Judge rules against Arizona sheriff in immigrant stops
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio talks to the media about the Department of Justice's investigative findings accusing the Maricopa Sheriff's Office of racial profiling and a pattern of discrimination at the Sheriff's office in Phoenix, Arizona December 15, 2011. Credit: Reuters/Laura Segall
By Alex Dobuzinskis Sat Dec 24, 2011 7:09am EST
(Reuters) - A federal judge on Friday barred high profile Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio from detaining people simply for being in the country illegally, in a ruling that faulted the local lawman for enforcing federal immigration law.
The 40-page written opinion by U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow came on the same day he issued legal sanctions against Arpaio over destroyed documents.
The decisions come as a further blow for the controversial sheriff, who already has faced rebukes from the U.S. Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
Both rulings by Snow stemmed from a 2007 civil lawsuit against Arpaio and his agency, which accuses his officers of racial profiling of Latinos in traffic stops the judge found were conducted as immigration sweeps.
The judge also said officers with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department (MCSO), which covers Phoenix and surrounding areas, circulated emails that "compared Mexicans to dogs" and portrayed them "as drunks."
"Local law enforcement agencies, such as MCSO, may not enforce civil federal immigration law," Snow said in his written opinion.
He added that the sheriff's agency was "hereby enjoined" from detaining "any person based only on knowledge or reasonable belief, without more, that the person is unlawfully present within the United States."
In his ruling, Snow also granted a request by plaintiffs to certify the lawsuit as a class action.
He defined the class action as encompassing all Latinos "stopped, detained, questioned or searched" by Arpaio's officers "while driving or sitting in a vehicle" on roads or parking areas in Maricopa County.
EVIDENCE DESTRUCTION
Snow also cited the admitted destruction of emails and patrol records by Arpaio's office related to the case. He noted the sheriff's agency never contested those documents were shredded rather than lost.
Further proceedings in the case are expected to be decided by Snow rather than a jury because the plaintiffs have not requested a jury trial.
Snow's sanctions against Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office were outlined in written opinions issued a day after the judge heard oral arguments on the matter.
Separately last week, the U.S. Justice Department issued a scathing report accusing Arpaio and his deputies of engaging in a "pervasive culture of discriminatory bias" and violating civil rights laws by singling out Latinos for unlawful detention and arrests.
The same day, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security barred Arpaio's deputies from screening jail inmates for their immigration status.
Arpaio was given until January 4 to agree to negotiations addressing the abuses cited by the Justice Department or face a request for a court order requiring compliance.
The Justice Department's report and the similar allegations raised in the lawsuit relate to Arpaio's controversial efforts to crack down on illegal immigration in Maricopa County.
Those efforts have earned him accolades in conservative political circles. Several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination sought his endorsement, which ultimately went to Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Arpaio has denied that his department engages in racial profiling and accused the Justice Department under President Barack Obama of undermining immigration enforcement.
A lawyer for Arpaio was not available for comment.
The sheriff was a strong supporter of controversial new Arizona law SB 1070, requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain and suspect of being in the country illegally.
That law is under challenge by the Obama administration in a case the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide next year.
Aside from the allegation of racial profiling, Arpaio also faces a firestorm over media reports that his office might have given short shrift to hundreds of sex-crime investigations.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio shows his badge as he holds a ceremony where 92 of his immigration jail officers turn in their credentials after federal officials pulled the Sheriff's Department's immigration enforcement powers. (Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press / December 21, 2011)
A scathing Justice Department report accuses Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio of bias toward Latinos. Some of his accusers couldn't agree more.
By Ashley Powers and Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times December 22, 2011, 6:17 p.m.
Armando Nido spotted the flashing lights of a Maricopa County sheriff's patrol car. He stiffened in fear.
It was February 2009, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio's deputies were the talk of the Phoenix area. Nido's relatives avoided parts of town when they swept through, wary of being stopped for something as minor as jaywalking and asked for immigration papers.
The deputy followed Nido, a U.S. citizen, to his home in Tempe. When Nido got out of his car, he said, the deputy ran him over.
Without naming Nido, the Justice Department [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/u.s.-department-of-justice-ORGOV0000160.topic ] detailed the incident in a scathing report last week accusing Arpaio's agency of bullying Latinos under the guise of immigration enforcement. Justice Department officials are expected to ask a federal judge to order changes in Arpaio's department, and the Homeland Security Department has stripped county jail officers of their authority to detain people on immigration charges.
Arpaio has derided the federal actions as part of a political witch hunt, and staged a media event this week when his detention officers turned in their Immigration and Customs Enforcement credentials. "We are proud of the work we have done to fight illegal immigration," he said at a recent news conference.
The Justice Department report omitted the names of victims of harassment by deputies. But by matching incidents in the report to lawsuits and other complaints, The Times was able to identify some victims.
Many people said Arpaio inspired paranoia, even among Phoenix's elite. Among those hassled and indicted were critics — a group that included judges, lawyers and Maricopa County supervisors.
One critic, Republican Supervisor Don Stapley, was arrested — twice. None of the charges, which involved Stapley's fundraising and financial disclosure forms, stuck. Democratic Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox was indicted on a host of similar white-collar charges. All were dismissed.
Wilcox claimed the sheriff also had deputies camp outside her downtown Mexican restaurant, El Portal, to convince patrons it was bugged — a factor that contributed to the restaurant's closure, she said in court papers.
"If you didn't agree with him, he would come after you," Wilcox, who is suing the sheriff, said in an interview. "I had fear in the pit of my stomach every day."
Members of a citizens group that opposed Arpaio were arrested at a county supervisors meeting in 2008 for applauding and shouting. They were charged with disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing, but none was convicted, the Justice Department report said.
In 2010, deputies arrested activist Salvador Reza twice during protests against SB 1070, Arizona's tough immigration law. One time, Reza said he had been watching demonstrators from across the street.
"I thought, if they can do this to me, they can do this to anybody," said Reza, who said he was barred by deputies from speaking to an attorney both times he was jailed.
Since his election in 1992, Arpaio has made headlines for his in-your-face style of law enforcement. He housed inmates in tents, clothed them in pink underwear and served them discolored green and blue meat — safe, but unsuitable for sale elsewhere. Troublemakers were given only bread and water.
In recent years, Arpaio gained a national following when he started using deputies as immigration agents. Arizona has struggled with illegal immigration, becoming a favorite entry point for smugglers after federal authorities toughened border enforcement in California. About 6% of Arizona residents are undocumented, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Arpaio's "sweeps" and muscular talk — he brags that he's America's toughest sheriff — endeared him to many Phoenix-area voters. GOP presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney sought his endorsement before he backed Texas Gov. Rick Perry. In recent months, Arpaio has publicly mulled running for U.S. Senate.
"Since this report came out, Joe Arpaio fans are more fervent in their support of him," said the sheriff's political advisor, Chad Willems.
Through the Sheriff's Department, Arpaio declined to be interviewed. His attorney, Bill Jones, also declined to comment. At his news conference, Arpaio said, "President Obama and the band of his merry men might as well erect their own pink neon sign at the Arizona-Mexico border saying, 'Welcome all illegals to your United States, our home is your home.' "
Though Arpaio said his agency would cooperate with the Justice Department's demands "the best we can," he has also described the incidents in the report as isolated "bumps," and not evidence of systemic problems.
But the report and interviews show that Latino residents, including U.S. citizens, mistrusted Maricopa County deputies, whom some residents call Los Sherifes del Arpaio.
For the department to launch a sweep, sometimes all it took was a citizen's letter to Arpaio asking whether a city's day laborers "are here under legitimate circumstances." A judge heard arguments Thursday in a lawsuit that accuses Arpaio's department of racial profiling during the immigration patrols.
Once in jail, Latino inmates were taunted with racial slurs and refused replacements for soiled clothes if they asked for them in Spanish. This week, a former female inmate filed a lawsuit accusing sheriff's deputies of shackling her before and after her 2009 caesarean section. And a male inmate found unresponsive after tussling with sheriff's deputies died Tuesday when he was taken off life support.
During a raid of a suspected smuggler's house in Phoenix in 2009, deputies knocked on musician Filiberto Gaucin's door. They asked whether he knew about the illegal immigrants at a nearby home and then, without a warrant, searched his house, Gaucin said.
"I had no idea that they had illegal people there," Gaucin said he told them in Spanish. "I would just go back there to throw away the trash."
Deputies restrained his hands with zip ties, he said, and made him sit outside in the mud. They did the same to his son, Filiberto Jr., who was 12. No charges were filed.
"I'm 12 years old. Why would I get handcuffed and put on the floor?" Filiberto Jr. asked. "I was confused. We did nothing wrong."
Such incidents frustrated deputies who tried to reach out to the Latino community and encountered what one told the Justice Department was a "wall of distrust." An attorney for the Maricopa County deputies' union did not respond to a request for comment.
The raids were only part of the problem, the Justice Department report said. Latino drivers were at least four times more likely to be pulled over by Maricopa County deputies than drivers of other races. Few stops turned uglier than Armando Nido's.
Nido, the man hit by the patrol car, recalled how its oil pan and bumper rolled over him before he was pinned under the vehicle. He said he heard the deputy who'd hit him, James Carey, tell his comrades: "Leave him there." Nido was stuck for about 40 minutes while deputies handcuffed his mother and tasered his brother, he and his family said in a lawsuit.
Eventually, firefighters extracted him. Nido's pelvis was broken in eight places, and pins were placed in his vertebrae, he said. Now 30, he runs a restaurant and a cellphone store, but often needs pain medication to get through the day.
The county settled his lawsuit last year for $600,000. Carey resigned and no charges were filed against him. The deputy said the episode was an accident — he thought that Nido had been trying to flee.
The Texans who live on the ‘Mexican side’ of the border fence: ‘Technically, we’re in the United States’
Tim Loop at the gap in the border fence that leads to his Texas home.
By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout – Wed, Dec 21, 2011
BROWNSVILLE, Texas—Pamela Taylor's living room has a Santa-hat-wearing stuffed dog atop a red doily on her coffee table, poinsettias near the couch, and, in the center of the room, an angel-topped Christmas tree with a few wrapped presents underneath.
Outside, the Christmas spirit is less visible, amid repeated warnings to KEEP OUT—though a "Merry Christmas!" sign hangs next to a warning to would-be trespassers that they're being filmed by a surveillance system. Written outside the front gate is the message: "Don't even think about parking here."
This will be Taylor's fourth Christmas living on what some Texans call the "Mexican side" of the U.S. border fence. Although she lives in Texas, her home is south of the 18-feet steel-and-concrete border wall erected by the American government. Taylor, who is 84, can see it from her front porch.
The wall was built to satisfy a law, passed in 2006 and 2008, that authorized 700 miles of fence on the southern border, 315 miles of it in Texas. President Bush said the fence would make the border safer and was "an important step toward immigration reform." Many of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, say they want to build a fence that spans the entire U.S. border. The Brownsville area shows just how complicated that project would be.
Because of a decades-old treaty with Mexico prohibiting building in the Rio Grande floodplain, the government built its border fence more than a mile north of the snaky river, trapping tens of thousands of acres of Texas--land in Cameron and Hidalgo counties--on the wrong side of the fence. The border wall is also riddled with miles-long gaps, seemingly placed at random. The U.S. Border Patrol says that illegal crossers are pushed to these gaps, where they are more easily apprehended.
Some Texans, like Taylor, live completely on the other side of the $6.2 million-a-mile [ http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/10/17/3451733/border-fence-returns-to-political.html ] wall. Others had their property split in half by the fence, after the government seized portions of their land. At least 200 people in Cameron County had some of their land seized for the fence.
'It's really done nothing for us'
Ten years ago, Taylor found a stranger sitting in her living room. "He had used my bathroom, he had shaved and cleaned himself off and he was watching the border patrol go by, sitting in that rocking chair," she said in an interview with Yahoo News. A few years later, she found 40 kilos of marijuana hidden in her bougainvilleas.
Taylor says she had to work hard to get her citizenship when she married an American soldier and moved to Texas from England after World War II. She doesn't think illegal immigrants should get a chance to become citizens. "If anything comes really easy, it's not appreciated," she said.
But the government's solution to the problem strikes her as ridiculous. "It's really done nothing for us because they're still coming across," Taylor says. Earlier this year, teenage illegal immigrants pounded on her front door in the middle of the night. She called the Border Patrol, which arrested them and a group of Hondurans they were trafficking, according to Taylor. She keeps a gun and a taser in her house, just in case.
'This is our property'
A few miles east of Taylor's house, Tim Loop's green two-story home, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, is also stuck behind the border wall. He agrees that the fence is not solving anything. Driving in his truck along the fence this week, he pointed out several places where scuffmarks suggested that people had recently climbed over. On one part of the fence not too far from his house, a torn shirt hung from the top of a pole.
Eloisa Tamez on her land, which is split in half by the border wall at far right.
Loop worries that the government will close the gaps in the fence. A complete wall wouldn't let him get to his house from the road, which is on the "American" side. The road also provides access to his farm, which grows sugar cane, grapefruit, corn, and other crops, for his eight employees.
Earlier this year, Homeland Security told landowners that it planned to close the gaps with 15-feet-wide gates that would have keypads on them. Each landowner would get a personal code to open the gate, and the government would be in charge of who else might be allowed to use each code.
"This is our property behind here," Loop said in an interview with Yahoo News. "We don't want somebody else to be the boss of our gate."
Taylor worries about a proposed highway whose path would require the government to move the fence closer to her house. "We will be more shut in than ever before," she said.
'We're in the United States'
Bob Lucio, the owner of a 165-acre golf course that lies entirely on the "Mexican" side of the fence, says the thought of Homeland Security using a secured gate to close the one entrance to the course keeps him up at night.
"If that happens, I don't think we can survive," he told Yahoo News during an interview in his office.
Lucio worked with Homeland Security to beautify the fence. Near the course, the wall is several feet shorter than elsewhere and is painted green. The wall is so subtle that some putters, many of them "winter Texans" from Canada and the Midwest, don't realize they're on the south side of the border wall, he says. A gate would change that.
"Technically, we're in the United States," Lucio said. But during a drug-cartel gun battle in June just across the Mexican border from his property, several Border Patrol agents lined up on the north side of the fence and didn't venture beyond it, he said. It gave him the impression that the Border Patrol was securing the fence line in times of trouble, instead of the actual border.
"The whole situation left me kind of numb," he said. "It's kind of like, 'You're on your own, buddy.'"
Rosalinda Huey, a spokeswoman for the Customs and Border Patrol, declined to comment on that episode but said agents patrol both sides of the fence.
'I couldn't sell my house now'
The landowners on the other side of the fence in Brownsville know their property isn't as valuable as it once was. "Would you want to buy a house behind the border wall?" Loop asked dryly.
The government didn't offer to buy the land it walled off from the rest of Texas, or to compensate people for the subsequent devaluation. It offered only to pay for the strips of land that were seized for the fence's path.
Eloisa Tamez, a nursing professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville and an outspoken opponent of the fence, refused to sell the government a quarter of an acre of her three-acre plot. She was initially offered $100 for the patch of land, which was used for the fence that now bisects her property.
Tamez's family has lived on her land since the 1700s. The family traditionally held an Easter party near the river, which is now on the other side of the wall. The only way Tamez can access the other part of her land is through a gap 1,200 feet away, which she can reach only by trespassing on her neighbors' land.
The government's offer eventually went up to $13,000, but she still didn't accept. She refused to sign the papers and is locked in a court battle with the government over the quarter acre it took from her.
Years after immigration raid, Iowa town feels poorer and less stable
The "Taste of Mexico" restaurant on Lawler St (Goodwin)
By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout – Wed, Dec 7, 2011
POSTVILLE, Iowa—A group of Jewish boys in yarmulkes and winter coats walked past the "Taste of Mexico" restaurant on Lawler Street last week on their way home from school. Minutes later, a Somali man wearing a keffiyeh scarf around his neck passed by, perhaps on his way to the town's makeshift mosque on Main Street.
This improbably diverse rural town of about 2,000 people in northeastern Iowa suffered a near-fatal shock more than three years ago when a federal immigration raid scooped up 20 percent of its population in a single day. An ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jewish family from Brooklyn bought the town's defunct meatpacking plant in 1987 and attracted workers from Israel, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The plant became the largest producer of kosher beef in the world. When the plant was raided one spring morning in May 2008, most of the workers on shift were Guatemalan and Mexican, and undocumented. Many workers later said they had been physically or sexually abused at the plant, and at least 57 minors were illegally employed there, some as young as 13 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/us/06meat.html ].
Six months later, the plant shut down abruptly. Sholom Rubashkin, the chief executive, was convicted of fraud and sent to prison. The national and local news media documented the near-demise of the town that followed, as businesses were shuttered overnight and hundreds of homes abandoned. The town shrank to nearly half its former size, as many of the illegal immigrants who were not netted in the raid left out of fear or because they couldn't find a job.
Immigration is one of the most contentious issues facing the Republican presidential candidates as they prepare for Saturday's debate in Des Moines, sponsored by Yahoo! and ABC News. Earlier this year, Rick Perry's candidacy suffered because of his support for allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public universities in Texas. Last month, Newt Gingrich struck a moderate tone on the subject, saying, "I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families [ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/newt-gingrich-prepared-heat-immigration-043951171.html ] that have been here a quarter century." Other candidates say Perry and Gingrich support policies that amount to amnesty for people who have broken the law. Yahoo News visited Postville to examine what immigration looks like in the Republican presidential campaign's first battleground state, one that is 90 percent white but that has outposts like Postville that are changing the state's ethnic makeup and driving its population growth. Though still less than 4 percent of the population, Iowa's foreign-born population increased by 159 percent [ http://www.cfpciowa.org/uploaded/Dreams%20and%20Opportunities%20-%20Immigrant%20Families%20and%20Iowas%20Future_1.pdf ] between 1990 and 2008, while the native-born population increased by only 5.7 percent.
Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers' immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008.
In order to staff its still low-paying jobs with legal immigrants, the new owner of the plant has recruited a hodgepodge of refugees and other immigrants, who often leave the town as soon as they find better opportunities, creating a constant churn among the population. The switch to a legal work force has made the community feel less stable, some locals say, and it's unclear if Postville will again become a place where immigrants will put down roots, raise children, and live in relative harmony with their very different neighbors.
'For me, it was a fairy tale'
Postville thinks of itself as a place where people of all backgrounds and nationalities can come, do hard and unsavory work, and get ahead. Svetlana Vanchugova, who teaches English classes to non-native speakers at the high school, is one such immigrant. Called "Ms. Lana" by her students, Vanchugova came to Postville in 1995 from Ukraine in order to escape an unhappy marriage and to start a new life with her two sons. "For me it was a fairy tale when I first came to this little town," she says.
Vanchugova taught English at a university in Ukraine, but when she arrived in America, her only option was to work at the plant, packing chickens. "Just imagine what a university professor feels working for agriprocessors for three years," she told Yahoo News as her high school students worked quietly behind her. "One thought was torturing me: that I didn't belong there."
She was quickly promoted to making labels for the food products and eventually became the quality control manager for the entire plant. The plant's managers sponsored her for a work visa, helping her to get legal immigration status after she overstayed her visitor's visa. Today, because of tighter federal rules, Vanchugova would most likely not have been able to adjust her immigration status.
"I prayed every day because I knew that … if you are illegal here, there is no way for you," she said. "You cannot get any job, you cannot do anything. All you can do is work at agriprocessors, and that is it."
When Vanchugova's sons attended school in Postville, officials there--desperate for a way to deal with an influx of students from dozens of countries who could not speak English--learned that she used to teach English at a university. They asked her to set up an English as a Second Language program at the high school. Now, about a third of the K-12 students in Postville are in ESL classes. Over time, the school has enrolled children from at least 35 different countries.
Three years after arriving in the town with two children, two suitcases, and no money, Vanchugova became a K-12 ESL teacher. She is now an American citizen.
Vanchugova thinks of Postville as her "motherland," the place where she was reborn. The immigration raid permanently changed the spirit of the town, she told Yahoo News. "Things changed, and not for the better," she said. "It is not that Postville anymore."
'I came here to work and have money'
For the next generation of immigrants to Postville--the Guatemalans and others who were netted in the raid--the fairy tale never came true. A few dozen were granted visas for cooperating with law enforcement in cases against their supervisors, but most of them are gone, according to Steve Brackett, the pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church who led the community's response to the raid's aftermath.
The wave of immigrants that replaced them has been less willing to put down roots and call Postville their home, locals say. "From my perspective as a community we were stabilizing in 2008," Brackett says. "Rather than single males working, they had brought their families. We had people who were buying houses and planned to stay here."
Wilson Eduardo, a native of the Pacific island of Palau, is one of four remaining Palauans, of about 150 who traveled 8,000 miles to Postville four months after the immigration raid in 2008.
Then-C.E.O. Sholom Rubashkin was desperate to find legal workers immediately after the raid, and sought them out in Palau (a former U.S.-administered United Nations territory, which means Palauans can live and work legally in America), homeless shelters in south Texas, and a Native American reservation in Nebraska, among other places. He offered to pay their way to the plant and promised them a land of opportunity.
The Palauans showed up in September 2008 in T-shirts and sandals. The newcomers were incredulous when they were told that winter temperatures could reach 20 degrees below zero, easy. And two months after the Palauans got to Postville, the plant went bankrupt, putting Eduardo and his 150 countrymen out of a job. Unlike nearly all of the other Palauans, who quickly fled home or to other states in a mass exodus, Eduardo decided to stay. He got a job cleaning apartments, and when the plant reopened in 2009 he went back to the chicken line, where he eventually earned $11 an hour.
Three years later, on a chilly December morning, Eduardo was fortified from the cold with a puffy coat and a knit hat adorned with a dollar sign. He bought a scratch-off lottery ticket and a phone card at the Guppy's gas station, chatted pleasantly with the woman behind the counter, and began walking home to his apartment, which is close to the new Dollar General store on the edge of town.
"Now I got a lot of people to know here," he says. "When I go around I meet some people I know and I talk. That's good for me."
As one of only four Palauans left in the town, Eduardo gets lonely. "But I don't mind because I came here to work and have money and help family," he says. In Palau, where he learned English in grade school, he made only $3.16 an hour working in the country's court system. Working in the meatpacking plant made him sick—the ammonia and chicken fluff irritated his lungs, and the repetitive chicken-hanging motion caused his wrists to swell painfully—but he was able to send home extra money to help his family.
A little more than a year after moving to Postville, Eduardo quit his job at the plant to work for a plastics company in nearby Decorah, a safer and more pleasant job. But a month ago, Eduardo was laid off from that job for the winter. He's planning on going back to the meatpacking plant, at least for now.
'There's less feeling of community'
Today, the meatpacking plant is called Agri Star, and its new owner, Hershey Friedman of Montreal, says he uses e-verify to ensure his workers are authorized to work in the United States. Legal refugees from Somalia, most of them men without families, have come to work. Chad Wahls, the principal of Postville's elementary and middle school, says only six Somali kids are enrolled in the town's schools, even though Mohamed Hassan, a Somali who moved to Postville from Minneapolis three months ago to work at the chicken slaughtering part of the plant, told Yahoo News he estimated the population of Somali adults to be more than 100.
"Guatemalans came husbands, wives, cousins, brothers, sisters … and everyone could see in the Guatemalans, you know, family values," said Aaron Goldsmith, a former city councilman and the first Orthodox Jewish politician to hold elected office in Iowa. Over the years, the Jewish population has built a synagogue, a kosher grocery store, and a gender-segregated religious school in Postville.
"When you have more of this eclectic crowd, there's less feeling of community and bond," Goldsmith said. "I think it makes it a little colder. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's different."
Hassan, the Somali immigrant, says he likes his work. But he thinks the Hispanic immigrants in the town--Postville is still 32 percent Hispanic, according to data from the 2010 census--don't like him. "They don't want Somali people here," Hassan said. He left his father and brother back in Minneapolis, and says he is looking for a wife but hasn't had much luck. (Finding a spouse is no easy thing to accomplish anywhere, but it's especially hard in Postville. Wahls, the principal, says it's difficult to recruit teachers to come here in part because "if you come here single, you're going to stay single. There's not a lot of fish in the sea for you here.")
Town officials let the Somalis worship in an empty restaurant storefront on Main Street, even though the mosque technically violates building codes. "Some of those things you just have to let go," says Leigh Rekow, the mayor.
A menorah decoration in Postville (Goodwin)
Postville's leaders are used to religious and cultural negotiations and concessions. For the holidays, Postville's streets are lined with alternating Christmas wreaths and menorahs. The city council "negotiated with the Jewish people and they get the intersections and we get the rest," Rekow said.
One menorah was placed at an intersection by the Lutheran church. "Some people complained about that," Rekow said. "We talked to them and we moved it back one pole."
'The only good thing I see about this raid'
One reason immigrant turnover in the town is higher than before the 2008 raid may be that legal immigrants have more employment options than the mostly undocumented Guatemalans and Mexicans who used to work at the meatpacking plant. They are also less vulnerable to abuse.
"The only good thing I see about this raid is at least it brought to the front page that our food is cheap in part because immigrants are exploited and are victimized," said Sonia Parras-Konrad, a Des Moines immigration lawyer who represented, pro bono, dozens of the Postville detainees. Undocumented people are often afraid to report labor abuses and crimes for fear of being deported, she says.
Parras-Konrad and Brackett, the Lutheran pastor, both told Yahoo News that the undocumented population is on the rise in the town and speculated that the plant may be hiring illegal immigrants again. That could happen even without the plant managers' knowledge: A 2009 federal study found that e-verify is only 46 percent accurate when checking unauthorized workers [ http://www.uscis.gov/USCIS/E-Verify/E-Verify/Final%20E-Verify%20Report%2012-16-09_2.pdf ], because it can't detect some kinds of fraud. Friedman, the plant's owner, said in an e-mail that the plant uses e-verify and that he has no difficulties finding legal workers to staff the plant.
What the federal immigration raid did not accomplish, however, is returning the meatpacking plant to how it was in the past, when Iowa-born Postville residents were paid middle-class wages to work on the all-beef kill floor. Harlan White, a retired appliance repairman and volunteer firefighter, said he made $2 an hour in 1960 (which, in inflation-adjusted dollars, would now be more than $15 an hour) to carry used cow hides from the plant's basement and pack them onto a train, one of the lowest-paying jobs at the company. In 1981, the Hygrade beef plant in Storm Lake, a four-hour drive west of Postville, paid $19 an hour as a starting salary--$47 an hour in today's dollars.
Workers at Agri Star now start out at $8.50 an hour, according to Eduardo and Mayor Rekow, a lower wage than they were offered three years ago in the aftermath of the raid. Rekow says some non-immigrants from Postville work in the plant's clerical office, but he's not aware of any who work on the line.
This story is part of a series of articles on the politics of Iowa, leading up to Saturday's Republican presidential debate in Des Moines, sponsored by Yahoo! and ABC News.
Sheriff Lee Baca to create task force to address wrongful jailings The L.A. County sheriff's move comes in response to a Los Angeles Times investigation [the post to which this is a reply] that found that wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. December 28, 2011 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wrong-id-jails-20111228,0,3640104.story [with comments]
Death In The Devil's Chair: Florida Man's Pepper Spray Death Raises Questions About Jail Abuse
Radley Balko First Posted: 1/11/12 04:22 PM ET Updated: 1/12/12 03:34 PM ET
When he left his home in Ohio to visit his brother in Fort Myers, Fla. in March 2009, Nick Christie was already breaking down, physically and mentally. His wife Joyce was concerned about his well-being. Rightly so. By the end of the month, the grandfather of two, whose only prior run-in with the law was a DUI in the 1980s, would be strapped to a restraining chair in the Lee County, Fla. jail, coated with a thick layer of pepper spray, smothered in a "spit hood," then finally taken to a Florida hospital where, two days later, he would die [ http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/news/investigates/photo-shows-pepper-sprayed-prisoner-12142011 ].
Christie, 62, a retired boilermaker, suffered from heart disease as well as emphysema, the latter the likely result of his former smoking habit and years of exposure to asbestos. A bout with diverticulitis had forced him to cancel a fishing trip the year before, and he slipped into a depression after he was hospitalized for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a condition that further constricted his breathing.
Christie had been taking medication for his depression, but the doctor who was treating him had recently moved. That left no one to manage Christie's spiraling emotional state, and no one to control the possible side effects of his medication. Christie's wife worried about his trip to Florida, to the point where she contacted police in Lee County herself to ask that they keep an eye out for her husband. At her request, a captain from the Girard, Ohio police department also called Lee County officials and asked them to take Christie to a hospital if they found him.
Christie was first arrested on March 25, for public intoxication. Though there's evidence Christie had been drinking, he was also beginning his mental deterioration, and may have merely been disoriented. One fast-food worker he interacted with that night said she thought he was suffering from Alzheimer's. Though confused (he couldn't remember his wife's or brother's phone number), Christie did inform the jail attendants of his various medical conditions, and gave them a list of the medications he was taking. He was released the next day.
Christie was then arrested again on March 27, this time for misdemeanor trespassing. Nicholas DiCello, whose Cleveland firm Spangenberg Shibley & Liber [ http://www.spanglaw.com/ ] has filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Joyce and Christie's estate, says the second arrest was for a minor offense. "It was for trespassing at the hotel where was staying," DiCello says. "He was having another mental episode. He was bewildered, acting crazy, and so the hotel got fed up and asked him to leave. When he didn't go, they called the police."
According to DiCello, the jail staff and the staff for Prison Health Services, the private company contracted to provide medical service to the jail, ordered no advanced physical or mental health screening for Christie before he was jailed, despite the long list of medical conditions already in his file from his prior arrest. There is also no indication that anyone was made aware of Joyce Christie's notification of Lee County officials, in which she informed them about her husband's conditions. According to the lawsuit, after the second arrest, Lee County deputies locked Christie's medications in his truck. During his 43 hours in custody, he was never given medication.
Christie was uncooperative and nonsensical from the time he was arrested, but at some point after his incarceration, he became combative. Lee County deputies responded by either directly spraying him or fogging his cell with pepper spray at least 10 times. (According to police, Christie was sprayed eight times. A cell mate was sprayed two other times, which may have affected Christie.) He was never allowed to "decontaminate" -- to wash the spray off. Other inmates in the jail, who weren't targeted with the spray, told the Fort Myers News-Press the blasts were so strong that the secondary effects caused them to gag.
The deputies then put Christie into a restraining chair, a controversial device that binds inmates at both wrists, both ankles, and across the chest. In depositions, the other inmates, along with a deputy trainee named Monshay Gibbs, testified that Christie was sprayed at least two more times after he had been strapped to the chair. He was also stripped naked, and outfitted with a "spit mask," a hood designed to prevent inmates from spitting on jail personnel. In Christie's case, the mask kept the pepper spray in close proximity to his nose and mouth, ensuring he would continue to inhale it for the full six hours he was in the restraint chair.
According to Gibbs' testimony, Christie pleaded with the deputies, telling them he had a heart condition and numerous other medical problems, and that the spit mask made it difficult for him to breathe. Other inmates have confirmed Gibbs' account, adding that Christie began to turn purple.
When Joyce Christie heard of her husband's second arrest, she flew down to Florida to find him. "She was actually relieved to hear he had been arrested," DiCello says. "She thought they had responded to her pleas for help, that they would take him to a hospital to be treated." She eventually made her way to the Lee County jail. Joyce Christie would later learn that at one point in the night, when she was pleading with police to take her husband to the hospital, at the same time and in the same building he was being tortured to death in the restraint chair.
"She left frustrated," DiCello says. "They weren't listening to her. She didn't know what to do."
In the early afternoon of March 29, Nick Christie went into respiratory distress. He was taken to the Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers. Joyce Christie told journalist Jane Akre [ http://news.injuryboard.com/pepper-sprayed-man-dies-in-jail-what-happened-to-nick-christie-.aspx?googleid=277120 ] that according to hospital staff, her husband was so covered in pepper spray that doctors had to repeatedly change their gloves as they became contaminated. Christie would suffer multiple heart attacks over the next two days before he was finally declared brain dead and his life support was removed on March 31. Two days after Christie had been transported out of the jail, Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Pfalzgraf noted [ http://www.winknews.com/Call-for-Action/2011-11-10/New-picture-shows-deceased-man-moments-after-OC-sprayed ] in his autopsy report that Christie still had brown-orange liquid pepper spray all over his body.
Pfalzgraf determined that Christie's heart gave out due to stress from his exposure to pepper spray. He ruled the death a homicide.
The Devil's Chair
"I look at this story, and all I can say is, what in the world were they thinking?" says David Klinger, a former police officer who now teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Klinger specializes in the use of force. "As a general rule, you don't use pepper spray on someone who is restrained. There might be some limited circumstances where, say, you have a suspect in handcuffs who is banging his head against the window of a patrol car. You might give him a quick burst of pepper spray. But never, never someone who is secured in a restraint chair. It just makes no sense at all."
The Lee County deputies appear to have violated accepted use of force guidelines a number of different ways, including the length of time they kept Christie strapped to the chair, pepper spraying him after he had been restrained (as well as their failure to clean the pepper spray off of him), their failure to properly evaluate him for mental and physical health problems, and their failure to allow him to take his medication.
While the Florida Sheriff's Association told HuffPost that it has no guidelines on the use of restraint chairs, there seems to be a strong consensus that the use of pepper spray, stun guns, or other compliance tools after a suspect has been restrained is at minimum excessive force, and possibly a crime.
The Florida State Prison System doesn't use restraint chairs, either. A spokeswoman told the Orlando Sentinel in 2006 that the state's Department of Corrections has determined the chairs are a safety risk, and inappropriate for prisoners with mental illness. The problem, some experts say, is that inmates with mental illness are particularly prone to "excited delirium," an escalating set of respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms that can lead to death. (Though the diagnosis is still controversial [ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7608386 ].)
Steve Yerger has been training law enforcement agencies on the use of force for 20 years, and gives what he says is the only course on restraint chairs in the country. Yerger says the complete restriction of movement to which the chair subjects inmates can trigger physiological effects -- both respiratory and circulatory -- and that the problem can be exacerbated in patients with mental health problems. "They can just go through the roof, and then they crash. You need to make sure you have constant monitoring, and that you always have medical professionals close by," Yerger says.
But inmates with mental illness are also more likely to present a threat to themselves or others, which means they're more likely to need restraint. A 2009 report [ http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/archives/fnp_display.htm?storyID=100267 ] by the Maryland Frederick News-Post, for example, found that in the previous year, 64 percent of inmates put in a restraint chair by the Frederick County Sheriff's Department had mental health problems.
There have been a number of deaths over the years at least in part attributed to what critics call "the devil's chair" or the "torture chair [ http://writechic.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/floridas-torture-chair/ ]." In a 2000 article for The Progressive [ http://www.progressive.org/mag_cusacchair ] Anne-Marie Cusac documented 11 deaths, including several inmates with mental illness as well as cases in which inmates were pepper sprayed after they had been restrained. Cusac notes that in the 1999 case of James Arthur Livingston, who died after being strapped to a restraint chair in Tarrant County, Texas, the first deputy who attempted to give Livingston CPR wrote in his report, "I then removed myself from the area and walked into the sally port, where I threw up from inhaling pepper gas residue from inmate Livingston."
Like Klinger, the former police officer, Yerger says the use of pepper spray in conjunction with the chair was particularly over the line. "This is a tool for restraint, and there's no reason to pepper spray someone once they're restrained. That's punishment, and it's a form of torture. At minimum, that sort of thing should cost someone his job. And it should probably lead to criminal charges."
Yerger says the other problem in Lee County is that once Christie had been securely restrained, he needed medical treatment. While the officers in Lee County were clearly out of line, Yerger says, the problem in many other cases is more a lack of training.
"Several years ago, I was researching the restraint chair for a case where I was going to be an expert witness. I found that all of these police departments across the country were using the chairs, but none of them were getting any training," Yerger says. "There's no training on the proper way to put someone into the chair, but more importantly, you have these people who have mental problems, or who are on alcohol or drugs. These are medical problems, that require medical attention. This isn't criminal behavior. But that's sometimes how it's treated."
In her 2000 article [ http://www.progressive.org/mag_cusacchair ], Cusac points to a deposition of Dan Corcoran, president of AEDEC International Inc., the Beaverton, Oregon, company which manufactures the Prostraint Violent Prisoner Chair. Corcoran acknowledges that the only testing he did of the chair before marketing it was to put some friends in it. He says the chair had never been tested in any scientific way for its effect on someone impaired by drugs, alcohol or mental illness (in fact, he specifically recommends the chair for the first two), or for other hazards like deep vein thrombosis [ http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/deep-vein-thrombosis/DS01005 ], the sometimes-fatal blood clotting that can occur after remaining in the same position for more than a few hours.
But both Yerger and Klinger say calls for banning the chair are misplaced. They say restraint is sometimes critical when a prisoner poses a threat to himself or others, and there's nothing particularly sinister about the restraint chair. "Once you take care of the immediate threat -- and you really do need to take care of that -- then you treat the case like it needs to be treated. That means if it's someone having a mental crisis, you get them to a hospital," Yerger says.
"Any new device or piece of technology can be helpful, or it can be abused, whether it's a restraint chair, a Taser, or baton," says Klinger. "If you have officers who are willing to punish and abuse a restrained prisoner, it's going to happen whether he's in a restraint chair, handcuffs, or a restraint bed or gurney. The device isn't the problem. It's the officers."
"It's really about culture," says Yerger. "You need to instill a distinct code, especially in a correctional facility, that emphasizes control over punishment."
Yerger cites Philip Zimbardo's famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment [ http://news.stanford.edu/news/2001/august22/prison2-822.html ] which, though it later came under criticism, showed how quickly students randomly chosen to be guards in a hypothetical prison resorted to abusing students randomly chosen to be prisoners. "It's a constant thing. It has to be hammered home, over and over."
In Christie's case, that puts the bulk of the blame on the deputies and Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott [ http://www.sheriffleefl.org/main/ ], not on the restraint chair.
No Accountability
When Joyce Christie finally got a phone call in March 2009 letting her know that her husband had been taken to the hospital, the call was anonymous, and the caller didn't say what hospital. She used caller I.D. to determine the call had come from the Gulf Coast Medical Center. When she arrived, the police wouldn't let her see her husband. Fortunately, someone in the waiting room overheard her conversation and gave her the card for a bail bondsman. She left to get the bond, and only after posting bond was she allowed to see him. By then, Nick Christie was close to death. As a deputy at the hospital got up to leave, he told Christie to make sure her husband -- now with eyes taped shut and tubes protruding from his face -- showed up for his court date, or else he'd be arrested.
Scott's office conducted its own internal investigation of Nick Christie's death and, perhaps not surprisingly, found no wrongdoing on the part of any Lee County deputy. That conclusion may come back to bite the county. Municipalities have what's known as sovereign immunity from civil lawsuits. But one way to get around sovereign immunity in a civil rights case is to show that a government agency has displayed a pattern or practice of improperly training employees about citizens' rights. Since using pepper spray on a restrained inmate and neglecting to get him medical attention are both clearly established civil rights violations, in concluding that none of his officers acted outside of department policy, Scott may have given DiCello an opening.
And in fact, none of the deputies involved with Christie's death were disciplined in any way. Florida State Attorney Stephen Russell [ http://sao.cjis20.org/ ] declined to press criminal charges. DiCello says that Russell's review was based almost entirely on the sheriff's department report. Samantha Syoen, communications director for Russell's office, says the investigation did use much of the sheriff department's investigation, but that the possible bias of that report was taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to pursue criminal charges. "We've prosecuted police officers before." Syoen says. "We've prosecuted judges, we've even prosecuted our own."
Syoen says the state attorney's office didn't clear the deputies involved with Christie's death, it only determined that under Florida law there wasn't enough evidence for criminal charges.
"Our office was very concerned about what happened to Mr. Christie," she said. "But the memo concluded that this would be a matter better settled at the federal level, either with possible criminal charges or with a lawsuit."
According to DiCello, the office of U.S. Attorney Robert O'Neill has yet to show any interest in the case. (O'Neill's office referred HuffPost to the FBI's Fort Myers regional office. That office did not return HuffPost's request for comment.)
Joyce Christie returned to Girard, Ohio shortly after Nick, her husband of 40 years, had died. A few days after she returned, she received something in the mail from Lee County, Florida. It was a warrant for her husband's arrest.
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