The next post is a transcript of Erik Camayd-Freixas lecture at Luther in October.
You can also access his essay detailing the things he observed as a court interpreter during the Postville cases at:
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Camayd-Freixas080724.pdf
I just wanted to mention a few things about his talk that I thought were especially interesting and revealing. Firstly, he explained that many of the Postville workers are orphans of the Guatemalan civil war. The Civil War was from 1960- 1996 and was essentially genocide against the Mayans. During this time the U.S. had a theory called the Domino Theory, which claimed that communism would spread like a domino effect if the U.S. did not intervene in the governing of other countries. Many of the government workers who were committing the genocide in Guatemala were on the payroll of the CIA. Therefore, the U.S. government actions are a direct cause of the migration of Guatemalans to the U.S. to find work. According to Camayd, he interviewed over 40 people about the raid and their imprisonment and one man said that the raid gave him flashbacks of when his village in Guatemala was surrounded and burned and almost everyone was killed.
Camyd also talked about NAFTA and CAFTA, which are trade agreements that were originally said to be intended to provide more jobs for Mexicans by increasing trade between the U.S. Canada and Latin America. However, the small Mexican farmers could not compete with the huge exports from the U.S., so they could not sell their goods for what it cost to produce them. This caused rural families to go hungry when they couldn't find buyers. And the cities were clogged with people migrating there, looking for work, so people could not find jobs there either. This is why people from Latin America are desperate enough to leave their homeland and come to the U.S. They simply cannot survive at home.
Another thing that was interesting to hear about was "operation end game". This is an ICE plan to transpose the doctrine of expediency used going into the Iraq war, with the same level of harshness, against immigrants, essentially treating immigrants like terrorists. The plan was to remove all deportable aliens from the U.S., which is 12 million people by 2012. Interestingly enough, when a journalist pointed out that this sounds awfully close to genocide, it was quickly removed from the records of the ICE. Camayd noted that this plan would cause the collapse of our economy, especially in the food production sector, because so many of food production jobs and jobs in general are filled by "illegal immigrants". In addition, many of the jobs that illegal immigrants do are jobs that no one else wants to do.
Camayd also explained that there were many violations of due process during the Postville trails. In jail, the detainees were intimidated into signing a waiver to receive trial by grand jury. This meant that no one had a chance to explain their personal circumstances. In addition, there was a severe shortage of immigration judges. People were being arrested faster than they could be processed by the courts, which means that they had to go to jail. The other thing that is unique and rather unprecedented about the Postville raid is that the immigrants were charged with aggravated identity theft because they had purchased papers with other people's social security numbers on them. However, most people thought that the numbers were fake when they purchased them, and some of the luckier one's actually did have fake numbers. Therefore, those with actual numbers were charged with a crime rather than an immigration infringement, as had been the usual practice before the merging of the INS with Homeland Security to form ICE. This is partly because in the wake of 9/11 people have been asking for retribution, which has in essence caused a war abroad (Iraq) and at home (immigration enforcement). The rhetoric and ideas associated with the "terrorists" abroad have been transferred to migrants coming into the U.S. and have caused their criminalization by the justice system and American public.
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