On Sept. 21, the House of Representatives voted 328-95 to approve HR 6094--the "Community Protection Act of 2006"--an anti-immigrant bill which would allow indefinite detention, overturning the Supreme Court's June 2001 Zadvydas v. Davis ruling. The bill would also allow noncitizens to be quickly deported if the government believes they are gang members, and would bar suspected gang members from obtaining political asylum. The same day, the House voted 277-140 to pass HR 6095—the Immigration Law Enforcement Act of 2006—which would authorize state and local police to enforce federal immigration law, expand expedited removal, limit appeals and lawsuits in immigration cases and revoke the Orantes injunction, which protects Salvadorans from expedited removal. A third bill, passed unanimously, would impose a 20-year prison sentence for creating or financing a tunnel under the US border.

Are domestic Islamophobes starting to emulate the tactics of their counterparts in India? Note that this comes on the heels of the atrocious mosque desecration in Maine. From AP, Sept. 23:

Shots were fired at a mosque in Melbourne, Florida as worshippers celebrated the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but no injuries or arrests were reported, authorities said Saturday.

Tell us again how the anti-Semitic upsurge is all in our imagination. We keep forgetting. From KNBC, Los Angeles, Sept. 22:

ENCINO, Calif. -- Two flags depicting Nazi swastikas were draped over a freeway overpass in Encino on Friday, on the eve of the Jewish High Holy Days.

On Sept. 2, about 5,000 immigrant-rights supporters marched through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall as part of a series of events planned through Labor Day weekend. The march was organized by the March 25th Coalition. (CBS2.com, Los Angeles, Sept. 2)

Can somebody explain to us why this is legal? US citizens, who have not been charged with any crime, are denied entry into the US. Why should submitting to an FBI interrogation abroad be a prerequisite for being allowed back into their own country? If the US has evidence they forfeited their citizenship by taking military training at a camp in Pakistan, then they can, conceivably, be legally barred. But lacking such evidence, this is just arbitrary abuse of power. Where is the outrcy over this? From the San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 26:

This is how censorship works in the USA: by other names—which, of course, makes it more insidious. An ACLU press release, Aug. 24:

Village Cannot Impose Prohibitive Insurance Requirement as Condition of Free Speech, NYCLU Warns
NEW YORK -- The New York Civil Liberties Union today urged the village of Bellport to drop an arbitrary and unconstitutional requirement that any group wishing to march on the street must purchase $2 million in insurance and indemnify Bellport from liability as a condition of receiving a permit.

The ongoing indigenous uprising in Ontario perculates up into the New York Times, Aug. 17. The Times gets a B for at least including some historical context, but a failing grade for consistency, having largely ignored this crisis for months, and finally slapping it in their "Journal" slot, for off-beat "local color" stories. They could have got an A for historical context if they were more accurate—the Six Nations (also known as the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederacy) were officially neutral in the American Revolution, and the campaign of ethnic cleansing that George Washington ordered against them (led by Gen. John Sullivan) was in response to guerilla activity by the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant and his band of partisans—not the Confederacy as a whole. The Times also fails to inform readers that the British had effectively won Indian sympathies by promising to halt settler colonization west of the Appalachians—as we have noted.

A Class Analysis

by George Caffentzis, Metamute

And my coyote, Virgil, said to him when he refused to take me, a living man, over the Acheron to Hell, "Charon, do not be angry, but this undocumented passage has been decided upon in the place where what is wanted always happens. So don't ask any more questions."

—Dante, Inferno, Canto III, lines 94-96.

Introduction: Invisible to Visible

There were more demonstrations in more places with greater participation between March 24 and May Day 2006 than any other six-week period in US history. For a number of days marches of more than half a million people overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Dallas, halting business, while there were literally hundreds of smaller gatherings in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Salem, Oregon; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Along with the public outpouring of bodies, there were dozens of student walk-outs in high schools around the country as well as a nation-wide immigrants' "general strike" called for May Day that was heeded by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of workers, including truck drivers who shut down the Port of Los Angeles (one of the main supply links in the commodity trade with China, South Korea, and Japan). The demonstrators' demands were amnesty for all undocumented immigrants and the defeat of pending draconian anti-immigrant legislation. In the process, they intermittently stopped or stalled the cycle of production, circulation and reproduction in the US for this six-week period. The slogan of these remarkable demos, whose size consistently surprised both their organizers and the authorities, became "Si Se Puede" ["Yes It Is Possible" in Spanish], implying their awareness of a new political power in the Americas.