Bollinger ICE raid

Not sure what, exactly, is going on here but the possibility that a company with so many critical ties to the Republican Party in general and to Donald Trump's campaign in particular, might be calling out ICE on its own employees probably needs consideration.

Federal agents staged an extensive search of the Bollinger Shipyards facilities in Lockport on Tuesday as part of an "ongoing federal criminal investigation" led by the Department of Homeland Security and also detained several immigrants in the country illegally at the facility, authorities said.

The operation at the Lafourche Parish shipyard on Tuesday was led by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman. Cox referred additional questions to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser declined comment.

Cox said federal agents also arrested 19 "unlawfully present foreign nationals" at the Bollinger Shipyards location. Five of those people were placed in ICE detention while the other 14 were processed and released after being placed into deportation proceedings in federal immigration court, Cox said.

Of course it also says there is an "ongoing federal criminal investigation"  and it's the sort of thing that has ensnared other Republican Party figures in the state already.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.

They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.

These are the guys who yell and scream about how we need tough immigration enforcement practices while they themselves are the ones profiting from the exploitation of migrant labor.  You ever wonder if maybe they just like to be able to threaten their workers?

Dangling

Hey good news! The dangling crane is dangling more safely now.

A crane dangling at the site of the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel in downtown New Orleans has been stabilized and the surrounding evacuation zone has been reduced in size, city officials announced late Friday.

Engineers told the New Orleans Fire Department that an operation to strap the damaged crane and boom that loomed over Canal Street to the core tower of the building had been completed, the city said.

Because the crane is now in safer condition, the city is shrinking the size of the evacuation zone around the building.

Going forward, the sidewalk on the upriver side of Canal Street that has been closed since shortly after the collapse of the 18-story hotel the morning of Oct. 12 will be open.

That's great news for anyone who wants to get a tattoo or brunch on the upriver side of Canal Street as businesses that provide those things can now reopen.

Meanwhile there isn't great news for everybody, though. Some are still dangling precariously as ever.

Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma, a Honduran national who was arrested by Border Patrol agents two days after the Oct. 12 collapse, was moved by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement on Nov. 15 to an immigration holding facility at the Alexandria International Airport in central Louisiana.

ICE’s charter airline uses the Alexandria airport as a hub for deportation flights to South and Central America.

Bryan Cox, a spokesman for ICE, said he couldn’t comment on possible plans to deport Ramirez because the agency does not discuss future operations “for security reasons.”

Advocates and attorneys warn that deporting Ramirez could seriously hamper an ongoing Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into the cause of the hotel collapse, both because Ramirez has spoken out about unsafe conditions and deficiencies at the work site and because other undocumented immigrants who were working at the site are now fearful about speaking with federal investigators.

The collapse killed three workers and injured dozens more, including Ramirez.

  Ramirez's wife believes he may be deported as soon as today.

Update:  #Actually they aren't deporting him today, says ICE.  But there isn't much more information than that.  The New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice is asking for your help in trying to halt the deportation .

The ICE police state makes everyone less free

It's quite a police state we're building for ourselves. We're always trying to hire more cops. The jail is never big enough. We can never point enough cameras at one another.  Why do we accept this?  We are so over-policed and paranoid now that Wildlife and Fisheries rangers will just walk up and ask to see your papers.

A Border Patrol spokeswoman said that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents had summoned officers to arrest Ramirez after spotting him fishing without a license. When pressed for identification, the Border Patrol spokeswoman said, Ramirez had only "foreign citizenship documentation."

A game warden can have someone deported.  Why do we accept that? Just that is bad enough but there is other context, besides. Ramirez was among the workers injured during the collapse of the Hard Rock hotel construction site. 

Besides seeking to compensate Ramirez for his injuries, Gray said, he and his colleagues will oppose his deportation, which he said was set in motion by an arrest that occurred within 24 hours of his "making a statement about the tragic events” at the collapse site to a Spanish-language news network.

Gray said Ramirez’s case illustrates why he believes some workers who know what was happening at the construction site ahead of the collapse are afraid to come forward.

They “fear … being deported or some other retribution by their employers,” Gray said at a news conference in the lobby of Civil District Court. “Just like all Americans, however, they do have the rights that are afforded to us within this courthouse.”

The main contractor on the Hard Rock site was Citadel Builders. According to Open Secrets, Its founder Derek Clark is a serial max donor to Republican federal office holders including Donald Trump and Senator John Kennedy who has been a vocal supporter of Trump's brutal immigration policies.

Can we think of any reason a company like Citadel would support the kind of police environment that keeps their workers in perpetual fear of speaking out about safety issues?  Does that police environment make us all more or less free?  Why do we accept it?

Why did Jeff Sessions like us so much?

Back in November, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions (wow.. not fired yet!) had a private meeting with Mitch in order to resolve some public back and forth (involving Jeff Landry and John Kennedy as well) over New Orleans's status as a so-called "Sanctuary City."

In some ways the meeting raised more questions than it answered. Cedric Richmond was either too busy to be there or Sessions didn't want him there. Sessions and Kennedy implied that the city agreed to notify ICE when undocumented immigrants were arrested and to allow ICE to interview arrestees.  But he mayor's spokespeople denied having agreed to that.  They both seemed to agree that the city was in compliance with... whatever Sessions was asking of them. 

"We are pleased that the attorney general and Senator Kennedy have come around to agreeing with the point we have made all along -- New Orleans is not a 'sanctuary city' and the NOPD's policies have maintained consistent compliance ..." Landrieu said in a statement.

Asked for comment after the meeting, Sessions' office issued a statement saying New Orleans "has committed to sharing information with federal law enforcement authorities ..."

But it was never clear exactly how.  Maybe they showed him Palantir. 

Law enforcement agents routinely use bank, telephone, and internet records for investigations, but the extent to which ICE uses social media is not well known.

One of the agents involved in the hunt responded that they could combine the data with “IP address information back from T-Mobile.” Another agent chimed in to say that the agency had sent the phone company an expedited summons for information.

“I am going to see if our Palantir guy is here to dump the Western Union info in there since I know there is a way to triangulate the area he’s sending money from and narrow down time of day etc,” responded Jen Miller, an ICE agent on the email thread.

Palantir is a controversial data analytics firm co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel. The company, which does business with the military and major intelligence agencies, has contracted with ICE since 2014. As journalist Spencer

Woodman reported last year, the company developed a special system for ICE to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate immigration officials in both discovering targets and then creating and administering cases against them.

At the time no news organization in New Orleans seemed to know anything about Palantir. Otherwise we imagine they probably would have asked about it, since it's clearly relevant.  But this year, when the city's usage of Palantir finally became a point of public controversy thanks to a national news story, our local papers screamed loudly at us that it was "never a secret." So who can say, really?

Anyway NOPD certainly definitely is not using it or anything like it anymore so it's not worth asking about now, probably.