Gutierrez: Obama Must Act Now and Lead Reform Efforts

Congressman Luis Gutierrez wrote on Huffington Post today:

It is open season on the Latino community in Arizona. In Phoenix, Tucson, and across the state, people in Latino neighborhoods are afraid to leave their houses, afraid to be apart from their children for even a minute, and afraid to walk the streets because they feel their arrest on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant could happen at any moment. It is a horrifying glimpse at what our future holds across the country if we continue down the path the Obama administration is leading us on immigration.

This week, we saw how destructive things are getting. The combination of a harsh piece of anti-immigrant legislation advancing in the Arizona legislature and a massive, well-publicized federal enforcement action against a broad human smuggling network has sent the unmistakable message to Arizona’s one million immigrants and two million Hispanics: there is a target on your backs and authorities are coming after you.

President Obama, who promised immigration reform but has failed to make it a priority or use his office to make good on his campaign promises, is now able to see what lies ahead. The Obama administration has escalated mass deportation as our singular approach to immigrants and this has combined in Arizona with anti-immigrant hysteria that is festering to the point that state and local elected opportunists are taking matters into their own hands – with complete federal acquiescence.

We are now deporting people at a rate of 1,000 per day — with nearly half of the arrests in the state of Arizona — and now the state legislature is on the verge of escalating that pace dramatically. A law (SB 1070) that passed the state House this week and is probably headed to Governor’s desk for signature, authorizes state and local police to round up anyone “suspected” of being an undocumented immigrant. As if that weren’t bad enough, the law throws in a bounty of $500 in fines and a possible misdemeanor conviction on criminal trespassing if the particular lawman involved happens to guess correctly and the person they arrest cannot prove they are here legally.

As we know from experience in Arizona and elsewhere, giving police such a broad mandate to arrest and book people “suspected” of looking a certain way isn’t just an invitation to racial profiling, it’s like waving a green flag and saying “gentlemen start your engines.” It is an insult to American justice and one of the harshest assaults on basic civil rights in recent American history.

Then Thursday, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency compounded the panic with one of the biggest Arizona enforcement actions in history, taking down an alleged state-wide smuggling ring. Let’s be clear, I support targeted enforcement against smuggling rings exploiting our broken immigration system and preying on vulnerable immigrants, but the timing of this show of force could not have been more destructive.

Television screens across the state flashed images of 800 federal officers unleashed in Phoenix and Tucson, taking people to jail and multiplying the sense of siege in immigrant and Latino communities. After years of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Latino neighborhood sweeps, harsher and harsher state laws that target Latinos and immigrants, and escalating federal deportation, I’m afraid we have turned a very dangerous corner in the war on immigrants.

And we have heard nothing from the President. Click here for the rest of the post.

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