Letters to the Editor
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Something smells fishy.
I looked into this site:
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/huttodetentionfac.htm
The claim is: The ICE T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility: maintaining family unity, enforcing immigration laws—and I don’t believe it. Citizens must question our government’s action with its many inconsistencies and contradictions.
The propaganda portraying Don Hutto Family Residential Facility only serves to reinforce my observations of the current government as it tears our country apart. While we should embrace our neighbors, our government is using divide and conquer tactics. While we should be working together to make substantial improvements to our infrastructure, education, food industry, and health systems, our government is squandering material, economic, and human resources, all the while destroying ethnic cultures and our environment. How is it that our government has justified taking this course of action against our neighbors, herding them up and shipping them out?
Check out this article by Elizabeth de la Vega, t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor (While this excerpt and direct response to the Alberto Gonzales hearings does not explain the justification for harassing immigrants, it provides an example how decisions are made without the responsible due process of lawmaking in the current Bush Administration)
Sunday 22 April 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042207A.shtml
Elizabeth de la Vega:
“Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch had apparently been clued in on the talking points. From time to time, he would lob questions to the
attorney general along the lines of "Do the US attorneys actually
handle the public corruption cases themselves?" The well-coached and
grateful Gonzales would then explain that, no, the work in the US
attorneys' offices is done by the career prosecutors, who will keep
doing their cases no matter who the US attorney is. Indeed, Gonzales
offered plaintively, the Office of the Attorney General didn't really
even know "that much" about what was going on in the US attorneys'
offices.
As one who worked as an assistant US attorney from 1983 through
2004 - in two districts, under four presidents and roughly ten
different US attorneys - I can say that virtually every clause, and
certainly the overall implication, of Gonzales's claim is false.
It is not true, for starters, that the AG's Office does not know
"that much" about what is going on in individual districts. US
attorneys' offices have traditionally had to submit to Washington a
frustratingly large number of reports, but the Bush administration has
tripled those requirements, mandating weekly, monthly, yearly and
sometimes even daily reports about every conceivable category of
prosecution. Assistant US attorneys must now obtain prior approval
from DOJ for indictments, plea agreements and sentencing
recommendations in an unprecedented variety of cases. In some instances - the cases that arose out of the pre-Christmas 2006 mass
arrests of illegal aliens, for example - the Bush administration
Justice Department simply mandates exactly what the charges, plea
agreement and sentence must be.”
(Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor with over 20 years' experience, was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California)