Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ category
FOX 11 – GOOD DAY L.A.
August 30th, 2010Will the immigration reform issue divide or unite our nation?
August 27th, 2010Democrats and Republicans cannot seem to come together to resolve our broken immigration system. Will this issue continue to divide communities throughout the United States? do you know of anyone who has been a victim of “HATE CRIMES” due to being an immigrant?
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR – California Republicans set out to woo Latino voters
August 24th, 2010http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Election-2010/2010/0824/California-Republicans-set-out-to-woo-Latino-voters
California Republicans set out to woo Latino voters
California Republicans have rejected the idea of a tough immigration law like Arizona’s and are reaching out to Latino voters. But they’ll be carrying a lot of baggage on that uphill climb.
From left to right, Tony Strickland, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, Damon Dunn, and Abel Maldonado thank supporters after speaking at the California Republican Party 2010 Fall Convention Aug. 20 in San Diego.
Chris Park/AP
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By Daniel B. Wood, Staff writer / August 24, 2010
Los Angeles
The California Republican Party came out of its semi-annual convention this past weekend high-fiving itself for fielding a diverse ticket to reach out to Latinos, a crucial voting bloc for November’s elections. But can the California GOP overcome its own history on immigration issues – and that of the national party – enough to persuade a significant portion of Latinos to back their candidates?
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.The percentage of the California electorate that is Latino has more than doubled in the past 20 years – from 10 percent to 21 percent – but Republican candidates aren’t getting very much of that pie.
The most recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll shows that 63 percent of the state’s Latino voters are registered Democrats, with about 19 percent Republican.
“I’m the first to admit my party has not done a good job of communicating with Latino voters,” says Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, the first Latino Republican to hold statewide office in more than 100 years. Mr. Maldonado estimates that Republicans get as little as 20 percent of the Latino vote. But “we should be getting more than 50 percent,” he says.
Maldonado says his personal tactic to change that is by “taking the Republican message directly to voters whenever possible” in his reelection campaign, he says. He spent much of last week campaigning in Latino-heavy East Los Angeles, speaking with chambers of commerce, and this week is headed to California’s Central Valley, where Latino unemployment is nearly 40 percent. “Some people may not like what I stand for, but showing up shows respect that we have not given them in the past. Showing up shows respect, and they accept that.”
The California GOP is banking on the hope that Latino voters are concerned about much more than immigration policy. At its convention last weekend, Republicans devised a platform its leaders hope will appeal to Latinos voters’ two top concerns: education and employment, which Maldonado and others feel are a broader concern than immigration policy. Of Latinos, “17 percent are out of work,” says Crystal Feldman, press secretary for the California Republican Party, “and 50 percent don’t graduate high school. We think we are giving them a diverse slate of candidates that will face their issues head on.”
Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, a former CEO of eBay, and US Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, both tout job creation as a high priority.
But the idea that Republicans have embraced diversity is dismissed by Hal Dash, chairman and CEO of Cerrell Associates, a Democratic strategy consulting firm. “Two white women … is a diverse ticket? I don’t think so,” says Mr. Dash. Though the GOP’s top eight candidates include three women, one black, and one Latino, ”the top of the ticket is what gets all the focus,” he says.
California Latinos’ wariness of Republicans goes back to 1994, says Dash, when Republican Gov. Pete Wilson backed Proposition 187, a ballot measure that denied education and social services to illegal immigrants. The measure passed but was later overturned by courts.
“Republicans dug themselves a giant bombshell crater with Pete Wilson and [Prop.] 187, and have yet to dig out of it,” he says.
California Republicans’ national party colleagues aren’t making outreach to Latinos any easier of late. Arizona’s passage of a tough law to crack down on illegal immigrants has divided the party and riled immigration rights groups. Ms. Whitman is reported to have nixed a California GOP resolution endorsing it.
“The California Republican Party failed to endorse Arizona’s controversial immigration law,” says Jessica Levinson, political reform director for the Center for Governmental Studies. “In addition, since winning her party’s primary election, Whitman appears to be softening her stance toward immigration. She has said she opposes [Arizona's] SB 1070 and Prop. 187. These moves may be, at least in part, attempts to obtain more Latino support. Republicans are likely hoping Latinos will look at those decisions favorably,” she says.
The California GOP’s marquee candidates face another challenge: identifying with and reaching Latino voters. Whitman and Ms. Fiorina both have piles of cash they are spending on their campaigns, but that could backfire, says Randy Ertll, executive director of El Centro de Accion Social in Pasadena, Calif.
“The question is: Are Republicans genuine in courting the Latino vote?” he says. “Actions speak louder than words, and thus Republicans have fallen short in truly outreaching and helping the Latino community…. The Latino electorate is more informed and aware of the Republican anti-immigrant stand,” says Mr. Ertll.
Republicans do not seem to know how to reach Latino voters, says Ertll, “and they continue to hire consultants and try to run token candidates – who many times are out of touch with their own communities.”
Comments Whitman and Fiorina made during their primary races aren’t going to help them either. Candidates can’t make it past the primary unless they appeal to their more conservative base, says Dash, pointing to immigration. Two weeks before her primary, the Los Angeles Times quoted Whitman speaking out against amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the Associated Press reported that Whitman would ban the admission of undocumented students to state-funded colleges.
“Opponents to Whitman and Fiorina will have a million sound bites to choose from, because there was lots of immigrant bashing” leading up to the primary, says Dash.
The GOP might be waging an uphill battle, but it has shown it can appeal to Latino voters in the past, says Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration in national campaigns for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the US.
“When Pete Wilson was spearheading the demonization of Latinos in California, George W. Bush was governor of Texas and was contemplating his approach to the White House. He realized the importance of reaching out to Latinos and newly naturalized Americans, and achieved high support from these communities,” says Ms. Martinez.
“As the 2008 election proved, the Latino vote is important in diverse states like Indiana, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Arizona and New Mexico,” she adds. “It’s hard to envision a GOP candidate for national office winning without appealing to a significant portion of the Latino vote.” [Editor's note: The original version has been changed to clarify comments from Ms. Martinez.]
REGISTER NOW: Flourishing in Challenging Times – 2010 Fall Conference of the Southland Council of Teachers of English
August 9th, 2010Flourishing in Challenging Times
2010 Fall Conference of the Southland Council of Teachers of English
SCTE is a local affiliate of CATE (California Association of Teachers of English)
Saturday, October 9 , 7:30 am—3:30 pm
at The Radisson Hotel, Whittier, California
Explore ways you and your students can flourish with our featured speakers
MORNING SPEAKERS:
William Archila, a poet who writes of Central American unrest and the immigrant experience; author of The Art of Exile; and Randy Jurado Ertll, author of Hope in Times of Darkness: A Salvadoran American Experience and executive director of El Centro de Accion Social in Pasadena.
LUNCHEON SPEAKER:
Alan Sitomer, award-winning author of five young- adult novels, creator of The BookJam (a new curriculum tool), author of methodol-ogy texts for English teachers, and California’s 2007 Teacher of the year
Stimulating break-out sessions, including
✦Pia Alexander: teaching novels, emphasizing rhetoric
✦Tracy Sprague:
✦Janis Stallones
✦Jo Anne Mitchell: The picture book — far more than just pictures
✦Jane Medina: Poetry for Your Diverse Classroom
SPECIAL RECESSION PRICING: $50 for SCTE members, $90 for non-members (includes price of membership), $10 for student teachers (enrolled in a student teaching program). Add $10 to registration after Sept. 30.
College credit available from LA Harbor College; some workshops meet GATE certification hours.
Name____________________________________________ ❑ Teacher for ____ years ❑ Other_________________
School______________________________________________District______________________________________
Home address____________________________________________________________________________________
e-mail_______________________________________________ Home phone_________________________________
_____ $ 50 CATE/SCTE Member registration
_____ $ 90 Registration, includes CATEb/SCTE membership
_____ $ 10 Student teacher registration
For questions: Courtney Lockwood: courtney.mo3@verizon.net or Nancy Himel: nancy@colorfulsky.com
Pay by credit card at www.CATEweb.org
Make checks payable to SCTE
Add $10 to registrations submitted after Sept. 30.
Send form to Richard Hockensmith, SCTE Registrar, P.O. Box 363, Angeles Oaks, CA 92305 E-mail inquiries to hockscte@msn.com
VOICE OF AMERICA – Book Recalls Troubles, Promise of Salvadoran Immigrant Life in US
August 8th, 2010Book Recalls Troubles, Promise of Salvadoran Immigrant Life in US
Mike O’Sullivan | Los Angeles 06 July 2010
Photo: M. O’Sullivan – VOA
Randy Jurado Ertll
At least one million people from the Central American nation of El Salvador have made the journey northward to the United States, where they often face hardship in places like inner-city Los Angeles.
Randy Jurado Ertll says the Salvadoran immigrant story is not often heard, “Because there’s not much literature. If you really look at it, you go to the bookstores, the libraries, you rarely find any books that speak of the Salvadoran-American experience,” he explained. “It’s usually Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Puerto Rican; so I felt it was about time that we started telling our own story too.”
El Salvador is a small Central American nation of six million people. It was torn by civil war in the 1980s and hundreds of thousands headed northward to escape the turmoil and poverty. Many entered the United States illegally, and few were granted political asylum.
The U.S. Census Bureau says that in 2007, there were 1.5 million people of Salvadoran background in the United States. Two-thirds were foreign-born, and nearly 40 percent lived in California. Ertll wanted to write a book that tells their story through his own experience.
He runs a social agency called El Centro de Accion Social in the small city of Pasadena, which operates programs for low-income residents, including after-school tutoring and English classes.
Most who take part are Hispanic and some, like Ertll, are Salvadoran-American.
The writer is the product of three cultures. His father was born in France and his mother was Salvadoran. They met in the United States, where Ertll was born.
Because he is U.S.-born, he is an American citizen. But his mother, a Salvadoran who had overstayed her visa, was deported when he was two years old, and he went with her to El Salvador.
When Ertll was five, his mother was able to return to the United States. They settled in a minority neighborhood in south-central Los Angeles plagued by crime and violence. When he was just six-years-old, Ertll recalls a young man across the street being fatally shot. His mother tried in vain to stop the bleeding.
There were racial tensions between African-Americans and Latino immigrants. He says many friends joined gangs, and some would later be killed or wind up in prison. He says the pattern has continued with the younger generation.
“You don’t get an education; you drop out, then you join a gang; and then you live by selling drugs, by hurting your own community,” he said.
Ertll was lucky to get some help along the way, in one case, from a concerned Irish-American teacher who spoke fluent Spanish and helped him learn to read and write, first in Spanish, then in English.
When Ertll was a teenager, his life would change when he was chosen for a program that sends inner-city youngsters to small American cities to pursue their schooling. He left south central Los Angeles to live with a host family in the north-central U.S. city of Rochester, Minnesota. It was home to a large computer manufacturing plant and a world-renowned medical clinic.
“And I would say it was great there because [it was a] different city; it was beautiful; you have IBM, you have the Mayo Clinic, great schools there,” he recalled. “And that was, I would say, a wonderful experience because I was able to focus on studying without all of the hassles of south-central [Los Angeles]; because, believe me, you’re not safe there.”
Returning to Los Angeles, Ertll focused on his studies at Occidental College, where a young Barack Obama had spent two years as a student a decade earlier.
Ertll studied political science and Spanish and then spent a year in Washington. He worked in the office of California Congresswoman Hilda Solis, who has since become the U.S. secretary of labor. Returning to Los Angeles, he worked with the Latino community.
He says inner-city Los Angeles remains a place of hardship with too few jobs. He fears violence that erupted in the city in the 1960s and the 1990s could happen again.
“Those areas can’t continue to be neglected, because otherwise you’re going to have the same problems. You had the Watts riots, you had the L.A. riots; and it’s just a repetitive cycle of violence,” he said.
Randy Jurado Ertll says that immigrant stories are complicated, and that life for new arrivals is difficult. He says for him and many others, the way to a better future is through education.
He believes that big cities should improve their schools. He also says Washington needs to tackle the difficult issue of immigration reform, and resolve the plight of millions of mixed-status families, composed of both American citizens and illegal immigrants.
‘It was a terrifying time’ in South Central – THEN and NOW
August 4th, 2010It is interesting how the L.A. Times did not cover hate crimes and many murders that were occuring in South Central Los Angeles before 1992. Especially attacks and murders against African American and Latino community members who lived there in the 1980s…now this story is shedding some light about those awful NIGHTMARES – that were not a scary Hollywood movie – BUT A SAD REALITY where thousands of kids/youth had to endure and grow with. How about the hundreds of immigrants that were beaten and murdered during that period of time too? maybe one day that story will be told too…
‘It was a terrifying time’
More than 100 women died during a 10-year period that serial killers roamed South L.A.
LAPD Det. Sal LaBarbera, assigned to the 77th Street Division in the mid-1980s, was once dispatched to five homicide scenes in one night. (Los Angeles Times, Gary Friedman / August 2, 2010)
PHOTOS: California’s most notorious killers
Map: Serial Killers in South L.A.
Graphic: Southland killers
Multimedia
Chart: Los Angeles serial killers
By Scott Gold and Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles Times
August 4, 2010
E-mail Print Share Text Size la-me-serial-killers-20100804
On a Monday morning in the spring of 2007, a prosecutor named Truc Do stood to tell a jury about the world in which Chester Turner had killed — and to offer a requiem for a dark chapter in the heart of Los Angeles.
Turner lived with his mom on Century Boulevard, drank fortified wine and made a sporadic living delivering pizzas and selling crack. His murderous binge, which took the lives of 10 women, began in 1987, a perilous time in South Los Angeles.
Jobs had vanished. Crack cocaine, a new drug so powerful and profitable it was worth dying over, ravaged the neighborhood. Gangs carved up the streets. The LAPD recorded a violent crime every eight minutes. It was a world, the prosecutor told the jury, in which “life itself is degraded.”
It was a world in which people could be killed with impunity.
The recent arrest of another man accused of being a serial killer active in that era, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. — allegedly the long-sought Grim Sleeper — prompted jubilation and noisy public pronouncements. The celebrations served to obscure, once again, a terrible truth about South Los Angeles: During a 10-year period beginning in 1984, multiple serial killers operated there, all of them targeting young, poor, African American women.
All told, between 1984 and 1993, LAPD detectives estimate that more than 100 women, almost all African American, were killed in South L.A. and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Some of the cases have been solved; others remain open. Detectives say many are tied to five serial killers operating in the area.
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FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this article and its headline stated that more than 100 women in South L.A. had been slain by serial killers; not all the deaths have been linked to serial killers.
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Franklin, 57, has been charged with 10 counts of murder. Turner, 43, is on death row after raping and strangling 10 women, one of whom was six months pregnant. Louis Craine was convicted of strangling four women between 1984 and 1987; he later died in prison, at 31. Michael Hughes, 54, was accused of killing eight, four in South L.A. and nearby Inglewood. And Daniel Lee Seibert confessed to killing 13 across the United States, two of them in South L.A.; he died in prison, at 53, in 2008.
Police believe they killed several additional women as well.
Biological evidence suggests that at least two more men, who have not been apprehended, were each responsible for at least four more deaths, officials said. That would mean at least seven serial killers were preying on women in the same neighborhood at roughly the same time.
During the years in which they were active, the South Los Angeles killers never earned the noir nicknames of the region’s other infamous killers — the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler.
Those other crimes were notorious sagas that gained national attention and had parts of the metropolis in a state of panic. By contrast, few people in South L.A., including parents of victims, were even aware of a serial killer operating in their neighborhood — much less five or more. While the more publicized cases had distinctive hallmarks, in South L.A. there were so many people being killed, almost all of them from the margins of society, that it was difficult for neighbors or police to pinpoint any patterns.
The rapes and murders of dozens of young women were, effectively, lost in the crime wave.
“Could you imagine — more than 100 women killed and nobody notices?” said Margaret Prescod, who founded an organization 24 years ago to press for a more aggressive response to the killings and now hosts a radio show. “Could you imagine it in Beverly Hills? Palos Verdes?”
South Los Angeles was once a storied African American community. The nation’s first hotel financed by African American businessmen was built in 1928 on South Central Avenue. West Coast jazz was pretty much invented in the surrounding clubs, and a revolutionary notion — of middle-class African American families — was nurtured there.
But the neighborhood could never fully shake off its entrenched poverty and bouts of violence. At times, as in the riots of 1965, the area degenerated into civic collapse.
Over time, the factories and union jobs, which had drawn thousands of African American families from Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere, vanished. Public housing moved in, freeway projects divided communities, and residential segregation deepened. Membership in gangs skyrocketed.
By Nov. 18, 1984, when 30-year-old divorcee Sheila Rae Burton, who also used the name Burris, was found stabbed to death on Maie Avenue — making her the first victim linked positively to one of the serial killers, though authorities suspect the killings began before that — South L.A. was in crisis.
That year, Los Angeles police investigated 757 murders, 240% more than they investigated in 2009, and 51,247 violent crimes, 216% more than they investigated in 2009. And they did it with 2,000 fewer officers than they have today.
Veteran LAPD Det. Sal LaBarbera, who was assigned to the 77th Street Division in the mid-1980s, was once dispatched to five homicide scenes in one night.
“It was triage,” he said. “I took the first one. My partner took the second. We were leapfrogging each other…. We would process the crime scene and complete our reports in time to go to the next crime scene and do it all over again.”
“It was a terrifying time,” Det. Cliff Shepard said. “Homicide detectives were overwhelmed.”
It would take nearly 20 years, Police Chief Charlie Beck said, for the city to recover “our faith in our ability to affect the outcome.” At the time, he said, “it seemed like the situation was hopeless and we would never recover from the downward spiral.”
Three-strikes laws and civil injunctions against gangs — two effective law enforcement tools that target career criminals and curtail gang activity — hadn’t yet been adopted.
Technology that police take for granted now wouldn’t arrive for years. Forget DNA analysis, which would eventually break three of the serial killer cases — detectives are quick to say that they had to use pay phones to coordinate responses to shootings.
Gang members were setting aside revolvers for semiautomatic handguns — so instead of manually reloading, they could swap out magazines of bullets, giving rise to the drive-by shooting.
The LAPD, too, was a different organization than it is today. Officers in South L.A. had adopted paramilitary tactics, crashing through the walls of suspects’ homes and wearing balaclava hoods during raids.
Racial animosity and two-way distrust between residents and the police, which would boil over in the 1992 riots, was palpable and meant little cooperation from the community during law enforcement investigations. “It was us against them,” said Carol Sobel, a prominent attorney who has fought in court to diversify the department.
Crack, meanwhile, was creating important cultural changes on the streets — particularly for women who were addicts, prostitutes or mentally ill, as were many of the serial killer victims.
Hundreds of addicts became “strawberries”— trading casual sex for small rocks of crack. In previous years, prostitutes had been offered some modicum of protection by their pimps or at least by working in the area’s many cheap hotels. Now, driven by addiction and expediency, many forsook any notion of safety, taking clients to abandoned houses, vacant lots and dead-end alleys, which is where their bodies began turning up.
Regina Washington, 27, six months pregnant, was found in a garage off South Figueroa Street. Myrtle Collier, 37, in an alley in Lawndale. Verna Williams, 36, in a stairwell of 68th Street Elementary School.
Barbara Ware grew up in a stable household; her father owned a furniture store on West Florence Avenue. She was a high school graduate. She was raising a daughter. She roller-skated Saturdays and went to church Sundays.
But she too succumbed to crack. On Jan. 10, 1987, her body was found in an alley off East 56th Street, a plastic bag draped over her head, trash covering her body. She was 23.
Ware was the fourth of Lonnie Franklin’s victims, according to investigators — but 21 years went by before her parents learned her death was tied to a serial killer.
“At that time, it was just another young African American lady,” said her stepmother, Diana Ware. “It didn’t get a lot of attention.”
She took a breath, then noted that Barbara Ware’s daughter is now 30 and has a daughter of her own. “Barbara would be a grandmother,” Diana Ware said.
Whether the city could have done more to combat the serial killers at the time remains a touchy issue.
Police bristle at the suggestion. LaBarbera, the LAPD detective, said all of the cases were investigated with “vigor.” Police officials say they first formed a task force in 1986 to tackle the killings, assigning 49 detectives who logged 4,800 tips and solved dozens of felonies, including two murders — even if they didn’t solve the serial killings right away.
That task force disbanded in 1988, but in 2001, the LAPD created its cold-case unit, charged with examining 9,000 unsolved murders dating to 1960. In 2007, a homeless man found the body of 25-year-old Janecia Peters in a dumpster off Western Avenue. DNA analysis linked that killing to two others that had already been connected to a 1987 slaying, which had, in turn, been linked to seven other deaths through ballistics evidence.
An investigation team dubbed the 800 Task Force, named after the room number in the LAPD’s former headquarters where the detectives worked, was formed to examine the connections. That work, and an experimental DNA dragnet, eventually led to the arrest of Lonnie Franklin, the alleged Grim Sleeper — an arrest, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said, which demanded “two decades of exhaustive detective work.”
But for Prescod, a founder in 1986 of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, the relief that came with the latest arrest was tempered by decades of frustration — and the sense that more could have been done.
Prescod’s organization had to lobby and cajole to get a reward established in the killings, to get the LAPD to coordinate its efforts with other law enforcement agencies, to get authorities to release to the public a composite sketch of one killer.
For several years, the city insisted on using the label “Prostitution Murders” to refer to the killings. That was not accurate — many, but by no means all, of the victims were prostitutes, and some were also mothers or nursing students — but it wasn’t just an issue of semantics, Prescod argued. By portraying the victims of the killers for so many years as the “dregs of society,” she said, “it gave a false sense of security to women who were not doing those kinds of things.”
Truc Do, the former prosecutor, said the victims of the South L.A. killers weren’t always the most sympathetic cases — and, she agreed, that shouldn’t matter. Do has since gone into private practice; she is a litigator with the L.A. firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.
“You’ve got victims that some people may not feel sympathy for, because they had a drug addiction, or prostituted their bodies to feed that addiction,” Do said. “It’s human nature. But these victims were prey. And they were so vulnerable.”
Prescod also cited incidents in which the investigation fell short. Police have acknowledged that they failed to aggressively follow through after a man called 911 to report seeing Barbara Ware’s body being hauled out of a van in 1987. Police did eventually release a tape of the call — 22 years later. Authorities also missed an opportunity to catch the alleged Grim Sleeper because his DNA was not collected as required under a 2004 law.
The only woman known to have escaped an attack by the Grim Sleeper gave police a detailed description of his unusual orange Ford Pinto with white racing stripes. Police appear to have canvassed Franklin’s street after that, but failed to see he had an orange Pinto. Franklin continued to drive the car for years; neighbors never reported it, though the Pinto was cited in posters at laundromats and markets.
Perhaps the holes in the investigation, Prescod argued, could help explain how most of the killers were so brazen and lived such public lives. Franklin showed one acquaintance a box of women’s underwear he kept behind his house. In one case, Chester Turner walked no further to kill than around the corner from his cheap hotel. He also reportedly attended a post-funeral dinner at the family of one victim.
“Lessons can be learned from this,” Prescod said. “There is no excuse to have a hierarchy of value in human life.”
scott.gold@latimes.com
andrew.blankstein@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Pasadena Star-News / Immigration appeal could be heard in Pasadena
July 31st, 2010Immigration showdown plays out in court and on the street; appeal could be heard in Pasadena
PHOENIX – The showdown over Arizona’s immigration law played out in court and on sun-splashed streets Thursday, as the state sought to reinstate key parts of the measure and angry protesters chanted that they refused to “live in fear.”
By day’s end, dozens were arrested in Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, officials geared up for the remote possibility that the Arizona’s challenge to a federal judge’s decision to block the law’s most controversial elements could be heard in federal court in Pasadena.
“The important thing is that people either for or against it don’t resort to violence,” Randy Ertll, head of El Centro de Accion Social said. “This has been such a volatile and heated issue.”
Regardless of calls for calm, little happened Thursday that dampened the raging immigration debate.
The judge has been threatened. Protesters rallied. And, the sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county vowed to continue targeting illegal immigrants. Lawmakers or candidates in as many as 18 states say they still want to push similar measures.
In Los Angeles, 10 people chained themselves together and hundreds of others marched around them during a protest that shut down a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard for more than six hours.
The protest began shortly after 10 a.m. Just after 3 p.m., officers began cutting the chains and carrying the protesters away.
“There were a total of 10 arrests,” Los Angeles Police Officer Rosario Herrera said.
City officials said if the Arizona’s appeal does come to Pasadena, the prospect of similar protests are not something to be feared.
“People should be encouraged to voice their opinions on this issue,” Pasadena City Councilman Victor Gordo said.
Despite the judge’s ruling, members of the Los Angeles City Council said the city has no immediate plans to lift the city’s economic boycott of the state.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, life continued as before, with officials sending back people who were captured while attempting to cross.
In Phoenix, hundreds of the law’s opponents massed at a downtown jail, beating on the metal door and forcing sheriff’s deputies to call for backup. Officers arrested at least 23 people, and dozens more were detained elsewhere throughout the day.
Activists focused their rage at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the 78-year-old ex-federal drug agent known for his immigration sweeps.
Outside his downtown office, marchers chanted “Sheriff Joe, we are here. We will not live in fear.” One was dressed in a papier-mache “Sheriff Joe” head and prison garb. Arpaio said he’d continue with a Thursday sweep.
“I’m not going to be intimidated and stopped,” he said. “If I have to go out and get in the car, I’ll do it.”
Elsewhere activists, armed with video cameras and aided by others listening to police scanners, roamed the county’s neighborhoods, saying they were ready to document any deputies harassing Hispanics.
Since Wednesday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton has received thousands of phone calls and e-mails. Some were positive, but others were “from people venting and who have expressed their displeasure in a perverted way,” said David Gonzales, the U.S. Marshal for Arizona.
Gonzales said his agents are taking some of the threats to Bolton seriously. He wouldn’t say how many there were or whether any threats were coming from recognized hate groups. He refused to discuss any extra security measures, which U.S. marshals routinely provide federal judges.
The protests, counter-protests and threats came as Gov. Jan Brewer appealed Bolton’s ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in San Francisco, but also hears cases in Pasadena.
The likelihood of the Arizona immigration debate playing out on the streets of the Crown City depends on whether Brewer seeks to expedite the state’s challenge. If that occurs, then the case would be heard at the Richard H. Chambers courthouse in Pasadena, according to Cathy A. Catterson, a spokeswoman for the Ninth Circuit and Court of Appeals executive.
Arizona has more than 400,000 illegal immigrants, and its border with Mexico is awash with smugglers who funnel narcotics and immigrants throughout the U.S. The law’s supporters say the influx of illegal migrants drains vast sums of money from hospitals, education and other services.
The Obama administration has decided to send National Guard troops to the border states to help federal agents with security.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border in punishing temperatures of more than 100 degrees Thursday, two immigrants climbed a fence and fled on foot, while a third threw rocks in the direction of Border Patrol agents. The officers arrested them.
The elements of the new law that took effect on Thursday will likely aid Arpaio in his immigration efforts.
In her temporary injunction, Bolton delayed the most contentious provisions of the law, including a section that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws.
Bolton indicated the federal government’s case has a good chance at succeeding in its argument that federal immigration law trumps state law.
But she allowed police to enforce the law’s bans on blocking vehicle traffic when seeking or offering day-labor services and a revision to the smuggling ban that lets officers stop drivers if they suspect motorists have broken traffic laws.
Bolton also let officers enforce a new prohibition on driving or harboring illegal immigrants in furtherance of their illegal presence.
Opponents of the law said the ruling sends a strong message to other states hoping to replicate the law.
But a Republican lawmaker in Utah said the state will likely take up a similar law anyway when that state’s legislative session starts up in 2011.
“The ruling … should not be a reason for Utah to not move forward,” Utah state Rep. Carl Wimmer said.
Staff writer Dan Abendschein, City News Service and Associated Press writers Michelle Price, Paul Davenport and Bob Christie in Phoenix, Alicia A. Caldwell in El Paso, Texas, and Sara Kugler Frazier in New York contributed to this story.
YOU CAN PRE-ORDER BOOK: UPCOMING SPANISH LANGUAGE EDITION OF HOPE IN TIMES OF DARKNESS
July 25th, 2010
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“Urgente y original, la historia de Randy Jurado Ertll nos obliga a resolver algunos de los problemas más urgentes e importantes de nuestros tiempos.”—Matt Rothschild, editor de The Progressive Magazine Randy Jurado Ertll, un salvadoreño americano, creció en el Sur Centro de Los Ángeles a fines de los años 1970 y durante los 80, y también vivió en El Salvador cuando era un niño, así como en Rochester, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., y en Alexandria, Virginia. En cada una de estas ciudades presenció la dinámica y retos de la comunidad Latina. Porque ha vivido y trascendido las luchas, es capaz de captar una imagen realista y compasiva de la comunidad Latina a través de esta experiencia convincente narrada en este poderoso libro.
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NAACP retracts criticism of USDA worker
July 20th, 2010NAACP leaders called Tuesday on the Obama administration to reconsider its ousting of a black Agriculture Department worker, saying that a conservative website edited her comments to make them seem racist.
NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a statement that the group was “snookered” into believing that USDA employee Shirley Sherrod expressed racist sentiments at a local NAACP meeting in Georgia earlier this year. Jealous said conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, whose website posted video of Sherrod’s remarks, deceived millions of people by releasing only partial clips. He said the full video makes clear that Sherrod was telling a story of racial unity.
“The tape of Ms. Sherrod’s speech at an NAACP banquet was deliberately edited to create a false impression of racial bias, and to create a controversy where none existed,” Jealous said Tuesday afternoon. “This just shows the lengths to which extremist elements will go to discredit legitimate opposition.”
The Obama administration said it was standing by its decision to oust Sherrod, despite evidence that her remarks were misconstrued and calls for the USDA to reconsider.
The controversy began Monday when the conservative website biggovernment.com posted a two-minute, 38-second video clip of Sherrod’s remarks to a local NAACP chapter. The Huffington Post said a YouTube video was then aired on Fox News. The footage has stoked racial and political tension amid allegations by the NAACP that the Tea Party movement is bigoted.
Newsvine: Was USDA official unfairly forced out?
Sherrod said she was on the road Monday when USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her and told her the White House wanted her to resign because her comments were generating a cable news controversy.
“They called me twice,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “The last time they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”
‘It hurts me’
Sherrod said administration officials weren’t interested in hearing her explanation. “It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care,” she said. “I’m not a racist … Anyone who knows me knows that I’m for fairness.”
The administration gave a different version of events.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — not the White House — made the decision to ask Sherrod to resign, said USDA spokeswoman Chris Mather. She said Sherrod willingly resigned when asked.
In a statement, Vilsack said the controversy surrounding Sherrod’s comments could, rightly or wrongly, cause people to question her decisions as a federal employee and lead to lingering doubts about civil rights at the agency, which has a troubled history of discrimination.
But Sherrod, in an interview with CNN, said her remarks to the NAACP were being intentionally misconstrued by conservative groups stoking racial tensions.
“I was speaking to that group, like I’ve done many groups, and I tell them about a time when I thought the issue was race and race only,” Sherrod told CNN. She said the incident she described in her speech occurred some 24 years ago, when she worked for a nonprofit aid group. “I was telling the story of how working with him helped me to see the issue is not about race. It’s about those who have versus those who do not have.”
The farmer’s wife, Eloise Spooner, 82, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday that Sherrod helped save their land. Spooner, who considered Sherrod a “friend for life,” said that “the federal official worked tirelessly to help” the couple hold onto their farm as they faced bankruptcy in 1986, the Atlanta newspaper reported.
“Her husband told her, ‘You’re spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,’ ” Spooner told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out.”
In the video, Sherrod is shown talking about “the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm.” Her remarks came at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, which the video says took place in March this year.
She said in the clip that the farmer had tried to show he was “superior” to her.
“He had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” she said in the film.
theGrio: USDA official’s punishment doesn’t fit crime“I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land — so I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough,” she added.
USDA
