RECENT ARTICLES

Unscrupulous Employers Robbing Latino Wages

The Loan Modification Scam Alert Campaign

CNN Reports on High Suicide Rate of Latina Youth

The Traffic of Black Gold on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Immigrant Detainees Stage Hunger Strikes in Louisiana

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Unscrupulous Employers Robbing Latino Wages

(CNN)  Low-income Latinos are routinely discriminated against in the South, a  report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center says.  The study’s author and others say the problem exists nationwide, with millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants living “beyond the protection of the law.”

The report, released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, documents the experiences of 500 immigrants in the South, finding that Latinos routinely are cheated out of wages, are denied basic health protection and fall victim to racial profiling.

“Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South” details stories such as that of a Tennessee woman who says she was jailed at a cheese factory for asking for pay, a bean picker in Alabama who says his life savings were taken by police at a traffic stop, and a rapist in Georgia who was not arrested because the suspect’s victim was an undocumented immigrant.

Forty-one percent of the people surveyed said they had experienced theft of their wages by employers. Forty-seven percent said they know someone who was treated unfairly by police. Seventy-seven percent of women surveyed said they have been sexually harassed by bosses, many saying that bosses used their immigration status as leverage.

“This report documents the human toll of failed policies that relegate millions of people to an underground economy, where they are beyond the protection of the law,” said Mary Bauer, author of the report. “Workplace abuses and racial profiling are rampant in the South.”

But such discrimination is also rampant nationwide, she said. The human-rights law center focused on the South because that’s the area the Montgomery, Alabama-based group knows best, she said.

Teodoro Maus, president of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, has heard thousands of discrimination complaints from Mexican immigrants during the past two decades.

“It’s absolutely correct that there’s generalized discrimination,” he told CNN. “There’s a general feeling that discrimination is valid because these people are illegal, because these people have no right to be here.”

But the attitude toward discrimination has changed throughout the years, said Maus, who was also the Mexican consul general in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 1994 and from 1995 to 2001.

“The big difference from previous years is that there were discriminatory acts before, but not the belief that discrimination is allowed,” he said.

Bolstered by what Maus called “an ultraconservative element,” some people “realized they could have open aggression against a group of people who could not defend themselves.”

Bernardo Mendez Lugo, Mexico’s deputy consul in Tucson, Arizona, said he sees three main forms of discrimination: racial profiling by law enforcement officers, problems in the workplace and difficulties in the rental housing market.

In the workplace, he said, employees often find they are passed over for promotions despite their qualifications or length of employment. The abuse, Mendez Lugo said, is generally aimed at undocumented workers.

“They are told, ‘I’m going to call immigration [authorities] if you keep asking,’ ” Mendez Lugo said.

Federal officials say there are more than 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Most of them come from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The center urged the federal government to strengthen labor laws and crack down on racial profiling.

“We’re talking about a matter of basic human rights here,” said Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen. “By allowing this cycle of abuse and discrimination to continue, we’re creating an underclass of people who are invisible to justice and undermining our country’s fundamental ideals.”

Source: CNN

The Loan Modification Scam Alert Campaign

Loan modification scams are proliferating at a rapid pace. Every day, scam artists prey on unsuspecting homeowners who are facing foreclosure. These homeowners are losing thousands of dollars and their homes—lured by the promise of loan modification help. To combat this issue, Congress asked NeighborWorks America® to launch a national public education campaign. The campaign will empower homeowners to protect themselves against loan modification scams, find trusted help and report illegal activity to authorities. NeighborWorks America is working with national, state and local partners on the ground and 235 community-based affiliates. Together, we will alert thousands of homeowners in hundreds of at-risk communities through real-life scam stories, fliers, postcards, e-cards, posters, print advertising, local PSAs, events, word of mouth and social media activity.

We need help from partners like you to reach homeowners in your area with our important information to:

• Alert them about scams
• Help them spot a scam before it’s too late
• Encourage them to report scammers to authorities

Joining the nationwide public education campaign is easy!

Simply access the toolkit of ready-made graphics, creative elements and written materials for distribution in your community. Some campaign materials are downloadable directly from this page, while others will be available on-demand for purchase through the “I was crying; I was very depressed. I had written a note to myself,” Francisca remembers. “I just said I can’t do this anymore. I want to kill myself.”

Francisca’s school called home, and her mother, Isabel Valdez, learned for the first time that her daughter was in serious trouble.

“I never told her,” says Francisca. “I never bothered her; she probably never bothered to notice.”

Such a disconnect between mothers and daughters is what Dr. Luis Zayas, a psychologist at Washington University, suspects is leading an alarming number of Latina teenagers to want to end their lives.

One out of every seven Latina teens, or 14 percent, attempts suicide according to a 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of high school students. And Latina high school students have higher attempted suicide rates than white non-Hispanic (7.7 percent) or black non-Hispanic (9.9 percent) girls their age, the CDC reports.

Zayas has spent the last 25 years trying to find out why. He says the typical Latina teen who attempts suicide is 14 or 15, the daughter of immigrant parents, lives in a low-income setting and is caught in an intense battle with her mother over Latino and American cultures.

Research conducted by Zayas has found the girls’ parents hold strictly to traditional Latino values, while teens who grow up in America learn “very different models about what girls should do, can do and are permitted to do.”

Zayas is nearing completion of a five-year study of more than 200 Latina teenagers who live in New York City. More than half of those studied have attempted suicide, including Francisca Abreu, who is now 15.

Francisca says life with her mother in the Bronx wasn’t what she thought it would be. Her mother worked three jobs, and Francisca barely saw her.

As she spent time with her new American friends, the distance grew between Francisca and her mother. When her mother wasn’t at work, Francisca says they were fighting.

“There are many girls who are well-behaved,” Isabel says. “But there are others who are on the wrong path. They like to flirt. They like hanging out. They like to stay out late. These are not the friends I like for my kids.”

Francisca says her mother wanted her to stay home, learn how to cook and clean the house. She says she wasn’t allowed to hang out with her friends.

The conflict between mothers and daughters is what Zayas says is driving many of the Latinas he has studied to the brink.

“Teenagers have certain freedoms; they don’t need to consult with their parents to make certain decisions,” Zayas says. “That’s the culture that’s here, and inserted in that is the Latino family that says the family is much more important than the individual.”

Trapped between two worlds, Francisca says she fell into a deep depression.

“I would cry about my dad, not being with him. How I missed my country.

Trying to escape the pain, Francisca made a desperate choice and decided to take some of her mother’s pills.

“I was tired of being another burden in my mom’s life,” Francisca says.

But the pain didn’t go away. A year later, Francisca was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after a teacher found the note she wrote at school. Three days later she was released and started counseling.

Today with the help of therapy Francisca says she’s learning to cope with her depression. In June, she shared her experiences about growing up Latina at a fundraising gala for her counseling center. Before hundreds of people, she thanked her mother.

“All she did was be a good mother, sacrifice her life for us,” Francisca says. “That’s all she did.”

To read the full article click here.

Source CNN.com

Author: Courtney Yager

The Traffic of Black Gold on the U.S.-Mexico Border

The theft of gas and other oil products is a relatively new crime that in just a few years has become a serious threat to Mexico’s financial stability.

The crime involves both drug cartels and corrupt government officials in Mexico and an undetermined number of oil refineries and companies in the US who have been willing to buy such stolen fuel.

Fuel trafficking has grown exponentially and has been linked to Mexican drug cartels whose infrastructure and criminal webs of corruption in governmental offices has streamlined the flow of this stolen goods across the border.

Just Tuesday, the US government awarded 2.4 million dollars to Mexico as part of a settlement in a case where a small refinery in Houston was found guilty of having imported stolen fuel from across the border.

This crime is where drug cartels are now diversifying their activities into fuel theft especially grave for Mexico, because, as president Felipe Calderón admitted recently oil administered by government owned company Pemex is the source of 40% of the federal income in Mexico.

According to Mexican authorities the majority of thefts can be attributed to the now famous group of gunmen “Zetas” the most violent arm of the Golf Cartel, apparently in charge of the transport and distribution of the stolen fuel inside Mexico but also into the United States and Central and South America.

The names of American companies currently under investigation for the purchase of stolen fuel has not been revealed by Federal US authorities but it is well known that “big names” are responsible in making stolen products available to US consumer gas tanks.

Both the US and Mexican governments are working together and earlier in 2009 Mexican authorities froze 149 bank accounts with millions of dollars, believed to be a result of the illicit sell of gas, diesel and crude oil products by “Zetas.”

An on July 30th, retired army general Miguel Estrada Martínez, head of Pemex Segurity was arrested by Federal Police accused of aiding in the fuel robbery operation.

Along with Estrada, many of his aides and workers were also questioned, computers and cell phones were seized in the hopes of finding sufficient evidence to prosecute them as having clear links between public officials and this organized crime groups.

But despite arrests the loss in fuel theft has reached new heights.

The stolen fuel market has been on the steady rise since 2007 as Pemex security officials find more illegal takes every year.

According to Pemex numbers,190 illegal takes where found in the first semester of 2009, where at least 2 million and 88 thousand fuel barrels where taken, marking an astonishing 10% increase in comparison to the same period just last year.

Pemex data analysis suggests 44.2% of the takes where found in Veracruz, 28 % in Mexico State but many others where found in Hidalgo, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Tlaxcala, Durango, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Puebla and Baja California.

Source: La Prensa San Diego

Author: Mariana Martinez

Immigrant Detainees Stage Hunger Strikes in Louisiana

Some 100 immigrant detainees at a private prison in Louisiana, angered by what they say are awful conditions, are engaged in increasingly tense protests.

Beginning in early July, they’ve staged waves of three-day hunger strikes or provided statements to immigrant advocates to gain attention for their complaints. Prison authorities, meanwhile, have been reacting by placing hunger strikers in isolation for days at a time, advocates say.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency in charge of immigrant detention, has said the solitary confinement isn’t disciplinary, but precautionary “medical isolation.”

At least six inmates remain in solitary confinement as a result of the last hunger strike, which began July 27, according to Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice.

Soni visited the Southern Louisiana Correctional Center, a 1,000-bed facility set near rice fields in the town of Basile, a four-hour drive west of New Orleans.

The detainees “are facing a severe sense of isolation and desperation,” he said.

In a report compiled by Soni and other advocates and published on the center’s Web site July 30, the detainees complain of lack of responsible medical attention, even for serious ailments like leukemia, high blood pressure, and asthma.

They also report unreliable, and in some cases nonexistent, phone contact with lawyers and family, a vacuum of information about their deportation cases, and scarcity of soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and even underwear.

One detainee reports “rats, mosquitoes, flies, and spiders inside the cell,” one of several shared by scores of immigrant detainees. A Jewish detainee, Manuchar Khalhaturov, said he was denied a kosher diet, while another said the detention center’s food routinely made him sick.

These conditions would put the facility in violation of several standards issued by the Department of Homeland Security for immigrant detainees, according to Soni.

But federal officials responsible for the detainees flatly deny they have been subjected to any mistreatment.

Philip Miller, acting field office director in New Orleans for ICE, said he visited the Basile facility on July 16 and found its maintenance and pest control program satisfactory.

Miller denies the claim contained in the July 30 report that there was no soap or toothpaste for three weeks in May. “That’s not true,” he said, since inmates receive toiletries upon request.

To date, there have been five three-day hunger strikes to protest conditions at the Basile detention center, and they’ve involved some 60 detainees, said Soni.

Prison staff reportedly sought to quell these protests by isolating hunger strikers, sometimes even before they began refusing food, according to statements from men who participated in earlier strikes.

In the report, Joaquin López said that on the morning of July 23, he and four other immigrant detainees in a cell called Wolf 3 were put into the “hole” for planning a hunger strike.

The next day, López said, they were brought out of the “hole,” cuffed at the ankles and wrists, and interrogated for two hours, then placed in solitary confinement again, in cells measuring 12 by six feet.

He was brought out of the isolation cell to speak with advocates on July 25.

Another detainee, Fausto Gonzalez, who has asthma, said that on July 28, more than 30 people in his cell, Tiger 2, refused food and voiced their complaints. Guards showed up in black riot uniforms, said Gonzalez, and two men were sent to the “hole.”

Soni said he doesn’t know how long the men mentioned in the July 30 report remained in solitary, since the limited contact doesn’t allow him to track them.

“Solitary confinement as retaliatory punishment for peaceful protest of conditions is unacceptable,” said the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights in a statement.

ICE denies that hunger strikers receive solitary confinement, or are unduly pressured.

Federal detention standards require that a hunger striker be placed in “medical isolation in order to closely monitor the detainee and meet his medical needs,” said Miller, the ICE field officer for detention and removal.

He added that hunger strikers undergo a medical review and counseling about the health risks they face.

Seven national advocacy groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, sent Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano a letter demanding that she investigate the Basile, Louisiana prison and the detainees’ grievances.

Last month, Napolitano’s department denied a court petition asking for bolstered, legally enforceable detention standards at the nation’s facilities housing immigrant detainees. Instead, DHS opted to stick with “performance-based” standards enforced by private contractors.

Source: New America Media

Author: Marcelo Ballvé

To read A Broken System; the report by the National Immigration Law Center  faulting the government for failing to meet its own standards at those facilities click here.