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mikemortgage · 6 years

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ICE quest for detention sites puts Trump county on tightrope

GOSHEN, Ind. — The sermon had been preached, the last prayers offered. Now, Mike Yoder decided, the time had come to share unsettling news.

As congregants at Silverwood Mennonite Church chatted around a Sunday potluck spread, Yoder, a county commissioner for 13 years and a dairy farmer for much longer, huddled with Pastor Jeremy Shue at the edge of the hall. There was a very good chance, Yoder confided, that the nation’s newest immigration detention centre would soon rise from a soybean field north of town.

“One of the only positives is that it would be less of a drive to protest,” Shue said.

Yoder needed no reminder of the potential for conflict. The Republican had paid close attention when nearly two-thirds of Elkhart County’s voters backed Donald Trump for president after a campaign in which he lambasted immigrants. He knew just as well that the politically mixed county seat and the largest local employers had made a place for thousands of immigrants from Mexico — a significant, but uncertain, number of them in the U.S. illegally.

It was a balancing act in this part of northern Indiana, founded on sometimes conflicting views about business and faith, community and law. And the proposal for a 1,200-bed detention centre put decision-makers on the tightrope.

“It was like a microcosm of all the different issues of immigration,” Yoder said, “right here in this county.”

——

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has long sought to consolidate immigrants held in scattered Midwest jails. Since 2011, contractors have proposed detention centres in seven communities near Chicago, from the exurb of Crete, Illinois, to the steel centre of Gary, Indiana.

“This is a game of whack-a-mole,” said Fred Tsao of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who has worked with activists to push a number of those proposals to defeat.

Local governments in Texas and California recently cancelled agreements to hold detainees for ICE even as other communities seek the jobs and dollars that doing so can generate.

But demand for those facilities is rising. Though Trump talks up building a border wall, his administration has focused a large part of its policy on arrests away from the border and is seeking new detention sites.

ICE does not own most of these facilities. Instead, it hires companies whose for-profit lockups hold two-thirds of the immigrants detained for being in the country illegally, with others in local jails under contract. The agency spends about $134 a day to hold each detainee, government figures show .

Last fall, ICE put out a request for new detention sites near Chicago, Detroit, Salt Lake City and St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as in South Texas, as it sought to expand capacity from 40,000 migrants to 51,000.

A proposal by CoreCivic Inc., one of the nation’s largest private prison companies, put Elkhart County on that list.

The county, two hours east of Chicago, is the hub of the booming recreational vehicle industry with around 2 per cent unemployment. A large Amish population has long provided many factory workers, but with 9,000 openings, “we have a lot of jobs that nobody wants,” said Yoder, whose father once led RV manufacturer Jayco Inc.

Immigrants have filled much of the gap in the workforce, yet residents remain divided on issues including immigration. More than 7,000 packed an Elkhart school gym in May to cheer Trump. But the county seat of Goshen — dotted with multilingual yard signs proclaiming “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbour”– is a counterweight, home to a Mennonite college and large Latino population.

The proposal for a detention centre would jab at those complexities. Yoder jumped in first, trying for a dialogue instead of a dispute.

“Commissioners had a mess to deal with, and that’s the reason I reached out early,” Yoder said. “It didn’t go as planned. Maybe that was because I was naive.”

——

Richard Aguirre had spent months helping start an ID card program for Goshen’s immigrants, many barred from obtaining driver’s licenses because they were in the U.S. illegally. To Aguirre, a Goshen College administrator, it was a victory, however local.

On campus, he knew dozens of students brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The grandson of Mexican immigrants, Aguirre had childhood memories of relatives struggling to get by without work papers.

“It struck me as unfair that depending on which side of the border you were born on, you had a good life or a fairly miserable life,” he said.

When Yoder heard about the detention centre, he knew it might antagonize people like Aguirre. But the project would be difficult to turn down, Yoder said. It would reap jobs and taxes from a site across from the county landfill and jail. Many Republican voters would likely back it.

So he asked his pastor to arrange a meeting with Mennonite clergy, many of whom preach a message of welcoming the stranger. If a detention centre was going to get built, Yoder said, maybe it would be best where clergy could minister to detainees.

He also was mindful of the county’s growing Latino population and Goshen’s more liberal voters. Elkhart County is about 16 per cent Hispanic, drawn to a region that produces 4 of every 5 RVs in North America. In Goshen, though, nearly a third of residents are Latino, accounting for more than half of school enrolment. Downtown, taquerias mix with wine bars and antique shops.

So the same day he spoke to pastors, Yoder met with Goshen Mayor Jeremy Stutsman, Aguirre and others.

“I’d really like your help communicating calmness,” the commissioner said.

“My reaction was, ‘No way!”‘ Aguirre said.

That night, he started a Facebook page for the Coalition Against the Elkhart County Immigration Detention Center. Activists had already planned a rally to celebrate the ID cards. Aguirre recast it as a protest.

Driving toward the courthouse on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Aguirre figured icy rain would cap turnout at 60. Then he climbed to the top of the granite steps, handing a microphone to Felipe Merino, an immigration attorney and the president of Goshen’s school board.

“I want you to raise your hands if you believe that we do not want an immigration detention facility in Elkhart County, Indiana!” Merino said.

More than 200 thrust fists from under umbrellas.

“No!” they shouted.

——

Listening to Yoder explain the detention centre, Neil Amstutz, pastor of Waterford Mennonite Church, knew it was a proposal he could not abide.

Years before, he had served as a missionary in Bolivia and worked in San Antonio, Texas, to settle refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala, becoming fluent in Spanish. After talking with fellow Mennonite clergy, he called a Mexican immigrant pastor, Jose Luis Gutierrez, whose Pentecostal church sits alongside an apple orchard two miles from Amstutz’s own.

Gutierrez’s church, Comunidad Cristiana Adulam, is named for the biblical cave where King David took refuge.

“Some people from my community find that kind of protection — they feel like refugees — in the church,” Gutierrez said. “It’s a safe place for worship because of the language, and it doesn’t matter if they have documents or not.”

With another pastor, Gutierrez and Amstutz invited clergy from around the county to meet, and the group made plans for a communitywide service to oppose the detention centre.

On Dec. 17, in a sanctuary decorated with candles for the holiday, an impromptu congregation filled most of the pews of Elkhart’s First Presbyterian Church.

“Why are we here?” Amstutz preached. “To show that whether or not our government builds a bigger wall to keep immigrants out, God’s church is about breaking down dividing walls!”

But many immigrants were increasingly apprehensive.

When 19-year-old Lizeth Ochoa first heard about the detention centre, she imagined a lockup filled with criminals.

“But then I realized, oh, it’s for people like me,” said Ochoa.

When Ochoa was 9 months old, her mother paid a smuggler to spirit them from Mexico. They joined her father, who had already found work in Elkhart.

Now, though, her place in the U.S. felt increasingly tenuous. President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative had eased concerns about deportation, but Trump was pulling the plug on the program. At home, she and her parents avoided talk of the detention centre, fearful of upsetting her four U.S.-born siblings. But quietly, she considered what they would do if ICE officers newly assigned to Elkhart knocked on their door.

“It’s been very stressful, (thinking) that my siblings might end up in foster homes because my parents and I would get deported,” said Ochoa, who will be a junior next fall at Goshen College. Nearly a quarter of its 900 students are now Latino, many brought to the U.S. illegally when they were children, and so Ochoa was not alone in worrying.

Trump’s election had already unsettled some in Gutierrez’s congregation. Talk of a detention centre renewed their uneasiness.

“If ICE can do that in this county, people are going to go away,” said Luis Fraire, a mechanic who came to Elkhart from Mexico 11 years ago, married and started a family and a business.

“We are all brothers in God,” he said, as fellow worshippers filtered out of Adulam one Sunday. “We pray to God because nobody else can stop this but him.”

——

To others, a detention centre was just what the county needed.

“Make sure you build it big ’cause it’s going to be overflowing,” George Holiday, a retired forklift driver, posted online.

In an interview, Holiday said the county had changed tremendously in recent years, with more signs in Spanish and new arrivals who don’t seem to speak English. Immigrants work hard but disregard laws requiring permission to enter or stay, he said.

A decade ago, Bob Schrameyer and fellow Goshen residents lobbied police to partner with ICE, and pushed employers to vet workers’ legal status. The problem, Schrameyer contends, is that many immigrants don’t pay their fair share of taxes, while collecting welfare benefits.

When he sought tighter controls, those who disagreed argued that enforcement was the federal government’s job. But when the Trump administration tried to do it, people complained about that, too, said Schrameyer, a retiree and founder of the local Citizens for Immigration Law Enforcement.

The detention centre “was a no-brainer,” bound to bring in new taxes, Schrameyer said.

“But the loud opponents of it were the supporters of illegal immigrants in the area and, of course, they were worried the storm troopers were coming to town,” Schrameyer said.

On a recent morning, Roland Weaver put aside the trowel he was using to seal the foundation of his home, down County Road 7 from the proposed detention site. Such a facility would uphold the rule of law, he said, but there was more to it.

“We have a Constitution founded on the principles of God, and a lot of them, the illegals, they don’t have that where they’re from and so they can bring in their beliefs. That’s what waters down what this country was founded on,” said Weaver, a tiler at an RV plant.

“A lot of people say Jesus, he loved illegals and he didn’t have borders when he was on this earth. But, hey, it’s a different world.”

——

At a holiday gathering in late December, Mayor Stutsman ran into retired cardiologist Mark Smucker. Talking over the proposal, the men were joined by Galen Miller, owner of a poultry company and a friend of Smucker’s since childhood.

“The argument I made was if we ever solve our problems with immigration in this country, either by reform or by deporting everybody, at some point we aren’t going to need an immigration detention centre,” Smucker said. “It seemed to me that the people in the RV manufacturing community would not like to see even more of their workers drift away.”

Stutsman, a Democrat, proposed a letter of opposition. Miller agreed to reach out to executives at Elkhart’s RV companies.

Back when CoreCivic had first called, Yoder said he cautioned a company official that the biggest potential pitfall would be wariness from major employers. But any concerns had largely been kept silent.

“There is this dilemma,” said Jim Siegmann, former owner of a printing company who is active in business and civic circles. Many of Elkhart’s business leaders, he said, are politically conservative but count on immigrant workers, though some are in the U.S. illegally.

“They know they couldn’t run their businesses without them,” he said.

When a small group met in Stutsman’s office, several executives endorsed his letter.

Worries, though, were stretching beyond profits. Civic leaders, wary of recessions and the region’s reputation as flyover country, had long invested in projects to make the county a draw for companies and workers. How did a detention centre fit that script?

On a recent morning, Pete McCown, president of the Community Foundation of Elkhart County, pointed from his office window to construction turning an industrial island at the junction of Elkhart’s rivers into a new hub with hundreds of apartments. Construction workers clambered over a shell that will house a $68 million community centre with a natatorium for competitive swimming.

Elkhart wants jobs, McCown said. But a detention centre would add positions that could be difficult to fill, while potentially labeling the county as a place to lock people up.

“We don’t want that to become our identification,” he said.

——

Stopping by the Electric Brew coffee shop in early January, Yoder ran into Aguirre.

CoreCivic officials were coming to meet business leaders, the commissioner said. Activists, whose online group had swelled to more than 2,000, organized a news conference, so representatives from the Nashville-based company would arrive to find their proposal in headlines.

The next morning, Jan. 17, Aguirre and others held protest signs outside Ivy Tech Community College as visitors in suits filed in.

Inside, CoreCivic representatives laid out their plans to executives from Thor Industries Inc. and Forest River Inc., the country’s largest RV makers; parts supplier Lippert Components; and other major employers.

They and other executives declined to comment or did not respond to calls or emails. But people who attended the meeting or spoke with those who did said that after listening to CoreCivic’s presentation, local executives were very direct.

“I do business here. I’ve been here my whole life, and I don’t want you to come here,” Forest River CEO Peter Liegl is said to have told the visitors.

Employers’ biggest issue was that a detention centre “would create concern and fear within the Latino community and would lead them to relocate,” said CoreCivic spokesman Steve Owen, who attended the meeting.

“That, to me, was the defining moment,” said Yoder.

The next day, Stutsman released his letter.

“Any tax dollars generated by the project wouldn’t be enough to offset the long-lasting damage such a facility would do to our county,” he wrote, backed by 45 CEOs and civic leaders. “Join us in showing all newcomers to our communities how welcoming we are.”

Yoder counselled CoreCivic officials to think over their next move. It came the following Monday.

“After careful consideration,” a company official wrote, “CoreCivic has decided to withdraw its application.”

“We won!” Aguirre posted on Facebook. “We won!”

——

On the first Friday night of each month, Goshen residents gather around the Elkhart County Courthouse for a street festival.

In early June, an Amish couple sold kettle corn. Children scribbled their names on the sidewalk with chalk. A local band, Los Ortega, pumped Mexican dance tunes across the grass.

“I love living here,” said Pepe Urzua, a roofer who arrived from Mexico eight years ago, cradling his infant daughter. “It’s a place where you want to raise your kids.”

Across the grass, Rob Emahiser, a salesman for a tire manufacturer, looked out over the crowd.

“I’m a Trump-loving Republican, and I love everything about this community,” he said.

Emahiser raised his beer to the tax cut Trump signed into law. Then he praised Latino co-workers and neighbours for working hard and taking care of their families — and pointed out that sometimes he and the president would have to disagree.

“They wanted to build a detention centre in this town,” he said as a guitarist led a line of dancing Latino couples through lengthening shadows. “That’s just not who we are.”

——

Geller can be reached at ageller//twitter.com/AdGeller

Read more of AP’s coverage of the reverberations of the Trump administration’s policies on immigration here .

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2LKFu6w via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

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inkroot-beast · 7 years

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Coyote Willow

Born and raised in Einbroch, Coyote only knew the dusky sky. The grey world illuminated by gas lamps, gunfire, and the blood red hue of sunset. This was the world he grew up in. As a child, Coyote stayed indoors. The smog outside was dangerous to children, anyone with a family was kept indoors until they were old enough to build up immunity and earn a specialized gas mask. For him, staying indoors was a terrible prison. The friends he mad through the reinforced window of his room were orphans. They were forced to survive the rat race outside, not knowing if they’d wake up the next day or not. His parents were seldom home, His mother was a gunslinger and his father a factory worker. Unfortunately, because the doors had locks that he didn’t have the keys for, he had no way of letting his friends in.

On his tenth birthday, Coyote was finally old enough to go to outside. Naturally the first thing he did was join the gang his outside friends were part of. They got into trouble here and there, although most of it was harmless pranks and hanging out in the airship plaza. Once he was let outside, Coyote was rarely home. It wasn’t particularly different from before. His parents never asked where he was, they rarely even saw each other. When he was thirteen his father was transferred to the Kiel Hyre Factory. He heard about it from a messenger sent from the factory he was previously working at. No one said anything else about the matter. By that point Coyote’s mother wasn’t even home, he didn’t know if she was alive or if she just died on a mission or in some ditch somewhere. It didn’t bother him anymore. He had a family with the Sigma Hawks gang. After hearing about the transferring of Coyote’s father, the SH leader decided for them to go explore the Kiel dungeon. It used to be heavily guarded, only authorized personnel were allowed in or out, and they never saw anyone leaving.

For some reason, that day there was no security. At the time no one thought it was strange, they just thought it was an opportunity to get into the factory. And they did. On the first floor there was blood everywhere. The air smelled like iron and rot, machinery, and the faint smell of electricity. It was empty, and the Sigma Hawks thought nothing of it. Naturally, Coyote just followed along as well. They explored the deserted floor, instead of questioning what happened they only wanted to delve deeper into the factory. Coyote ended up being left by himself. He didn’t know where the others went, only that (hopefully) they were still on the same floor. He didn’t know how much time passed, or where he was on the floor anymore. Everything was silent and the lights were starting to dim. The sun was setting. The air was growing colder and the hallway becoming ever so slightly darker as time passed.

Something scared him. Skin crawling, sweat beginning to drip down his neck. Coyote didn’t know what it was, but he knew he wanted to get out. He had to get out. The sound of scraping broke the silence, it took him a few seconds but he was also able to realize that it wasn’t scraping. This sound was one he was ultimately all too familiar with. This was the sound of gears running. Fitting together in a running machine. Given that they were in the Einbroch area that was a sound that you always heard. It was then that it dawned on him. It was silent in this place. Separated from the outside world, until now there had been no sound except their own heartbeats.

The gears were getting louder and louder, fear filled Coyote’s eyes as he ran. Down this corridor, into that corridor, through this hallway; the sound followed him like a hunting dog. Hitting a dead end, dread crept up on him as a shadow obscured what little light was left in the hallways and he turned around. A dark figure, floating, knifes, glowing eyes. He didn’t know what she was, only that she was more than likely going to kill him. A disgusting laughter came from the floating girl as she swung at him, sleeve full of knives smashing into the wall and luckily unable to catch his small frame. Ducking under her he ran, praying that she wouldn’t catch him again.

Coursing the halls, he could feel her tailing after him, and it was remarkably unpleasant. The door the SH gang entered through was in site along with another corridor, probably where the group originally started branching off. Time slowed for him as Coyote ran and felt something catch his leg. A crack on the floor. The floating girl was able to close in on him in those few seconds. She missed the first swing, but the backhand caught him square in the face. The impact on the side of his head disoriented him, but the tips of those knives drew blood. While he was stunned he felt someone grab the back of his shirt and pull him clear off his feet, hitting the ground and feeling his back hit a wall.

Somehow, the Hawks were able to get out in one piece, but they didn’t get out unscathed. Coyote lost a bit of visual capacity, unable to focus on anything moving too quickly; difficulty seeing definitive shapes. As he grew up his friends slowly disappeared from his life. Being in the younger age range for the gang, the older members quickly set off ambitiously to be gunslingers, adventurers, mercenaries. Those were the lucky ones though. A fair amount of them eventually died from the pollution, and by the time Coyote was old enough to apply to the Gunslinger’s Guild he was alone.

Leaving Einbroch, Coyote set off to drift just like his mother did in bedtime stories his father would tell. He wasn’t strong, by far he was weaker in comparison to other gunslingers that had the hawk-eyed vision of snipers. Without being able to effectively pinpoint vulnerabilities, the only option he had was to use shotguns and scarcely, grenade launchers.

#Coyote Willow #Ragnarok OC

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