Amnesty Advocates: Use Ferguson to Portray Immigration Laws, Police as 'Criminal'

Amnesty Advocates: Use Ferguson to Portray Immigration Laws, Police as 'Criminal'

Pro-amnesty advocates are attempting to use Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, to portray the police and illegal immigration laws as “criminal.” 

Marisa Franco, the director of the “Not1More” campaign at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, called for “Black-Brown” unity in the wake of Brown’s death, even though a grand jury has not even heard the facts about the confrontation in which Brown may have allegedly beaten Officer Darren Wilson nearly unconscious before he was shot and killed.

“We must redirect the conversation from one of stereotypes about criminal behavior to how the deportation system, police and prisons are criminal,” she wrote on MSNBC.com

She urged “Latino and immigrant communities” to “go beyond hollowed statements of solidarity, and towards a genuine compañerismo.”

“Within Latino and immigrant communities, we have been fighting a monster,” she wrote about an “immigration enforcement system” that she says “has grown out of control” with deportations and “a dramatic expansion of the detention system from the border to our backyards.”

Comparing immigration enforcement to the war on drugs, Franco said that Latinos should sympathize with the “criminalization of the black community” that has occurred because “politicians have created an extensive set of laws in their crusade to be tough on crime and wage a war on drugs, often times enforced disproportionately on black people.” She urged activists to “recognize that black lives matter.”

“Let’s enter the ring on this one, not simply because the devaluation of life also happens within and outside of our communities, but because we are responding to the direct threat this presents to our black sisters and brothers,” she continued.

She said that Michael Brown’s death is “an opportunity to go beyond theory and rhetoric” by building and deepening the “unity between our communities through joint struggle.”

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.