New Orleans Big city police chiefs from places like Miami,
Sacramento, and elsewhere came out yesterday against 287(g). They don’t want local police forces to be confused with the immigration storm troopers of ICE.
The Miami chief in a published report cited the downturn of cooperation between immigrants and police in his city as dating from a “get-tough-on-immigrants” speech made by Senator John McCain during the campaign. He and others stated the obvious: new immigrants do not know the difference between the local police force and federal officials. No, duh, in many of the countries from which they hail the federales are synonymous with the local police and don’t have the nice qualms around jurisdictional limits we find (supposedly) in the states.
I’m not sure what it takes Secretary Napolitano and President Obama to throw out 287(g) and the ravages of blockheads like Sheriff Joe Apaio, but big city chiefs with significant populations of immigrants are shouting loudly and clearly, if they would just listen, that 278(g) is hurting, rather than helping their departments, their cities, and the real fight against crime.
Seattle My morning started with a long call with a young producer and 8-year veteran of Fox News Special Reports explaining to me why the special reports in depth documentaries were different from the regular whack Fox News. What a job? Her real pitch is that they had been “tasked,” as she said with doing a documentary on ACORN and she wanted to convince me that they were “fair and objective,” and I should be interviewed for the show based on my new book, Citizen Wealth.
We were greeted by a gorgeous, sunny day in Seattle with a couple of free hours before the book event at Secky Fasciane’s house, so my colleague John Anderson from Vancouver ACORN indulged me and off we went to find the new Seattle Central Public Library. I was eager to see the Rem Koolhaus building that was under construction last time I was downtown, and that I had read now defined the state-of-the-art in establishing a modern library and perhaps something about public space as well. We were not disappointed.
Vancouver The board of ACORN Canada hunkered down at the Arundel Hotel next to the office to review both plans for the coming year and assess where the organization stood right now on a number of fronts. Lengthy discussion also centered on ACORN Canada’s leadership role in Community Organizations International and what it took to advance the first global campaign around the financial injustices involved in remittances. At the end of the meeting we received the news from Toronto ACORN leader Elise Aymer that Scotiabank, the target of the action in that city, had been the first of the targets to provide a formal, albeit inadequate, response to our demands.
