Texas Civil Rights Review

Author: mopress

  • In Dallas Obama will Find Fresh Memories of Deported Student

    What the New York Times forgot to mention

    by Greg Moses

    OpEdNews / TheRagBlog / CounterPunch

    While the New York Times Monday morning proclaims that the Obama administration is not deporting college students whose parents brought them to America at a young age, the President is headed toward a fundraiser in Dallas Monday night where one such case is well known.

    Dallas real estate developer and immigrant rights advocate Ralph Isenberg bought tickets to the fundraiser with President Barack Obama so that he can plead for the speedy return of a young deportee from Texas. Isenberg has been working for several months to secure the return of 19-year-old Saad Nabeel who was deported to Bangladesh with his parents in early 2010.

    If the New York Times is correct about what the Obama administration is trying to do, then the deportation of Saad Nabeel was a big mistake. He had lived in the USA since age three, completing grades six through twelve in Texas. When he was deported at age 18, Nabeel was studying electrical engineering on full scholarship at the University of Texas at Arlington.

    “I plan to tell the President that if he is looking for a poster child for someone who has been unfairly treated and who we need to do right by, then Saad Nabeel is perfect,” said Isenberg Saturday in a telephone interview with the Texas Civil Rights Review.

    “There are multiple legal issues that we can pursue to try to get Saad back in the country,” said Isenberg. “But the quickest solution by far would be to pass a DREAM Act that includes an amendment for young persons who have been recently deported. Other legal issues would require lengthy legal actions–and the wait would do no good to Saad.”

    If adopted by Congress and signed by the President, the DREAM Act would offer citizenship options to youth who were brought to the USA by migrant parents. When Isenberg approaches the President in Nabeel’s behalf, he will also be representing the opinions of Saad’s young friends who are this week preparing their returns to college life.

    “I feel like everything that has happened in the past year was unnecessary,” explains Chris Anderson, one of Nabeel’s high school friends contacted by the Texas Civil Rights Review. “Saad was brought to America by his family when he was a young child. He lived like every other American by going to school, getting a job, and spending time with his friends and family. Everything that he knew and loved was in the United States, and one day he was just uprooted from college, thrown in jail for over a month, and shipped to a foreign third world country that he has no memory of.”

    Nabeel’s case has attracted media attention in Dallas and the German magazine Der Spiegel. Other international media have shown interest in the case. Isenberg agrees with Der Spiegel that Nabeel’s campaign to return to the USA has been helped by the young man’s fluency with computer skills.

    Keeping tabs on news via computer in Bangladesh, Nabeel saw Monday’s New York Times report as soon as it hit his inbox as the morning’s top story. When asked via email what he would like to say to the President during Monday’s visit to Texas, Nabeel replied within two minutes:

    “I love America and would die for my country in a heartbeat. It is the only home that I know.”

    “Saad’s case is really rather compelling,” said Isenberg over the weekend. “Given the discretion that is available to immigration authorities, this thing could have so easily gone the other way. My hope is that the most powerful man in the world will at least take a brief interest.”

  • Dallas Donor Plans to Discuss Deportee Case with Obama

    by Greg Moses

    OpEdNews

    Dallas real estate developer and immigrant rights advocate Ralph Isenberg bought tickets to a Monday night fundraiser with President Barack Obama so that he can plead the case of a young deportee from Texas.

    Isenberg has been working for several months to secure the return of 19-year-old Saad Nabeel who was deported to Bangladesh with his parents in late 2009. The younger Nabeel had lived in the USA since age three, completing grades six through twelve in Texas. When he was deported at age 18, Nabeel was studying electrical engineering on full scholarship at the University of Texas at Arlington.

    “I plan to tell the President that if he is looking for a poster child for someone who has been unfairly treated and who we need to do right by, then Saad Nabeel is perfect,” said Isenberg Saturday in a telephone interview with the Texas Civil Rights Review.

    “There are multiple legal issues that we can pursue to try to get Saad back in the country,” said Isenberg. “But the quickest solution by far would be to pass a DREAM Act that includes an amendment for young persons who have been recently deported. Other legal issues would require lengthy legal actions–and the wait would do no good to Saad.”

    If adopted by Congress and signed by the President, the DREAM Act would offer citizenship options to youth who were brought to the USA by migrant parents. When Isenberg approaches the President in Nabeel’s behalf, he will also be representing the opinions of Saad’s young friends who are this week preparing their returns to college life.

    “I feel like everything that has happened in the past year was unnecessary,” explains Chris Anderson, one of Nabeel’s high school friends contacted by the Texas Civil Rights Review. “Saad was brought to America by his family when he was a young child. He lived like every other American by going to school, getting a job, and spending time with his friends and family. Everything that he knew and loved was in the United States, and one day he was just uprooted from college, thrown in jail for over a month, and shipped to a foreign third world country that he has no memory of.”

    Nabeel’s case has attracted media attention in Dallas and in the German magazine Der Spiegel. Other international media have shown interest in the case. Isenberg agrees with Der Spiegel that Nabeel’s campaign to return to the USA has been helped by the young man’s fluency with computer skills.

    “Saad’s case is really rather compelling,” says Isenberg. “Given the discretion that is available to immigration authorities, this thing could have so easily gone the other way. My hope is that the most powerful man in the world will at least take a brief interest.”

  • Demanding Dignity, Not Detention at Hutto Detention Center Vigil

    Taylor, TX – On Saturday, August 7, 2010 at 7 p.m., friends and advocates of the women detained at the T. Don Hutto Center will hold a vigil at 1001 Welch in Taylor. The vigil is part of a statewide opposition to the growth of detention centers in Texas. The vigil, organized by Texans United for Families, Grassroots Leadership, and other community members, marks the one-year anniversary of ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton’s announced plans for a major overhaul of the agency’s immigration detention system. Nevertheless, little has changed to date.

    Last August, in response to sharp criticism from advocacy groups, community organizations, and government officials, Morton promised sweeping changes aimed at improving detention conditions for the nearly 400,000 immigrants held in the custody of ICE each year. According to Morton, the agency intended to take substantial steps to transform the sprawling network of approximately 350 jails and prisons into a non-penal “civil detention system.”

    As part of its reform effort, ICE discontinued the detention of families and children at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas. The Hutto facility received national attention in 2007 when it became the target of protests and lawsuits brought on behalf of 26 immigrant children detained with their parents at the facility as a result of the substandard conditions.

    Today, ICE uses the Hutto facility, which is privately owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), to detain women. Hutto came under scrutiny again this year when ICE announced its investigation of a pattern of sexual assaults by a CCA guard.

    “A year ago, we were heartened that the Obama administration ended family detention at Hutto and took on reforming the broader immigration detention system,” said Rocío Villalobos, a member of Texans United for Families. “Today, the majority of women at Hutto are seeking refuge from violence in their home countries. This spring’s sexual assault incidents show how detention subjects people to more violence which deepens their trauma, rather than protects them from it.”

    Sexual abuse has been an ongoing problem in detention facilities in Texas. In 2007, CCA fired a guard for initiating sexual contact with a mother detained with her family at Hutto. In 2008, the WOAI news station in San Antonio reported sexual abuse of women detained at the GEO Group’s South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall. Earlier this year, a former Port Isabel Detention Center officer was sentenced to prison for abusing detained women at the south Texas detention center. Reports of sexual abuse against females in detention have also plagued MTC’s (Management & Training Corporation) Willacy County Detention Center in Raymondville, TX.

    The sexual assault incidents also seriously call into question ICE’s heralding of Hutto as a model detention facility. “Building more detention centers won’t solve this problem,” said Lauren Martin of Grassroots Leadership. “ICE must transform its system towards one that prioritizes release over detention. That is the only way to ensure these tragedies do not continue.”

  • Texas Deportee Featured by Der Spiegel

    One year ago, Frisco, Texas high school graduate Saad Nabeel was getting ready to go off to college at the University of Texas at Arlington where he had been awarded a full scholarship. Although he had been born in Bangladesh, he had been living the USA since the age of three, and had attended Texas schools for grades six through twelve. When his father was deported by US immigration authorities in Nov. 2009, Saad’s life suddenly changed for the worst. Now he is using the computer skills that he learned in Texas to campaign for a return to the country that he has always called home.

    Saad, a thin, frustrated 19-year-old boy with a Beatle haircut, is sitting on the bed. He is waiting for the electricity to come on again after yet another power failure, so that he can start up his laptop and get back on the Internet. It’s his connection to the United States and his old life — a life that was significantly better than his current life in Bangladesh. — 08/05/2010 “The YouTube Weapon: One Man’s Virtual Fight against Deportation” By Uwe Buse, Der Spiegel

    Thanks to a tip from longtime friend Ralph Isenberg of Dallas, the Texas Civil Rights Review has been in contact with Saad for several months. Saad helped your editor complete his first Skype call from Texas to Bangladesh. And we are planning more coverage of his case in the future. Stay tuned. And don’t forget to check out the Facebook page for Saad’s friends.–gm

  • Reflections on the John Allen Rubio Capital Murder Trial in McAllen

    By Nick Braune

    [This essay was written earlier this week for my weekly column in the Mid-Valley Town Crier. Later this week, however, the Rubio trial concluded and the jury deliberation was quick. At the end of the essay, I will discuss the trial’s results and make some short comments on this closely watched case in the Rio Grande Valley. N.B.]

    The retrial is in progress. Back in 2003 I urged my logic class to follow the case of John Allen Rubio, and the students were into it. A capital case, very interesting, lots of blood — Rubio and his common-law wife had killed their three children and the population was riled. But my students began peering behind the headlines. Although the insanity plea is a rare bird nowadays, the defense was using it, and it appeared to me and the students, after looking at definitions of insanity and some philosophy behind it, that Rubio indeed fit the definition.

    Rubio’s wife, participating in the gruesome beheadings, was clearly insane too. (When I hear about a mom who does something like killing and mutilating her children, my first reaction following disgust is that there is something greatly unnatural there, undoubtedly serious mental problems. And as the trial proceeded, the class saw it that way.)

    Psychiatrists at the first trial testified that Rubio had been clearly delusional, was schizophrenic, hearing voices; testimony showed that “for three days before the murders he scrubbed the apartment with bleach in order to keep evil away.” (The Monitor) His mental disorder was compounded during that period by frequent drug use.

    The trouble started with Rubio’s mom. She hated children — that is my non-clinically trained, layman’s diagnosis. She introduced him to drugs and used him as a prostitute when he was 8 years old, according to testimony. (Subpoenaed for the current trial, she may provide interesting testimony. She also has a criminal record, drugs.) Abused through his childhood, teetering on the edge of sanity, huffing (putting chemicals or gasoline in a plastic bag and deep-breathing the fumes into the lungs until dizziness starts), what did Rubio do at 21? He shacked up with a woman just like mom, who had drug problems and destructive urges toward children.

    But the jury in 2003 saw otherwise, finding Rubio sane and convicting him of murder, to the surprise of my class. He was sentenced to death.

    Although America warehouses the mentally ill in prisons by the thousands and even executes some, basic civil norms urge that we help, not punish, severely sick people. Our legal system, rooted in the old common law traditions which evolved, with some lapses, in a progressive direction, has asked the jurors not simply to focus on who did the criminal act. Jurors have traditionally been charged with assessing the “mental element” involved in the act.

    Example: Sir Edward Coke in 1593 reserved the term “murder” for those with “sound memory and discretion” (sanity) and who act with “malice aforethought” (premeditated evil), so juries were not just charged with deciding if the defendant “did it,” but whether there was a rationally deliberate, premeditating evil mind involved. The evolving humane law of England, when it looked at murderers to be punished, envisioned evil villains who calculate advantages and lay in wait to kill.

    I picture some rich merchant in Chaucer’s time who had the opportunity to corner the market on fabulous jewels and plotted for weeks to murder his competitors, while throwing suspicion on someone else. To me, that merchant was the person that the common law would accuse of the highest crime before a jury of peers, not some raging peasant struck by the plague screaming incoherently and slashing at others with a knife. Rationally deliberated premeditated evil is what makes the crime so heinous. If the rich merchant killed the victims with slick poison instead of bloodying up the kitchen like delusional Rubio and his troubled wife did, a jury today might find the merchant’s actions less disgusting, but the spirit of the law and ethical considerations, I believe, should dictate otherwise. The merchant’s crime was worse.

    On TV the criminals carefully scrub the apartment after the murder, but Rubio scrubbed it before the murder, trying to bleach away evil. But even this month, when Rubio is having his second trial, it is not because the appeals process reconsidered his sanity. (The retrial was granted because the eager prosecution was found to have improperly shown the jury a video of Rubio’s wife discussing the crime.)

    If I were the prosecutor I would not have retried it; actually, I wouldn’t have tried it the first time. I would have saved fuss and money and gotten Rubio into a mental hospital where he could eat properly, remember to take his medications, talk through his life’s problems (his mom and wife) and stop huffing.

    But no, our prosecutor brings in a New York consulting psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Welner last week, paying him over $110,000 to counter the defense psychologists. Welner interviewed Rubio six years after the murder and dutifully concluded that Rubio was cleverly faking his symptoms back then. (With his website advertising his services as very convincing, Welner received some $245,000 during the Andrea Yates retrial in Houston several years ago, testifying she was sane when she drowned her children. Thankfully, the jury didn’t believe him in the Andrea Yates case.)

    *** *** ***

    [The Trial Results: This week the jury deliberated for four hours and found Rubio guilty of capital murder. On Thursday, July 29th, Judge Noe Gonzalez sentenced him to lethal injection. The Monitor quoted the Judge:

    “I have sentenced more people to death than any other judge in South Texas. I have never seen a case like this…A lot was said back and forth about forgiveness. A lot was said about apologies. None of that matters…If you want forgiveness, you will have to get it from a higher source.

    “The jury has found you guilty of the capital murder of Julissa Quesada, Mary Jane Rubio, and little John Rubio. Critics of capital punishment say the wait is worse than the execution, that is if you have any feelings. We’ll see about that in this case…I can’t imagine anyone hurting their children, much less at that age…Bailiff, shackle Mr. Rubio and escort him out.”

    Three quick notes: 1. The Monitor says that prior to Rubio, 15 offenders have been sentenced to death in Hidalgo County. Rubio and his common-law wife had killed their children in Brownsville, but the trial had been moved to McAllen because of all the publicity there. This week I spoke to Silvia Garza of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty in McAllen. Her son was one of the 15. Although I knew she was trying to get a vigil set up at the court house before Rubio’s sentencing, I was unable to attend.

    2. Rubio’s lawyer says that photographs of the murdered children proved to be the most disturbing part of the trial. “Jurors, research volunteers and assistants became physically ill when having to view them.” How conducive are photos like these for the deliberative process?

    3. Rubio’s lawyer earlier in the trial said that Dr. Michael Welner advertises his victories like “trophies” on the internet. There are a lot of puff pieces about him there and about the classy New York consultation company he founded: The Forensic Panel. One article about his successful work said, “Dr. Welner was the principal prosecution mental health witness in all three of the first and only successful federal death penalty verdicts in the Northeast United States in decades: Gary Sampson (MA), Donald Fell (VT), and Ronell Wilson (NY).”)]