Jul 27, 2007

Protester Survives His Month-PlusTime in Jail

In our last issue, we reported about Don Perry, a 79-year-old retired metallurgist whose daughter and son-in-law operate Becker Farms, an orchard and farm market, in Gasport in western New York.

Perry went to jail May 25 and was to be sentenced June 28. The results?

On that day, he was sentenced to time served and released. He survived his time in jail, somewhat battered after guards roughed him up when trying to get him to stand up after he fainted.

“I have a low blood pressure problem,” he said.

The judge, seeing his bruises, moved him out of Niagara County to a different jail.

In our new conversations after July 10, Perry seemed less concerned about getting sympathy for his bruises than he was that his message be gotten out.

He believes the state of New York is being made into a sanctuary for illegal aliens and that he is being persecuted for speaking out about that. He believes laws designed to regulate immigration and worker visas are being undermined and replaced by “crimmigration laws” that favor illegal aliens and punish employers who hire them. He believes the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, is implementing that as state policy.

“I was jailed for talking to Assistant Attorney General Michael Higgins on the phone to discuss then New York State’s Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s policy on the use of his offices as a sanctuary, or safe house, for illegal non-immigrant aliens whose visas had expired and they did not want to be deported. Spitzer, in effect, declared New York state offices a sanctuary in defiance of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE).

“U.S. District Court Judge Richard Arcara (who sentenced Perry) had decreed that ‘any person’ who reports non-immigrant aliens residing in the United States illegally to ICE or the Border Patrol commits a crime and deserves jail time.”

Perry said he was jailed under Judge Arcara’s “any person” law. He calls these “crimmigration laws,” protecting the “rights” of illegal aliens invading the United States.

“This is a landmark crimmigation case,” he said, “set up to trash the Immigation Reform and Control Act of 1986” and specifically the portion of it regulating H-2A workers, who are being given new “rights” the current immigration law did not intend them to have.

“H-2A non-immigrant alien guest workers,” he said, “are not migrant farm workers, are not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act or the Migrant/Seasonal Work Protection Act and have no private rights of action.”

Becker Farms is being sued by four H-2A workers from Peru who left the farm as their contract work period was ending, did not return to their home country as required by their H-2A visa, and then sued Becker Farms for $500,000 alleging unpaid wages and other abuses. Becker Farms was “cleared” by state agencies, but the lawsuit, pressed by attorneys advocating for illegal aliens’ rights, continues.

In choosing to defend himself, he rejected the help of a court-appointed public defender, Marianne Mariano, “a practitioner of crimmigration law and the antithesis of U.S. immigrations laws and sovereignty,” he said.