I hate the term immigration reform. It feels heavy in my mouth, as if the boca knew that such a term hides just how and why the current U.S. immigration polices work against so many communities. It’s no accident or coincidence that hate crimes against Latinos have gone up at least 40% over the last few years.

Recently reveled information shows that about 3 years ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka as our friends at ICE, made a conscious decision to keep talking up the danger factor about undocumented immigration while targeting the not really dangerous at all. In other words, all that talk about good immigrants vs bad immigrants was just a cover.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

Such a shift reminds of living under Giuliani time in New York City, when the mayor and his police force decided to take parts of the broken windows theory and make every non-white person suspect and target, whether they were walking home in their own neighborhoods or jumping a turnstile. In the name of upping numbers and making quotas to make a show of lowering crime statistics (which had been on the decline nationally even before such heavy handed policing tactics were used widespread), the most vulnerable were victimized. Sound familiar?

Unable to make the connection between terrorism, crime and undocumented immigration, ICE has let hate organizations bring the new fear factor, scapegoating undocumented immigrants for the economic troubles of the country.

In an advertisement the Coalition for the Future American Worker (CFAW) says: “Last year 2.5 millions of Americans lost jobs … Yet with millions jobless, our government is still bringing in a million and a half foreign workers to take American jobs.”

The TV spot, aimed at US workers threatened by a further downturn in the economy, concludes with the question: “Could your job be next?”

Yes, according to ICE. It was just last weekend that ICE invoked the economic crisis as justification for their continuing to mass deport, while ignoring due process, among other things.

I guess it is easier and requires less thought to attack undocumented immigrants and those “read” as undocumented because of what they look like or what their last name is than it is to look at a long government sponsored history of supporting big companies over worker rights.

Via / The New York Times, The Latin Americanist