Today's Stories

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Crime, Punishment and Immigration

The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

By TOM BARRY

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refers to its new deterrence strategy, the agency is not talking about nuclear arsenals, missile defense, or border security. For DHS, deterrence is a strategy of immigration control that relies on what U.S. law enforcement does best: imprisonment.

The United States has more people in jail—2.3 million—than any other nation. Although the United States has less than 5% of the world's population, it holds almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. One of every 100 adults in the "land of the free" is locked up.

Immigrants are the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population. The DHS agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains 300,000 immigrants annually, with some 32,000 immigrants in ICE detention centers on any given day. ICE's budget for its Detention and Removal Operations has jumped from $959 million in 2004 to $2.3 billion today.

The rise in the number of immigrants detained or incarcerated by the federal government for immigration-related offenses dates back to the mid-1990s when Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

The combined effect of the two acts was to dramatically expand the definition of a "criminal alien" to include immigrants—legal and illegal—who falsify their identity documents and Social Security numbers, or who have been convicted of any misdemeanor or crime, as minor as shoplifting or disturbing the peace.

An immigrant who does not appear at a scheduled immigration hearing is labeled a "fugitive alien" and is subject to immediate detention and deportation, or, as ICE's Homeland Security deterrence strategy increasingly kicks in, possibly sentencing, imprisonment, and then "removal."

Homeland Security Locks Up Immigrants

It wasn't until after Sept. 11 with the creation of DHS in March 2003, however, that the federal government launched a campaign to criminalize immigrants for offenses previously deemed administrative violations. Similarly, the hunt for "fugitive aliens" began in earnest only after the Bush administration established Homeland Security.

DHS says its "main priority is to prevent terrorist attacks against the nation and to protect our nation from dangerous people." Since 2003, budget allocations for immigration control have been rising at an annual rate that's more than double that of the department as a whole. DHS is unable to make a case that its ongoing immigration crackdown has netted terrorists or people that threaten the nation's security.

The number of immigrants crossing illegally into the United States is declining, but the number of immigrants that are detained or incarcerated continues to climb. Deportations—what DHS now calls "removals"—rose from 178,657 in 2005 to 282,548 in 2007—an increase of nearly 60% in two years. Meanwhile, the number of immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol dropped from 1.07 million in 2006 to 859,000 last year.

In the past, most of those captured by the Border Patrol were either quickly returned to the other side of the border (Mexicans) or released with an order to appear later for an immigration hearing (non-Mexicans).

Although ICE has largely continued the traditional practice of expedited removal for Mexicans captured, it has stopped its "catch and release" practice for OTMs (their term for "other than Mexicans") and instituted a "catch and detain" procedure. In a pilot project called Operation Streamline, ICE is also now detaining both Mexicans and OTMs in the Yuma, Laredo, and Del Rio sectors of the border and prosecuting and jailing them for illegal entry.

As this practice extends to other border sectors such as Tucson, the federal courts are being flooded with immigration cases, overwhelming judges and attorneys and diverting the entire law enforcement and judicial sectors from real threats to public safety.

While other sectors of the building industry are slumping, prison construction is booming, fueled largely by the demand for more prison beds for immigrants.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Texas, prisons are a growth industry. The border town of Del Rio has become a major destination for immigrants. The county's Val Verde Correctional Facility, which is owned and run by GEO Group, had only 180 beds eight years ago. Today, after undergoing its second 600-bed expansion, the maximum-security jail can fit 1,425 prisoners.

It's not as if the county is experiencing a crime wave. The non-immigrant population at the jail has stayed the same—about 70-80 a day. But the number of those behind bars for immigration violations has fueled the prison expansion.

The increased number of immigrants in detention centers, jails, and prisons around the country is the result of a phalanx of new Homeland Security initiatives that are criminalizing immigration.

Through one of its latest criminal initiatives, "Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens," ICE says it intends to "maximize cost effectiveness and long-term success through deterrence and reduced recidivism." Adopting the language of the penal system, ICE calls it recidivism when an immigrant attempts to cross illegally after having been "removed" once.

Other ICE measures that target immigrants include Operation Secure Streets, Community Shield, and Operation CrossCheck, among a cascading array of new initiatives aimed at identifying immigrants through increased cooperation with local law enforcement officials. Its 75 Fugitive Operation Teams arrested more than 30,000 immigrants in 2007—nearly double the number captured in raids in 2006.

Immigration restrictionists have long demanded that the federal government increase its raids in the country's interior—meaning beyond the borderlands. ICE is now complying, not only with its fugitive hunts but also with increased "workplace enforcement operations." As part of the new emphasis on criminalizing immigrants, ICE and the Justice Department now refer to workplace raids as "criminal workplace enforcement operations," since the arrested workers are no longer just detained and deported but charged with "aggravated felonies" such as falsifying a Social Security number to obtain employment.

Since the mid-1990s the federal government has had the authority to elevate low-level violations to aggravated felonies. It wasn't until the immigration crackdown heated up in 2005 that the criminalization of immigration took hold.

The DRO Vision—"Removing All Removable Aliens"

From the start DHS adopted military terminology—security, surges, protection, operations, deterrence, etc.—for its immigration initiatives and strategies. As part of the department's strategic plan, the newly created Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) set forth its Operation Endgame strategy. DRO is component of ICE.

The DRO strategic plan "sets in motion a cohesive enforcement program with a 10-year time horizon that will build the capacity to "remove all removable aliens," eliminate the backlog of unexecuted final order removal cases, and realize its vision."

In a June 23, 2003 memorandum, DRO director Anthony Tangemann explained that "DRO provides the endgame to immigration enforcement," namely the deportation of illegal immigrants. "This is also the essence of our mission statement and the 'golden measure' to our successes."

The Operation Endgame strategy statement also calls for more funding, including for the construction of new detention facilities and higher security jails for its rising number of "criminal" immigrants. Using the example of the El Paso detention center, the statement noted that "over the last five years, our population has increased by 136% [in the El Paso center], and the classification of our population has gone from primarily noncriminal to a population of over 65% criminal."

Operation Endgame sees the detention and removal of aliens as a fundamental component of a national security strategy: "Moving toward a 100% rate of removal for all removable aliens allows ICE to provide the level of immigration enforcement necessary to keep America secure."

Beyond the Endgame

Since 2003, when Homeland Security launched Operation Endgame, DHS has moved beyond the endgame of "removing all removable aliens." It has adopted a deterrence strategy of criminalizing and imprisoning immigrants as a message to others. The program aims to deter immigrants from overstaying their visas or attempting to cross into the United States without the proper documents.

As ICE explains, it is committed to "detain and remove criminal and other deportable aliens [as] part of the strategy to deter illegal immigration and protect public safety." Despite these statements, community crime statistics show little or no correlation between immigrant populations and threats to public safety.

Immigrants arrested as part of Operation Streamline are subject to sentences that range from 15 to 180 days, depending on the severity of their immigration violation. Immigrants who are arrested after having already been "removed" once are sentenced to two years in prison.

Basically the idea is to use the plight of imprisoned immigrants to signal their communities in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, or wherever poor people look to America as the land of opportunity that the risks of crossing into the United States far outweigh any possible benefits. The international media relay the images meant to make prospective immigrants think twice—men and women being arrested, hauled off with their hands and feet shackled, thrown in prison, and finally deported.

The massive arrests of the largely Guatemalan workforce at the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and meat-processing plant in northeastern Iowa in mid-May highlighted the new ways of immigration enforcement in America. The falsely documented workers in the meatpacking plant—most of whom earned $7.50 or less an hour—were rounded up and taken from the slaughterhouse in handcuffs. At least 270 were charged and convicted in an expedited judicial process criticized by civil liberties organizations as a violation of due process for "aggravated felonies" such as using a fraudulent ID. Most plea-bargained for sentences of five months behind bars followed by immediate deportation.

"This has an unbelievable deterrent effect," says Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "When people who cross the border illegally are brought to face the reality that they were committing a crime, even if it's just a misdemeanor, that has a huge impact on their willingness to try again."

It does appear that the deterrence strategy is working, measured by increased "removals" and decreased illegal immigration across the southern border. But in the process, the government is moving yet further away from enacting an immigration policy that is just and sustainable.

Instead it is compounding the problems of the already badly flawed immigration system. Federal courts are clogged with immigration cases, human rights and civil liberties abuses are rising, and tens of thousands of families are being torn apart.

Sadly, America's immigration policy has created a new system of crime and punishment.

Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) of the Center for International Policy.

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