por David Bacon Truthout

­http://www.truthout.org/immigrant-steel-workers-march-against-unjust-firings/1329922142.

Pacific Steel workers march through Berkeley.  (PHOTO BY DAVID BACON)

BERKELEY, CA (2/18/12) — Two hundred immigrant workers, their wives, husbands, children, and hundreds of supporters marched through downtown Berkeley February 17, protesting their firing from Pacific Steel Castings. The company is one of the city’s biggest employers, and the largest steel foundry west of the Mississippi River. Starting at City Hall, they walked for an hour past stores and homes, as bystanders often applauded. Teachers and students at a Montessori school along the route even came out to the sidewalk to urge them on. At a rally before the march started, fired worker Jesus Prado told the assembled crowd, “I worked for Pacific Steel for seven years. We’ve organized this March for Dignity because we want to stop the way they’re stepping on us, and treating us like criminals. We came here to work, not to break any laws.”

“Many of us are buying homes, or have lived in our homes for years,” added another fired worker, Ana Castaño. “We have children in the schools. We pay taxes and contribute to our community. What is happening to us is not just, and hurts our families. All we did was work. That shouldn’t be treated like it’s a crime.”

Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin agreed. “We’re here today to send a message to the Obama administration that the I-9 raids have to stop,” he told the crowd.

Two hundred fourteen workers were fired in December and January, as a result of a so-called silent raid, in which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security inspected the company’s records to find workers who don’t have legal immigration status. ICE then demanded that the company fire them.

For the past year these workers have held meetings in union halls and churches, distributed food to families hungry because they can no longer work, and spoken to elected officials. The march was the culmination of months of debate in which to us is not just, and hurts our families. All we did was work. That shouldn’t be treated like it’s a crime.” Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin agreed. “We’re here today to send a message to the Obama administration that the I-9 raids have to stop,” he told the crowd.

Two hundred fourteen workers were fired in December and January, as a result of a so-called silent raid, in which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security inspected the company’s records to find workers who don’t have legal immigration status. ICE then demanded that the company fire them.

For the past year these workers have held meetings in union halls and churches, distributed food to families hungry because they can no longer work, and spoken to elected officials. The march was the culmination of months of debate in which rights organizations, ­and local elected officials.

Bill Ong Hing, law professor at the University of San Francisco, says the lack of jobs in Mexico is a consequence of free trade and structural adjustment policies designed to benefit large corporations. He calls the administration’s justification divorced from reality. “Employer sanctions [the section of immigration law that prohibits undocumented people from working] have not reduced undocumented migration at all. They’ve failed because NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and globalization create great migration pressure. Trying to discourage workers from coming by arresting them for working without authorization, or trying to prevent them from finding work, is doomed to fail in the face of such economic pressure. To reduce it, we need to change our trade and economic policies so that they don’t produce poverty in countries like Mexico.”

Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights called this kind of enforcement a violation of the workers’ basic human rights, “These families have done nothing wrong,” she said. “They’re being punished for working, which is what people in our community are supposed to do. We will not let this happen in silence, nor allow these workers to be treated as though they are invisible.”

As hundreds of people filled Second Street, a block away from the foundry where they’d put in their years of labor, the fired workers were certainly not invisible any longer.

by Mike Adams
Natural News

Vaccine pushers often resort to an interesting fear tactic to try to mandate vaccine obedience among the masses: They insist that those who areunvaccinatedare a health threat to the rest of the vaccinated population because thevaccinatedpeople might get infected by the unvaccinated disease carriers!

The quack logic of such a claim should be self-evident. If vaccines protect people from infectious disease, then vaccinated people should not be concerned at all about being around unvaccinated people. After all, the vaccine made them all “immune,” right?

But of course that’s all propaganda. Vaccines don’t really work at all. They are marketed under a blanket of disease hysteria and pimped by a cult following of medicalized quacks and needle junkies who abandoned real science long ago. After all, who needs real science when you’ve got the CDC marketing all the fear for you? The CDC is to medicine what George Bush was to the war industry — spread a little fear and the profits roll in. The real risk to others? People who routinely take antibiotics As it turns out, the real health risk that does exist in person-to-person exposure of infectious disease comes from people who routinely takeantibiotics.

Those who take the most antibiotics becomedrugresistant bacteria factories, and they can spread their drug-resistant strains to others around them. Their risk of developing superbugs rises proportionally to the frequency and duration of their taking prescription antibiotics. (http://www.naturalnews.com/028479_superbugs_antibiotics.html)

The most dangerous person in your family, it turns out, is not the “unvaccinated” person but the one taking antibiotics! They arehuman breeding groundsfor bacterial mutations that can be downright deadly.

Why hospitals are so dangerous to your health

That’s why informed people knowthe hospital is the most dangerous place you can go, other than working in a homemade meth lab of course. Hospitals are where superbugs pass easily from patient to doctor, and then from doctor to another patient.Hospital superbugs are spread by the medical staff, mostly because they routinely fail to wash their hands before touching patients. As NaturalNews reported in January, 2010, a whopping247 people die every day in U.S. hospitals from medical staff failing to wash their hands.(http://www.naturalnews.com/027981_doctors_hand_washing.html).

This is like a jumbo jet falling out of the sky and killing everyone on boardevery single day. It’s like a 9/11 terrorist attacking happeningevery two weeks. This is one of the most alarming (and preventable) causes of death in America today and virtually no one ­even talks about it. Doctors, of course, strongly contribute to the development of superbugs by handing out antibiotics as if they were Halloween candy. Someone shows up at the office with a sniffle, and the busy doctor scribbles out a prescription for some fashionable new antibiotic that earns him perks from the young drug rep whose PC database tracks every name-brand prescription he writes. The patient, meanwhile, spends a pocket fortune on a useless drug that’s actually quite dangerous. Not only does it increase that patient’s chances of developing a mutant strain of drug-resistant bacteria; it also flushes antibiotics down the drain and contaminates the environment downstream.

So if you’re walking around in public suspiciously glancing around to see who might be sniffling or sneezing, clear your head and think about reality for a second. The CDC wants you to stupidly believe all the unvaccinated people are a threat to your health, when in realitypeople who consciously refuse vaccines tend to be far healthier and get sick far less oftenthan the hypochondriac dweebs who rush out to get vaccinated every few months. Doctors and drugs are the greatest threat to your health – far greater than terrorism The real people who are a threat to your health are not just the pill-popping antibiotics consumers, but also:

• The psyched-out grandma on psychotropic drugs barreling down the road behind the wheel of a 1978 Buick. (Driving While Medicated…)

• The teen schoolboy who was diagnosed with depression and put on SSRI drugs that make him feel violently suicidal.

• The pediatrician who wants to inject your child with chemotherapy to “prevent” cancer and insist he’s going to call CPS if you don’t let him poison your child.

• The drug addict pharmacist who, in between incorrectly filling your prescription with random deadly chemicals, snorts up his own private concoction of controlled substances in the back room.

• The oncologist who misdiagnosed you with breast cancer but wants to poison you with five rounds of chemotherapy “just to be sure.” (Oh yeah, I bet he never told you that he PROFITS from selling you the chemotherapy drugs that poison you…)

• The school bus driver with a heart condition who takes an extra dose of deadly statin drugs and suffers a fatal heart muscle breakdown while behind the wheel of a bus carrying 58 schoolchildren toward a railroad crossing. These are the real threats to your safety… not a bunch of healthy people who deliberately refuse to be injected with hazardous vaccines. But of course the medical establishment doesn’t want you to be aware of any risks associated with using their products. All their drugs are perfectly safe! Perfectly effective! Perfectly priced! Perfectly profitable! There’s nothing wrong with them, by God, or the FDA would never have approved them, would they?

­by Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration

Luis A. Ferré

(Two-tier plebiscite will gauge voters’ support of current territorial status, as well as non-territorial status preferences)

Ponce, Puerto Rico – For the first time ever, Puerto Rico’s voters will face in 2012 an up or down vote on their support for the island’s current status as a U.S. territory. The vote is part of a two-tier status consultation that Puerto Rico Governor Luis G. Fortuño signed into law today, during a ceremony held in the hometown of his Republican predecessor and political mentor, former Governor Luis A. Ferré.

The November 6, 2012 status choice ballot, which will be included as a separate ballot the same day voters also choose their Governor, non-voting Member of Congress, Mayors and legislators, will pose two questions to the island’s electorate. Voters will first be asked if they agree with maintaining the current territorial political condition, to which they can answer either yes or no.

Irrespective of voters’ answer to the first question, voters will also be asked to express their preference for one of the three non-territorial status options recognized by Congress, Republican and Democratic presidential administrations as well as the United Nations: statehood, independence or free association.

“By virtue of this status consultation, we will know clearly, first, whether or not our people wish to maintain the current territorial status ­and second, which of the non-territorial alternatives enjoys the most support among Puerto Ricans,” said Governor Fortuño.

The Governor emphasized that the two-tier configuration of the 2012 status consultation takes into account a series of findings and recommendations from the three most recent reports of the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status (2005, 2007 and 2011), as well as previous experiences with both local and federal status initiatives. “This status consultation also fulfills a pledge we made to voters in 2008, that during this term they would have the opportunity to express their preference for Puerto Rico’s future,” said the Governor.

“The island’s status is an issue that affects every aspect of our daily lives, including employment opportunities, health services, public safety, our children’s education and our very rights as American citizens,” said the Governor. “The moment has arrived for our people to act decisively to resolve Puerto Rico’s status issue once and for all. When the people make their historic choice next November, it will then be the turn of elected officials – both in San Juan and Washington – to act upon that mandate,” Fortuño concluded.

by Jim Lamare

Hispanic Link

In a 2-1 opinion, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Feb. 6 temporarily halted five deportation cases involving seven undocumented immigrants.

The lead case, Aranda Rodríguez v. Holder, involves Mexican David Aranda Rodríguez, who has resided in the United States for more than two decades and cares for his two U.S.-born children. He has no criminal past.

The other six plaintiffs have a similar profile.

In issuing the order, the Court instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to determine if Rodríguez and the others should be granted relief from deportation under the new policy of prosecutorial discretion.

ICE director John Morton issued a memorandum on June 17 last year announcing the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in handling deportation cases. ICE officials and DOJ’s immigration courts are to give “positive consideration” in deciding the fate of:

• veterans and members of the U.S. Armed Forces;

• long-time lawful permanent residents;

• minors and elderly individuals;

• individuals present in this country since childhood;

• pregnant and nursing women;

• victims of domestic violence, trafficking or other serious crimes; and,

• individuals with serious health conditions.

Undocumented immigrants in these categories are to be assigned low priority in determining their deportation status. Implementation of prosecutorial discretion was delayed until specific operational criteria were formulated to enforce the new policy.

In mid-November, ICE announced it was ready to apply the new rules. Federal officials were asked to review, case by case, some 300,000 deportation proceedings pending before the nation’s 59 immigration courts using the new criteria.

To assist in this tedious labor-intensive process, officials were required to attend a half-day training session by Jan. 13. They were presented several scenarios about appropriate deportation outcomes.

According to Julia Preston of The New York Times, who observed an orientation session, one scenario involves a young undocumented woman “arrested by a state trooper for driving without a license. She has been living in this country since 1993 and has an infant son [a U.S. citizen]. But she lied to ICE officers, failing to tell them she had a conviction for shoplifting in 1995.”

What should the immigration courts and federal prosecutors do?

In this instance, she should not be deported because “she is not a threatening criminal and may still be nursing her American baby.” Her case should be closed.

What about an undocumented immigrant who in 1996 crossed the border illegally and failed to appear at a “critical” immigration court hearing back then? He has committed no other crime “and he coaches soccer at the school where his twin daughters, both citizens, are enrolled.” Again, the answer:“case closed.”

Application of these new criteria was trialed in the immigration courts of Denver and Baltimore during December and January. The courts determined that 16% of the 7,923 deportation cases pending in Denver involved low risk individuals, thus allowing 1,301people to stay in the United States.

In Baltimore, of the 3,759 cases reviewed, 366, about 10 percent, were closed.

Based on these findings, the New York Times projected that 39,000 deportation cases nationwide stand to be closed by the end of the year. Closed, but not cancelled. At any time, these low priority cases can be reopened. Federal officials have until March 19 to respond to the 9th Circuit Court’s order to apply prosecutorial discretion to the seven plaintiffs in the five pending cases.

In other related news: FEDS PAY LATINOS $350,000, SETTLE SUIT OVER RAIDS.

By Griselda Nevárez & Estuardo Rodríguez Eleven Hispanic men rousted from their homes in New Haven, Conn., and jailed after a raid conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents nearly five years ago were awarded a total of $350,000 as compensation in an agreement reached Feb 13 between the federal government and the plaintiffs.

The 11 men were among 29 persons, nearly all of Hispanic origin, apprehended on June 6, 2007, after federal agents barged into their homes without warrants. Lawyers and law students from the Worker & Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic at the Yale Law School filed a federal civil lawsuit on their behalf.

The plaintiffs claimed ICE agents had violated their constitutional rights by racially profiling them and conducting unreasonable search and seizure.

­The settlement gave the plaintiffs the option of terminating any pending deportation proceedings or deferring any immigration action brought against them for four years and allowing them to reapply for legal residency.

The settlement is the largest ever paid by the government in a suit over a residential immigration raid and the first to include monetary compensation and immigration relief. Prior to the settlement, five of the 11 plaintiffs had already won termination of the deportation actions against them. Laura Huizar, one of the Yale students representing the plaintiffs, told Hispanic Link that at least four of the others who were arrested are still in removal proceedings, while some have won release.

She said the plaintiffs are “hoping to use this victory to pressure the government to stop all of the removal proceedings resulting from the same raid.” ICE spokesperson Ross Feinstein said the settlement is not intended to be an admission of fault on the part of the U.S. government. “The government is settling in order to avoid the additional time and expense of further litigation,” he said in a statement.

Another involved Yale law student, Mark Pedulla, who told Hispanic Link the agreement makes it clear that “agencies of the judicial (system) need to follow the Constitution and respect the rights of the people.”