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Black Alliance Tours Border

African American leaders from 10 cities and six states journeyed to the Arizona-Sonora border recently to personally assess the situation.

Gerald Lenoir, a member of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, says his group joined the National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights and Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos for a tour to investigate alleged human rights violations against documented and undocumented immigrants, as well as violations against U.S. citizens.

“We met with human rights activists and religious leaders, and with migrants themselves in Altar, Sonora,” Lenoir says. “From those meetings what we heard was there was persistent and consistent racial profiling and human rights abuses.”

On the U.S. side of the border, Lenoir and his group were told of American Latinos being followed at night by Border Patrol agents, lights being shined in the windows of their homes and attempts to search their homes. Native Americans they talked with also shared their experiences with the Border Patrol.

“The Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaquis, traveling to and from religious ceremonies in Mexico, have reported Border Patrol harassment, following and stopping them,” Lenoir says. “One reported a Border Patrol agent putting a gun to her head.”

Lenoir said his group also met with the local county medical examiner, who detailed the marked increase in migrant deaths since the tightening up of the border. “There is a direct correlation,” Lenoir says.

The alliance seeks to bring an international spotlight on the racial profiling and deaths along the country’s southern border.

“We are writing a report and bringing it the United Nation’s special rapporteur on migrant rights,” Lenoir says. “It’s a war zone. People are dying as a result.

“We’re hoping that the UN as a whole will take up this issue, certainly within the human rights arena. We are also taking this to our own communities, to the Bay Area, Los Angeles and other cities.”

At the same time the Black Alliance was in our border region, another well-known African American announced he would try to change the state’s existing affirmative action laws.

Ward Connerly, who directs the American Civil Rights Institute, an ultra-right wing group based in Sacramento, Calif. , announced initiatives to end racial preferences in multiple states, including Arizona .

Connerly is patterning the Super Tuesday initiatives after his successful Proposition 209, which prevented California state and local governments from granting preferences on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity in contracts, employment or education. (Connerly successfully spearheaded this same initiative in Washington state and Michigan.)

Passage of the initiative also would affect scholarships awarded based on ethnicity and race.

A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle quoted a Michigan spokesman who marshaled votes against Connerly.

“Connerly has been effective because he convinces people that his initiative will remove discrimination,” David Waymire was quoted as saying.

Connerly is also known for his sound bites.

On a YouTube video clip Connerly voices his admiration for the KKK, seing things from his ultraconservative perspective.

"If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right, God bless them. Thank them for finally reaching the point where logic and reason are being applied, instead of hate."