Immigration

This time last year William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) asserted that President Obama is stoking “a conflict with White America” and suggested that “some type of extra-political activities that I can’t really talk about because they’re all illegal and violent,” such as a military coup, is needed to “remove him from office.”

Yesterday in an interview on Voice of Christian Youth America’s Crosstalk to discuss Obama’s move to stop deportations of non-violent undocumented youth, Gheen warned listeners that the Obama administration may be engaging in a “new form of warfare” against Americans that “is taking place with a large group of people within our own government that seems to be working in someone’s interests other than the American public’s.”

He even maintained that “there is a heavy anti-conservative, anti-Christian and, yes in a lot of cases, anti-European descendent flair” to the groups backing immigration reform and that “Obama is literally unleashing violent criminals on the American public now.” Gheen insists that Obama and immigrant rights advocates “are putting our personal security at risk” by “acting on behalf of an invading group of people more so and in their interests and in the interests of foreign powers more than the interests of American citizens,” creating conditions similar to South Africa.

We put out an email two weeks ago advising our people, our supporters to do whatever they need to do within the law to begin preparing to defend their families because Obama is literally unleashing violent criminals on the American public now. You’ve got the micro-psychology there of where the illegal criminal is like, ‘wow check that out, not only am I in the country illegally and not only do they know I’ve done these crimes but they’re signaling me that I can still be free and continue these actions.’ Then you’ve got the situation where once that situation spreads in the street and gets to other predators and they’re like, ‘oh yeah did you hear about Larry and Bob and José and Juan, they all had rap sheets for this and that and Obama set them free! What does that say to me?’

People have to be real here, we have to be realistic. We’ve got some very serious problems in the executive branch of the United States government which currently seems to be acting on behalf of an invading group of people more so and in their interests and in the interests of foreign powers more than the interests of American citizens. There is a heavy anti-conservative, anti-Christian and, yes in a lot of cases, anti-European descendent flair to many of the constellation of political groups involved here and it is getting to a point where they are putting our personal security at risk. Defenses that are not being built on the border will soon be built around most people’s homes and houses much like you see all over Johannesburg, South Africa.

According to Gheen, Obama and the “elite aristocracy” are creating “a new form of dictatorship” that will “overthrow the American Republic” by “supporting and facilitating the illegal alien invasion of the United States of America.” “When you look at what Obama has just done and you look at the fast and furious scandal, which the mainstream media doesn’t want to talk about,” Gheen said, “we’re telling people this is high crimes and this may be treason.”

This is a new form of dictatorship. Sure, Obama was elected but he wasn’t elected to do this and he doesn’t have the power to do this. He even admitted in his own speeches a year ago he told the La Raza groups he doesn’t have the power to do this, but here he is being backed by so much of the media. The American media is not taking him to task; it seems to be under control of what seems to be an aristocracy, an elite aristocracy that believes that it’s OK to overthrow the American Republic when you’re agenda is being pursued.

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The reason Americans are unhappy with the direction of the country is because we the people of America are not running our own country. Here we have an example of exactly how we have been deprived of the controls of our own nation, our self-governance. Americans are supposed to be free and prosperous because this is that place where we the people of the United States, a representative form of democracy, drive our own nation and we’re not driving. This is not what our elected representatives are supposed to do, this is contrary to what our elected representatives—I mean the people we elected to Congress have passed laws that have gone unenforced by Bush and now Obama. The country has thus been flooded by millions of people from Third World countries that are committing crimes and taking jobs and taking billions in taxpayer resources and voting feloniously in elections and a host of problems that we can go on about for hours, but the main concern of the executive branch seems to be on behalf of supporting and facilitating the illegal alien invasion of the United States of America. When you look at what Obama has just done and you look at the fast and furious scandal, which the mainstream media doesn’t want to talk about, we’re telling people this is high crimes and this may be treason.

Alabama’s Roy Moore, the Republican Party’s nominee for Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court who in 2003 was removed from the same post after he refused to move a Ten Commandments monument he installed in the courthouse rotunda, spoke to Steve Deace last week to register his disapproval with the Supreme Court’s rulings on Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 and the health care reform law.

He maintained that the Court, by striking down parts of SB 1070 while upholding the Affordable Care Act, have given undocumented immigrants more rights than citizens. “I’m curious what would happen if an Arizona policeman arrests an illegal alien going to a health care facility without a green card and find out that they haven’t paid the individual mandate, are they to be detained or released or what?” Moore asked, even though undocumented immigrants are not covered in the law. “Steve, do we have less rights than people that have no right to be here?” he continued.

Later, he warned that “false religions” are taking hold in America and as a result “Christians are being persecuted while people of a religion foreign to our country are doing what they want.” Moore, who earlier warned that secular government leads to Sharia law, appeared to twist Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Religious Freedom, where Jefferson said that governments throughout history have established and imposed religions forcibly on their people, to attack non-Christian minorities:

Moore: Thomas Jefferson in his Bill for Religious Freedom said that would happen, when men presume to restrict your freedom then they will allow false religions to come into your country and it all began when he said ‘well aware that the opinions and beliefs of man depend not upon their own will but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds that almighty God hath created the mind free.’ You see he recognized that God gives him that freedom of conscience and when men come in and try to restrict it what happens is false religions come in and that’s what’s happening in our country today. Christians are being persecuted while people of a religion foreign to our country are doing what they want.

A number of top Religious Right figures over the last few years have been trying to rally support among conservatives for comprehensive immigration reform, arguing that Hispanics are potential allies in their anti-choice and anti-gay advocacy work while warning that if the Right continues to alienate and demonize Latino voters then they will be writing their own political death sentence. As a result, it wasn’t a surprise to see Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Sam Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference enthusiastically applaud the Obama administration decision to stop deporting undocumented immigrations who are under the age of 30 and arrived in the U.S. before they were 16 years old, and Republican activist Adryana Boyne endorsed the move at the stage of the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s national summit on Saturday.

However, not all social conservatives are on board.

Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family, who earlier this month signed onto the pro-reform Evangelical Immigration Table, called the announcement partisan and divisive. Minnery even suggested that the decision to stop deporting some young migrants is bad for families because they won’t be deported with their parents:

Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family’s senior vice president for government and public policy, said he was disappointed with the president’s actions.

“A quick fix in a contentious issue seems designed only for partisan advantage and will divide the country even further,” he said.

Minnery noted that the action will serve to break up families by targeting parents for deportation, while leaving young people behind to fend for themselves.

“Teenagers just out of high school, without intact families, are more likely to wind up dependent on the government,” he said. “This is no solution at all.”

American Family Association’s Buster Wilson attacked the decision by revisiting a debunked conspiracy theory that the Department of Homeland Security thinks that people “who believe in pro-life issues and the second coming of Jesus should be watched as potential terrorists vote,” and then went on to wonder whether Obama is going to allow the young people impacted by the decision to vote, even though they won’t be granted citizenship:

It’s so interesting to me that these people who are, whether they were brought here as children by fault of their known or not, they are still in the process of violating US immigration law. Janet Napolitano will work with her president to do whatever she can to honor those folks while first thing she did in this position, right out of the shoot back in 2009, was issue a white paper to all law enforcement saying that people like you and me who believe in pro-life issues and the second coming of Jesus should be watched as potential terrorists. Incredible; I continue to ask every day now what country am I living in? It is not the America I grew up in.

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Another thing that was suggested by some, and I have tried to be fair about this and to try to ascertain how this could happen. I don’t know what the process would be to make this happen, but some have suggested that 800,000 young but old enough to get work permit illegals that the president is throwing out the welcome mat to, giving them basically a soft, backdoor amnesty, could this be his way in an election year, in just months before the election, of adding 800,000 plus votes to his side of the ledger in November? Good question to ask.

The Republican National Committee’s Hispanic Outreach Director Bettina Inclan sparked a mini-firestorm today when she told reporters that she could not comment on Romney’s immigration positions because “he’s still deciding what his position on immigration is.”  She later tried to clean up the mess by tweeting that she was mistaken, and that his position was clear, linking to his website. 

Unfortunately for Romney and for the RNC’s Hispanic outreach, his position is all too clear: he opposes not only “amnesty” but all “magnets” – such as the DREAM Act or in-state tuition for students whose parents brought them here as children.  Romney has backed legislation, like Arizona’s, that has the goal of making life for undocumented immigrants so miserable that they will choose to “self-deport.”  That’s a bit much even for some right-wing activists, including some of those at the Freedom Federation’s recent Awakening conference in Orlando, Florida, where one speaker called the “self-deportation” approach “cruel” and “unbiblical” and where the Southern Baptists’ Richard Land called the GOP’s positions on immigration policy “dismal” and “indefensible.”

The Religious Right, in general, has traditionally taken a pretty hardline stance when it came to the issue of immigration, which was why it was notable last year when a handful of leaders announced their support for a "just assimilation immigration policy" and called upon their allies in the movement "to stop politicizing this debate needlessly."

One of those leaders was Samuel Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who has been the guest on James Robison's "Life Today" television program for the last two days where he has been appealing to the Religious Right to support immigration reform on the grounds that "the Hispanic community loves Jesus" and God has placed them in America in order to bring about revival and redemption:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is something of a hero to the anti-immigrant Right. He was one of the most outspoken proponents of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law last year, in a large part because he had already been using the racial profiling tactics it authorized for years. He delighted in punishing prisoners –including protestors of his tactics – by making them wear pink underwear, a practice he commemorated last month by giving Sarah Palin her very own pair. He briefly had his own reality TV show. He was courted by the Tea Party. GOP presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain vied for his endorsement, which he ultimately gave to Rick Perry before joining the candidate on the campaign trail.

Arpaio’s reckless flair for self-promotion and disregard for civil rights have been well-known for as long as he has had national fame. But today, the Justice Department released a long and scathing report detailing the Sheriff’s record of civil rights violations, including his discrimination against Latinos and non-English speakers, “excessive use of force” and “unlawful retaliation against individuals exercising their First Amendment right to criticize MCSO’s policies or practices.”

The AP outlines some of the most shocking allegations in the report:

The civil rights report said Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latinos and that the agency's immigration policies treat Latinos as if they are all in the country illegally. Deputies on the immigrant-smuggling squad stop and arrest Latino drivers without good cause, the investigation found.

A review done as part of the investigation found that 20 percent of traffic reports handled by Arpaio's immigrant-smuggling squad from March 2006 to March 2009 were stops - almost all involving Latino drivers - that were done without reasonable suspicion. The squad's stops rarely led to smuggling arrests.

Deputies are encouraged to make high-volume traffic stops in targeted locations. There were Latinos who were in the U.S. legally who were arrested or detained without cause during the sweeps, according to the report.

During the sweeps, deputies flood an area of a city - in some cases, heavily Latino areas - over several days to seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Illegal immigrants accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by Arpaio's office.

Police supervisors, including at least one smuggling-squad supervisor, often used county accounts to send emails that demeaned Latinos to fellow sheriff's managers, deputies and volunteers in the sheriff's posse. One such email had a photo of a mock driver's license for a fictional state called "Mexifornia."

The report said that the sheriff's office launched an immigration operation two weeks after the sheriff received a letter in August 2009 letter about a person's dismay over employees of a McDonald's in the Phoenix suburb of Sun City who didn't speak English. The tip laid out no criminal allegations. The sheriff wrote back to thank the writer "for the info," said he would look into it and forwarded it to a top aide with a note of "for our operation."
 

Federal investigators focused heavily on the language barriers in Arpaio's jails.

Latino inmates with limited English skills were punished for failing to understand commands in English by being put in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day or keeping prisoners locked down in their jail pods for as long as 72 hours without a trip to the canteen area or making nonlegal phone calls.

The report said some jail officers used racial slurs for Latinos when talking among themselves and speaking to inmates.

Detention officers refused to accept forms requesting basic daily services and reporting mistreatment when the documents were completed in Spanish and pressured Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms that implicate their legal rights without language assistance.

The agency pressures Latinos with limited English skills to sign forms by yelling at them and keeping them in uncomfortably cold cells for long periods of time.

These allegations are disturbing enough in themselves. But what’s even more troubling is that the person behind them has been not only held up as a hero by the Right, but has served as an inspiration for immigration legislation around the country. In a report last year, we examined the ways the anti-immigrant Right has worked to dehumanize immigrants in order “to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment and build political opposition to comprehensive immigration reform.” It should come as no surprise that Sheriff Joe is the movement’s figurehead.
 

Cross-posted from PFAW Blog

This summer, William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC appeared on the Janet Mefferd program where he declared that President Obama had become a dictator with plans to create a police state and use undocumented immigrants to wage war on "White America."

Gheen went on to suggest that there was no "peaceful, political recourse" to Obama's dictatorship and so people might need to start contemplating "some type of extra-political activities that I can’t really talk about because they’re all illegal and violent."

Today, Gheen sent out an email to supporters reporting that due to anemic fundraising, ALIPAC is on the verge of being forced to shut down operations:

We are sorry to report that for the first time in our organization's history, we have failed to reach our minimum operational expenses for our final funds drive of 2011. All things being equal, this would put us on a final shutdown date of January 1, 2011.

ALIPAC's fund raising difficulties can be explained by four major causes. The first is the horrific political and economic environment we find ourselves in as a nation at this time. The second is that we are having to take issue with different politicians like Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich of whom some of our members have decided to support.

Third, many of our supporters are utterly dismayed by the authoritarian and dictatorial actions of Obama, who has decreed a form of Amnesty for illegal aliens, while secretly using our tax monies to buy military style weapons for the smugglers bringing in the aliens and the drugs. Unfortunately, Obama has demoralized some of our supporters who are throwing their hands up in exhaustion instead of rallying against Obama.

The fourth reason we are having trouble raising funds has to do with some very important technical issues involving our website and e-mail distribution lists. These issues have caused many of our supporters to be unfortunately, disconnected from our reach and our communications. We have a bold plan to fix these issues.

We are so thankful for all of you who have given of your time and money to support ALIPAC. Your loyalty and dedication to our cause is something for which we cannot say thank you enough times!

It’s that time of year again when anti-Muslim activists discuss the growing threat of halal foods. WorldNetDaily has published yet another exposé into the “march of Sharia” through the “growth of halal foods,” quoting American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer as an authority on the matter. Fischer, who has called American Muslims a “toxic cancer” on society and wants the U.S. to deport all Muslims, implied that the availability of halal foods is an illustration of “creeping” Sharia law:

Specialty markets first supplied "halal" food to Muslims in America, then restaurants joined in the effort and now the very grocery stores from which you buy hamburger and chops are offering food that has been slaughtered according to Islamic ritual, according to responses from food outlets contacted by WND.

Islam requires Muslims to eat such "halal" food, which as part of the religion's rituals already has been dedicated to the Muslim god Allah.

And it's an alarming issue for Christians because the Bible warns against eating food previously dedicated to idols. Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Wash., has explained in previous WND reports that eating food that's "halal" would be the same as disregarding the Bible's commands.

"From the Christian standpoint, Allah would be an idol," Biltz told WND earlier.

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But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association also has expressed alarm.

"To see where things are going with this whole halal business, look no further than the U.K., where grocers have gone whole-hog – pardon the expression – on offering halal meat but without telling anybody about it.

"Shariah law is no longer creeping up on us. It's bearing down on us at full gallop. It's time for Christian civilization to grab the reins of this runaway horse and stop it dead in its tracks. No Shariah law in America, period."