Immigration Surveillance Negative

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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Varsity Division
Immigration Surveillance Negative – Table of Contents
Summary.............................................................................................................................................. 2
Glossary ........................................................................................................................................... 3-4
Inherency Arguments
No Inherency – Decreasing Deportations Now ..................................................................................... 5
No Inherency – ICE Re-prioritizing Deportations Now .......................................................................... 6
Economics Advantage Arguments
Illegal Immigration Hurts the Economy – Domestic Competition........................................................... 7
Illegal Immigration Hurts the Economy – Minority Workers ................................................................... 8
Illegal Immigration Hurts the Economy – Taxes .................................................................................... 9
Human Rights Advantage Arguments
Reducing Violations – Federal Oversight ............................................................................................ 10
Reducing Violations – Medical Care ................................................................................................... 11
Security Should Be Prioritized Over Rights ......................................................................................... 12
Solvency Arguments
No Solvency – Inefficient Systems ...................................................................................................... 13
No Solvency – States Will Continue to Exclude .................................................................................. 14
Turn – Increased Smuggling ............................................................................................................... 15
Turn – Violent Militias .................................................................................................................... 16-17
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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Summary
The Negative position has some options when it comes to attack the Affirmative case.
First, the Negative can argue that the current problems are already being solved. The Obama
Administration has made it a priority to improve the deportation process so that it is fair and efficient.
New guidelines issued by the federal government call for immigration enforcement agencies to target
individuals who have been convicted of violent crimes and to reduce the amount of non-criminal
individuals being deported. In particular, the administration has indicated it hopes to keep families
together and reduce the amount of parents being taken away from their children.
Second, the Negative can argue that unlawful immigration can be detrimental to the economy.
Undocumented immigrants can burden our social service system by using public goods like
healthcare or food supplements. In addition, corporations take advantage of undocumented
immigrants by exploiting them for cheap wages. Not only are they exploited but individuals who are
citizens can no longer to afford to work in those industries because companies will just choose to hire
workers who they can pay less.
Third, the Negative can address the human rights issue by analyzing the improvements happening in
the system now. Much of the criticism of U.S deportation policy has been that the detention centers
we use to hold immigrants violate human rights. The ICE has been working to solve these concerns
by providing proper medical care and establishing more stringent federal oversight. In addition, the
Negative can compare how we should evaluate human rights compared to security for the U.S.
Lastly, the Negative can simply argue that the plan doesn’t actually solve the harms it lists. Ending
surveillance alone won’t address anti-immigrant policies that states have adopted and will make the
ICE more inefficient by forcing them to do their job without surveillance technology. Some have also
argued that lenient immigration policies fuel the immigration crisis because they give smugglers an
incentive to send people across the border illegally. Moreover, states have a right to deport
immigrants and curtailing surveillance could make the immigration court system worse and fuel the
rise of violent anti-immigrant militias.
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Glossary (1/2)
Alterity: the state of being other or different; otherness.
Arizona v. United States: a legal case brought to the Supreme Court of the United States that dealt
with whether the State of Arizona could make its own immigration law independent of the federal
government. On a 5-3 decision the court found that Arizona could not make it a crime to be in Arizona
without legal papers, making it a crime to apply for or get a job in the state, or allowing police to arrest
individuals who had committed crimes that could lead to their deportation because those laws
infringed upon the federal government’s authority in immigration law.
Attendant: occurring with or as a result of; accompanying.
Border Patrol: is the agency in charge of watching and monitoring the border in order to prevent
people from entering the United States illegally.
Civil Rights: the rights of citizens to political and social freedom and equality.
Consular Consolidated Database (CCD): is a database used by U.S consular officials that records
data from visa applications such as photographs and democratic information of applicants.
Dataveillance: Surveillance of someone’s personal data.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS): Is an agency of the United States federal government
that was formed in 2002 from the combination of 22 departments and agencies. The agency is charge
of various task related to making the United States homeland safe including customs, border, and
immigration enforcement; emergency response to natural and manmade disasters; antiterrorism
work; and cybersecurity.
Duress: describes a range of symptoms and experiences of a person's internal life that are
commonly held to be troubling, confusing or out of the ordinary.
Federal expenditures: spending by the federal government.
Human Rights: a right that is believed to belong justifiably to every person.
Immigrants Detention Center: is a facility used by the federal government to house undocumented
immigrants who have been detained and subject to deportation.
Non-governmental organizations (NGO): an organization that is not a part of the government. For
example, Doctors Without Borders is an NGO.
Nonjusticiable: If a case is "nonjusticiable." a federal court cannot hear it. The justice of the court of
does not have the ability to make a decision on the matter at hand.
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Glossary (2/2)
Secure Communities Program: is a program of the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) that uses information shared between the ICE, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and
local law enforcement agencies to find whether individuals who have a criminal record have also
violated immigration law by entering the United States illegally.
Undocumented Immigrant: refers to a foreign nationals residing in the U.S. without legal
immigration status. It includes persons who entered the U.S. without inspection and proper
permission from the U.S. government, and those who entered with a legal visa that is no longer valid.
Undocumented immigrants are also known as unauthorized or illegal immigrants.
U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): is an agency within the Department of
Homeland security that enforces federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and
immigration to promote homeland security and public safety.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.): The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services is responsible for processing immigration and naturalization applications and establishing
policies regarding immigration services.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.): Customs and Border Protection prevents people
from entering the country illegally, or bringing anything harmful or illegal into the United States.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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No Inherency – Decreasing Deportations Now
[__]
[__] The federal government is decreasing deportations now by only focusing on deporting
individual’s convicted of a crime.
Washington Post, 2014
(Obama announces immigration overhaul shielding 4 million from deportation,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-immigration-plan-will-shield-37-million-fromdeportation/2014/11/20/3345d672-70dd-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html)
President Obama sought to convince the American public Thursday that his plans to unilaterally
change immigration laws were well within the precedent set by previous administrations and did not
amount to an amnesty program for illegal immigrants. In a prime-time address from the White House,
Obama argued that a mass deportation of the nation’s more than 11 million undocumented
immigrants “would be both impossible and contrary to our character.” Rather, the president said,
the measures he is enacting to defer the deportations of 4 million immigrants while
simultaneously refocusing federal border control agents on the highest-priority cases, such as
felons, gang members and recent border-crossers, are aimed at “actual threats to our
security.” “Felons, not families,” Obama said of who would be in line for deportations. “Criminals,
not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” Under Obama’s
plan, the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who have lived
in the country for at least five years can apply, starting this spring, for relief from deportations
for a period of three years. About 3.7 million immigrants are expected to qualify under the new
guidelines. The president also is expanding a 2012 program that has provided administrative
relief to nearly 600,000 young people brought to the country illegally as children. Officials said
that expansion, which will remove an age cap, could reach another 287,000 people.
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No Inherency – ICE Re-prioritizing Deportations Now
[__]
[__] ICE has undergone major changes in order to make sure it prioritizes the deportation of
criminals.
Rosenblum and Kandel, Congressional Research Service, 2012
(Interior Immigration Enforcement: Programs Targeting Criminal Aliens,
fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R42057.pdf)
ICE also announced three major changes to the §287(g) program (in July 2009) and Secure
Communities (in June 2011) designed to address each of the specific concerns raised above.146
First, ICE has taken steps to impose agency-wide enforcement priorities on the §287(g)
program and Secure Communities. The 2009 MOAs established a uniform three-level enforcement
priority system for the §287(g) program, which was then superseded by the 2011 agency- and
department- wide memos and letter (see “DHS Enforcement Priorities and Discretion”). The 2011
guidance memos clarify ICE agents’ ability to exercise discretion throughout the immigration
enforcement process, and ICE specifically linked the memos to Secure Communities by releasing
them in the context of the other June 2011 reforms to that program.147 The reforms also included
the creation of a Homeland Security Advisory Council Task Force on Secure Communities
composed of law enforcement professionals, ICE agents, and community and immigrant
advocates. The task force’s goal was to recommend how to focus the program on high-priority
offenders and ensure discretion in Secure Communities jurisdictions, among other issues.148
The task force issued a report with findings and recommendations in September 2011, and ICE
published a formal response to the task force in April 2012.149 Second, ICE has developed new
record-keeping requirements and other tools to attempt to guard against pretextural arrests
and racial profiling. ICE’s ENFORCE tracking system has been modified to track data on the
circumstances leading to aliens’ arrests, information which may improve oversight of ICE’s
partnership programs. ICE and CRCL have reportedly developed new statistical data to be collected
on a quarterly basis to evaluate whether Secure Communities is being implemented in a biased way
or otherwise resulting in racial profiling.150 The new §287(g) MOA also seeks to prevent pretextural
arrests by requiring agencies to pursue all charges for which aliens are initially arrested.
Nonetheless, media reports indicate that statistical monitoring of the Secure Communities program
had been delayed as of November 2012, and that ICE may not be able to implement the statistical
monitoring that had been announced in response to the Secure Communities task force
recommendation.151 Third, ICE and CRCL also have developed new materials and procedures
to further reduce the risk of racial profiling and misuse of these enforcement programs.152
New training materials target ICE agents as well as local law enforcement agents involved in
these programs. ICE and CRCL have also developed new immigration detainer forms clarifying that
individuals should not be detained for more than 48 hours and that law enforcement agencies
must provide detainees with information about how to file a complaint if they believe their civil
rights have been violated.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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Illegal Immigration Hurts the Economy – Domestic Competition
[__]
[__] Immigration hurts the economy by increasing competition amongst workers leading them
to be paid less over time.
Lowenstein, report for the NY Times, 2006
(ROGER LOWENSTEIN, The Immigration Equation,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/magazine/09IMM.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
Using a computer, Borjas measured the slope: it suggested that wages fell by 3 to 4 percent
for each 10 percent increase in the share of immigrants. With this graph, Borjas could calculate
that, during the 80's and 90's, for instance, immigrants caused dropouts to suffer a 5 percent
decline relative to college graduates. In a paper published in 2003, "The Labor Demand Curve
Is Downward Sloping," Borjas termed the results "negative and significant." But what about the
absolute effect? Assuming businesses did not hire any of the new immigrants, Borjas's finding
would translate to a hefty 9 percent wage loss for the unskilled over those two decades, and
lesser declines for other groups (which also received some immigrants). As we know, however, as
the population grows, demand rises and business do hire more workers. When Borjas adjusted for
this hiring, high-school dropouts were still left with a wage loss of 5 percent over those two
decades, some $1,200 a year. Other groups, however, showed a very slight gain. To many
economists as well as lay folk, Borjas's findings confirmed what seemed intuitive all along: add to the
supply of labor, and the price goes down.
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Illegal Immigration Hurts the Economy – Minority Workers
[__]
[__] Illegal immigration leads to lower paying and worse job prospects for African Americans.
Borjas, Grogger, and Hanson, Economica (Academic Journal), 2009
(GEORGE J. BORJAS, JEFFREY GROGGER and GORDON H. HANSON, Professors at Harvard
University, University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego respectively, Economica
(2010) 77, 255–282)
This paper extends the literature by examining the relation between immigration and black wages,
employment and incarceration. We use data drawn from the 1960–2000 US censuses. The data
reveal a strong correlation between immigration and black wages, black employ- ment rates and
black incarceration rates. As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a
particular skill group, we find a reduction in the wage of black workers in that group, a
reduction in the employment rate, and a corresponding increase in the incarceration rate. Our
study suggests that a 10% immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group
is associated with a reduction in the black wage of 2.5%, a reduction in the black employment
rate of 5.9 percentage points, and an increase in the black institutionalization rate of 1.3
percentage points. Among white men, the same 10% increase in supply reduces the wage by
3.2%, but has much weaker employment and incarceration effects: a 2.1-percentage-point reduction
in the employment rate and a 0.2- percentage-point increase in the incarceration rate. It seems,
therefore, that black employment and incarceration rates are more sensitive to immigration
than those of whites.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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Illegal Immigration Hurts the Economy – Taxes
[__]
[__] Unlawful immigration overstretches the governments resources and harms the economy
Camarota, Researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, 2004
(Steven A. Camarota, The High Cost of Cheap Labor Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget,
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html)
Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal
government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost
$10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household. Among the largest costs are Medicaid ($2.5 billion);
treatment for the uninsured ($2.2 billion); food assistance programs such as food stamps,
WIC, and free school lunches ($1.9 billion); the federal prison and court systems ($1.6 billion);
and federal aid to schools ($1.4 billion). With nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high
school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and
resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social
services.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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Reducing Violations – Federal Oversight
[__]
[__] ICE is now subject to federal oversight and this is resolving any human rights concerns
Kelly, reporter at the Arizona Republic, 2010
(Erin Kelly, ICE strives to improve migrant-detainee care,
azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/01/26/20100126az-ice.html)
The head of U.S. immigration enforcement on Monday announced plans for an overhaul of the
government's controversial detention system for people who face deportation. The moves
described by John T. Morton, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, address oversight, medical care and tracking of detainees at facilities in
Arizona and across the country. Plans include: Hiring 50 federal employees to oversee the
largest detention facilities, which now are largely run by contractors without much government
oversight, Morton said. Assigning regional case managers to keep tabs on detainees with
significant medical problems to ensure they are getting proper care. Detainees with major
problems will be housed in facilities near hospitals and medical centers, Morton said. In June,
launching an online immigrant-detainee locator so family members can easily find their
relatives when they are in custody awaiting possible deportation.
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Reducing Violations – Medical Care
[__]
[__] ICE is reforming now by providing proper medical care
American Civil Liberties Union, 2010
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Lawsuit Charged Lack Of Medical And Mental Health
Care Led To Unnecessary Suffering And Death, https://www.aclu.org/news/ice-agrees-improvehealth-care-provided-immigration-detainees-part-settlement-aclu-lawsuit)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have agreed to provide immigration
detainees with constitutionally adequate levels of medical and mental health care as part of an
agreement to settle an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charging that deficient care at the San
Diego Correctional Facility (SDCF) caused unnecessary suffering and death. As part of the
settlement, ICE has also agreed to change its policy on medical care that had led to the denial
of what ICE deemed to be "non-emergency" care, including heart surgeries and cancer
biopsies. "For the first time, ICE has committed to providing all necessary health care to
immigration detainees beyond just emergency care," said Elizabeth Alexander, former Director of
the ACLU National Prison Project and lead counsel on the case. "For too long, ICE's own policies
allowed it to provide detainees with nothing beyond a narrow definition of emergency. This settlement
is recognition that it is unconstitutional not to provide people in government custody with all necessary
health care." Among the settlement agreement's provisions are requirements that detainees at SDCF
receive health care that meets or exceeds National Commission on Correctional Health Care
standards and that an additional full-time psychiatrist and four full-time psychiatric nurses be hired to
ensure that detainees receive adequate mental health care. The settlement also requires
immigration officials to remove from existing policies all statements suggesting that detainees
will receive only emergency medical services and to include in the same policies explicit
statements mandating that detainees shall be provided medical care whenever it is necessary
to address a serious medical need.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Security Should Be Prioritized Over Rights
[__]
[__] Absolute commitments to values like human rights fail when confronted with violence in
the real world – because of this we should prioritize security first.
Isaac, Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, 2002
(Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale, Jeffery C., Dissent
Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban
regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy
and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized
ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied
by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the
problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to
contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is
not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate
feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish
anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it
about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say
that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers
such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may
be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It
fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends.
Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may
seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as
serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that
in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it
is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as
opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically
repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect;
and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant.
Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that
generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's
goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing
these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways.
Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It
promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
No Solvency – Inefficient Systems
[__]
[__] Dismantling surveillance programs causes ICE to revert to enforcement policies that are
extremely inefficient.
Cadman, researcher at Center for Immigration Studies, 2015
(Dan Cadman February 2015 Interior Immigration Enforcement Legislation,
http://cis.org/Testimony/Cadman-House-Judiciary-Committee-Hearing-021115)
But it is not just in the area of worksite enforcement that interior immigration enforcement has
suffered. In her testimony a week ago, Ms. Vaughan spoke eloquently and in detail to the dangers
to public safety that have been engendered by misuse of prosecutorial discretion, which has
been turned on its head from an occasional act of ministerial grace accorded to those few with
significant mitigating circumstances, to one of requiring officers to justify, at length and in detail to
their superiors, taking enforcement action in lieu of said "discretion". What is more, a key public
safety program that takes advantage of modern electronic technologies and connectivity —
the same kind of technologies routinely used by citizens today in their multiplicity of
computers, smart phones, tablets, and other devices — to quickly and effectively identify alien
criminals in a cost-efficient and work-saving way, has been dismantled. I am speaking of course
of the Secure Communities program. This dismantling pushes the efforts of ICE agents back to
pre-electronics days, in which they have to rely on paper and faxes to obtain and exchange
information in a laborious and time consuming manner.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
No Solvency – States Will Continue to Exclude
[__]
[__] Ending surveillance fails because states will seek other ways to exclude immigrants.
Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, 2006
(Attrition Through Enforcement, http://cis.org/Enforcement-IllegalPopulation)
Frustrated with the federal government’s failure to make progress in reducing illegal immigration, and
under pressure from impatient voters, many state and local jurisdictions are taking matters into
their own hands by enacting laws and ordinances to discourage illegal settlement and by
taking advantage of federal services, such as the database used for Basic Pilot, to verify
immigration status. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, lawmakers in 42
states are considering 380 bills related to immigration; 70 of these bills deal with
employment.58 Many of these measures, such as laws to restrict access to driver’s licenses,
are intended primarily to enhance security and minimize identity fraud; nevertheless they have
provided a powerful incentive for illegal immigrants to voluntarily return home. In other cases,
legislatures have considered more direct approaches, such as mandatory work authorization
verification. Because these laws can have such a positive effect on compliance, and require little in
the way or federal resources, they must be more actively supported by federal immigration
authorities.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Turn – Increased Smuggling
[__]
[__] Ending surveillance leads to parents paying for their children to be smuggled to the
United States this leads to suffering during the border crossing.
Cadman, researcher at Center for Immigration Studies, 2015
(Dan Cadman February 2015 Interior Immigration Enforcement Legislation,
http://cis.org/Testimony/Cadman-House-Judiciary-Committee-Hearing-021115)
This bill confronts the reprehensible fact that, through its policies and practices, the federal
government has become a major facilitator in the business of smuggling minors. In a scenario
repeated thousands of times, it goes something like this: Central American parents living and
working illegally in the United States send remittances back to their home country for the
express purpose of having their children smuggled northward. Smugglers move them through
the perilous journey and, if nothing untoward happens, deliver them on the U.S. side to be united with
relatives. If the children are apprehended, then the government itself moves the children onward to be
united with relatives, no questions asked. This has become so well known that, for their part,
smugglers are just as likely to deposit their loads of minors or families at crossroads
proximate to the border so that they can be found by Border Patrol agents, thus conveniently
relieving the smugglers from the burden of transporting the children on American highways, with the
concomitant chance of exposure and arrest such ventures carry. And, because the illegal parents
face no consequence for their part in having initiated the enterprise, word spreads and others
do the same, at great risk to the children.5 How many perish in the jungle lowlands and
highlands in Central America, or in the heat of the Mexican desert because they can't keep up?
We don't know. How many die from illness, dehydration, hypothermia, accidents, or murder? We
don't know. In the shadowy world of commerce in human beings, there is a thin line between
smuggling and trafficking: how many children whose smuggling is arranged by parents end up
being diverted into lives of abuse in the sex or drug trades? We don't know. On this side of the
border, we don't always even know with certainty who the children are being tendered to. The
bill requires an inquiry into the status of those persons, and initiation of proceedings if they are
unlawfully in the United States. Critics will say this will deter parents from coming forward. Perhaps.
But the alternative is for the United States to continue facilitating the movement of human
beings as cargo, even while we lecture the rest of the world as to their obligations to halt
human smuggling and trafficking. The moral imperative is clear: Our government should
undertake no policy or practice that puts more children at risk.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Turn – Violent Militias (1/2)
1. Refusing to enforce immigration law leads to a rise in violent militias
Bever, reporter at Washington Post, 2014
(Lindsey Bever, Texas ‘militia’ says it’s heading out to help ‘secure’ border,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/08/local-lawmakers-law-enforcementand-residents-take-on-the-immigration-crisis/)
The group, called Operation Secure Our Border-Laredo, was identified to the San Antonio
Express-News as “Patriots,” “Oathkeepers” and “Three Percenters,” a reference to the 3 percent of
colonists who took up arms against England during the Revolutionary War. Organizers are using
social media and a 24-hour hotline to recruit and mobilize armed volunteers to send to Laredo,
Tex., within the coming weeks.
It’s uncertain how many people belong to the group or how many might actually show up.
“We’re here to supplement and be where law enforcement is not and help them support the
border,” Chris Davis, the 37-year-old listed leader, told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s nothing
malicious, there’s no malicious intent — every person is vetted. We’re just here to serve freedom,
liberty and national sovereignty.” Davis said once the group has enough manpower, it will do its
duty in a “legal and lawful manner.”
It’s quite a different tactic than the one Davis announced via a YouTube video in which he
allegedly said: “You see an illegal. You point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes,
and you say, ‘Get back across the border or you will be shot,'” the McAllen Monitor reported last
week. Davis told the Express-News he removed the video after it was taken out of context “by a
newspaper that supports amnesty.”
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Turn – Violent Militias (2/2)
2. A rise in militia groups leads to the violent murder of undocumented immigrants and
Latinos.
Lenz, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012
(Investigating Deaths of Undocumented Immigrants on the Border, Intelligence Report, Fall 2012,
Issue Number: 147, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-allissues/2012/fall/death-in-the-desert)
For years, the area has been crisscrossed by “civilian border patrols” — the “Minutemen”
groups that President George W. Bush characterized as “vigilantes” and that were enraged by what
they saw as a purposeful invasion. A neo-Nazi leader who led fellow armed radicals to the
border spoke of laying mines to prevent non-whites from entering — and later reportedly
asked a witness to help him surveill homes where he hoped to murder Latinos. Law
enforcement has found at least one pipe bomb planted on a smuggling trail, and last year a neo-Nazi
was arrested with other bombs he was taking to the border. Still other neo-Nazis told the Intelligence
Report several years earlier that they were scouting sniper positions at the border. The recent
shootings near Eloy, coupled with the murders in January and February of 2007, have raised
these worries again. An internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report from the
earlier period, obtained by the Report, said the 2007 shootings were likely connected to each
other. And in the second incident that year, police found two men with non-Hispanic names
“concealed in the brush” nearby watching the police response — a “curious” fact, the DHS report
said. Through it all, most Arizona authorities have dismissed virtually all the non-weather-related
deaths as the result of attacks by drug and human smugglers — and there is little doubt that that is
behind some of the mayhem. But many activists and at least some in law enforcement fear that
a small but committed cadre of hard-core extremists on the border may actually be engaging
in murder. Matt Browning, a retired Mesa police detective who spent years undercover infiltrating
racist border and neo-Nazi skinhead groups, is one of them. “In Arizona, we might not have
Hammerskins or Volksfront or the Klan,” Browning said, referencing some of the more prominent
contemporary white supremacist groups. “What we do have is a lot of angry, militant white men on
the border sitting like hunters waiting for these people to come across.”
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