In response to widespread immigration raids, a coalition of immigrant rights activists has announced the launching of a Rapid Response Network Hotline that will give help to those confronted with the raids. The RRN Hotline, sponsored by the NJ May 1 Coalition and the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee is a 24-hour toll free number covering New York and New Jersey that will provide immediate, contact with Spanish-speaking volunteers. In the event of a raid, the volunteers will calmly inform callers of their basic rights, especially the right not to admit the ICE agents to their homes without a warrant signed by a judge and the right to remain silent. Go to the website www.njmay1.org to learn more.

UPDATE October 12th, 2007

I have sad news to bring. Cecil Harvey is being removed tomorrow, Saturday. He is being sent to Barbados. He was last there as a child. He can be very proud of his tenacity in his legal fight to stay in the United States, the only country he knows. He fought long and hard, remaining in the U.S. prison/detention system for many years. All total, 10 years fighting his deportation. His is an incredible story of our times. This is an incredible demonstration of personal strength coming from a man who is frail and in poor health. In the nearly four years I've known Cecil, I've never known him to complain about his plight. He has always maintained a positive attitude. He has shown genuine excitement about the legal challenges he has filed and pursued. He educated himself to master the legal maze of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and represented himself well through the convoluted legal swamp of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He can be very proud of his heroic effort. Tomorrow he will be a free man. This is a time for celebration. A new chapter is about to begin in Cecil's story. I'm confident that Cecil will master his new challenges and excel in whatever he chooses to do. He has family in Barbados. His parents are alive and have returned to the Island. His wife is already planning a Christmas trip there. He will now be able to communicate more easily with his family in Queens than he has for the past several years. He thanks all of us for all the support we have given him during his terrible ordeal. I'm sure we will all remain connected through the years ahead. Stan Organek

Detainee Cecil Harvey, was recently caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic web resulting in a second period of detention for him. He was detained this second time for missing a hearing that jail officials prevented him from attending during his previous detention.

He is a Barbadian-American who has lived in the U.S. for 35 years and has raised children and grandchildren here. He is being kept in a prison in Alabama at a great distance from his family in New York. Of considerable concern is that he is in chronic pain with well-documented back and neck problems. The jail has not met his special orthopedic medical needs.

Sign the petition for Cecil Harvey.

It concerns the treatment of detainees. A key sentence reads in part "we are concerned that undocumented aliens are not only suffering from inadequate medical attention while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they are also dying in our Nation's detention facilities."
The letter goes on to ask a number of questions regarding medical facilities and deaths.

Read this letter.

Eric Lerner of NJCRDC said: "This isn't a serious report. ... This is in no way a reflection of the information we gave to the OIG. It's basically a whitewash that specifically does not address the many reports of abuse of the detainees."

Read the full report Also read the three news articles in the column at the right dated January 17th and 19th, 2007.

Read the Linda Greenhouse story in the New York Times.
Or the AP article in the International Herald Tribune.

• The PBS show.
• An interview of Daniel Zwerdling by Leonard Lopate on WNYC.
  

• End to Passaic County Detentions.
• NYC Commission of Inquiry Tries Real Criminals for Detention, Torture.
• NJCRDC in the Community.
• Massive Immigrant Rights Rallies Defeat Criminalization Bill.

AP estimate of the biggest rallies:
400,000 in Chicago
400,000 in LA
100,000 in San Jose
55,000 in San Francisco
15,000 in Houston
30,000 across Florida

In New York City, estimates of size were all over the place, but the 3-mile long March could not have been smaller than 150,000

In certain areas and industries, the strike was almost complete. Agricultural production across both Florida and California came to a halt. Contstuction workers in Florida struck in large numbers. In the Midwest, all three of the largest meatpackers were forced to close, knowing that if they did not, their workforces would have walked out anyway. In Los Angeles, the garment workers closed the huge garment center and the wholesale food workers struck as well. The independent truckers shut down the ports of Los Angles and Long Beach. Except for some of the meatpackers, none of these groups of workers were in unions.

By comparison, in all of last year, labor-union strikes involved 100,000 people.

Workers have found the US in 2006, as they have found in other places and at other times that there is another way to fight than traditional union strikes: the political mass strike. What demands for wages or working conditions alone could not do, an ambitious political demand--for the legalization of ALL immigrants--has accomplished.

At the same time, the immigrant rights movement, now clearly a movement of the immigrant section of the working class, has discovered that bold, uncompromising demands--for Equal Rights, no deportations--and bold tactics--a general strike-- can achieve unity , while timid "realistic" demands and tactics cannot.

In New York the crowd was overwhelmingly Latino, so the sort of unity achieved among various immigrant groups in Chicago has not yet come to New York. Nor were many native-born in evidence, so the unity of the peace movement and immigrant movement is also yet to be achieved. But it was a joyous and militant crowd. The sure-fire applause lines were all those calling for legalization for all immigrants and equal rights for all. Those were the demands that unified everyone and that had brought them there.

At the rally, Saleh Ajaj spoke for NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee on the demand, adopted by the May 1 coalition, to "free all detainees". He movingly spoke of being himself detained for 14 months. We then paraded in the midst of the huge crowd with our "FREE ALL DETAINEES" banner, which got into many photos.

Of course, the local English-speaking press declined to publish any of the demands.

Importantly, the coalition passed out tens of thousand of flyers calling people to a New York metro regional conference on June 17 and to the next meeting of the coalition, tomorrow night,. Hopefully through these flyers were will bring into a new democratic organizing process some of the key grass-roots activists who mobilized this strike in workplaces and communities. That will be the key to building an ever-growing movement for immigrant and worker rights.

Videos from last October’s First Session of the Commission of Inquiry are now available for viewing. The following are on the Testimony on Detention and Torture

Eric Lerner of NJCRDC and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights

Sarah Sohn, Immigration Equality

Saleh Ajaj, former detainee

Session II of the International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration was held in New York on January 20-22, 2006.

Read the announcement in Business Wire or the more interesting story in The New York Times.

Read the news stories at the right starting with December 29th, 2005.

Read the NJCRDC statement and press release.

• NJCRDC meets with Monmouth Officials, visits Detainees.
• Hunger Strike at Passaic County Jail.
• Office of Inspector General Audits Detention Facilities.
• Massive hunger strike by immigrant detainees at Guantanamo.

Read this Passaic County Jail report