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From Los Angeles Times

U.S. to investigate Secure Communities deportation program

Homeland Security's inspector general plans a review of the immigration enforcement program that purports to target 'serious convicted felons' but which some accuse of racial profiling.

by Lee Romney, Los Angeles Times

May 18, 2011

Reporting from San Francisco

The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General plans an investigation of an immigration enforcement program that purports to target "serious convicted felons" for deportation but has ensnared many illegal immigrants who were arrested but not subsequently convicted of crimes or who committed minor offenses, a letter obtained Wednesday shows.

The letter from acting Inspector General Charles K. Edwards to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), who requested an investigation late last month, said the watchdog agency had already scheduled a review of the program, known as Secure Communities. Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency launched the program in 2008 with plans for mandatory nationwide participation by 2013.

The review, Edwards wrote, aims to "determine the extent to which ICE uses the program to identify and remove dangerous criminal aliens from the United States."

It will also examine cost, "the accuracy of ICE's data collection," whether the program is being applied equitably across communities, and the way ICE officials portrayed the program to states and counties, which were initially told they could opt out but were later informed that participation has always been mandatory.

Under the program, fingerprints routinely sent by local jails to the FBI for criminal background checks are shared with ICE. Although local law enforcement does not actively participate, the program has turned jails in about 1,200 U.S. counties into immigration screening centers. All 58 California counties are on board, though San Francisco and Santa Clara sought unsuccessfully to opt out.

Proponents, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, say the program is successfully targeting serious threats to public safety. According to ICE, about 28,000, or 35%, of the people deported so far had been convicted of felonies including murder and rape. An unknown number who appear in ICE data on the program as "noncriminals" or as having committed only misdemeanors had prior violent felonies here or in their home countries, or were previously deported and returned illegally, they note.

But opponents contend that by also sweeping up minor offenders or those never convicted of crimes, the program is dissuading illegal immigrants from cooperating with law enforcement.

ICE data show that about half those flagged for deportation since the program began were not convicted after their arrest or were convicted of misdemeanors. Immigrant rights groups also say the program has encouraged racial profiling, an allegation that recently prompted Homeland Security officials to hire an outside statistician to analyze the arrest data.

Secure Communities "has been shrouded in secrecy and we hope that the OIG takes a real and serious look at all aspects of its operation," said Melissa Keaney, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center.

The organization requested an Office of Inspector General audit of the program last fall and was told one would be conducted.

The program has been particularly controversial over the issue of whether local governments could opt out. Officials initially said it was voluntary but now maintain that it will be operating in all states and counties by 2013 regardless of opposition. In seeking an investigation last month, Lofgren bluntly accused ICE officials of lying to local governments and to members of Congress.

In a response to the congresswoman, ICE Director John Morton pointed the finger in part at private contractor Dan Cadman. Cadman was terminated in March after emails released in response to litigation showed that he told New York officials that opting out was possible and suggested that pressure be applied to Cook County, Ill., officials to bring them on board with the program. His were among hundreds of internal ICE emails released.

ICE, Morton told Lofgren, "takes full responsibility for the confusion and the inconsistent statements the agency has made about participation in the program." Steps taken to address the issue, he added, included "the termination of a contractor who authored several unacceptable emails."

However, the released emails indicate that knowledge of the deceptive messaging went much higher than Cadman, a point the contractor makes in a May 9 letter to Lofgren obtained Wednesday by The Times. In it, Cadman claims he has become a scapegoat for higher-ups who are responsible for the confusion. In his correspondence, Cadman included an April letter to Secure Communities Acting Assistant Director Marc Rapp that supports his assertions.

"ICE painted itself into a corner and needed someone to blame," Cadman wrote. "I think you will agree after reading my letter that confusion over opting out of Secure Communities has arisen not because of me, but because of the government's own vacillation, policy shifts and inconsistent public stances."

In his letter to Rapp, Cadman notes his recommendations in 2009 and early 2010 that ICE be clear with local officials about the lack of an opt-out but says they were rejected by higher-ups. "I faithfully put forward the government's often shifting positions, as best I understood them, even when I did not personally agree with them," he wrote. Reached Wednesday, he declined to comment.

The ICE press office also declined to comment on the Cadman correspondence and said that "as a matter of policy we do not comment on pending IG reviews."

Legislation pending in California would modify the state's agreement with ICE in part to apply the program only to convicted felons. If ICE does not agree to the changes, the legislation would require California to withdraw from the program.

Illinois' governor this month terminated that state's agreement with ICE after unsuccessfully seeking similar modifications. And on Wednesday, program opponents protested in front of the office of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo urging him to take similar action.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-secure-communities-20110519,0,5898370,print.story

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Chilling portrait of neo-Nazi's home life emerges

The 10-year-old son of neo-Nazi leader Jeffrey R. Hall tells Riverside investigators of shooting his father and says Hall beat him and other family members regularly.

by Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times

May 19, 2011

A chilling family portrait emerged Wednesday in the case of a 10-year-old Riverside boy charged with murdering his neo-Nazi father, including outings to practice target shooting, a house with guns and knives stashed in easily accessible places and, the boy told police, regular beatings by his father. And he knew exactly where to find the family's .357 magnum revolver.

The boy gave a harrowing account of how he carried out the early morning attack May 1 as his father, 32-year-old Jeffrey R. Hall, was dozing on the living room couch, detectives said in a court declaration filed in connection with charges against the boy's stepmother, Krista F. McCary.

The 10-year-old told police he grabbed a Rossi .357 magnum revolver from a closet and "went downstairs with the gun, pulled the hammer back, aimed the gun at his dad's ear while he was asleep and shot him," Riverside Police Det. Greg Rowe wrote in the declaration. The boy "went upstairs and hid the gun under his bed."

Document: Allegations filed against stepmother

The court document, based on police station interviews of McCary and four of the family's five children, offered the first glimpse of a household terrorized by Hall's alleged out-of-control violence and rants. The boy was a target of that abuse "on a daily basis," McCary, 26, told police, adding that her husband "kicks, hits and yells" at him more than the other four children.

"He was tired of his dad hitting him and his mom…he thought his dad was cheating on his mom and thought he might have to choose which person he would live with," Rowe said, referring to McCary in the court declaration. "He knew his mom and dad had a gun, and he knew where they kept it."

These details came out on the same day that the boy appeared in Riverside County Juvenile Court for a detention hearing. Judge Charles J. Koosed approved a request by the boy's attorney, Public Defender Mathew Hardy, for a mental health evaluation. Hardy said he may pursue a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity. The boy is expected to enter a plea at his next hearing, set for July 22.

McCary has been charged with five felony counts of child endangerment and four counts of criminal storage of a firearm. The four other children, ranging from 2 months to 9 years of age, have been taken into protective custody and placed with a relative, police said.

Police found an unloaded .22-caliber rifle in the garage of Hall's home, 10 feet away from an unlocked and stocked ammunition cabinet. They also found several sharp-edged weapons in the master bedroom.

The prosecutor in the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ambrosio E. Rodriguez, cautioned that the court declaration was a "very short summary" of the evidence leading to McCary's arrest.

"It in no way gives a full explanation of the evidence we have in the case involving the juvenile's actions and mental state during the murder," he said.

From the outside, the family's stucco home near UC Riverside blended in seamlessly with the rest of the well-kept suburban neighborhood, though neighbors complained about Hall's occasional neo-Nazi barbecues and gatherings. Inside, police found squalor: dirty clothes strewn across floors, bedrooms smelling of urine, filthy bathrooms and beer bottles littering the downstairs, under the swastika of a National Socialist Movement flag.

Numerous complaints had been made to Riverside County Child Protective Services, the declaration stated, but most of the allegations were determined to be unfounded and may have stemmed from Hall's bitter child custody dispute with his ex-wife, the mother of the 10-year-old boy.

Sylvia Deporto, assistant director of childrens' services, said state law prohibits her from discussing any abuse investigation involving the family. In general, however, she said it's difficult to prove allegations of abuse unless confirmed by family members, who are often fearful of retaliation, or there is physical evidence.

Riverside police said they had no reports of domestic violence at the home prior to the shooting.

Rodriguez said there was nothing to indicate that Hall's neo-Nazi activities led to the shooting.

"I don't think you can deny that Jeff Hall's involvement, his leadership in the Nazi movement, is going to be an issue in this case. Think of the hate, the vitriol," Rodriguez said. "I don't see how that doesn't become an issue in a case when we're talking about a 10-year-old boy and what happened in the house."

Hall was the director of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement in the Western United States and last year lost a bid for the local water board.

Paul Mones, a Portland, Ore., attorney who has handled numerous cases involving children accused of killing a parent, said the vast majority of patricide cases are committed against controlling fathers abusing multiple members of their families.

"Many people know the situation in the house, but adults don't typically speak out for kids," Mones said. "If there's anything to take away from these cases, it's that kids suffer silently, and kids are put in the impossible human situation of ending it violently."

Maureen Pacheco, assistant director of Loyola Law School's Center for Juvenile Law and Policy, said she was dismayed that the details of the alleged shooting and abuse were made public in a court declaration, even though releasing the account was "legal, without a doubt."

A decade ago, California voters also approved Proposition 21, which opened to the public juvenile court proceedings involving alleged violent felonies.

"It's important to remember that because this boy is so young, he can't be prosecuted as an adult," she said. "That means he eventually is going to come back into society."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-neo-nazi-20110519,0,7755159,print.story

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Fighting mosques in the name of freedom

The real threat in a Tennessee case is to our nation's Bill of Rights.

by Doyle McManus

May 19, 2011

Last year, a Muslim congregation in Murfreesboro, Tenn., a pleasant college town of about 110,000 people southeast of Nashville, decided that the time had come to build a proper mosque.

For 20 years or more, the town's roughly 250 Muslim families had met for prayers in makeshift quarters, and the congregation's prosperous leaders — doctors, professors, auto dealers — thought they could do better. They bought a 15-acre plot of land next to a Baptist church south of the city limits, and won approval from the Rutherford County Planning Commission for a 53,000-square-foot community center.

Then, as has happened in several places around the country lately, bedlam broke out.

Conservative activists protested that they didn't want a big, visible mosque in their quiet Southern town. A candidate for the Republican congressional nomination decried the construction. Vandals torched one of the (non-Muslim) contractor's bulldozers. And a group of residents filed suit, charging that the building permit had been issued improperly and that they would suffer "emotional distress" if they had to live near a mosque.

What happened next was unexpected, but it was what should happen in a country where freedom of religion is enshrined in the Constitution: Most of Murfreesboro rallied around the Muslims. Christian clergymen and a rabbi formed a support committee; there were marches and teach-ins. The fiery congressional candidate lost her primary race.

Among the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro's most important supporters was the elected mayor of Rutherford County, a Republican farmer and retired healthcare executive named Ernest G. Burgess. He's also an elder at North Boulevard Church of Christ.

"This is going to sound a little philosophical, but this is a matter of principle," Burgess told me this week. "When I took this office, I promised to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state of Tennessee.... As far as I'm concerned, that's the end of the story."

Only it wasn't.

In a move that could portend a shift away from mosque battles as strictly local fights, the anti-mosque forces consulted with national conservative groups to marshal arguments against the project. And they imported a Washington-based activist, former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney Jr., to testify in court that American Muslims — including those in Murfreesboro — want to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on the United States, and that the proposed mosque, gymnasium and swimming pool were part of a "stealth jihad."

"I'm willing to take this case all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to," said Joe Brandon Jr., the plaintiffs' lawyer. "And I'm getting a lot of help. I didn't know anything about Islam or Sharia when this started — I'm just a criminal lawyer — but I've learned a lot."

In short, what began as a strictly local zoning case that looked open and shut — under federal law, religious congregations can build houses of worship almost anywhere — has become the focus of a battle that opponents would like to take national.

"I can't help thinking that if this were just a local controversy, it would have been settled by now," Mayor Burgess said last week.

Brandon, the plaintiffs' lawyer, dismisses the idea of outside agitation, noting that national donations to pursue the case haven't been pouring in. But he acknowledges that national groups such as Gaffney's Center for Security Policy have helped him make his case.

Gaffney's argument boils down to this: Devout Muslims want to live under Sharia, the religious legal code that governs in Saudi Arabia and other traditional Islamic societies. But Sharia, which treats women as unequal, is incompatible with U.S. law. So organized Islam, Gaffney charges, is conspiring to supplant American law with Muslim law — and that, he says, is sedition.

"What is going on in Murfreesboro … fits into the profile of the stealth jihad that is being waged by the Muslim Brotherhood," he told me. "It's a mega-mosque that's clearly disproportionate to the community that it's intended to serve. It has the purpose of demonstrating a kind of triumphalist agenda."

Murfreesboro's Muslims haven't actually done anything explicitly seditious, he acknowledges, but "you want to err on the side of caution."

It's hard to see how the lawsuit against the Murfreesboro mosque can prevail. Even if Brandon wins his case, the most he can ask for is a rehearing on the building permit. Meanwhile, the Muslim congregation has actually sped up construction on the advice of its lawyers, who say that once the building is up, it will be harder to undo.

But it's unlikely that even a resounding defeat in court will end attempts to stop mosque construction. In Gaffney's view, the protests across the country are crucially important, "analogous to the Cold War and the struggle against communism."

Newt Gingrich probably wouldn't disagree; last year he called Sharia "a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States."

Gaffney has a point: Not since the communist scares of the Cold War have we heard that kind of rhetoric. Back then, plenty of politicians found it useful to run against sedition, both real and imagined. The Bill of Rights survived, but it certainly came under attack. Looks as if it's in for another battle.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-mosques-20110519,0,1952445,print.column

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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DHS Partners on the "If you See Something, Say Something" Campaign with the Pentagon Force Protection Agency

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