Representative Sheila Jackson Lee Commentary from the Houston Chronicle
July 23, 2005, 7:49PM
Wrong weapon to fight alien gangs
Proposed legislation outdated, ineffective
By REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE and DAVID COLE
Last month, the Justice Department issued a little-noticed report finding that, contrary to popular perception, gang violence has dropped dramatically over the past decade. The percentage of violent crimes committed by gang members fell by 73 percent from 1994 to 2003.
Yet, members of Congress are acting as if gang crime is exploding, and proposing laws that would repeat some of the worst sins of the past, from guilt by association to the resurrection of an attorney general's list of blacklisted groups.
The House has already passed one gang bill that, among other things, would make nonviolent misdemeanors grounds for deportation. And now Republicans have introduced the Alien Gang Removal Act (AGRA), which goes even further. It would give the attorney general virtually unfettered power to designate any of thousands of gangs in the United States, and would then make automatically deportable any foreign national deemed to be a member of such a gang.
The law would apply even to legal permanent residents who had never committed a crime. It would apply to young children, often the target of gang recruiting drives. And it would require us to return an individual to a country where he faced persecution, based solely on his perceived associations.
We agree that gang crime remains a problem, although the Justice Department's own statistics show that much of the rhetoric about the problem is hyperbole not grounded in fact. But we think the problem can be dealt with through existing laws, by focusing on gang members who commit serious crimes, rather than extending such harsh consequences to individuals who have never committed a crime in their lives.
Our country has generally relied on three strategies for dealing with youth gangs: suppression, which has meant longer criminal sentences and penalties; intervention, through job training, education and skills development in an attempt to reform gang members; and prevention, through school- and community-based programs designed to reach out to at-risk children before they become involved with gangs.
For instance, the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles known as G-Dog or Father Greg, began Homeboy Industries in 1992, a job-training program to salvage the futures of gang members. Many of his employees had long arrest and prison records, and nearly all had no work skills. But Boyle and Homeboy Industries officials have counseled and found jobs for several thousand youths from 500 Los Angeles gangs.
Immigration law can also be an appropriate tool for targeting gang crime. Under current law, any foreign national gang member who violates the terms of his visa can be deported, as can any foreign national gang member who has committed a deportable criminal offense. Thus, where an immigrant gang member has broken the law, he is generally deportable under current law.
What AGRA would do is make immigrants deportable who had never violated the law, based solely on their alleged membership in a designated gang. That is guilt by association; it holds people responsible not for their own actions, but for the actions of others with whom they have associated.
We have seen this kind of approach before.
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Congress made it a deportable offense and a crime merely to be a member of the Communist Party. At the same time, the attorney general created a subversive organizations list as the basis for imposing guilt by association even further.
The McCarthy era taught us a lesson: namely, that guilt by association, as the Supreme Court has said, is alien to the traditions of a free society and the First Amendment itself.
But apparently some have forgotten that lesson. Under this bill, the attorney general would again have a subversive organizations list. The gangs listed would have no right to challenge their designation by offering evidence that the designation was wrong. And individuals charged as members of the gang would be expressly barred from challenging the designation. It would be no defense to show that one had never committed any crime, or that one's gang had never committed a crime.
The politics behind such efforts also echo the McCarthy era. Sen. Joe McCarthy was driven as much by a partisan desire to paint his Democratic opponents as soft on communism as by any actual threat communists posed. So, too, today, nothing could be easier, as a political matter, than to go after alien gang members. But in responding to the problem of gang crime, we should be driven by facts and principles, not pure politics.
Jackson Lee, a Democrat, is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Houston. Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington, D.C.
Wrong weapon to fight alien gangs
Proposed legislation outdated, ineffective
By REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE and DAVID COLE
Last month, the Justice Department issued a little-noticed report finding that, contrary to popular perception, gang violence has dropped dramatically over the past decade. The percentage of violent crimes committed by gang members fell by 73 percent from 1994 to 2003.
Yet, members of Congress are acting as if gang crime is exploding, and proposing laws that would repeat some of the worst sins of the past, from guilt by association to the resurrection of an attorney general's list of blacklisted groups.
The House has already passed one gang bill that, among other things, would make nonviolent misdemeanors grounds for deportation. And now Republicans have introduced the Alien Gang Removal Act (AGRA), which goes even further. It would give the attorney general virtually unfettered power to designate any of thousands of gangs in the United States, and would then make automatically deportable any foreign national deemed to be a member of such a gang.
The law would apply even to legal permanent residents who had never committed a crime. It would apply to young children, often the target of gang recruiting drives. And it would require us to return an individual to a country where he faced persecution, based solely on his perceived associations.
We agree that gang crime remains a problem, although the Justice Department's own statistics show that much of the rhetoric about the problem is hyperbole not grounded in fact. But we think the problem can be dealt with through existing laws, by focusing on gang members who commit serious crimes, rather than extending such harsh consequences to individuals who have never committed a crime in their lives.
Our country has generally relied on three strategies for dealing with youth gangs: suppression, which has meant longer criminal sentences and penalties; intervention, through job training, education and skills development in an attempt to reform gang members; and prevention, through school- and community-based programs designed to reach out to at-risk children before they become involved with gangs.
For instance, the Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles known as G-Dog or Father Greg, began Homeboy Industries in 1992, a job-training program to salvage the futures of gang members. Many of his employees had long arrest and prison records, and nearly all had no work skills. But Boyle and Homeboy Industries officials have counseled and found jobs for several thousand youths from 500 Los Angeles gangs.
Immigration law can also be an appropriate tool for targeting gang crime. Under current law, any foreign national gang member who violates the terms of his visa can be deported, as can any foreign national gang member who has committed a deportable criminal offense. Thus, where an immigrant gang member has broken the law, he is generally deportable under current law.
What AGRA would do is make immigrants deportable who had never violated the law, based solely on their alleged membership in a designated gang. That is guilt by association; it holds people responsible not for their own actions, but for the actions of others with whom they have associated.
We have seen this kind of approach before.
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Congress made it a deportable offense and a crime merely to be a member of the Communist Party. At the same time, the attorney general created a subversive organizations list as the basis for imposing guilt by association even further.
The McCarthy era taught us a lesson: namely, that guilt by association, as the Supreme Court has said, is alien to the traditions of a free society and the First Amendment itself.
But apparently some have forgotten that lesson. Under this bill, the attorney general would again have a subversive organizations list. The gangs listed would have no right to challenge their designation by offering evidence that the designation was wrong. And individuals charged as members of the gang would be expressly barred from challenging the designation. It would be no defense to show that one had never committed any crime, or that one's gang had never committed a crime.
The politics behind such efforts also echo the McCarthy era. Sen. Joe McCarthy was driven as much by a partisan desire to paint his Democratic opponents as soft on communism as by any actual threat communists posed. So, too, today, nothing could be easier, as a political matter, than to go after alien gang members. But in responding to the problem of gang crime, we should be driven by facts and principles, not pure politics.
Jackson Lee, a Democrat, is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Houston. Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington, D.C.
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