Can someone explain ‘soliciting for political purpose’
Al’s Loupe
Can someone explain ‘soliciting for political purpose’
By Alvaro F. Fernandez
Arizona visited Florida last week. On the baseball diamond, the Marlins managed to split a two game series with the Diamondbacks. But it was another example of what Arizona stands for these days that has me smarting over events of last Friday.
Anyone who has followed my moves over the past decade knows that I’ve dedicated part of my life to convincing persons in this country to the importance of political participation. As a result, an ongoing project of mine has been the registration to vote of unregistered U.S. citizens. My focus has been naturalized citizens – in South Florida they’ve been mostly from the Caribbean and Latin America.
Earlier this year I quietly kicked off a new project you’ll be hearing more about in the near future called Miami Progressive Project (MPP). I refer to it as a “democracy project.” Our aim is to bring truer democratic values to my hometown, Miami. Our ultimate goal is to create a new, vibrant, dynamic and honest political leadership class to replace our current group of mostly stale and corrupt elected officials.
Leading our voter registration side is Carlos Pereira, a good friend and director of his own very successful organization, CODI — Centro de Orientación del Inmigrante. Carlos is from Honduras. Currently the people we have working with us in the voter registration projects are from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and countries that make up what Miami has become, and will look like, even more so, in the not too distant future.
On Friday, May 21, we had a group of volunteers working a citizenship ceremony in Miami. We try to attend as many of these as possible. Because of our professionalism and know-how when doing this type of work, we have been able to establish a good, working relationship with the authorities who direct these ceremonies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more commonly known as ICE.
I suppose there’s always the exception. But then again, with things revving up the way they are across the country, and with a majority of Floridians in favor of what in my opinion is Arizona’s unconstitutional new immigration law, SB 1070, which gives the green light to profiling, I should have expected what occurred.
One of our more experienced volunteers, I will call her Elva, was doing her work that morning when she was suddenly approached by an ICE agent by the name of Wiles. For no good reason he questioned Elva and then proceeded to arrest her. But not only was she arrested, in the process she was abused verbally and violently manhandled by whom I must term an ICE goon. Officer Wiles roughly took Elva by the arm and painfully twisted it behind her back doing damage to her shoulder. Along the way he made sure to dig his fingernail deep into her hand causing her to bleed. She was then charged with “soliciting for political purposes.”
Is there something wrong with registering new U.S. citizens to vote? Did I miss something? Or does the problem have to do with registering new, mostly brown skin-toned citizens?
The fact is that our volunteer’s skin is brown. You can tell she comes from somewhere else. In fact, she was born in Honduras. She looks “illegal” as far as a bigoted ICE agent is concerned. And the ICE agent wanted to make sure this “illegal” was sent back to where he felt she belonged. It is why he called the Miami-Dade police to have her arrested.
The surprise was that Elva happens to be a U.S. citizen and was able to prove it when given the chance…
The story, believe it or not, does not end there. We asked to speak with the ICE agent in charge that day. He spoke to Carlos. He graciously and apologetically told him that they had to be weary of anyone no matter how old or young or innocent looking. Their age did not prevent them from wrapping explosives around their bodies.
Folks I did not make this up. It’s all a very true and scary story. And it is not relegated to Arizona. If you live in Miami, for example, and you happen to not be blonde with green or blue eyes, do yourself a favor and stay out of the sun. No matter how much you love the beach.
