That’s what makes initiatives like those started by Arturo Venegas, a retired Chief of Police, essential. The Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative was created to to lift up the voices of law enforcement officials calling for common-sense immigration reform. Government programs that arm state and local enforcement with federal immigration responsibilities require knowledge of complicated immigration laws, are costly, but most importantly, lose the faith of communities. And who better to testify to this than policing professionals.

Watch Arturo Venegas testify to the growing importance of this movement.

At it’s most recent press conference, Chief Rick Braziel spoke of a recent incident in Sacramento, Texas, where a couple at a red light were hit by a drunk driver and witnesses caught the drunk driver but ran away in fear of the police. Describing the success of community policing in Arlington, Texas, Deputy Chief Kim Lemaux was emphatic that if a group of residents fears the police, they would not turn to officers making them viable victims instead. It seems that tasking the police with immigration enforcement sets them on a path that directly conflicts with community based policing. And Sheriff Bill McCarthy of Polk County, Iowa movingly described the impact of the Postville raid, that reduced the postville community of 3600 down to 2000, left a company in bankruptcy, with 200-400 people including broken families continuing to be fed in the churches.

Time to listen to the experts.

So says a new report “ICED OUT | How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered with Workers’ Rights” (the name reminds me of Breakthrough’s video game ICED – I Can End Deportation!).

Drawing on case studies from across the country – including California, Texas, Tennessee, Kansas, Iowa, Rhode Island, Florida and Oregon – the report examines a series of alarming incidents between 2005 and 2008 in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement has taken action at the behest of employers, conducted raids in the midst of labor disputes and even arrested workers on the courthouse steps while they were standing up for their rights.

An MOU from 1998 established a firewall between immigration and labor law enforcement to limit abusive treatment of workers but has largely been ignored, leading to serious impacts for on native and immigrant workers.

Like Josue Diaz, an immigrant worker who was recruited from a day laborer corner in New Orleans to work on reconstruction efforts in Texas after Hurricanes Ike. “We were forced to live in tents in an isolated labor camp at an abandoned oil refinery, we were made to work in toxic conditions without safety equipment, we were subjected to racist and dehumanizing treatment, and when we protested the discrimination and illegal treatment, our employer…called local police and ICE. We were arrested immediately. Instead of enforcing our labor rights against the company, the police and ICE tried to turn us into criminals.”

Or a series of very high profile raids from 2006-8 which captured the headlines, including a food processing plant in Portland, Oregon, just after local media reported on the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the workers in the plant. And let’s not forget the largest immigration raid in U.S. history in Postville, Iowa which resulted in the arrest of 389 workers, the same plant that was being investigated by 3 other agencies for serious labor violations.

And although ICE claims that the focus of its worksite enforcement is on employers that “egregiously
violate immigration laws”, for 2008 the agency made 6,287 arrests for immigration offenses at workplaces of which only a small fraction (2.1 percent) were of employers. At the same time, the labor department has cut back its own enforcement of the labor laws as reported in a recent Government Accountability Office report.

The only people who really benefit from this are employers who can terrify workers into accepting substandard wages, unsafe conditions, and lack of benefits. It’s time to stop letting immigration enforcement overshadow the equally important goal of protecting labor rights.

Words from the farewell letter written by Dov Charney, American Apparel’s chief executive, to almost a quarter of his staff laid off because of a federal investigation that found irregularities in their documents. According to a New York Times article,

The firings at the company, American Apparel, have become a showcase for the Obama administration’s effort to reduce illegal immigration by forcing employers to dismiss unauthorized workers rather than through workplace raids. The firings, however, have divided opinion in California over the fallout of the new approach, especially at atime of record joblessness in the state and with a major, well-regarded employer as a target.

In fact just yesterday California lawmakers put forth a resolution which passed in the California Senate (it does not have the force of law) whose first sentence states, “The State of California….strives to enable all residents to work and live free from discrimination, exploitation, and repressive federal immigration enforcement.”

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has opened audits of 654 other companies, but what makes American Apparel stand out is its open and strong support of immigration reform (remember Legalize L.A.!). While it’s certainly been a relief to see a stop to the old workplace raids, replacing these with a different kind of enforcement that often has the same effects is not quite the solution one is looking for.

Watch Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren describing the old style raids.

It was an interpreter translating in the hearings for nearly 400 immigrant workers picked up in the Postville raid who revealed that many of the workers pleaded guilty to social security fraud (a dubious claim that the Supreme Court rejected) without understanding the criminal charges they were facing, or the rights that they had waived. Many went on to serve 5 months in jail and then get deported.

Two new documentaries examine the effects of the raids by tracing them back to their villages in Guatemala. Both Guatemala: A Tale of Two Villages that screened on PBS’s Frontline and In the Shadow of a Raid (courtesy FIRM) show how the biggest immigration raid in U.S. history made a Guatemalan village weep while pushing an Iowa farm town to the brink of collapse.