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Justice

Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed

By Marie Diamond on Jan 6, 2012 at 9:50 am

Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, 21, died in Mexico after being deported last year

In August 2010, Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, an undocumented construction worker in Chicago, fell 20 feet off a building while on the job and was paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to pay his own medical expenses, he was deported back to Mexico on December 22, 2010.

But he never made it home. Instead, he was left to languish at a small Mexican hospital that was unequipped to handle his needs. UPI reports that Ojeda died on New Year’s Day:

A young man returned to Mexico by a Chicago-area hospital after a construction injury that paralyzed him from the neck down has died, officials say.

Advocates say Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, 21, spent months in a small hospital in Mexico that did not have the facilities to care for a quadriplegic, the Chicago Tribune reported. [...]

“He never even made it to his home,” said Jesus Vargas, a friend in Chicago. “He was always in the hospital stuck to the machine that helped him breathe.”

Ojeda, who was working illegally in the United States, was treated at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill., after a 20-foot fall paralyzed him. The hospital transferred him to Mexico three days before Christmas in 2010.

Ojeda’s deportation followed a heated battle between the hospital and immigration advocates. He was transferred to a Mexican hospital in an air ambulance despite protests from Ojeda and his family that the move would jeopardize his health.

In light of his death, the Chicago hospital that treated him has said it will reexamine its policies for treating international patients.

Ojeda told the Chicago Tribune last February that he feared returning to Mexico because he “need[ed] a lot of things they don’t have.” Tragically, his fears turned out to be all too real.

Justice

Santorum Says Mass Deportation Isn’t So Bad: ‘We’re Not Sending Them To Any Kind Of Difficult Country’

By Marie Diamond on Dec 1, 2011 at 3:20 pm

Being deported is like taking a vacation in Cancun, basically.

ThinkProgress has been reporting on how GOP contenders have practically been tripping over each other to offer the harshest, most costly proposal for dealing with undocumented immigrants. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (PA) joined in the chest-thumping yesterday on Fox News, opposing the idea that undocumented immigrants who have been here for decades should have any path to reside here legally or apply for citizenship. Santorum said there shouldn’t even be consideration for immigrants who have family members living in the U.S. legally.

He “doesn’t want to break up families,” he said, but deportation isn’t so bad because “we’re not sending them to any kind of difficult country”:

SANTORUM: Yeah I feel bad, I don’t like to break up families, but you know the family can go back. We’re not sending them to Siberia. We’re not sending them to any kind of, you know, difficult country. They’re going to Mexico, which is a great country, a nice country. And they can go back like every other Mexican that wants to come to America and come here legally.

Watch it:

Santorum may think that being deported to Mexico is akin to taking a permanent vacation in Cancun, but most immigrants find it a harrowing experience. Immigrants, some of whom have lived in the U.S. since childhood, are forcibly removed from their families and sent to a place where they often have no remaining connections, no relatives, and no housing or job prospects.

In search of a better life and more economic opportunity, approximately 400,000 migrants go through Mexico each year to reach the United States. Nearly half the Mexican population, or 52 million people, live in poverty, 11.7 million of them in extreme poverty. Much of the population lacks access to food, clean water, education, and health care.

Some immigrants who come to the U.S. are also refugees who are too scared of being deported or intimidated by the difficult legal process to apply for asylum. The U.S. asylum system has been particularly unmerciful for people running from Central American gangs — despite a surge in gang-related claims, their petitions are rarely granted. Many immigrants have been killed by gangs after being deported, proving their lives really were at risk — but too late.

NEWS FLASH

Hour One Of Climate Reality: Mexico City | The Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality begins in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest megacities. The city of 20 million residents is facing a water crunch from two directions — increasing demand is drying out aquifers, causing rapid sinking of as much as a foot-and-a-half a year. Meanwhile, extreme precipitation fueled by greenhouse pollution is on the rise, causing killer floods that overwhelm the city’s sewer systems. The dangerous present and future for the largest and oldest city in North America is being presented in Spanish by Gerardo Pandal, the area manager for renewable energy at Guascor de México.

Highlights:

Related Posts

Alyssa

Beauty Queen And Border Crossings

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 12, 2011 at 4:08 pm

This trailer for Miss Bala makes the movie look pretty good, and also helps me put my finger on another thing that irritated me about Colombiana that I couldn’t articulate at the time:

Colombiana, despite ostensibly being a drug war movie, has absolutely nothing new to say about the relationship of American governmental organizations to drug trafficking, and nothing at all to say about the roles of cartels in day-to-day life in the countries where they operate. Miss Bala, by contrast, is set in Tijuana, and appears to have some sense (even if it is not journalism) of what it’s like to be in a place where the integrity of governmental organizations is not assured.

William Finnegan’s done amazing reporting for the New Yorker over the last couple of years in particular about things like the efforts to reclaim control of and reform Tijuana’s police force (its radio frequencies were hijacked by narcotraficantes, among other things) and by extension, the city’s streets; and the infiltration of cartels into a wide range of aspects of life and institutions, both in government and business, in Michoacán, and I’ve always wondered why we don’t have more good action movies that reflect and explore that reality, or more movies about the state of Mexico at all. The movies Mexico’s sent to the Academy Awards to compete in the Foreign Language Film category in recent year have a tendency to be either personal stories, or set in Spain: Silent Light and El crimen del padre Amaro fall into the first category; Biutiful, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Aro Tolbukhin; Al otro lado is the only one of these movies to address immigration. I’m not saying Mexican filmmakers have to make movies about the state of Mexican society, or that Mexico is obligated to put such movies in Oscar contention, but I do think it would be good for Americans to see movies that give them a sense of what’s going on one country over.

If our war on terror is abstract, Mexico’s war on drugs is dreadfully concrete, and much closer to our borders than our fights in Iraq and Afghanistan: between 2006 and 2010, it killed 23,000 people. Our movies about why people might want to come here and why we should let them haven’t done particularly well recently. Chris Weitz may be pushing his immigration movie A Better Life hard for Academy Awards contention, but it only made $1.8 million at the box office. Spanglish‘s $42 million domestic gross in 2004 almost certainly had more to do with Adam Sandler’s presence in the movie than any interest in the heartwarming immigration story. If filmmakers want Americans to be sympathetic to immigrants to the United States, illegal and otherwise, maybe they need to tell more stories about what people are coming from, rather than what they’re coming to.

Health

Perry Proposed A Bi-National Health Insurance Plan With Mexico In 2001

By Marie Diamond on Sep 1, 2011 at 10:00 am

Gov. Perry with then-Mexican President Vincente Fox.

The ghosts of Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) more moderate past have come back to haunt him in recent days, particularly when it comes to health care.

In 2001 at a border summit in south Texas, Perry spoke optimistically about the prospects for a “bi-national health insurance” program that would cover both U.S. and Mexican residents along the border. He also praised the Texas legislature’s bill to increase funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Given that Perry now considers Medicaid to be unconstitutional, the speech reads like it comes from another world — or an entirely different person:

There are other challenges that require a unified approach, especially in the area of health care. [...] I urged legislators to pass a telemedicine pilot program that will enable, through technology, a sick border resident of limited financial means to receive care from a specialist hundreds of miles away.

But the effort to combat disease and illness requires greater cooperative efforts between our two nations. It is a simple truth that disease knows no boundaries. [...] We have much to gain if we work together to expand preventative care, and treat maladies unique to this region.

Legislation authored by border legislators Pat Haggerty and Eddie Lucio establishes an important study that will look at the feasibility of bi-national health insurance. This study recognizes that the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border compose one region, and we must address health care problems throughout that region. That’s why I am also excited that Texas Secretary of State Henry Cuellar is working on an initiative that could extend the benefits of telemedicine to individuals living on the Mexican side of the border.

In the speech, Perry also extols the need for more preventative medicine and brags about how the legislature “expanded access to Medicaid for more low-income children” and increased Medicaid funding by $4 billion. His past praise for a “unified,” transnational health care program is a stark contrast with the view he expresses in his recent book Fed Up, where he posits that the Constitution forbids a “federally operated program of pensions” and “a federally operated program of health care.”

The remarks paint a refreshing picture of an enlightened, compassionate Perry who is informed about the benefits of preventative health care and Medicaid and has sympathy for poor border residents and undocumented immigrants.

The Perry campaign is, predictably, trying to downplay the speech. Campaign spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger tried to distance Perry from the proposal, saying, “A bill was passed by the Legislature that authorized a study to look into this issue, which ultimately concluded there were numerous barriers to accomplishing that idea, and the Legislature took no further action on this concept.”

Perry has also faced scrutiny this week for a 1993 letter he wrote as Texas Agricultural Commissioner praising then-First Lady Hillary Clinton for her efforts to reform the health care system. That legislation was brought down by mass GOP opposition and “Hillarycare” is still derided by conservatives as the precursor to “Obamacare.”

Security

Issa Wants ‘Fast & Furious’ Gun Data Disclosure Today, But Wanted To Make It Illegal In 2006

By Ben Armbruster on Jul 8, 2011 at 2:20 pm

The ATF has come under heavy criticism for its now defunct surveillance program called “Operation Fast and Furious.” Under this program, the ATF instructed its agents to allow guns to be illegally trafficked into Mexico in order to “to reach beyond the low-level purchasers and build a complex case against traffickers and their weapons brokers.” However, criminals allegedly used “Fast and Furious” firearms against U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and authorities recovered two of the weapons at a site in southern Arizona where smugglers killed an American border patrol agent.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) have been leading the oversight charge in Congress and both lawmakers have asked authorities in Mexico and Arizona for the serial numbers of the guns recovered in violent crimes and submitted to ATF for tracing to determine if “Fast and Furious” weapons were involved. The ATF has this data too, however, appropriations riders known as the “Tiahrt Amendments” prohibit the ATF from disclosing the data to members of Congress. Just last night on Fox News, Issa complained about the lack of information:

ISSA: You have the point where it was sold and you have the point where you have a dead Border Patrol agent. And in between, you have no idea where that weapon was.

But Issa himself co-sponsored legislation in 2006 that would have made the Tiahrt amendments permanent. If passed, H.R. 5005, “a bill to make technical changes to Federal firearms laws” would have made it illegal for the ATF to disclose this information:

Information in the firearms trace system database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, shall not be disclosed to any entity, except to a Federal, State, local, or foreign law enforcement agency for a Federal, State, or local prosecutor solely in connection with and for use in a bona fide criminal investigation or prosecution and only to the extent that the information pertains to the geographic jurisdiction of the law enforcement agency or prosecutor requesting the disclosure.

So while the Darrell Issa of today requests gun data in an effort to tarnish President Obama’s Justice Department, the Darrell Issa of 2006 frowned upon any such type of information sharing, and wanted to make it permanently illegal and a punishable offense of up to 5 years in prison.

But this isn’t the only tinge of hypocrisy in Issa’s crusade to bring down Holder. The Washington Post reported last month that Issa “was briefed on ATF’s ‘Fast and Furious’ program last year and did not express any opposition.”

Justice

Issa-Led Hearing Inadvertently Highlights The Need For Tougher Gun Control

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jun 16, 2011 at 8:44 pm

Yesterday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman and NRA sweetheart Darrell Issa (R-CA) held a hearing aimed at pushing the ongoing GOP-led congressional investigation into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) deadly “gunrunner” scandal. Yet, when asked about what allowed the ill-fated project to be implemented, Issa’s own witness — ATF agent Peter Forcelli — ended up pointing to the structural deficiencies that the NRA-backed GOP has fought to keep in place.

In one instance, Forcelli argued in favor of tougher gun laws:

REP. CAROLYN MALONEY (D): District court judges view these [straw purchase] prosecutions as mere paper violations. Have you heard this criticism before?

FORCELLI: I have and I agree with it. I think that perhaps a mandatory minimum one year sentence might deter an individual from buying a gun. Some people view this as no more consequential than doing 65 in a 55.

In another, Forcelli admitted that his agency simply doesn’t have the resources it needs to be effective:

REP. GERALD CONNELLY (D-VA): Do you really have the resources you need to do your job?

FORCELLI: It’s amazing, sir, that you ask me that… [...] I have less than 100 agents assigned to the entire State of Arizona, that’s 114,006 square miles. So do we have the resources, no we don’t. We desperately need them.

Watch it:

Issa jumped in to remind Forcelli that his assessment fell “outside the scope” of the hearing and “would not be considered valid testimony.”

Issa’s hearings on the gunrunner operation come just a few months after the NRA requested “expedited” hearings on the issue, in hopes that the it would reportedly “help kill a request from federal regulators for more authority to track gun purchases in the southern border states.” This past May, at the NRA’s annual convention, the powerful gun lobby group called for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder over the ATF operation.

Ironically, the NRA lobby itself has been blamed for weakening the ATF and rendering it leaderless since 2006. “The gun lobby has consistently outmaneuvered and hemmed in ATF, using political muscle to intimidate lawmakers and erect barriers to tougher gun laws,” reported the Washington Post. “Over nearly four decades, the NRA has wielded remarkable influence over Congress, persuading lawmakers to curb ATF’s budget and mission and to call agency officials to account at oversight hearings.”

Rather than further debilitating the agency, Democrats have promoted the strengthening of “toothless” U.S. gun laws in conjunction with a probe into the ATF’s gunrunner activities.

Security

Mexico May Sue U.S. Gun Makers

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Apr 22, 2011 at 7:35 pm

At this point, it’s no secret that thousands of U.S. guns have illegally made their way across the U.S. – Mexico border and into the hands of deadly drug cartel operatives. State Department Secretary Hillary Clinton has indicated in the past that she feels “very strongly” that the U.S. and Mexico share co-responsibility in the drug war. Now, the Mexican government may be considering holding U.S. gun companies responsible in court. CBS reports:

CBS News has learned that the Mexican Government has retained an American law firm to explore filing civil charges against U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors over the flood of guns crossing the border into Mexico.

Sources say Mexico’s frustration with U.S. efforts to stop the flow of weapons has pushed them into this novel approach. The law firm is looking at charges that may include civil RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act]. The contract was signed on November 2, 2010 by a representative of Mexico’s Attorney General, at their Washington embassy.

Mexicans have good reason to be frustrated by the United States’ inability to stem the flow of guns down south. A report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that “90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.” From 2006 to 2009, a total of almost 19,000 guns in Mexico were traced to the United States. An overwhelming majority of these guns came from the stores in Texas, California, and Arizona. News broke earlier this year that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives purposefully permitted 1,800 weapons to “walk” into the hands of drug lords and gun runners in an attempt to trace them back to high-level drug cartel operatives. And while these traced firearms do not represent all of the guns recovered in Mexico, there’s only one gun store in all of Mexico where they could’ve come from. That store is run by the Mexican military. The Brookings Institution estimates that 2,000 U.S. guns are smuggled into Mexico each day.

Meanwhile, the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of at least 35,000 people — many of them innocent civilians — since 2006.

The Firearms Committee responded to the news that Mexico might sue U.S. gun manufacturers, saying, “it is wrong for anyone to blame America’s firearms industry for the problems Mexico is currently facing.” Richard Feldman, President of the Independent Firearms Association, suggested that “maybe we should be suing the Mexican government for their failure to prevent drugs from coming into our country.” Tea Party Nation also issued its own release which proclaims that “Mexico is our enemy” and that “Mexican President Felipe Calderon is about as useful as Joe Biden sleeping through a Barack Obama speech.”

While the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act makes it especially hard to win a lawsuit against the gun industry, Mexico may have have a case. Many of the guns that have made their way to Mexico were purchased by U.S. citizen “straw buyers” who were paid by gun runners to buy the firearms for them. Yet, there has been at least one case in which a gun dealers were directly involved in funneling weapons to Mexican drug cartels. If Mexico can prove that at least one individual engaged in a “pattern of racketeering activity,” they might have a case against the gun industry under the RICO statute.

With all that said, even if Mexico does have a case against gun manufacturers, it shouldn’t distract attention away from the responsibility that Mexico shares with the United States. U.S. drug consumption is funding the drug war, U.S. guns may be fueling it, but ultimately, Calderon’s militarization of the drug war has only resulted in more violence and deaths.

Economy

Big Bank Ignored Warnings That It Was Being Used To Launder Money By Mexican Drug Cartels

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Apr 20, 2011 at 5:31 pm

One year ago, Bloomberg News reported that Wachovia Corp. — one of the biggest banks in the U.S. — “had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers.” Wells Fargo & Co., which acquired Wachovia a couple of years ago, admitted in 2010 that it “failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers — including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.” The case was later settled for about $110 million and Wachovia paid another $50 million in fines for failing to properly monitor the transfer of $378.4 billion from currency exchange houses in Mexico. The charges were dismissed.

It turns out, Wachovia had been receiving warnings for years from a senior anti-money laundering officer in its own London office, Martin Woods. Yet, Woods’ words of caution weren’t only met with indifference. Wachovia reportedly retaliated against Woods and essentially drove him out of his job. The Observer recently reported:

Rather than launch an internal investigation into Woods’s alerts over Mexico, Woods claims Wachovia hung its own money-laundering expert out to dry. [...] On 16 June Woods was told by Wachovia’s head of compliance that his latest SAR [suspicious activity report] need not have been filed, that he had no legal requirement to investigate an overseas case and no right of access to documents held overseas from Britain, even if they were held by Wachovia. [...]

“Wachovia had my résumé, they knew who I was,” says Woods. “But they did not want to know – their attitude was, ‘Why are you doing this?’ They should have been on my side, because they were compliance people, not commercial people. But really they were commercial people all along. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the biggest money-laundering scandal of our time.

At some point, Woods received a letter from the bank’s compliance managing director which accused him of failing “to perform at an acceptable standard.” In 2008, Woods sued Wachovia for bullying and detrimental treatment of a whistleblower. Wachovia settled that case too and agreed to pay an undisclosed amount under the condition that Woods leave the bank.

To this day, not a single bank has been indicted for violating the anti-money-laundering Bank Secrecy Act. Meanwhile, foreign government agencies in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Colombia, along with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime have all reportedly documented money laundering by the banking industry. According to Al Día, financial institutions such as Bank of America, American Express, Western Union, the Mexican offices of Citigroup, the European HSBC and Banco Santander have all “helped move money for Mexican cartels.”

Meanwhile, the drug war has claimed the lives of at least 35,000 people since 2006 in Mexico alone. Senior U.S. commanders told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that Mexico and Central America make up one of the most dangerous regions in the world, rivaling the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as the U.S. continues to pour millions of dollars into fighting the drug war in Mexico, U.S. drug users contribute approximately $40 billion a year to Latin American cartels — money which apparently often ends up passing through U.S. banks.

Yglesias

A Dynamic Concentration Approach To Controlling Drug Violence In Mexico

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 16, 2011 at 6:26 pm

(my photo available under cc license)

Mark Kleiman on what Mexico can do to better control drug-related violence:

Mexico should, after a public and transparent process, designate one of its dealing organizations as the most violent of the group, and Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts should focus on destroying that organization. Once that group has been dismantled – not hard, in a competitive market – the process should be run again, with all the remaining organizations told that finishing first in the violence race will lead to destruction. If it worked, this process would force a “race to the bottom” in violence; in effect, each organization’s drug-dealing revenues would be held hostage to its self-restraint when it comes to gunfire.

I certainly agree that something along these lines is the right way to deal with the crime and violence associated with hard drugs. The idea that a city is going to eradicate the buying and selling of cocaine and heroin from its borders is preposterous. What you want to do is make the dominant business strategy for a vendor of hard drugs be something like “don’t kill anyone and don’t be a nuisance.” You find the peg that’s stick out highest on the disruptiveness chart, and you whack it down.

But this all relies on what Mexico can’t necessarily count on—a well-functioning public sector that can be relied on to engage in “a public and transparent process” in a reasonable way.

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