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Day Laborers' Lawsuit Casts Spotlight on a Nationwide Conflict
The New York Times
NATIONAL | September 17, 2006
In Shadow of 70's Racism, Recent Violence Stirs Rage
By DAN FROSCH
Navajo leaders in New Mexico are calling for a federal inquiry after a white police officer killed a Navajo man.
FARMINGTON, N.M. - The memory of 1974 still hangs heavily over this troubled New Mexico town, like a bad spirit drifting down from the sandpaper mesas and scrub-speckled hillsides.
Joni Gee, left, whose cousin, Clint John, was shot by a police officer, with Adrienne Sakizzie, her sister.
That was the year the bodies of three Navajo men were found in nearby Chokecherry Canyon, burned and bludgeoned. The three white high school students charged in their killings were sent not to prison but to reform school.
The violence and mild sentences incited marches by Navajos through Farmington's streets and exposed tensions between them and the town's largely white residents. The United States Commission on Civil Rights eventually investigated and found widespread mistreatment and prejudice against Navajos.
Now, more than three decades later, Navajo leaders here are again calling for federal intervention.
On June 4, the police said, three white men beat a Navajo man, William Blackie, 46, and shouted racial slurs at him after asking him to buy beer for them. The men were charged with kidnapping, robbery and assault, and are being prosecuted under the state hate crimes law, which allows for longer sentences....
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The New York Times
NEW YORK REGION | September 17, 2006
Day Laborers' Lawsuit Casts Spotlight on a Nationwide Conflict
By FERNANDA SANTOS
A lawsuit accuses Mamaroneck, N.Y., officials of harassing day workers and rests on the workers' 14th Amendment claim that they are discriminated against because they are Hispanic.
Day Laborers' Lawsuit Casts Spotlight on a Nationwide Conflict
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: September 17, 2006
WHITE PLAINS, Sept. 14 - The 36-year-old Mexican man has lived in Mamaroneck for eight years, trekking each morning to Columbus Park near the village center to wait for contractors who might pay him $10 an hour at best. But the village closed the hiring site in the park in February, and after that, he testified in court here last week, the police often chased away the employers with tickets, and the workers with fear.
Day laborers wait for work on Jefferson Avenue in front of a gas station in Mamaroneck. The village has become a gathering place for day laborers, to the distress of residents.
"An officer stands very close, sometimes within a foot or 18 inches, to where I or a group of day laborers stand," the man told a judge, speaking through a Spanish translator. "He crosses his arms and stares at us for long periods of time until we eventually feel compelled to change our location.
"Sometimes," he added, "he places his hand on his gun while he stares at us."
The man, identified in court as John Doe No. 6, is one of six anonymous day laborers whose federal lawsuit against the Village of Mamaroneck could set a new national standard for the way local governments deal with the fast-growing influx of day laborers in their communities. For a week, Judge Colleen McMahon in Federal District Court heard testimony in a nonjury trial from the laborers, the police, contractors, merchants and village officials. Lawyers in the case said they hoped a decision would be reached by mid-October.
The case accuses village officials of harassing the workers as part of a "deliberate and coordinated" campaign to drive them off the streets, and rests on the workers' 14th Amendment claim that they are discriminated against because they are Hispanic. At the start of the trial, they dropped their original First Amendment claims - that the village had violated their rights to free speech and free association - out of concern that it would force them to reveal their immigration status. The plaintiffs say they are remaining anonymous because they fear retaliation from the authorities. Their lawyer said some of the workers were here legally, while others are not.
"If we lose, the signal that is being sent is that towns and villages can aggressively enforce ordinances in a way that might make it impossible for the day laborers to find work," said Cesar A. Perales, president of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. "That's what's being tested here."
Across the country, the proliferation of day laborers has yielded disjointed responses, both in traditional immigrant hubs such as Texas and California and in suburban communities like Mamaroneck that have experienced sudden and sharp increases in immigration. Advocates and local officials place the blame, in part, on the federal government's inconsistent enforcement of immigration policies.
In Burbank, Calif., local officials required a new Home Depot store to build a day labor site, but five miles to the southeast, the City of Glendale passed a law barring day laborers from soliciting work from curbs. In May, a federal judge sided with the laborers in Glendale in a suit claiming that the law violated their free speech rights; the city has appealed the decision.
Fort Worth opened an official hiring site to get the workers off street corners and out of shopping center parking lots. In Herndon, Va., a Washington suburb, a similar move last year drew protests from the Minutemen Project, a group intent on fighting illegal immigration.
After years of recoiling in the face of opposition, the laborers are now fighting back, in court and on the streets. In Freehold, N.J., for example, after officials shuttered a hiring site two years ago, the workers filed a class-action suit, and though they now lack a place to gather, they have organized to keep daily lists of everyone seeking jobs.
"The day-laborer issue is very controversial and emotional," said Edwin Meléndez, a professor at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy and co-author of a recent study of day laborers.
"These workers are highly visible, which makes them an easy target. And then you have the neighbors complaining that they drink, loiter, urinate in public. When you have this equation that your safety is being threatened and your quality of life is being affected, the sort of knee-jerk reaction is to conclude that the day laborers have to go."
Here in Westchester County, day laborers had flocked to Mamaroneck, a village of 19,000 on the edge of Long Island Sound, for at least a decade, turning the parking lot of Columbus Park into an unofficial hiring site. Many worked regularly for the same contractors; many of the contractors relied on them during the hectic summer months.
Two years ago, the Hispanic Resource Center in Mamaroneck proposed building a hiring site on a piece of village-owned land near Interstate 95, but residents objected, saying it would clog traffic on an already busy strip. Instead, village officials soon decided to formally designate the parking lot as a sanctioned hiring spot. On warm days, as many as 200 men converged at the park, coming from across Westchester County and from as far south as the Bronx.
Residents charged that the workers urinated in public, defecated, fought with one another, littered and slept in the park overnight. Parents bringing children to a nearby day-care center told the police that the men's presence made them feel uneasy, and a developer of luxury condominiums being built across from the park urged officials to make the laborers go elsewhere.
In August 2004, the Police Department began posting two patrol cars at the park, which the laborers said scared away the contractors. At a public hearing in January, one village trustee compared the laborers to locusts, and then joined in a 3-2 vote to shut down the site on Feb. 1, 2006. In April, Mamaroneck's mayor, Philip J. Trifiletti, defending the decision, accused the workers of "trashing" the park and straining village finances.
The workers moved to the streets after that, and the police followed them, particularly along Mamaroneck Avenue and Van Ranst Place, where most of the men gathered between 7 and 10 a.m. every day but Sunday, according to court testimony. At times, the laborers said, police officers used words or gestures to order the workers to move; other times, they just stared.
Two contractors testified that they were ticketed for minor traffic violations after picking up workers in Mamaroneck, suggesting it was retaliation for supporting the day laborers. None of the workers have been arrested or ticketed. But the village's police chief, Edward E. Flynn, a defendant in the lawsuit, along with Mayor Trifiletti and the village itself, said his officers were simply enforcing the law by citing drivers who violate traffic regulations. "At no time was the police presence ever undertaken to restrict or impede laborers from soliciting or obtaining work," Chief Flynn testified.
He said he had gotten complaints from residents about laborers running across the street and blocking traffic or sticking their heads into cars to solicit work. "There was definitely increased police activity in that area, but that was because of the complaints we had received."
The village's lawyer, Kevin J. Plunkett, added, "What they're trying to do now is beat up our Police Department, and we're simply not going to allow that."
As the trial progressed through the week here, day laborers continued to pace the streets six miles away in Mamaroneck, searching for work.
Testimony for two of the plaintiffs had to be postponed because they were working when they were scheduled to be in court. "What choice to I have?" asked one of those plaintiffs, a 24-year-old man from Guatemala. "I have a family to support at home, and I still have to pay my rent."
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