Fuerza!: The Fight Against SB 1070 and the Prison Industry
in Arizona

Matthew Johnson
Border Wars
August 15, 2012
https://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/14/fuerza-fights-against-sb-1070-and-prison-industry-arizona

On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling on
the constitutionality of Arizona's infamous SB 1070,
leaving intact Section 2(b), which significantly expands
police authority to check Arizonan's papers. National
civil rights groups have now asked a lower court to block
Section 2(b) on Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection
grounds, but the provision may yet take effect in the near
future if a federal court injunction issued in 2010 is
reversed.

This current legal limbo leaves Arizonans awaiting word on
whether police departments across the state will soon be
required to investigate individuals' legal status whenever
they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe a person who
has been stopped, detained or arrested is undocumented.

Since the passage of SB 1070 in April 2010, dramatic
images of mass demonstrations and non-violent blockades
have shown the outrage prompted by the deliberate
targeting of Arizona's immigrant communities. While such
direct actions continue, the emerging face of resistance
in Arizona is community education and training, systematic
documentation of racially-biased police practices, and
daily non-compliance as Arizona residents refuse to submit
to the logic of fear and racial division which defines SB
1070.

One component of the grassroots response involves a
campaign led by directly-affected community members in
Tucson that is targeting the prison industry for its
profiteering on anti-immigrant legislation like SB 1070.
Corazon de Tucson, a group of undocumented and
mixed-status families organized to defend civil and human
rights, has assembled a broad community coalition under
the banner of Fuerza! to fight back against the prison
industry and hold local leaders accountable for their role
in legislative attacks on immigrants.

Nationally, much of the current conversation surrounding
SB 1070 focuses on the law's codification of police
practices, which hinge crucially upon racial profiling.
While requiring police to investigate the immigration
status of individuals when a "reasonable suspicion" exists
that they are undocumented, the law provides no criteria
for making such a determination.

As part of a raging white supremacist discourse in Arizona
that equates "criminal" with both people of color and
(im)migrants, SB 1070 effectively expands and promotes
longstanding law enforcement reliance upon race as a prime
determining factor of criminality. Even Arizona governor
Jan Brewer, one of SB 1070's chief proponents, has been
unable to describe a non-discriminatory manner of
implementing the law, offering only a halting response to
one reporter who asked if she could describe what an
"illegal immigrant looks like."

SB 1070 is part of a suite of legislative proposals
introduced over the past several years in Arizona
specifically targeting immigrant and Latin@ communities
with criminalizing measures and expanded enforcement
operations. Among these is HB 2281, a law signed just
weeks after SB 1070, which banned ethnic studies programs
in the state and paved the way for the dismantling of
Mexican-American Studies in Tucson schools. The
unabashedly racialized rhetoric used by the proponents of
such legislation has laid bare political leaders'
willingness to capitalize on white fears of immigrants and
people of color to advance a legislative agenda that
scapegoats and targets those communities.

While racist police practices, and the associated
racialized discourse of criminality, have received
national attention in the wake of SB 1070, they are
nothing new to Arizona. In the state's capital Phoenix,
police with broad federal authority to arrest immigrants
have targeted Latin@ communities for years. Leading the
way has been openly anti-immigrant bigot sheriff Joe
Arpaio who has made it his duty to round up immigrants
through aggressive "crime suppression sweeps" in Latin@
neighborhoods. He now faces two lawsuits over the racist
practices of his agency.

Meanwhile, within the wide swath of militarized territory
extending north from the international boundary, Border
Patrol agents operate within a vacuum of oversight and
accountability, carrying out a deadly enforcement policy
and abusing those in custody. A 2011 report published by
the humanitarian organization No More Deaths describes a
culture of brutality and impunity so deeply entrenched as
to constitute the very fabric of Border Patrol enforcement
practice.

In border communities, the Border Patrol works closely
with local law enforcement and represents a constant
threat to immigrant residents. In Tucson, where the agency
is a regular presence in Latin@ neighborhoods, for
instance, discretionary authority allows police officers
to routinely prolong ordinary detentions while the Border
Patrol is summoned to assume custody.

This combination of enforcement practices means that
people are torn from their families, locked away in
immigration detention, and plunged into deportation
proceedings every day in southern Arizona, even without
full implementation of SB 1070.

What is unique about SB 1070 is perhaps not its inevitably
racist application nor its expansion of police powers, but
rather the fact that the law represents a new tack in
corporate governance of immigration policy in the United
States.

Historically, federal immigration policy has been molded
in part in response to the pressures of certain powerful
industries in the United States. While examples abound,
one need look no further than the Bracero Program
(1942-64), which was heavily promoted by the agricultural
and railroad industries. The program allowed millions of
Mexican nationals to enter the United States and engage
temporarily in low-wage labor, largely in agriculture.

In the decades since, agribusiness, highly dependent upon
low-wage non-citizen laborers to turn a profit, has
lobbied against restrictionist policies that would cut off
a vital supply of workers. However, in no sense has the
industry become a voice for humane priorities such as
family unification, full regularization of status, and
freedom of movement. After all, agribusiness benefits from
international migration precisely because U.S. policies
ensure the subordinate status of those who enter the
country as immigrants.

While agribusiness benefits from a relatively "open"
immigration regime, the private prison industry, in
contrast, stands to profit from greater restriction. Thus,
the prison industry has been both a chief beneficiary and
leading proponent of the push in recent years toward
expanded enforcement and increased incarceration. In this
regard, SB 1070 and laws like it in Utah, Indiana, South
Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama represent a new and
carefully refined method of more efficiently
instrumentalizing immigrants in pursuit of profit by
further criminalizing immigrant communities and widening
the dragnet that funnels immigrants into detention centers
and penal institutions.

Today, some 8% of state and federal inmates and nearly 50%
of immigration detaineees are held in private facilities,
a fact that has made private corrections a $5
billion-a-year industry, while powerfully incentivizing
anti-immigrant laws and harsh enforcement practices.

The private prison industry appears to have made a cold
political calculation that landing more immigrants in
detention will bolster its bottom line, undertaking a
quiet but crucial role in pushing for state legislation
that targets immigrant communities. No longer must
immigrants be employed as low-wage laborers to benefit the
economic elite; now they must simply fill a bed in a
private prison or detention center.

In states such as Utah, Georgia, and Arizona, which have
all passed comprehensive anti-immigrant laws, industry
fingerprints have been found all over the legislation in
the form of powerful lobbyists, campaign contributions,
and close relationships with key officials. Unconcerned
with the human consequences of the policies from which it
profits, the prison industry has made millions as widening
criminalization, mandatory detention, and mass deportation
separate hundreds of thousands of families each year,
destabilize c

After witnessing the effects of prison industry
profiteering in our own communities, Tucson's Fuerza!
coalition has responded with a campaign to build public
opposition. Coalition members have been conducting
cafecitos, house meetings and other forms of popular
education to promote public understanding of the prison
industry and build local capacity for resistance to
industry-backed anti-immigrant practices. In order to spur
greater national momentum against the prison industry,
Fuerza! is urging lifelong Tucsonan and former U.S.
Senator Dennis DeConcini to resign from the Board of
Directors of the nation's largest prison firm, the
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
Credit: Chris Summit.

Affiliated with a national movement against the private
prison industry, the Fuerza! campaign is backed locally by
a broad coalition that includes undocumented and
mixed-status families, students, community organizers,
advocacy groups, humanitarian aid organizations, and faith
communities, all united in their opposition to racism and
anti-immigrant legislation. While complementing other
forms of ongoing work against SB 1070, the Fuerza!
campaign has succeeded in building strong alliances
between directly-affected and allied communities in the
fight against the prison industry while advancing the
vision of a society in which private prisons and
immigration detention are a thing of the past.

==================
Matthew Johnson is an organizer with the Fuerza! Coalition
Against the Prison Industry and a volunteer with the
humanitarian organization No More Deaths in Tucson,
Arizona. For more information about Fuerza! and the
campaign against the Corrections Corporation of America,
please visit fuerzatucson.wordpress.com

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