NEWS BYTES An INS employee in Utah has filed suit against the agency, claiming that it has discriminated against him because of his Mormon faith. According to R. Kurt Halverson, numerous other INS employees in the Salt Lake City, Utah office, including several supervisors, ridiculed him because of his religious beliefs, and he was in some cases, the victim of active discrimination. On one occasion, Halverson alleges, a supervisor referred to Mormons as “sneaky and cult like.” According to the suit, while there were a few Mormon INS agents in Salt Lake City, none of the supervisors were and no Mormon agents were ever promoted to supervisory level.
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While inspecting a proposed site for a new complex of court buildings on Staten Island in New York, officials discovered a 19th century cemetery that holds immigrants who were quarantined upon their arrival to the US. Officials estimate that there could be thousands of people buried in the cemetery, which is close to the location of the former Marine Hospital, founded in 1799 when immigrants were discovered to be carrying many communicable diseases. The cemetery holds those immigrants who did not survive the quarantine period.
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At the recent meeting of the American Bar Association House of Delegates, the body that adopts the organization’s positions on important legal issues in the country, the organization approved several resolutions calling for changes to immigration law. One of the most important of these was the adoption of a resolution opposing the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings. Secret evidence has been used to hold a number of people, mostly Arabs, for periods of more than three years. The evidence is kept secret from the detainee, making it difficult for him to counter it. Last year a bill was introduced in Congress to eliminate the use of secret evidence, but it was stalled in committee. It will be introduced again, and perhaps with the lobbying efforts of the ABA, will receive at least a full vote in Congress.
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The American Bar Association has announced that it will be awarding 00 grants to eight local bar associations to assist with the provision of pro bono legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children. The ABA has long urged practitioners to perform pro bono work, and this latest move is in response to the increasing number of unaccompanied children taken into INS custody each year. In 1999, the INS had 4,600 unaccompanied minors in custody, up from 2,375 in 1997. The ABA also adopted resolutions calling for the appointment of counsel at the expense of the government to unaccompanied immigrant children, calling for the recognition of gender-based persecution as a ground for asylum, and calling for an end to the practice of moving INS detainees to facilities where they can no longer easily communicate with their lawyers.
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This week the Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Michael Negele, whose US citizenship had been revoked because he served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War Two. In 1999, Negele was stripped of his citizenship after a judge found that he had served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen camp and that the Theresienstadt ghetto. Negele had concealed his wartime activities on his application for immigration in 1950, and because he committed fraud in this application, he was ineligible for citizenship.
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US foreign police experts have produced a report containing a recommendation that the US government try to develop closer ties with Cuba. While the official Cuban reaction was negative, sources say that the private reaction to the report, created by the US Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan group, was encouraging. Among the recommendations in the report are increased trade and cooperation against drug trafficking, as well as changing US immigration policy toward Cuba, and making it easier for Cubans to visit family in the US.
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In a rare demonstration, 250 sweatshop workers in New York protested their working conditions last weekend. Such demonstrations are rare because, while the conditions in sweatshops are dangerous and workers are seldom paid even the minimum wage, many of the workers are undocumented and hesitant to complain. Several groups, including the Latin American Workers Project and the Garment Workers Solidarity Center, organized the event. According to organizers, the number of sweatshops in New York is growing, but workers are slowly realizing that by organizing they can improve their conditions by pressuring employers.
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Recently, migrant farm workers in Florida held a protest outside of a St. Petersburg Taco Bell restaurant to draw attention to the conditions in which they work. Most of those protesting work as tomato pickers, and they have taken to public protests because growers and the government refuse to meet with them. During the last gubernatorial campaign Florida governor Jeb Bush met with representatives of workers and was involved in obtaining a raise for some of them, but since then his representative to agricultural workers, Luis Rodriguez, appears to have convinced him that groups representing farm workers do not really care about the workers. The workers plan to continue their protests, and a bill has been introduced in the state legislature to improve some of the conditions.
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