Campaign News

New York Times – November 6, 2013, by Kirk Semple -

At about 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Maximino Leyva Ortiz, wearing an orange jumpsuit, his wrists shackled, stood before a judge in an immigration courtroom in Lower Manhattan, a lawyer at his side. The federal government was seeking to deport him.

He took an oath, lawyers’ identities were confirmed, and then Mr. Leyva told the judge he would not fight the order; he was prepared to be deported.

“You’re doing so voluntarily, sir?” Judge Brigitte Laforest asked.

Within minutes the hearing was over and Mr. Leyva was being led out of the courtroom by a bailiff; he was on his way back to Mexico.

The proceedings were quick and subdued. But the banality of the scene belied its significance. Mr. Leyva was the first client in a new program that seeks to provide public defenders for all poor immigrants residing in New York who have been detained and are facing deportation. The initiative is the first of its kind in the country.

Unlike in the nation’s criminal court system, defendants in immigration court have no constitutional right to a court-appointed lawyer. Fear and ignorance conspire with language barriers and poverty to keep detainees from securing legal counsel.

The new initiative, called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, emerged from several years of study and lobbying among immigration lawyers and immigrants’ advocates. They were concerned that the absence of competent legal representation for many of New York’s immigrant detainees was resulting in unnecessary deportations that ruptured families and put an undue financial burden on government.

Last summer, the New York City Council allocated $500,000 to help pay for a pilot program to test the viability of the initiative. The project’s organizers said that money, plus a supplementary contribution from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, would allow them to provide representation to 190 immigrants.

“At its core, it’s a justice issue,” said Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Cardozo who helped lead the initiative. “Most excitingly, it’s a chance to mark a sea change in the treatment of immigrants in this country.”

The organizations behind the project are the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo Law School, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Vera Institute of Justice and Make the Road New York. They are ultimately seeking to provide representation for all indigent immigrants living in New York who have been detained and are facing deportation in immigration courts in New York City; Batavia, N.Y.; Newark; and Elizabeth, N.J. — an annual population of about 2,450.

Full funding would cost about $7.4 million per year, proponents said. But in a report to be released on Thursday, the advocates argue that by shortening detentions and reducing deportations, the full-blown program would save governments and private employers an estimated $5.9 million a year.

Though the pilot project opened on Wednesday with a deportation, Mr. Markowitz, who watched the proceedings from the gallery of the small, windowless courtroom, said the benefits of the program were immediately evident. Mr. Leyva had no legal relief from deportation, Mr. Markowitz explained, and to prolong his case would have meant postponing the inevitable, at great cost to the government and to Mr. Leyva.

“He didn’t spend needless time in detention,” Mr. Markowitz said.

By the end of the afternoon, 10 detainees had faced the court accompanied by lawyers from Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, which are providing legal counsel for detainees in the pilot program.

The efficiency of the hearings involving public defenders stood in sharp contrast to the first case on the docket. The detainee, Lewis Spencer Taveras-Mejia, was not included in the pilot project because his family had retained a lawyer for him.

But the lawyer failed to show up for the hearing.

“They told me that they hired a lawyer and that she would be here today,” Mr. Taveras-Mejia told the judge. He said he had never met the lawyer or learned her name, and then he began to cry. The judge decided to schedule a new hearing for Nov. 19.

“That’s 13 days of detention that the taxpayers have to pay for and that he’s unnecessarily spending in jail,” Mr. Markowitz said. He tapped on his phone, calculating the extra detention cost: $2,067.

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Shawn Sebastian, field director of Fed Up, a campaign by labor, community and liberal activist groups that wants the Fed to enact pro-worker policies, said the choice of Williams damaged the Fed’s legitimacy and credibility.“Today, the Federal Reserve concluded another opaque and controversial Reserve Bank presidential selection process by ignoring the demands of the public and choosing yet another white man whose record on Wall Street regulation and full employment raises serious questions,” he said.

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The toyseller's former private-equity owners said they were forming the fund on Tuesday after months of pressure from former employees and their representatives, along with some public pension funds and lawmakers including Warren, a former Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert who is considering a run for president in 2020. The groups, linked to the Center for Popular Democracy, estimate that workers are owed $75 million in severance pay, and they've also pressed Toys "R" Us creditors including Solus to pitch in.

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The St. Louis American - March 12, 2014, by Rebecca Rivas - African-American residents are sick and tired of hearing about an economic recovery that does not apply to them, said Derek Laney, an organizer for Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

In St. Louis, the unemployment rates for the black community remains triple the rate of white residents, 14.1 percent for blacks compared to 5.7 percent for whites, he said. However, some economists claim that the economy is rapidly approaching full employment.

“Is there only one set of the population that matters?” Laney said. “And if they are all right, we’re all right? That’s something we can’t accept.”

On Thursday, March 5, activists attempted to ask James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, those same questions. At noon, a coalition of community-based organizations, faith leaders, elected officials, labor unions and service organizations gathered in front of the St. Louis Fed in downtown St. Louis as a part of the national Fed Up Campaign (whatrecovery.org).

They pointed to a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy released this month that details the difficulties for African-American families to find living-wage employment. The report is titled, “Wall Street, Main Street, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard: Why African Americans Must Not Be Left Out of the Federal Reserve’s Full-Employment Mandate.”

In response to the protest, a St. Louis Fed spokeswoman stated in an email to The St. Louis American: “We are aware of the protest at the St. Louis Fed and respect people’s right to protest peacefully.”

The coalition asked Bullard to prioritize full employment and rising wages for all communities. Laney said as the economy starts to recover, some are calling for the Fed to raise interest rates to prevent wages from rising – which would severely impact families still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. In mid-March, the St. Louis Fed and its leaders will meet to discuss policy. Laney said they hoped the action will help “shape those discussions.”

The report emphasizes that the Federal Reserve is responsible for keeping inflation stable, regulating the financial system and ensuring full employment.

“These mandates reflect the tension between the interests of Wall Street on the one hand and Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the other,” the report states. “As a general matter, corporate and finance executives want to limit wage growth – or, as they call it, ‘wage inflation’ – and to maximize their future profits from lending money.”

The report argues that in past decades, the Federal Reserve resolved this tension in favor of banks and corporations, intentionally limiting wage growth and keeping unemployment excessively high.

“The Fed’s policy choices over the past 35 years have led to increased inequality, stagnant or falling wages, and an American Dream that is inaccessible to tens of millions of families – particularly black families,” the report states.

Since the Ferguson movement began, many local and national leaders have emphasized the need to address the “structural racism” in the region. 

“Economic racism cannot be delinked from racism by law enforcement and other governmental entities,” according to the coalition’s statement. “However, James Bullard has been silent on issues of economics and their impacts on communities of color in the region over the past seven months.  Today, we are bringing these issues to his front door.”

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