WASHINGTON, May 1: A new bill, already endorsed by the Bush administration, will empower police to enforce immigration laws and will strip immigrants of their right to protection against illegal detention. This Real ID act, if enacted, would give the Secretary of Homeland Security unlimited powers. Immigrants will no longer be able to obtain driver’s licenses or car insurance. Police can randomly stop an immigrant and ask him to prove his status and can arbitrarily detain him.
The proposed law, which is now being negotiated by a House-Senate conference committee, will also make it much harder for those fleeing political and religious persecution to find refuge in the United States. The act will further tighten the bail process, making it exceedingly difficult for immigrants awaiting hearings on their court cases to be released on bail.
“In the name of national security, the immigrants are being stripped of their basic rights,” says Aarti Shahani of Families for Freedom, a multiethnic defence network for immigrants fighting deportation. “It is for the first time since the civil war that immigrants are being deprived of the constitutional right to habeas corpus.” The proposed bill also calls for building a three-mile fence across wetlands in California to prevent illegal immigrants from entering the United States.
The White House already endorsed this controversial anti-immigrant legislation, which has initially passed in the House of Representatives. The US Senate is expected to vote on the Real ID Act sometime this week. To ensure a quick passage, the bill has been attached to a supplemental appropriations package to fund troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and to fund tsunami relief efforts in Asia.
In a letter to House and Senate conferees, the White House Office of Management and Budget said, “The Administration strongly urges the conferees to include the Real ID Act of 2005 in the final version of the bill.”
On April 14, the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella organization for 150 groups that work with immigrants and refugees, sent a letter to senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer urging them “to take a strong public position against the Real ID Act and to do everything you can to stop this anti-immigrant proposal from passing in Congress.”
“Simply put,” the letter read, “the REAL ID Act is blatantly anti-immigrant legislation masquerading as a national security initiative.” Sponsors of the bill, which was written by Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and member of the Conservative Political Action Conference, say that by increasing restriction on immigration, they are protecting the United States against future terrorist attacks because perpetrators of 9/11 were all immigrants.
Under the proposed bill, asylum-seekers will have an even more difficult time proving their cases. The legislation would place a heavier burden on applicants to prove claims they were persecuted at home. They would be expected to make persuasive cases of mistreatment, preferably with documented evidence.
Immigration judges who do not believe the immigrants’ claims could order them deported even before their appeals run out, and federal courts would no longer have recourse to step in.
“We are deeply disappointed that the Bush Administration would so unequivocally embrace punitive measures that link all immigrants to terrorists,” said Angela Kelley, Deputy Director of the National Immigration Forum, a leading pro-immigrant advocacy organization in Washington, which has been generally supportive of the Bush administration’s call for comprehensive immigration reform.
