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PHOENIX — The head of a major Latino rights group wants the next president to appoint a Homeland Security chief who will agree to halt immigration raids during the 2010 Census.
But Gov. Janet Napolitano, who could be that appointee, is on record as opposing such a move.
John Trasviña told the Arizona Latino Research Enterprise Town Hall Friday that getting an accurate count is critical to electing more Hispanics to office. And the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund said to do that first requires educating the Latino community about the importance of the decennial count.
“We cannot do that as well as we want to until we know the Department of Homeland Security is not going to be out there at the same time the enumerators are out there, knocking on doors, asking for people’s names and who lives at that particular house,” he said.
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Trasviña said a proper count of Hispanics, legal and otherwise, will affect how congressional and state legislative districts are drawn for the 2012 elections.
“If we do our job right, we will have a record number of Latinos in Congress, Asian-Americans in Congress,” he said, along with gains in state houses.
In Arizona, he said, counting all those who are not citizens — a figure the Census Bureau most recently estimated at 700,000 out of about 6.4 million residents — could mean the difference between getting just one or two new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Trasviña said the chief immigration officer in charge in 1990 and again in 2000 agreed to “back off” during the count. But Russ Knocke, press aide to current Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, said that idea is a non-starter.
“As long as we are around, we won’t halt or even think of letting up our enforcement operations,” he told Capitol Media Services.
Napolitano, when asked about the idea last year, said she sees no need to slow or halt raids.
The governor acknowledged it is important to get an accurate count of everyone here, legal or otherwise, with everything from congressional representation to federal aid tied to those figures. But Napolitano said the question of raids versus a correct count is a “false dichotomy.”
She said the Census Bureau can count heads and then augment those with some of the statistically based methods to go from ‘actual’ count to ‘real’ count.” The governor said federal officials already do that.
“You can’t ever count everybody all the time because people move around,” she said.
Her stance could be more significant than her role as Arizona governor: An early supporter of Democrat Barack Obama, Napolitano has been mentioned as a possible Cabinet pick, including Secretary of Homeland Security or Attorney General.
In his speech Friday, Trasviña had some things he wants from the next president in his pick for that latter post, too.
“We need an Attorney General who will take Latino civil rights seriously,” he said. Trasviña said he wants someone modeled after Robert Kennedy, who held that post in the 1960s during the civil rights era, “to take over from the uncontrollable and the irresponsible Southern sheriffs.”
Trasviña said this is more than a criticism of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio whose department has conducted crime suppression “sweeps” that foes say target anyone who looks Hispanic. He said the federal statute which gave Arpaio’s deputies the right to enforce immigration laws needs to be revisited by Congress.
He said that provision, known as 287-G, has led to racial profiling by other police departments who have received the authorization. Trasviña wants current 287-G agreements suspended — including the one being used by Arpaio — and no new agreements “until we can get some sense out of what’s going on with local law enforcement of the federal immigration laws.”
Trasviña said MALDEF is making this and other demands Obama and Republican John McCain to ensure they do more than pay lip service to Latino interests. He said simply promising to ask Congress to enact an immigration reform bill is not enough.
first svian wrote on Oct 22, 2008 7:09 AM: