Groups Sue U.S. Government over Life-Threatening Deportation Process against Mothers and Children Escaping Extreme Violence in Central America

ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Council, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, and National Immigration Law Center today sued the federal government to challenge its policies denying a fair deportation process to mothers and children who have fled extreme violence, death threats, rape, and persecution in Central America and come to the United States seeking safety.

The groups filed the case on behalf of mothers and children locked up at an isolated detention center in Artesia, New Mexico — hours from the nearest major metropolitan area. The complaint charges the Obama administration with enacting a new strong-arm policy to ensure rapid deportations by holding these mothers and their children to a nearly insurmountable and erroneous standard to prove their asylum claims, and by placing countless hurdles in front of them.

"These mothers and their children have sought refuge in the United States after fleeing for their lives from threats of death and violence in their home countries," said Cecillia Wang, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. "U.S. law guarantees them a fair opportunity to seek asylum. Yet, the government's policy violates that basic law and core American values — we do not send people who are seeking asylum back into harm's way. We should not sacrifice fairness for speed in life-or-death situations."

According to the complaint, the Obama administration is violating long-established constitutional and statutory law by enacting policies that have:

• Categorically prejudged asylum cases with a "detain-and-deport" policy, regardless of individual circumstances.
• Drastically restricted communication with the outside world for the women and children held at the remote detention center, including communication with attorneys. If women got to make phone calls at all, they were cut off after three minutes when consulting with their attorneys. This makes it impossible to prepare for a hearing or get legal help. 
• Given virtually no notice to detainees of critically important interviews used to determine the outcome of asylum requests. Mothers have no time to prepare, are rushed through their interviews, are cut off by officials throughout the process, and are forced to answer traumatic questions, including detailing instances of rape, while their children are listening.
• Led to the intimidation and coercion of the women and children by immigration officers, including being screamed at for wanting to see a lawyer.

"Fast-tracking the deportations of women and children from immigration detention is an assault on due process. There is no way that justice can be served when so many people are being rushed through the system without any real opportunity to assert claims for relief. What we are seeing in Artesia is nothing less than a sham process that values expediency over justice," said Melissa Crow, legal director of the American Immigration Council.

The plaintiffs include:

• A Honduran mother who fled repeated death threats in her home country to seek asylum in the United States with her two young children. The children's father was killed by a violent gang that then sent the mother and her children continuous death threats. When she went to the police they told her that they could not do anything to help her. It is common knowledge where she lived that the police are afraid of the gang and will do nothing to stop it.
• A mother who fled El Salvador with her two children because of threats by the gang that controls the area where they lived. The gang stalked her 12-year-old child every time he left the house and threatened kidnapping. She fears that if the family returns to El Salvador, the gang will kill her son. Some police officers are known to be corrupt and influenced by gangs. The mother says she knows of people who have been killed by gang members after reporting them to police. 
• A mother who fled El Salvador with her 10-month-old son after rival gangs threatened to kill her and her baby. One gang tried to force the mother to become an informant on the activities of another gang, and when she refused, told her she had 48 hours to leave or be killed.

"The women and children detained in Artesia have endured brutal murders of loved ones, rapes, death threats, and similar atrocities that no mother or child ever should have to endure, and our government is herding them through the asylum process like cattle," said Trina Realmuto, an attorney at the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. "The deportation-mill in Artesia lacks even the most basic protections, like notice and the opportunity to be heard, that form the cornerstone of due process in this country."

The lawsuit, M.S.P.C. v. Johnson, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Co-counsel in this case includes the law firms of Jenner & Block, and Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale, LLP; and the ACLU of New Mexico, ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, and ACLU of the Nation's Capital.

"Any mother will do whatever it takes to make sure her children are safe from harm's way," said Karen Tumlin, managing attorney for the National Immigration Law Center. "Our plaintiffs are no different: they have fled their homes to protect their children, only to find that the U.S. deportation system is intent upon placing them back in the dangerous situations they left. We are filing this lawsuit today to ensure that each mother is able to have her fair day in court, and that we are not sending children and their mothers back to violence or their deaths."

The complaint is available at:
aclu.org/immigrants-rights/mspc-v-johnson-complaint

US Spreads Propaganda of Fear - Senator Inhofe warns of potential terrorist attacks on U.S. soil

ICH

 “We're in the most dangerous position we've ever been in as a nation,” Senator Inhofe told Fox 25's Phil Cross.

A War on Gaza's Future? Israeli Assault Leaves 500 Kids Dead, 3,000 Injured, 373,000 Traumatized

DemocracyNow

As the Israeli offensive in Gaza resumes, we look at the impact the military campaign has had on the children of Gaza. More than 467 Palestinian children have died since July. That is more than the combined number of child fatalities in the two previous conflicts in Gaza. According to the World Health Organization, more than 3,000 children have been injured, of which an estimated 1,000 will suffer from a lifelong disability. The United Nations estimates at least 373,000 children require direct and specialized psychosocial support. And, based on the total number of adults killed, there may be up to 1,500 children orphaned. Gazan children’s right to an education has also been severely compromised with at least 25 schools reportedly damaged so severely that they can no longer be used. We speak to Pernille Ironside, chief of UNICEF’s Gaza field office.

"There isn’t a single family in Gaza who hasn’t experienced personally death, injury, the loss of their home, extensive damage, displacement," Ironside says. "The psychological toll that has on a people, it just cannot be overestimated, and especially on children."

Dr. Paul Farmer on African Ebola Outbreak: Growing Inequality in Global Healthcare at Root of Crisis

DemocracyNow

As the death toll from the West African Ebola outbreak nears 1,400, two American missionaries who received experimental drugs and top-notch healthcare have been released from the hospital. We spend the hour with Partners in Health co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer discussing what can be done to stop the epidemic and the need to build local healthcare capacity, not just an emergency response. "The Ebola outbreak, which is the largest in history that we know about, is merely a reflection of the public health crisis in Africa, and it’s about the lack of staff, stuff and systems that could protect populations, particularly those living in poverty, from outbreaks like this or other public health threats," says Farmer, who has devoted his life to improving the health of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. He is a professor at Harvard Medical School and currently serves as the special adviser to the United Nations on community-based medicine. He has written several books including, "Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues."

To See The Danger Of Militarizing America’s Police Forces, Look South

ThinkProgress

Neither the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot six times by a white police officer, nor the events that have since unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri have taught us anything about American race relations that hasn’t been abundantly clear since for decades. What Ferguson has done is expose, in unprecedented public fashion, the shadowy osmosis of military tactics and equipment into local and state police departments. And one needs only look to one of America’s closest allies in the hemisphere for how badly this could turn out.

The tactics used in Ferguson are not a particularly new phenomenon, but images of armored vehicles spewing tear gas and Army-grade assault weapons being pointed at civilians, combined with the momentum the story has built on Twitter, has turned police aggression into a national issue, even for people who aren’t moved by the simple fact of Brown’s death. In that sense, June’s ACLU report on the subject seems rather prescient. “By invoking the imagery of war, aggressively funding the enforcement of U.S. drug laws, and creating an over-hyped fear of siege from within our borders,” it reads, “the federal government has justified and encouraged the militarization of local law enforcement.”

What the study doesn’t discuss at length is that the federal government has already experimented with similar approaches in countries across the world, affording all manner of political support and military aid to repressive autocratic regimes from Indonesia and Iraq, to South Africa, Egypt, and Guatemala, sometimes with even less oversight than has been exercised back home. These and other historical examples provide the best indicators available of what unchecked fear-mongering and the continued militarization of law enforcement could mean for U.S. democracy over the long term.

In no place are the lingering effects of this “paramilitary police juggernaut” more evident than Colombia, which has, for at least the last 20 years, been by far the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid, equipment, training, and tactical guidance of any country outside the greater Middle East, and which remains — some would say as a result — one of the most entrenched human rights crises in the world.

Since the mid-1980s, Colombia has been a key staging ground for the so-called wars on drugs and terror, but U.S. military involvement in the country actually predates even the 50-year armed conflict often used to justify it. Regardless of the true motives, the reliance of institutionalized right-wing paramilitary violence as an institutionalized strategy in the Colombian conflict has been more or less consistent — from the mid 1960s, when U.S. “special advisors” began advocating for the creation of just such a “guerrilla/terrorist” counterinsurgent structure, all the way up to the early 2000s, when Presidents Clinton and Bush both waived human rights restrictions on massive Plan Colombia aid packages, despite overwhelming evidence that the Colombian state was working hand-and-hand with narcotrafficking death squads throughout much of the country.

The guiding principle throughout has been the conflation of civilians with guerrillas of legitimate dissent and grievances with the act of supporting terrorism. And the results have been predictably destructive. A close parallel to the ongoing protests in Ferguson would be the Colombian government’s handling of last year’s national Agrarian Strike movement, which protested some of nether same systemic inequalities as demonstrations in Missouri .

Almost as soon as roadblocks went up in Colombia last summer, the government reacted with naked displays of force that led to charged confrontations with protesters. Tear gas was employed liberally in civilian areas, and reports emerged of death threats and unprovoked attacks being leveled against peaceful demonstrators, journalists, and even uninvolved bystanders. In one notable case, a local legislator was arrested during one of protests, and various other organizers were held and released without charges. Throughout the month-long strike, top-down rhetoric centered around claims of “outside infiltration” and emphasized isolated incidents of protest violence to the exclusion of widespread police abuses.

That should sound familiar enough to anyone following the Ferguson story. And if getting called out for human rights conduct by Egypt is an embarrassment, then any viable comparisons to Colombian security should say troubling things about the state of U.S. law enforcement.

Looking more broadly at Colombia shows what the extreme version of the trends in the U.S. looks like, offering a warning to American civilians. According to the National Center for Historic Memory, the military-paramilitary apparatus in Colombia has been responsible for more and more gruesome acts of deliberate violence against civilian populations, surpassing the leftists insurgents the government is ostensibly fighting. If 80 percent of the victims in the armed conflict have been unarmed civilians, then the solution has caused dramatically more damage than the supposed problem.

Even in 2013, seven years after what the Human Rights Watch refers to as the “sham” demobilization of Colombia’s largest paramilitary organization, a combined 87 percent of all human rights violations registered by the Center for Popular Investigation and Education were attributed to state (44 percent) and paramilitary (43 percent) actors. To rid the country of terrorism and drugs, in other words, the U.S.-funded, U.S.-backed Colombian government has worked extensively with the worst terrorists and most powerful narco-interests in the country. In Colombia, then, the pretexts for military escalation have only had slightly more grounding in fact than they have in the States, where the same justifications have been used toward the same basic purpose.

The comparison isn’t exact, obviously, particularly as after a third night of calm, the situation may finally be desalting in Ferguson. But the difference is one of degree rather than quality. It’s not hard to look at, say, “false positives,” the widespread Colombian military practice — recently correlated to U.S. aid — of dressing murdered civilians up in guerrilla uniforms, and see a crude metaphor for the posthumous “character assassinations” of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, and countless others like them. In many cases in the United States, this blanket antagonistic mentality already seems to be there, and has been for a long time. Americans should think twice about arming it.

Heritage Foundation Urges GOP To Fund Vigilante Border Groups If Obama Enacts Immigration Changes [for Non-Whites]

ThinkProgress

Washington Post Editorial Board Will Stop Using ‘Redskins’

ThinkProgress

RNC [white party] Official Claims Non-White Child Migrants Are Trained ‘Warriors’ And Will ‘Rise Up Against’ Americans

ThinkProgress

A Republican National Committeewoman claimed on her radio show Thursday that kids who are arriving in waves unaccompanied at the U.S. southern border could be “warriors” and would likely “rise up against” Americans. In an interview with a Tea Party leader, RNC committeewoman Tamara Scott said that children could be coming from countries where they are highly trained as soldiers and may harm Americans, according to Right Wing Watch.

Scott said, “When we see these kids, you and I think young kids, we think maybe 12-year-olds …middle-schoolers, But we know back in our revolution, we had 12-year olds fighting in our revolution. And for many of these kids, depending on where they’re coming from, they could be coming from other countries and be highly trained as warriors who will meet up with their group here and actually rise up against us as Americans.”

Her guest, Mary Huls, president of the Texas-based Clear Lake Tea Party, stated that it’s especially worrisome that the children don’t come with documentation since the terrorist group Hezbollah “funds several training groups in Venezuela and other South American countries, they are training these youths beginning as early as eight or nine years old through the MS-13 gangs and they’re being trained as warriors. You’re absolutely right.”

12-Year Report On NYC's Unconstitutional Stop-And-Frisk Non-Whites Policy Debunks Right-Wing Media Claims

MediaMatters

A new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union that offers a "complete factual record of stop-and-frisk activity" in New York City between 2002 and 2013 has found that this unconstitutionally performed policing tactic was largely ineffective at reducing violent crime, a clear rebuttal to right-wing media's frequent justifications for the practice.

Right-wing media have long supported stop-and-frisk policies that allow police officers to stop, question, and pat down "suspicious" pedestrians. Although stop-and-frisk when correctly practiced is generally legal, the racially discriminatory version employed by the New York Police Department was determined to be unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013. The judge in that case determined that "at least 200,000 stops were made without reasonable suspicion," which "resulted in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of blacks and Hispanics in violation of the Equal Protection Clause."

Nevertheless, right-wing media complained loudly about the decision, accusing the judge of "substitut[ing] her own view of the world, her own utopian view of how the world should be for the way the real life is, for the people who are trying to get by, not get killed, not get robbed, not get raped on the streets of New York."

Fox News has been particularly vocal in their support for stop-and-frisk, with Bill O'Reilly continually insisting that stops reduce crime because "the police take the guns and they pat down people" and that without it, "more black Americans and more Hispanic Americans are going to die." O'Reilly has also stated that stop-and-frisk "is racial profiling, but it's really criminal profiling." Most recently, frequent Fox guest Bo Dietl, a former New York police officer, argued that scaling back stop-and-frisk was "ridiculous," because, he claimed, it made the streets less safe for law enforcement. Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy agreed, and suggested that the police were "demoralized" after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced reforms to address unconstitutional policing tactics. Other Fox hosts have erroneously claimed that stop-and-frisk is responsible for New York City's declining murder rate.

But the NYCLU's comprehensive report, which analyzes 12 years of stop-and-frisk data from NYPD records, debunks right-wing media's claims that this controversial law enforcement tool was essential for public safety. From the report:

The NYPD often sought to justify the large number of stops on the grounds that the stop-and-frisk program was critically important to recovering guns and thus reducing shootings and murders. The NYPD's data contradict this argument.

Between 2003 and 2011, annual stops increased dramatically, but gun recoveries, which were always a tiny percentage of stops, moved up and down and any increases were quite small. During that same time, the number of shooting victims remained largely flat and murders moved up and down. By contrast, in 2012 and 2013, recorded stops dropped dramatically. At the same time shootings and murders dropped dramatically.

“Less Lethal” Flash-Bangs Used in Ferguson Leave Some Feeling the Burn

Propublica

Flash-bang devices are one of many military-style weapons being used in Ferguson, along with tear gas and beanbag munitions. While marketed as non-lethal, there have been instances in which flash-bangs have caused serious injury and sometimes death when used by police, prompting debate over their proper use.

Earlier this year, a flash-bang critically injured a two-year-old baby in Georgia when a police special response team threw one into a crib while entering a home on a narcotics warrant.

According to Sgt. Colby Dolly, St. Louis County's 18-member tactical unit used the 7290 CTS flash-bangs for the first time three nights after Michael Brown's death and has continued to use them periodically in the subsequent days.

It's not clear how many people may have been burned or hit by flash-bangs in Ferguson. S.W.A.T. teams typically use them to temporarily paralyze suspects and prevent them from destroying evidence while carrying out search warrants and no-knock raids. They are less commonly used for crowd control and inside prisons.

Flash-bangs are descended from blank grenades developed by military special operations units. In the split second they take to deploy, they emit a wave of heat, light and sound intense enough to cause temporary blindness and deafness within a five-foot radius. Within closer range, they may cause partial hearing loss and bodily injury – particularly for children who are standing lower to the ground and closer to the impact. Some experts say that when used outdoors, flash-bangs can pick up gravel and launch it like shrapnel.

Accidents have been documented since the first days American tactical teams started using flash-bangs. In 1984, less than a year after the Los Angeles Police Department incorporated flash-bangs into their S.W.A.T. team, a woman was killed when a device exploded at her back as a tactical team entered her home to carry out a drug raid.

Flash-bang manufacturing has evolved significantly since then from crude explosives that detonated like grenades without shrapnel, to today's flash-bangs, many of which release a sudden volume of igniting gas through vent holes and leave behind an empty canister, like those found on the streets of Ferguson.

Witnesses to this week's unrest in Ferguson told ProPublica it feels like the ground is shaking when the devices deploy nearby. "It was a real loud explosion and people began to run, but they didn't know where to run to," said Tef Poe, who has been on the streets the past 12 days.

Dolly said that his agency hasn't been able to track injuries because individuals scatter when a flash-bang is deployed near them. "If you say you're injured, you're implicating yourself in causing trouble," he said.

The St. Louis County tactical unit uses flash-bangs occasionally when carrying out search warrants, but Dolly could not recall his unit ever using them to disperse crowds until this week.

In St. Louis County, tactical officers get a four-hour training course on flash-bangs taught by a member of their team. The in-house instructors are sent to Combined Tactical Systems for a three-day course to become certified trainers. CTS didn't respond to inquiries about what its training courses cover.

Proper training is critical to ensuring that flash-bangs are used safely, said R.K. Miller, who teaches tactical officers with the California Peace Officers Standards and Training. "They're dangerous if they're not used correctly."

The National Tactical Officers Association also offers training and sample guidelines on the use of diversionary devices including flash-bangs. Many tactical teams also attend training programs run by device manufacturers.

Peter Kraska, a professor in justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University who has written extensively on police militarization, contends that S.W.A.T. units typically offer much less training than the 250 hours per year the NTOA recommends, with "over 50 percent of teams in smaller jurisdictions receiving a mere 50 hours per year per officer," Kraska has reported.

In 2008, flash-bang manufacturers agreed to best practices and launched a voluntary program preventing sales of flash-bangs to law enforcement agencies that lacked certified trainers. Don Whitson, who teaches a course for the officers' association on 'less lethal' tactics including flash-bangs, says he has seen fewer injuries from flash-bangs since the agreement, but data quantifying these injuries does not exist.

Some law enforcement experts say that, even with the training issues, flash-bangs are preferable to other devices the police have used for similar purposes.

"I would rather see flash-bangs used than gas grenades which contaminate everyone, guilty and innocent," said Charlie Mesloh, a professor at Northern Michigan University who studies less lethal weapons. "There is very low risk of injury unless it literally went off when it was in contact with a person."

Still, Dolly acknowledged that there's no way to eliminate all risk, especially in the volatile and fast-changing situations police have faced on Ferguson's streets.

"Anytime you deploy a less-lethal device there's risk involved," he said. "You always consider the background and what's in the environment."

California passes law banning sterilization of inmates

[JURIST]

California Governor Jerry Brown was a presented with a bill [SB 1135, text] on Tuesday to ban sterilization of female inmates in California after the California Senate [official websites] unanimously voted to pass the law. The bill bans any form of sterilization in a correctional facility for the purposes of birth control unless there is a medical necessity and there is no other alternate procedure available. Specifically, the bill protects inmates against tubal ligation following a June audit [text, PDF] of jail records indicating that errors were made in obtaining consent for 39 of 144 inmates who received tubal ligation between 2005 and 2011. The bill also contains a provision protecting whistleblowers from retaliation for reporting violations.

Prince George’s County Black businessmen cry foul on council’s anti gogo policy

WashPost

Brian Logan is a businessman. He owns a hair salon, does landscaping and works as a DJ. But what Logan cannot do is run a go-go club in his native Prince George’s County.

In July 2011, after a string of homicides linked to clubs in the area, the county passed a law prohibiting anyone convicted of a felony from operating a dance hall that plays music. That means Logan, who was convicted in 2000 of possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute, cannot operate a club, something he says he was unaware of until after he had invested in a dance hall in Landover.

“People with prior convictions own other businesses,” Logan argued. And after serving 18 months in jail and a year of probation, he was able to have his voting rights reinstated. So, he asks, why can’t he run a dance club?

The reasons have much to do with how the music is perceived in the region.

Go-go music is the District’s own indigenous style of music. Steeped in a heavy bass line and backed by a heavy beat, the music has been the soundtrack for a number of black Washingtonians and others in the close in suburbs. Over the years, violence has sometimes overlapped with clubs playing the music. 

That violence led Prince George’s officials to pass a law that many hoped would dissuade those with criminal inclinations. But for lovers of the music, the law is seen as overly restrictive — and worse.

This summer, club owners — most with no criminal record — filed a $10 million lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging discrimination, but the case was dismissed. Logan was among the plaintiffs.

Missouri racial violence recalls apartheid, UN rights chief says, "Apartheid is also where law turns a blind eye to racism."

Reuters

- Clashes between police and protesters in the U.S. town of Ferguson are reminiscent of the racial violence spawned by apartheid in her native South Africa, the top U.N. human rights official said on Tuesday.

Navi Pillay, who is due to step down at the end of the month after six years in the U.N. hotseat, urged U.S. authorities to investigate allegations of brutality and examine the "root causes" of racial discrimination in America.

U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday called for calm and a change in police tactics in Ferguson, Missouri, which has been rocked by racially charged clashes and riots after a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager 10 days ago.

"I condemn the excessive use of force by the police and call for the right of protest to be respected. The United States is a freedom-loving country and one thing they should cherish is people's right to protest," Pillay said in a wide-ranging interview in her office along Lake Geneva.

"Apart from that, let me say that coming from apartheid South Africa I have long experience of how racism and racial discrimination breeds conflict and violence," she said.

"These scenes are familiar to me and privately I was thinking that there are many parts of the United States where apartheid is flourishing."

Noting that African-Americans are often among the poorest and most vulnerable U.S. citizens, and accounted for many of the inmates in the country's teeming prisons, she added: "Apartheid is also where law turns a blind eye to racism."

From the Plantation to the Penitentiary: America's racist penal system is slavery by another name

TelegraphUk

When the unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot by a police officer in Ferguson violent protests broke out. Alarming pictures of police violence, siege-like militarism and a stand-off that recalls the Sixties Civil Rights era have since been beamed across the globe. However, for those who have been aware of the barometer of American civil rights struggles, this is unsurprising. What is surprising is that it hasn’t bubbled up before. Even under its first black president, America is a mostly segregated society. I grew up in New Jersey in the Eighties and Nineties, and people for the most part had either white friends or black friends. High-school lunch tables were codified by colour. The America I knew had a massive race problem and as an Iranian, neither white nor black, I experienced enough racism to know I couldn’t change it from within. So I left America in 1996, tired of the inequalities, particularly around race and social justice, and certain that a life as a free-thinking filmmaker wasn’t possible, certainly not when you had to wed yourself to a corporation in order to have health care.

This year, now a UK Citizen, I am returning to America to film a documentary which will look at the issue of race in America through the prism of the prison system. I have already visited one in Louisiana where I saw mostly black men picking cotton in fields - they were paid up to 13 cents per hour - while the predominantly white guards, armed and on horseback, watched over. Sound familiar? Unknown to most, slavery is still legal in the US: under the 13th Amendment it was outlawed “except as a punishment for crime”.

My film, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, looks at the privatised prison system as a sanitised slave system. And in it, I ask whether America is heading towards another race war. It is not, as some have said, fanciful agit pop. What we have seen in Missouri over the past couple of weeks shows what is bubbling close to the surface. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, along with Eric Garner, Ezell Ford and John Crawford III all men who have been killed by the police, is another victim of the race wars in America. [MORE]

Israel: Violent Racist Frenzy – Right-Wing Groups Chant “Death to Arabs”; Palestinians Beaten, Arrested for Gaza Support

Globalresearch

Israeli police arrest a protester in Haifa during a protest against the assault on Gaza, 18 July. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh / ActiveStills)

As a Palestinian political activist living in present-day Israel, Tareq Yassin, 23, has grown accustomed to racist intimidation and threats of violence.

Yassin, secretary of the left-wing Hadash political party’s student wing at the University of Haifa, has been targeted for his activism time and again. Yet last month was the first time he was subjected to vigilante violence by right-wing Israelis.

He was punched in the head during a protest in solidarity with the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing military offensive has killed more than 2,000 Palestinians. “I was attacked by a group of Israeli right-wing racists,” Yassin recalled.

Since Israel began its latest war on Gaza in early July, Palestinian activists in Israel have told The Electronic Intifada that the political climate has become even more frightening than usual as the country spirals into a violently racist frenzy.

“Very disturbing”

Lynch mobs have targeted Palestinians and left-wing Israelis in places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Palestinian citizens of Israel across the country have been beaten during protests, attacked by vigilantes, threatened on social media outlets and arrested by police.

Dozens of Palestinians across Israel have also been fired from their jobs for posting content critical of the war on Gaza on social media outlets such as Facebook.

In most cases, employers fired Palestinian employees who posted political content after being threatened with a boycott by local Jewish Israeli communities, according to a lawyer working with the Nazareth-based Kav LaOved workers’ rights group.

In other cases, “Israeli Jews have read statuses of colleagues and then demanded their termination,” the lawyer, Gadeer Nicola, told the liberal Zionist grantmaking group the New Israel Fund in an interview published on the organization’s website.

“The overall atmosphere for Palestinians in the ‘48 territories [present-day Israel] is very disturbing,” Yassin told The Electronic Intifada.

An estimated 1.7 million Palestinians carry Israeli citizenship and live in cities, towns and villages across the country. According to the Adalah Legal Center, a Haifa-based Palestinian advocacy group, Palestinian citizens of Israel are subjected to more than fifty discriminatory laws that stifle their political expression and limit their access to state resources, including land.

Even if Charges Were Dropped, a Lingering Arrest Record Can Ruin Chances of a Job

WSJ

Over the past 20 years, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. As a result, the FBI currently has 77.7 million individuals on file in its master criminal database—or nearly one out of every three American adults.

Between 10,000 and 12,000 new names are added each day.

At the same time, an information explosion has made it easy for anyone to pull up arrest records in an instant. Employers, banks, college admissions officers and landlords, among others, routinely check records online. The information doesn't typically describe what happened next.

Many people who have never faced charges, or have had charges dropped, find that a lingering arrest record can ruin their chance to secure employment, loans and housing. Even in cases of a mistaken arrest, the damaging documents aren't automatically removed. In other instances, arrest information is forwarded to the FBI but not necessarily updated there when a case is thrown out locally. Only half of the records with the FBI have fully up-to-date information.

"There is a myth that if you are arrested and cleared that it has no impact," says Paul Butler, professor of law at Georgetown Law. "It's not like the arrest never happened."

The wave of arrests has been fueled in part by unprecedented federal dollars funneled to local police departments and new policing tactics that condoned arrests for even the smallest offenses. Spending on law-enforcement by states and local governments hit $212 billion in 2011, including judicial, police and corrections costs, according to the most recent estimates provided to the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, those figures, when adjusted for inflation, were equivalent to $179 billion in 2001 and $128 billion in 1992.

In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the number of full-time equivalent sworn state and local police officers at 646,213—up from 531,706 in 1991.

A crackdown on what seemed like an out-of-control crime rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s made sense at the time, says Jack Levin, co-director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Boston's Northeastern University.

"Zero-tolerance policing spread across the country after the 1990s because of the terrible crime problem in late '80s and early 1990s," says Mr. Levin.

The push to put an additional 100,000 more officers on the streets in the 1990s focused on urban areas where the crime rates were the highest, says Mr. Levin. And there has been success, he says, as crime rates have fallen and the murder rate has dropped.

But as a consequence, "you've got these large numbers of people now who are stigmatized," he says. "The impact of so many arrests is catastrophic."

San Jose Police Collect, But Don’t Analyze Racial Data

SanJoseInside

Back in 1999, the San Jose Police Department led the charge in collecting racial data about the people it stops and arrests.

Original figures, based on a few months of traffic stops, implied racial profiling: black people made up 4.5 percent of the population but 7 percent of drivers stopped, versus white people who made up 43 percent of the population but 29 percent of stops.

“The community asked for the numbers and we gave them,” then-Chief William Lansdowne said at the time. “Up until this point, all we had were anecdotes. We can’t be afraid to look at the statistics.”

So is the SJPD now afraid? The department stopped analyzing such information in 2008, according to a recent report by the San Francisco Chronicle. When the newspaper made a public records request for the last five years of racial data, police said it would cost $1,820—broken down to $91 an hour for 20 hours of work.

Macy's reaches $650,000 settlement in a racial targeting case

From LZ

After a high-profile investigation that lasted 18 months, Macy’s today agreed to pay $650,000 to settle a racial profiling case and will hire an independent monitor to address complaints from minority shoppers.

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The New York state attorney general’s office opened the investigation in February 2013, after receiving reports from customers who said they faced heightened surveillance from clerks and security officers at the Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square in Manhattan. Some of the shoppers were wrongfully detained. The issue attracted public attention when it was discovered that one of the shoppers alleging unfair treatment was Robert Brown, an American actor known for his work on the HBO series Treme.

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State attorney general Eric Schneiderman said in a press statement that an inquiry found that Macy’s had “detained African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities for allegedly shoplifting at significantly higher rates relative to whites.” He continued: “It is absolutely unacceptable—and it’s illegal—for anyone in New York to be treated like a criminal simply because of the color of their skin.” Macy’s has not responded to requests for a comment.

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Schneiderman’s office reached a similar settlement last week with Barneys New York, the luxury retail chain, which agreed to pay $525,000 and bring in an anti-profiling consultant after being accused of racially profiling customers at its own flagship store in Manhattan.

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Brown filed his own racial discrimination lawsuit against both Macy’s and the New York City Police Department last year after he was allegedly handcuffed in June 2013 at the Herald Square store and taken by police officers. The police and store personnel accused Brown of using a fake credit card. Brown settled the case last month.

Congress Members Who Approve Militarization of U.S. Police Receive 73% More Money from Defense Industry

BlackListedNews

Americans of all stripes oppose the militarization of U.S. police forces.

For example:

• A December 2013 Reason-Rupe poll found that 58% of Americans thought that police militarization has gone too far

• A new Pew research poll shows that a plurality of people think that the police have gone too far in Ferguson, Missouri

So why does Congress continue to approve militarization? For the same reason that Congress members vote for NSA spying on Americans and go easy on Wall Street criminals: money.

Maplight reports that congress critters opposing Congressman Grayson’s bill to demilitarize police receive 73% more money than those voting for it:

International Business Times explains:

The group’s new report looked at a June congressional vote on legislation, offered by U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., that would have blocked the Pentagon from spending resources on transferring military hardware to local police agencies. The bill was defeated 62-355.

According to data compiled by Maplight, the lawmakers “voting to continue funding the 1033 Program have received, on average, 73 percent more money from the defense industry than representatives voting to defund it.” In all, the average lawmaker voting against the bill received more than $50,000 in campaign donations from the defense industry in the last two years. The report also found that of the 59 lawmakers who received more than $100,000  from defense contractors in the last two years, only four voted for Grayson’s legislation.

Protesters Gather at CNN's Atlanta Headquarters to Protest Racist News Coverage

ColorLines

So remember when CNN suggested that police in Ferguson should use water cannons on protesters? It was just one of the more infuriating moments in the network's coverage of the escalating violence that's happened in the St. Louis suburbs since Michael Brown's death on August 9.

On Monday night, at least 250 protesters showed up to the network's headquarters in Atlanta to protest holding signs that read "How good must we look to be considered innocent?" The message was in response to CNN's coverage late last week and over the weekend that focused on what Brown did to make himself a suspect.

So far, the network hasn't reported anything about the protests happening on their front lawn.