This month, the Bush administration rolled out a new strategy to solve illegal immigration and just as quickly rolled it back in. It was called Operation Scheduled Departure, and it was simply this: It asked people to turn themselves in.
Those who showed up would have 90 days to get their affairs in order — to find foster parents for their citizen children; to settle mortgages and car loans; to prepare themselves for new lives in the old country. Of the 457,000 people facing deportation orders, eight took the bait. The program was scrapped after three weeks.
It is tempting to mock the administration for naïve conception and even worse execution, but that would give it too much credit for sincerity. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could never have expected to reap a big crop of undocumented people this way.
We suspect what it really wanted was to lend cover to its continuing campaign of raids and arrests. That is the real strategy. It is brutal, simplistic and also ineffective, but it is the one the country is sticking with.
By capturing almost nobody, the report-to-deport program has bolstered the talking points pushed by the immigration agency and the restrictionist hard-core: illegal immigrants are a vast class of criminal fugitives, and only more enforcement can solve this problem.
The New York Times tries to use common sense when it comes to immigration...
One in 20 workers is undocumented. Federal raids are seizing undocumented workers only a dozen or a hundred at a time, a rate that will leave millions in the shadows for decades to come. The raids are also sweeping up and terrorizing citizens. Mass deportation is an impossible mission, and a recipe for family and economic upheaval on a colossal scale: more than three million young Americans, native-born children, live in households where one or both parents are undocumented.
There is a better way. It is to build a system for immigrant workers and family members that more closely matches demand and supply — a system that people will go through, not around. It is to deal sanely with the hidden, hard-working undocumented by requiring them to legalize and assimilate, and using enforcement power to catch and deport the criminals.
That is the path toward a controlled border and a less vulnerable America — not quick fixes that sound good and solve nothing.
...unfortunately, we have idiots at City Hall who are more interested in votes than using common sense.
04.25.22 (RADIO): WSHU Latino group call on Connecticut lawmakers to open a Danbury charter school
06.03.22 (OP-ED): KUSHNER: "Career Academy ‘a great deal for Danbury"
On September 26, 2007, ten plaintiffs filed suit in response to an arrest of aday laborers at a public park in Danbury, Connecticut. Plaintiffs amended their complaint on November 26, 2007.
The amended complaint states that plaintiffs sought to remedy the continued discriminatory and unauthorized enforcement of federal immigration laws against the Latino residents of the City of Danbury by Danbury's mayor and its police department.
Plaintiffs allege that the arrests violated their Fourth Amendment rights and the Connecticut Constitution because defendants conducted the arrests without valid warrants, in the absence of exigent circumstances, and without probable cause to believe that plaintiffs were engaged in unlawful activity. In addition, plaintiffs allege that defendants improperly stopped, detained, investigated, searched and arrested plaintiffs. Plaintiffs also allege that defendants violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights when they intentionally targeted plaintiffs, and arrested and detained them on the basis of their race, ethnicity and perceived national origin. Plaintiffs raise First Amendment, Due Process and tort claims.
Plaintiffs request declaratory relief, damages and attorneys fees.
On September 26, 2007, ten plaintiffs filed suit in response to an arrest of aday laborers at a public park in Danbury, Connecticut. Plaintiffs amended their complaint on November 26, 2007.
