7/25/2007: Security News Brief: ICE crackdown increases: Not Reported
in the MSM:

Breaking the silence in a middle-class enclave of tract homes and cul-
de-sacs, federal immigration agents recently swooped in and grabbed
Sara Munoz, carting away the illegal Mexican immigrant before her five
crying U.S.-born children.

In nearby Minneapolis, community activist Juana Reyes was nabbed for
her illegal status as she stepped out of her car, spurring a rapidly
transforming neighborhood into action on behalf of her 9-year-old
daughter, an American citizen.

And, 110 miles south in Austin, Minn., a divided community seethes
after several recent deportation arrests. Latin American immigrants
are afraid to open their doors, while long-time residents press the
mayor to do more to stop the changes in a former union town built
around the global headquarters of the Hormel Foods meatpacking
operation.

Similar scenes nationwide are part of a ramping up of federal arrests
of illegal immigrants, activity that Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff recently warned is ''gonna get ugly'' after
immigration legislation failed in Washington last month.

Arrests from workplace raids have skyrocketed from about 845 in 2004
to nearly 4,000 already this year, federal records show. Arrests of
illegal immigrants who have ignored court orders to leave the country
have doubled since last year to a rate of about 685 per week.

''We're gonna do more enforcement actions,'' Chertoff said during a
recent Chicago Tribune editorial board meeting where he lamented
Congress' failure to move immigration reform forward and predicted
extensive grief. ''And, if they have kids at home, even if we make
arrangements with social services to take care of the kids, the kids
are gonna be scared because Mommy or Daddy is not coming home that
day.''

Though the arrests will be ''as humane as possible,'' Chertoff said,
''We do have to get control over this general problem of illegal
immigration.''

The heightened enforcement has fueled tensions in fast-changing areas
of Minnesota, where jobs in meatpacking plants, factories and farms
have made the state a magnet for new immigrants from Africa, Southeast
Asia and, especially, Latin America.

As state legislatures and cities nationwide consider their own local
measures for enforcement, a menacing cloud has swelled over America's
immigrant landscape, advocates say.

''We have a tsunami coming at us in terms of enforcement measures,''
said Angela Kelly, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum,
an immigrant advocacy group in Washington. ''That's pretty terrifying
in terms of what it means for the 12 million undocumented immigrants
and their families.''

Both sides of the immigration debate, however, see advantages in the
hardening climate.

''We want them ... looking over their shoulders all the time,'' said
Marlene Nelson, 63, a member of the Minnesota Coalition for
Immigration Reduction, among scores of such groups in the country
pushing for even more enforcement. Advocates for undocumented
immigrants characterize the arrests as a necessary ''low'' that could
revive a legalization movement after the defeat in Washington.

''There are a lot of people who don't want to see people treated
badly, but there's a need for them to see that,'' said Kelly,
predicting it would strengthen citizenship drives and lead to street
marches akin to those that swept through Chicago and other U.S. cities
last year. ''That kind of fear as a motivator, that needs to be ramped
up and that needs to be tapped.''

Among the glistening Minnesota lakes that remind him of his native El
Salvador, Nixon Munoz, 36, believed his family was safe from such
anxiety.

In 1990, Munoz, an ex-government soldier who won political asylum
after fleeing his civil war-ravaged country, moved from Los Angeles
after learning there were plenty of jobs in Minnesota. Working as a
machinist for a box manufacturer, he soon met a shy Mexican woman who
was visiting on a tourist visa to attend a wedding.

The couple fell in love, and Sara Munoz's visa expired as they planned
for a family and the home they eventually bought outside Minneapolis.
After three daughters and a son, their youngest child, Edwin, 4, was
born autistic. Sara Munoz cared for him between shifts at a local dry
cleaning company.

''It was a nice life,'' Nixon Munoz said. ''We were very content.''

That changed last month. Arriving from the grocery store with his
children, Munoz said, he saw his terrified wife handcuffed in front of
their two-story stucco home. With the family in tears, she was taken
away and, eventually, deported to Mexico, where she tries to parent
her five children through long-distance calls.

The couple's eldest daughter, Joanna Munoz, who turned 14 the day
before her mother left, has stepped in as a mother figure. The hazel-
eyed teen cooks, cleans and tries to comfort Edwin when he calls for
his mother at night, sometimes in uncontrollable tantrums during which
he hurls himself against walls.

''He still thinks my mom is visiting family,'' she said of her
brother, unsure how all this will affect her dream of attending
college and becoming a marine biologist.

The impact that such arrests and deportation have on the estimated 5
million children of illegal immigrants in the U.S. is troubling, said
Randy Capps, a researcher at the Washington-based Urban Institute who
has been studying the aftermath of raids in several states.

Many of these children are likely to grow up harboring resentment
against law enforcement. Others will have psychological problems that
stem from seeing their parents ripped from their lives, he said.

''If they stay in the country, they've been through this traumatic
experience and will continue to be separated from their parents for
some time,'' Capps said. ''These are people that didn't choose to come
over.''

Such worries have fueled the reaction in South Minneapolis to the
arrest of Juana Reyes, 52, a soft-spoken activist known as much for
the opinionated daughter seemingly stuck to her hip as she was for her
work helping new immigrants. Arrested this month, Reyes is inside a
county jail in Elk River, Minn., one of some 26,500 illegal immigrants
imprisoned nationwide on a given day, according to a recent report by
the federal Government Accountability Office.

Betty Reyes, 9, tries to shrug off the experience with jokes or one-
word replies. Occasionally, however, the facade crumbles in tears and
she will not let anyone answer a door knock, friends and family said.

Her experience has inspired plans for a ''children's march'' in the
neighborhood clustered near a row of Mexican restaurants and shops
that began sprouting along the Lake Street business corridor in the
1990s.

''We're training the children now to become activists,'' said Mariano
Espinoza, director of the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network. ''They
are going to take this movement to the next level.''

Inside his tiny office in Austin, organizer Victor Contreras longed
for such optimism.

Since a raid last month when federal agents pulled some 20 immigrants
from their homes, plus others capturing hundreds more in neighboring
towns nestled between drought-singed corn fields, ''the community is
consumed by fear,'' Contreras said. ''Nobody wants to open their
doors. We are up against a great force.''

Some evidence of that could be heard two doors away, at the public
library.

Inside a meeting room, about 20 long-time residents harangued Austin
Mayor Tom Stiehm, a retired police officer who won his job last fall
on an immigration-enforcement platform.

Many in the room pinned the steady arrival of mostly Mexican
immigrants to Austin during the past decade on a yearlong strike at
Hormel during the mid-1980s, when the company known best for making
Spam canned meat busted the local union after a wage dispute.

Well-paying union jobs were given to immigrants willing to work
cheaply, the residents said. That sparked a demographic transformation
now seen along Main Street, where Hormel's Spam Museum sits a short
distance from the Mi Tierra restaurant and several other Mexican
businesses.

''What are you going to do about it, Tom?'' one resident shouted,
complaining with others about crime, overcrowded housing and the
formation of a separate non-English-speaking society.

The resentment illustrated the pressure even small-town officials like
Stiehm are under.

Shrugging, Stiehm promised to make arrests in cases of welfare fraud
and other crimes.

''I'm going to go after the law-breakers and leave the families alone,
the ones that want to be a part of Austin,'' the mayor vowed. ''You
can't just get rid of them all. If you did, we'd lose 7,000 people,
we'd be closing down our schools.''

That answer sparked more protests, with angry voices echoing through
the small, recently built library.
Source: Morning Security News Brief via Harvested news & MCT
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