SEIU blasts Obama immigration enforcement policies
- From: Wolfgang <vaneigen@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2010 08:38:44 -0700 (PDT)
SEIU blasts Obama immigration enforcement policies
By Spencer S. Hsu
One of the nation's biggest labor unions, a major backer of President
Obama, is condemning his Department of Homeland Security's immigration
enforcement practices, protesting the use of deportation quotas for
agents and expanded workplace audits.
Eliseo Medina, international executive vice president of Service
Employees International Union, said SEIU members want DHS "to stop
these crazy, irrational policies," while seeking to turn up pressure
on Congress to take up overhaul legislation. SEIU is holding vigils
and demonstrations Thursday in Oakland and Sacramento, Calif., and
then in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, New York City
and Minneapolis Friday.
While Obama and Homeland Security Janet Napolitano criticized the
George W. Bush administration for emphasizing factory raids and
neighborhood sweeps, and promised instead to focus on deporting the
most dangerous illegal immigrants, immigrant advocates said that
thousands of ordinary workers are still being forced into the
underground economy by electronic audits of companies' hiring records.
Combined with recent disclosures that U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement is changing how it evaluates agents to emphasize caseload
quotas and is widening whom it targets for deportation to sustain high
removal statistics, Medina said the reality of DHS's actions is not
matching the administration's rhetoric.
"They said they were going after criminals. They need to do that. They
said they were going after bad actor employers to take away the profit
motive. They need to do that. But instead, they are still going after
meatpackers, janitors and cooks," Medina said.
"There has been a failure with this strategy, and so there's a lot of
anger within our union, because we look at and see the everyday impact
of these policies, and it's the complete opposite of what they said
they were going to do," Medina said.
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