American in Edinburg to Georgetown University’s law school in Washington D.C. Graduating in 1978, he worked in legal aid until establishing a private practice in 1995.

The experience gave Hinojosa an appreciation for the subtle differences between Latinos in different areas of the state. For example, Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley, he says, are not as concerned with immigration as those in the major urban centers. “You didn’t see these huge demonstrations in South Texas that you saw in the big cities,” he explains. He plans an approach Democrats haven’t tried before: tailoring different messages to Latinos in different parts of the state. He hopes a fresh message from the party, more engagement in Hispanic communities, and more grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts will spur Latinos to the polls. Latino turnout in Texas is much lower than in heavily Hispanic California, Colorado and Nevada. In 2008, just 37 percent of Texas Latinos who were eligible to vote went to the polls, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—below the national average of 49 percent and far below the 58 percent of California Latinos who turned out. That has to change for Democrats to win elections in Texas.

Hopefully Hinojosa will succeed in influencing Blue Dog Texas Democrats, many of whom are Hispanic, to remain the party of the people. Of the three Democrats in the Texas Senate who voted for the anti-woman, pre-abortion sonogram bill, all were Hispanic. Of the five Democratic Texas House members who voted for it, three were Hispanic. That any of the Dems voted for it is disappointing.

Ultimately, Hinojosa knows the Dems have a secret weapon with Latinos—the angry rhetoric coming from some Republicans.

“What helps more than anything else is the [members of the] Republican Party who are so anti-Hispanic, to the point of being bigoted,” he says.

At the end of the day, that could be Hinojosa’s most powerful tool.

This year’s Democratic primary race for Congressional District 35, predicted to come down to long-time Congressman Lloyd Doggett and Bexar County Tax Assessor-Collector Sylvia Romo, is like a made-for-TV movie about Texas’ changing demographics.

The ingenious Republicans used redistricting to put Doggett in a tough position. He’s running against a Latina from San Antonio in a district based partly in Bexar County where many of the voters are Latino. The race comes at a time when Latinos, who will soon comprise a majority of Texans, have celebrated a new state Tejano monument and could stand to elect Texas’ first Latina congresswoman in Romo—at the expense of one of the few Anglo politicians who has championed their causes for nearly 20 years. The alternative is to keep Doggett, a proven advocate, and turn their back on history. For Latino voters in CD 35, it’s an unenviable decision to make.

Neither Romo or Doggett lives in the newly drawn district, which begins in Travis County and runs a long skinny way down to Hispanic-heavy San Antonio. Only grass-roots candidate and Air Force veteran Maria Luisa Alvarado lives in District 35. Alvarado, who ran a lost-cause race for lieutenant governor against David Dewhurst in 2006, is considered a long shot because of her lack of funding. Both Doggett and Romo plan to move to District 35, (Doggett lives five blocks east, currently), should they win the primary on Tuesday.

“The congressman is running in CD 35 because he has always said that he will run in whichever district has the largest number of his current constituents,” Ashley Bliss-Herrera, a spokesman for the Doggett campaign, told me.

Of the five congressional districts that Travis County was sliced into, District 35 is the only one that maintains a Democratic majority. Of course, it also stretches down to San Antonio—a deliberate move by the GOP to oust Doggett by saddling him with a Hispanic majority voter base that doesn’t have a history with him. (The GOP tried this same strategy in 2003-2004, when Tom DeLay’s mid-decade redistricting plan put Doggett in a majority-Latino district that stretched from Austin to the Rio Grande Valley. Doggett won reelection anyway. The district was redrawn for the 2006 election after federal courts invalidated parts of the DeLay map.)

Romo, a former state rep who’s now attempting to leap from a county office to Congress, has some serious confidence in her raza-ness to run against Doggett in any race. But it’s a gamble that could pay off.

“This is a district that was designed to elect a Latino and my feeling is that is what it’ll do,” Romo told me. “I think many in the district see this as an opportunity to make history by electing the first Latina from Texas to Congress.”

She’s also tapped into a dark secret I, as a liberal Hispanic, hate to say out loud: Hispanic Democrats in Texas are not necessarily so liberal. At least based on her platform of “non-partisanship” and emphasis on job creation and fiscal health rather than national healthcare or broad immigration reform—two issues Doggett has a history of championing.

The race may hinge not only on money—which Doggett has much more of— but also who turns out to vote, the so-called “liberal elite” Hispanic who, in many ways, bucks traditional Latino mores, or the working class voters who share more conservative values.

Doggett has a proven record of taking on Republicans and advocating for education, fair taxation and a host of other progressive causes. Doggett was also endorsed in the race by both the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express-News. But Romo is the liberal ideal come to fruition: a minority woman representing her own district—and an experienced public official who would be Texas’ first ever Latina in Congress.

It’s liberal ideals vs. the liberal dream actualized.