1) ACTION ALERT: Sign On to Support the Solve Act
Date: 5/10/2004
From: mbelanger@immigrationforum.org

1. ORGANIZATIONAL LETTER OF SUPPORT - SIGN ON AND CIRCULATE TO YOUR NETWORKS

The American Immigration Lawyers Association is circulating the
following sign-on letter for organizations wishing to support the SOLVE
Act, S. 2381 and H.R. 4262, comprehensive immigration reform legislation
introduced on May 4 by Senator Kennedy and Representatives Menendez
(D-NJ), Gutierrez (D-IL) and others.

The deadline for signing on to the letter is Wednesday, May 26, so there
is time to circulate this letter to your networks, if you haven't done
so already. We would like to have a very large response to show
Congress there is broad support for this bill!

TO SIGN ON by WEDNESDAY MAY 26: Send an e-mail to solve@aila.org. Please
also clarify if you are signing on as a national or local organization.
(If you are signing on as a local organization, please note your
address.) Please also note that this letter is for organizations only,
not individuals. Thanks!

TEXT OF THE LETTER:

[DATE]

Senator Edward Kennedy
317 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Representative Robert Menendez
2238 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Representative Luis Gutierrez
2367 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Senator Kennedy, Representative Menendez, and Representative
Gutierrez:

The undersigned organizations write in support of S. 2381/H.R. 4262, the
SOLVE Act of 2004 (Safe, Orderly Legal Visas Enhancement Act of 2004).
We applaud your leadership in introducing this measure, which will fix
an unworkable and outdated system and make immigration safe, legal and
orderly.

Your measure, if enacted, will reunite families, reward work, respect
workers, reduce illegal immigration, and enhance our security. Your
bill achieves these ends through:

* An earned adjustment for people who work hard, pay taxes, and
contribute to their communities;
* New "break-the-mold" worker program; and
* Family-backlog reduction.

We look forward to working with you to pass this much-needed
legislation.

Sincerely,

2. FOR INDIVIDUALS - SEND A MESSAGE TO CONGRESS

Two organizations now have features on their website to make it easy for
you to send a message to your representative and senators specifically
about the SOLVE Act.

Go to the website of Service Employees International Union at:
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/solve.

There, you can follow the directions to send a pre-written message to
your representative and senators asking them to co-sponsor the SOLVE
Act.

In addition, you can go to the following feature on the website of the
American Immigration Lawyer's Association:
http://capwiz.com/aila2/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=5755531.

There, you can send a pre-written message (which you can modify, if you
wish) urging support for the SOLVE Act, and swift passage of the DREAM
Act and AgJOBS.

3. MORE MATERIALS RELATED TO SOLVE

In a day or so, we will update the index page on our website with links
to materials relating to Comprehensive Immigration Reform. To that page
we will add some of the links that we have circulated previously
relating to the SOLVE Act.

http://www.immigrationforum.org/currentissues/CIR.htm

In the meantime, here are more links relating to the SOLVE Act.

Text of the Senate bill, S. 2381:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.2381:/

Text of House bill, H.R. 4262:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.4262:/

"Talking Points," Chinese translation:
http://www.immigrationforum.org/currentissues/articles/SOLVE_TPChinese.pdf

More reactions to the SOLVE Act

Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader:
http://democraticleader.house.gov/sp/avisos.cfm?pressReleaseID=553
This is in Spanish only.

Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee:
http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=2230

Hate Free Zone, Seattle, Washington:
http://www.hatefreezone.org/home/pressrelease.htm

National Conference of Catholic Bishops:
http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2004/04-084.htm

National Council of Pakistani Americans:
http://www.ncpa.info/news/view_newsdetails.asp?id=181

National Korean American Service and Education Consortium
http://www.nakasec.org/press.html

People for the American Way:
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=15334

2) The USA PATRIOT Act: Two Years Later: Questions and Answers For Concerned Communities
Date: 5/10/2004
From: knewell@napalc.org

Please find attached a “Question and Answer” fact sheet from NAPALC entitled, “The USA PATRIOT Act: Two Years Later: Questions and Answers For Concerned Communities”. Feel free to distribute. We will be posting this on our website at www.napalc.org.

This fact sheet was prepared to assist advocates. We are considering the preparation of a simplified version for use with individual community members and for translating. Your feedback is welcome. Please contact knewell@napalc.org.

The article below may also interest you, if you haven’t seen it already.

National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium
Katherine Newell Bierman
Staff Attorney, Immigrant Rights
1140 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20036
phone: 202.296.2300
fax: 202.296.2318

Analysis: Did President Misconstrue Patriot Act in Oregon Case?
By Justin Rood, CQ Staff
April 26, 2004

"Let me give you an interesting story," President Bush said April 19 in a speech on domestic counterterrorism reforms in Hershey, Pa.
"In late 2001, in Portland, Oregon . . . police . . . turned up evidence about a local man who was planning attacks on Jewish schools and synagogues, and on American troops overseas.

"The initial information was passed to the FBI and to intelligence services - quickly passed - who analyzed the threat and took action," Bush said, according to a White House transcript of his speech.

"See," the president concluded, "the Patriot Act allowed for unprecedented cooperation."

No post-9/11 homeland legislation has sparked more controversy than the suite of counterterror measures known as the USA Patriot Act (PL 107-56), which was aimed at expanding the government's powers to identify, investigate and prosecute suspected terrorists.

Some 300 municipal, county and state governing bodies have passed resolutions opposing portions of the act, which got a new jolt of controversy this month when Attorney General John Ashcroft said "walls" codifying investigative restrictions on the FBI during the Clinton administration might have made it harder to disrupt the 9/11 hijacking plot.

When the president took up the cause of the Patriot Act again last week, he cited the Portland case as an example of how the law has helped catch terrorists.

But interviews with someone involved in the case, as well as a review of news accounts of the episode, tell a different story from the president's - one with a different moral.

Target Practice
On Sept. 29, 2001, the sheriff's office in Skamania County, Wash., got a call about a crackle of gunfire.

"There were six people in a rock pit that were target practicing," said Dave Brown, now Skamania County sheriff, in a telephone interview.
Brown was chief criminal deputy at the time.

"We had a citizen that called and made a complaint that she heard a lot of rapid gunfire," which is not unusual in his county, Brown said. But when a deputy responded to the call, he found six people "dressed in turbans and in flowing gowns, or whatever you call those things," Brown said.

The deputy checked the men's identification papers, advised them they were on private property, and said they had to leave, according to Brown.

Upon checking their backgrounds, said Brown, the deputy discovered one person had a felony conviction. But since the deputy did not see him holding a gun, he was not arrested.

However, "because it was in such proximity to 9/11," Brown explained, they forwarded a report to the FBI - specifically, the nearest branch office of the bureau, in Vancouver, Wash., a city of 144,000 on the banks of the Columbia River in the southwest corner of the state.

Brown could not remember the exact date, he said. But earlier news accounts quoted Sheriff Chuck Bryan as saying the report was sent to the FBI's Vancouver office on Oct. 1, two days after the incident occurred - and three weeks before the USA Patriot Act was passed.

Read About It in the Paper
Sometime in December, according to Brown - early December, according to an Oct. 5, 2002, article in Vancouver's newspaper, the Columbian - a member of the Skamania County sheriff's office read in the newspaper of the Oct. 24 arrest by federal agents in Portland of suspected terrorist Khaled Ali Steitiye.

They recognized Steitiye's name as belonging to one of the gravel-pit shooters. Wondering if the FBI had shared their report, they called the FBI office in Vancouver.

"There was some discussion," Brown said. The Vancouver FBI "couldn't locate [the report], and asked us to send it again."

They did. Then, on a hunch, they called the Portland FBI office to see if the FBI in Washington state had ever shared their report on the gravel-pit shooters with them, Brown said.

The police were told that the Portland FBI's counterterror task force - known as a Joint Terrorism Task Force, because it includes state and local police as well as FBI agents - had never seen the document.

"[We] found out they hadn't had any discussions with the FBI in Vancouver, and that was very frustrating for us," said Brown.

"We finally sent our report not only back to the local FBI office but to the Portland office," the sheriff said.

FBI spokesman Ray Lauer confirmed that the Vancouver office received the first police report and did not forward it to the Portland office - or anywhere - until the Skamania County sheriff's office did. But, Lauer said, the Vancouver office - a small satellite facility known as a "resident agency" - had only three agents at the time.

"The guy who took the [report] was also working his own cases," Lauer said in a telephone interview. "He did what he was supposed to do - get into the computer system, check and see if any of these people are of interest to us. . . . Nothing popped up," Lauer said.

"[Then] he's to redirect [the report] to any of the person or persons, agencies that might have an interest in the report," such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or the Portland FBI office, Lauer added.

"He was going to ship the stuff off," Lauer said. "But before that ever happened, the [Steitiye] arrest was made."

Ashcroft Lauded Sheriff
Back on Oct. 4, 2002, Ashcroft credited the arrests of four of the Portland terror cell members to the Skamania County sheriff's phone call.

"The information provided by Sheriff Bryan . . . helped lead Oregon authorities to the individuals arrested today," Ashcroft said in a speech announcing the collars.

Ashcroft called the case "a textbook example of the central role that cooperation with local state and federal enforcement officials . . . plays in the prevention of terrorist attacks."

But to Sheriff Brown, it was "flat amazing" the FBI could not do that basic information-sharing on its own.

"It was a prime example of the FBI not communicating between Portland and [Vancouver]," said Brown.

"[Vancouver is] ten miles across the river from the Portland office, and they didn't talk to each other. That's FBI to FBI," Brown said, "and that was flat amazing to local law enforcement, that you could be ten miles apart and not talk to each other."

Groups that oppose the Patriot Act - and its renewal - charge President Bush and administration officials with misconstruing the law, some say for political purposes.

"There's absolutely nothing in federal law that prevented local police from communicating with the FBI" before the Patriot Act was passed, says Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"And nothing in the Patriot Act had to do with sharing information between local police and the FBI" anyway, Edgar said.

And a federal prosecutor who worked on the Portland case agrees there were no legal blockades to the FBI and police sharing information before the Patriot Act was passed.

"They could have shared it with the law enforcement side of the FBI" before the USA Patriot Act was enacted, conceded Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Gorder in a telephone interview.

In fact, they did: The local police first reported the terrorist information to the FBI on Oct. 1, 2001 - three weeks before the Patriot Act was passed.

"[T]he law never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities," wrote Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies at the George Washington University, in a new report.

"To the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing. . . . None of the 9/11 failures to share information can be laid at the feet of the law," Martin stated in her article.

"The 'wall' is not primarily a creation of law," said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It was mainly a creation of internal guideline and misinterpretation, folklore.

"It's purely political," Dempsey said. "The president is almost creating a red herring that some unnamed, unknown person wants to reinsert the wall. [But] there is nobody who is arguing to re-erect a wall."

The Bush administration disagrees. The USA Patriot Act brought down a legal wall, it insists. President Bush highlighted that belief in his speech, and underscored it with the Portland anecdote.

"He's saying the Patriot Act has allowed for unprecedented information sharing," said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, who said in a telephone interview that he spoke for the White House on the matter.

"I don't see anything inconsistent in what the president has said," Corallo said. "I think you're trying to make more of it than you probably should. . . . As we moved on through the investigation, the removal of the wall assisted."

Justin Rood can be reached via jrood@cq.com