From the Desk of Asif Nawaz

So, how many of you knew that Congress Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who is currently the Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was born in Karachi, Pakistan?� Yeah baby!� Seems like we got someone on our side (please do sense the sarcasm!)!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16912619/.

Here’s an article I think you should definitely read.� You can either click on the link above or read it here.

By Spencer S. Hsu and Sylvia Moreno

Updated: 5:01 a.m. ET Feb. 2, 2007

RAYMONDVILLE, Tex. - Ringed by barbed wire, a futuristic tent city rises from the Rio Grande Valley in the remote southern tip of Texas, the largest camp in a federal detention system rapidly gearing up to keep pace with Washington’s increasing demand for stronger enforcement of immigration laws.About 2,000 illegal immigrants, part of a record 26,500 held across the United States by federal authorities, will call the 10 giant tents home for weeks, months and perhaps years before they are removed from the United States and sent back to their home countries.

The $65 million tent city, built hastily last summer between a federal prison and a county jail, marks both the success and the limits of the government’s new policy of holding captured non-Mexicans until they are sent home. Previously, most such detainees were released into the United States before hearings, and a majority simply disappeared.

The new policy has led to a dramatic decline in border crossings by non-Mexicans, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.But civil liberties and immigration law groups allege that out of sight, the system is bursting at the seams. In the Texas facility, they say, illegal immigrants are confined 23 hours a day in windowless tents made of a Kevlar-like material, often with insufficient food, clothing, medical care and access to telephones. Many are transferred from the East Coast, 1,500 miles from relatives and lawyers, virtually cutting off access to counsel.

“I call it ‘Ritmo’ — like Gitmo, but it’s in Raymondville,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer from nearby Harlingen.An inspector general’s report last month on a sampling of five U.S. immigration detention facilities found inhumane and unsafe conditions, including inadequate health care, the presence of vermin, limited access to clean underwear and undercooked poultry. Although ICE standards require that immigrants have access to phones and pro bono law offices, investigators found phones missing, not working or connected to non-working numbers.

With roughly 1.6 million illegal immigrants in some stage of immigration proceedings, ICE holds more inmates a night than Clarion hotels have guests, operates nearly as many vehicles as Greyhound has buses and flies more people each day than do many small U.S. airlines.Gary Mead, assistant director of ICE detention and removal operations, said the agency is proud of its record, calling Raymondville “a modern, clean facility” that meets federal standards — “which we believe are among the highest you’ll find anywhere.” Mead added: “We think the conditions of confinement there are both humane and consistent with all the rights they should be entitled to.”

Despite its spartan conditions, the facility in Willacy County, 260 miles south of Austin, is a key to President Bush’s drive to create a channel for temporary foreign workers and a path toward legalization for as many as 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.To do so, the government must convince skeptics that it can credibly enforce laws aimed at illegal immigrants and their employers, and can hold and deport those caught by the U.S. Border Patrol. At the same time, the administration and its allies argue that even additional detention beds will be overwhelmed without new channels for legal immigration.

Building campaign
Accordingly, the United States has embarked on a huge prison building and contracting campaign, increasing the number of illegal immigrants detained from 19,718 a day in 2005 to about 26,500 now, and a projected 32,000 this summer.About 80 percent of ICE’s beds are rented at 300 local and state jails nationwide, concentrated in the South and Southwest, or at eight sites run by contractors such as the Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group Inc., in places such as Houston, San Diego and Aurora, Colo.

ICE recently added a 1,524-bed facility in Stewart County, Ga., and a 512-bed center in Taylor, Tex., for immigrant families, both run by Corrections Corp.With the new beds, the administration has imprisoned and deported virtually 100 percent of non-Mexicans caught since August, under faster proceedings that deny hearings to all but asylum seekers.

The administration says this has deterred many others. After quadrupling over four years, the number of non-Mexicans apprehended fell 35 percent in 2006, to 108,026.But immigration experts and U.S. authorities say the impact of the prison boom will be hard to sustain and still is absorbing only a drop in the bucket of illegal immigration. The Border Patrol made 1.1 million apprehensions last year — mostly Mexicans who were promptly returned across the border — but estimates 500,000 people evaded capture or entered legally and then overstayed visas.

An additional 630,000 are at large, ignoring deportation orders, and 300,000 more who entered state and local prisons for committing crimes are to be deported but will probably slip through the cracks after completing their sentences.U.S. authorities acknowledge that gains from the latest crackdown will be fleeting without the major changes the president wants.

“The short answer is, it is not sustainable,” Mead said. “There comes a point where we can’t detain any more people. Hopefully, prior to getting there, the deterrence factor will kick in.”The increased tempo of operations is a strain. ICE has no modern nationwide system to track its facilities’ populations. It relies on an antiquated computer system created in 1984.

Growing pains
Every day since July, six officers have manually tracked and transferred detained immigrants among 24 regional offices, matching bodies to vacant beds and airplane seats in a Detention Operations Coordination Center, Mead said. “We have all of the information,” he said. “It’s a question of automation.”Legal advocates contend that some of the older facilities where immigrants are housed are in deplorable condition and that growing pains afflict even new facilities.

Under fire in Taylor, for example, ICE has expanded hours of daily schooling for children from one to seven hours to meet Texas guidelines.In Willacy County, one of the country’s poorest, ICE has set up 10 huge tents on concrete pads, surrounded by 14-foot-high chain-link fences looped with barbed wire. Each “sprung structure” holds about 200 men or women, divided into four “pods.” Similar temporary buildings were used for troop recreational facilities in Iraq.

The center is part of a chain of facilities in South Texas with 6,700 new immigration detention beds. At a cost of $78 a night per bed (compared with an ICE average of $95 a bed), the Willacy facility is not only cheaper than any bricks-and-mortar prison but also faster to construct, move or dismantle, Mead said.Detainees are subject to penal system practices, such as group punishment for disciplinary infractions. The tents are windowless and the walls are blank, and no partitions or doors separate the five toilets, five sinks, five shower heads and eating areas. Lacking utensils on some days, detainees eat with their hands.

Because lights are on around the clock, a visitor finds many occupants buried in their blankets throughout the day. The stillness and torpor of the pod’s communal room, where 50 to 60 people dwell, are noticeable.Goodwin described a group of women who huddled in a recreation yard on a recent 40-degree day with a 25-mph wind. “They had no blanket, no sweat shirt, no jacket,” she said. “Officers were wearing earmuffs, and detainees were outside for an hour with short-sleeved polyester uniforms and shower shoes and not necessarily socks.”

Perhaps more troubling, lawyers said, large numbers of immigrants have been transferred from Boston, New York, New Jersey and Florida, far from their families and lawyers. Because some immigration judges do not permit hearings by teleconference, detainees are essentially deprived of counsel.Immigration violators in the United States are held on civil grounds and have no right to appointed lawyers. But federal guidelines call for providing them law libraries, telephones and phone numbers for legal aid.

Lawsuit challenges conditions
Joining a lawsuit last week, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged that severe overcrowding at a Corrections Corp. facility in San Diego poses an unconstitutional risk to detainees’ health and safety, arguing that as administrative detainees, illegal immigrants should be treated better than convicted criminals.The National Lawyers Guild and five other groups petitioned the Department of Homeland Security last month to set binding regulations for detention sites, saying U.S. standards set in 2000 are not enforceable.And the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee has announced a campaign to stop ICE’s use of county jails.“The standards are there,” said David A. Martin, a former general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, ICE’s predecessor agency, who advocates concentrating detention centers in perhaps 10 cities to ensure access to lawyers and oversight. “But there are some real indicators federal standards are not well monitored or policed. We ought to do better.”

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

Kudos to Spencer S. Hsu and Sylvia Moreno on having the guts criticize homeland securitys’s so-called efforts.
But how come no one ever talks about the all the legal immigrants held up in such detention facilities illegally?� What, Americans are so scared they’re afraid to bring up the fact that their own government is full of preppy wanna be cool racist pigs who are in fact jailing legal immigrants in order to portray an image of better border patrol and homeland security?

Please, if you’re American enough to investigate anything like that further, whether you are Spencer Hsu or Sylvia Moreno or any other reporter, get in touch.� My contact info is at the top of this page.

Oh, and if you need more information, just visit the Immigration Service Center on 8101 N Stemmons Freeway, Dalls, TX.� Ask for a Philip Martinez.� He’ll be sure to tell you how much of a prissy little twat he feels in the large bureaucracy of the US Department of Homeland Security, and how to make himself feel better in his worthless insult of a life he arrests legal immigrants who come to the office to attend their appointments.

I’ve recently had a thought, a premonition if you will (sense the sarcasm), if I were a religious leader:� What if Josemaría Escrivá was� a Shi’ite Muslim gone sour?� It may be a crazy or offensive thought to many, but it’s certainly likely that someone got upset with the people of his religion and joined the other side, still practicing similar ideas.� After all, it’s not like religion today is about dedication…at least not for most people.

Now I’m not very familiar with the concept of sainthood in Catholicism, but the Opus Dei is declared as a part of the Catholic Church, alleged by some to have been formed by the Catholic Church; a group started by Josemaría Escrivá which claims that everyone should work towards sainthood.� � Encyclopedias and� various sources on the internet also claim that there are many religions which indulge in corporal mortification, but i’m� not aware of any sects of any� divine religions which indulge in that activity except the Opus Dei and Shi’ite Muslims.� Now, since I’m making� the comparison, I have to alott the creation of Opus Dei to a rogue Shi’ite Muslim because the Shia belief has been around for centuries before Opus Dei came into being in 1928.

What’s very interesting is that the reason behind the� corporal mortification in both sects of their own religions is very similar.� Shi’ite Muslims abuse their bodies� and weep to remind themselves of the tragedy that happened� at the Battle of� Karbela and the martyrdom of the Husayn ibn Ali,� to remember the pain that he put himself through, to exemplify his sacrifice.� Opus Dei, on the other hand, scar their body to remind themselves of the difficulties, pain, and sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for his people.� I’m not sure either party has given too much thought to the idea, but that’s what just my opinion, and it can easily be incorrect.

What’s to be kept in mind is that neither of these parties were present at the time that Ali was martered or Christ was crucified.� Both the sects have come centuries after those events, Shi’aism, of course, superceding Opus Dei by a millenium or so.�

It’s not for me to pass judgement, but critics of catholicism have repeatedy warned people from the danger of the Opus Dei.� That they are a secret organization.� That they are a right wing secretive organization that sometimes does the dirty work for the Catholic Church (which sadly, the Catholic Church has now become famous for).� Similarly, the United States of America has accused Shi’ite Muslims of being the destructive force in Islam.� Well, I take that back, not the United States, but the Republican Party and especially George W. Bush & Co.� They’ve done this by primarily accusing Iran as the only high threat posing Islam country in the world.� They just happen to be Shia.� Now I may be pushing it a little here, but you’re telling me there’s not even a touch of resemblence between Shi’aism and Opus Dei?� I beg to differ, in fact,� I think the Catholic Church could have a learnt a lesson from Muslims here to create their own sect of rather harshly dedicated Christians, for whatever purpose.