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News & ArtsThursday, May 20, 2010
City Immigration Rally: A Sign of Victory or Defeat?
Posted by Cienna Madrid on Thu, May 20, 2010 at 3:56 PM
As we reported earlier, the rally for immigration reform that began at 11:00 a.m. today in the rain, and was supposed to end shortly thereafter in public, politicized arrests, instead ended a little more than two hours later in quiet dispersion.
The rally, organized by One America, was part of a nationwide effort to pressure the Obama administration into providing a clear path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. The government must also process the existing backlog of immigrants who are simply waiting for their paperwork to go through, explains Lorena Gonzalez, spokeswoman for One America. And Gonzalez adds that "we need due process for people taken into custody. Right now, they have no rights to seek legal council."
These are all critical issues, which is why, as One America spokesman Charlie McAteer put it "we're putting bodies on the line today. We're ready to get arrested. We're escalating the situation."
They escalated the situation by blocking escalator doors. When that didn't work, they blocked intersections at 2nd Avenue and Madison Avenue, 3rd and Madison, and 4th and Madison. Lines of cars and buses were rerouted a block away by police officers. Within two hours, the group pronounced the rally a victory anyway and called buses to pick them up.
"I think they were scared of arresting us," said Pramila Jayapal, executive director of One America, which organized the civil disobedience protest.
"Seattle's making a statement by not arresting us," said failed arrestee Dan Ford. "The city isn't willing to use unnecessary force with the Latino community."
"It's a clear victory," agreed Estela Ortega, executive director of El Centro de la Raza, another failed arrestee. "We celebrated our first amendment rights to free speech and hopefully our non-arrests mean that [the city] supports immigration reform."
But at least a few protesters felt the group gave up. "Why are we leaving?" one protester asked a friend. "I thought our job was to get someone arrested. Our work isn't done. My feet aren't even sore."
"Getting arrested isn't hard," replied the friend. "These people don't know what hard work really is." He was clearly joking, but he had a point: it appears that organizers weren't prepared for a long-haul effort. They expected civil disobedience to include being arrested in a civilized time frame—two hours or less.
By contrast, when five college-aged immigrants (three of them undocumented) staged a sit-in protest at Senator John McCain's office in Tucson on Monday to pressure him to sponsor legislation for young illegal immigrants to gain legal status, they spent at least six hours on the floor before being detained.
Hilary Stern, executive director of Casa Latina, said she volunteered to be arrested because she "looked forward to making a sacrifice and feeling, just for one night, what many people go through just for being in this country."
Civil disobedience is newsworthy; civil inconvenience is less so. If the stakes are as high as protesters indicated, they have to be prepared to get uncomfortable. At this rally, it didn't appear that they were.
2
They would have arrested you eventually, folks, but the SPD really isn't looking to get bad press right now, and for them, ICE and the city government, quick action at the cost of negative attention is a bad calculation.
4
Thanks a lot you self righteous asshole protesters. You just pissed off a bunch of people and after you didn't accomplish anything in a short time frame you headed out.
with liberal white Jews like Stern, it is always selfishly about their own feelings and getting everyone to notice how enlightened and progressive they are while they engage in their feel-good absolutely inconsequential do-gooder actions. Barf barf barf at their smarmy smugness.
Great protests like these are how movements come alive, how change happens. It certainly isn't going to come from politicians. So cheers to the people who took action in their hands today and closed down the streets. That they got front page stories across the northwest and a lively discussion going where it was quiet before is one victory. But I'm sure they think - and I'd agree - that the real victory will come when the immigration laws are made right.
@ Lee - I think you're right - bad time for SPD to be seen arresting leaders of minority advocacy groups. But could make a great visual if they keep this up!
9
I see you're going with the "it's a good protest if a starts a conversation!" canard, but you're incorrect. It's not a good protest if the conversation that follows it is people asking "Was that a protest?"
Serious question. What exactly is that supposed to accomplish? I fully agree with the protesters on the underlying issues, but I'm sick and tired of the lame-ass tactics.
If you really think serious criminal activity is the solution, go burn something (and be prepared to suffer the legal consequences). If you think minor trespass is the solution, at least do it in front of something appropriately symbolic, like maybe whenever the Arizona Diamondback play the Mariners. If you think education is the solution, then do the fucking-hard work of talking to a million uninformed people, one by one, to explain the issue.
11
Otherwise you're just standing in an intersection until you get bored.
I dunno if that was a quote from a press release or not, but if not, Cienna needs to take some remedial English as that's at least the third obvious error in the past couple of days
or maybe she didn't graduate from high school like Dominic
15
Arizona Summer! (without irony!)
16
It's not like we can afford to pay for the cops and prisons we have already ...
Now, if they wanted to arrest the CEOs and COOs of the firms that hire illegal workers, I'm all for frog-marching those guys in cuffs to jail and forgetting the keys.
18
@9 yeah, it shouldn't stop at just a conversation which is why you inconvenience people. and take to the streets. i'm sure they pissed off some and fascinated others. and if you watched the video from other sites and saw that 200 people were stuffed into the lobby of a skyscraper singing and chanting, the people caught up in it were not asking 'is that a protest?'
22
Stupid protesters demanding amnesty. It figures that the Democrat Party wants to actually give it to them.
Viva Joe Arpaio!!!
.wsp.wa.gov/
crime/wanted.php
Hey libtards what do most of the people pictured at the WSP's Most Wanted site have in common? Why do you naive white-guilt pukes want EVEN MORE MEXICAN REDNECKS around here?
21 of the 27 people currently on the Washington State Patrol's Most Wanted list are Mexcrement/Latrinos.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement won't comment on the case of Jose Lopez Madrigal. But KING 5 got the information through confidential sources and documents.
Larry Klein was the man who heard the alleged victim's cries for help. Police say the suspect pulled the woman off the street to a dumpster and raped her.
"I could see the back of his head. I could see his pants were down. I could see her lying on the ground. I could hear her crying, but I couldn't really see her face," said Klein.
Klein called police, who quickly arrested the suspect. But learning his identity took much longer because of some 30 aliases. It was only through fingerprints that they identified him as Madrigal, a Mexican citizen.
Madrigal's arrest and immigration record includes a staggering number of contacts with law enforcement since 1989. That's the year he was convicted of theft using a firearm in California.
He was deported a couple of times after that. Then in 1999, he was arrested for drug sales in both San Diego and San Francisco. Records show that he was deported three times that year between April and August.
He was arrested for drugs again in Stockton, Calif. in 2000. In 2002, he pleaded to third degree sexual assault in Denver. Later that year, he was deported again. And in 2003, records show he was deported three more times.
People who live near the scene of Sunday's alleged rape wonder how it could keep happening.
"Makes you wonder, what are we doing wrong? How is he getting back in here?" said Kirby Aumick.
"It’s troubling. I mean, if this man should not have been in this country, he should have been behind bars then, really, this is a senseless tragedy," said Klein.
According to our sources, Madrigal's last contact before Sunday was around 2003. So, it's not clear how much of that time Madrigal was in this country.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has refused to comment on the case which started making national headlines when it was learned that Madrigal had been deported several times prior to the Edmonds case.
In reviewing records and talking with confidential sources, the KING 5 Investigators learned just how extensive Madrigal’s immigration and arrest record is.
They found he was first deported in California in 1989 and since then he’s returned from his Mexican homeland and been arrested for drug crimes, a sex assault in Colorado and other offenses.
One criminal justice source says Madrigal is a "poster boy" for the federal governments ineffectiveness at keeping the most serious "criminal aliens" – illegals who commit crimes – out of the United States.
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