Department of Homeland Security arrests 582 ‘gang’ members

SF Veiw | August 15, 2005
by Jean Damu

Ever since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security following the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., we’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. On Monday, Aug. 1, it dropped.

Furthermore, Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox, may want to pay attention to the racism generated by our homeland agency to determine what impact it may have on the long-term relations between Washington and Mexico City.

In a Washington press conference, Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his agency would team up with the Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct a nationwide search, seizure, prosecution and deportation of suspected gang members.

The 2003 creation of the Department of Homeland Security called for it to assume responsibilities of the old INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service. And the new agency has not disappointed its critics who feared it would begin to carry out right wing political agendas and sharpen the cutting edge of institutionalized racism in the U.S.

In a statement almost designed to confirm critics’ worst fears, Chertoff announced that in the past two weeks, in what has been labeled Operation Community Shield, 582 alleged gang members were arrested in 27 states and were awaiting either criminal trials or deportation hearings.

In Washington, Homeland Security and ICE officials stated they had targeted members of what they considered to be the most violent street gangs. They included Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13; Surenos (the Southerners from southern California); the 18th Street Gang; the Latin Kings; the Mexican Mafia; Border Brothers; Brown Pride “and numerous others.” All, it should be noted, are Latino organizations.

The names and affiliations of those arrested indicate the Department of Homeland Security has now redefined its mission to include making the streets safer for law-abiding Americans. If that were really the goal of Homeland Security, there would be no argument. However, we suspect it is not. We are not against making the streets safer, but we are against any American form of ethnic cleansing.

The racist edge to the admitted focus of Operation Community Shield is that there is no mention or publicized concern about the existence here of a Russian mafia, an Italian mafia, a Jewish mafia, an Irish mafia or even a Kosovo mafia.

The word mafia is an Arabic term that means sanctuary. In America these organizations provided a social form that shield illegal businesses and activities of immigrants and cultural outsiders to white America and today represent a highly evolved form of gangs or street gangs.

Though we may not like to admit it, the truth of the matter is gangs, street gangs and violence-prone foreign cultural affiliations are as American as baseball and apple pie. They are a real, though disguised, part of American history.

Martin Scorsese’s film “The Gangs of New York” portrayed the interaction of cultural gangs in the mid-19th century in that city and how they were used by Boss Tweed to manipulate elections and configure political power. The influence, corruption and graft that William Mark Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall used to steal tens of millions of dollars from the city of New York was nothing more than gangland politics and violence on the part of the Irish. This corrupt form of politics dominated the nation’s largest city until the 1930s.

The work of Scorsese is not cited to honor nor laud the existence of gangs in America. Rather it is included to underline the durable existence of them and to dramatize the point that gangs, as long as they are white, have long been tolerated for many of the reasons already mentioned.

When the Department of Homeland Security was initially organized, critics complained it would unjustly and unnecessarily stigmatize people who looked and dressed as if they were Middle-Eastern. These complaints were more than validated as thousands of males with Arabic names were rounded up and arrested.

Now the homeland agency has spread the dragnet for Latin Americans, and if Vicente Fox doesn’t have a clue about racism against Blacks, it would serve everyone’s self interest if he speaks up on this issue. If the Department of Homeland Security is going to crack down on gangs, it should include white gangs as well.

The legendary words of Christian activist Martin Niemoeller now take on timely significance. He said: “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”