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Vol. 64/No.18      May 8, 2000

INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class

151 Federal Agents Carry Out Massive Assault at Miami Home

BY MIKE ITALIE, ARGIRIS MALAPANIS, and GREG McCARTAN

MIAMI—In a brutal attack on democratic rights and in an assault on working people, 151 federal agents, many of them heavily armed, carried out a raid under authority of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, in the early morning hours of April 22.

A force of 131 INS agents and 20 U.S. marshals were involved. Some 53 INS agents surrounded the two-bedroom house, threatening a crowd there and roughing up a number of people. The cops used battering rams to knock down the door. An eight-member Border Patrol Tactical Unit, wearing goggles and bullet-proof vests, and carrying automatic rifles, led the charge inside.

An AP photographer inside the house caught the now-famous scene of an agent with the barrel of an automatic weapon in the face of Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who rescued the boy, holding Elian Gonzalez in his arms in a bedroom. Outside, the cops ordered bystanders to the ground, told reporters to stay where they were, and doused protesters with pepper spray, both as they launched the raid and before they sped off in their vans.

NBC has filed a complaint with INS commissioner Doris Meissner for federal agents roughing up a cameraman and sound man to prevent them from shooting footage of the assault.

Earlier in the day, Miami police and federal agents arrested two men who lived in a house behind the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, claiming there had been reports of weapons being stockpiled. Lacking evidence, they arrested both men on immigration charges.

The raid was organized by attorney General Janet Reno, who briefed President William Clinton in advance of the assault. In the days since, they have won substantial backing within U.S. ruling circles for the attack.

Gonzalez is a Cuban-American worker and U.S. citizen. He was given custody of the boy by the INS last November after the six-year-old was found at sea, one of the few survivors of the collapse of a flimsy boat carrying him, his mother, and 12 others who had left Cuba. The INS revoked Gonzalez's custody rights April 13 and had been involved in negotiations about turning over the boy to his father up until the moment the raid began.

Lazaro Gonzalez is an opponent of the Cuban revolution and became a temporary front man for the U.S. government as he used his possession of the boy to provide a platform from which to denounce Cuban president Fidel Castro, smear the Cuban revolution, and attempt to gain custody of the child.

Reno ordered the invasion of Gonzalez's home three days after the 11th Circuit Court of appeals dealt a blow to the Justice Department when it barred anyone from taking the boy from the United States until a court hearing on what is purported to be a request for asylum by the six-year-old. The document was filed by the distant relatives. After the raid, a judge on the appeals Court added further conditions to his stay and indicated he may seek to secure "a special guardian" to "report to the Court directly on the Plaintiff's [Elian Gonzalez's] condition and care as well as the circumstances of his present custody."

'A textbook police operation'

"A textbook police tactical operation," boasted Janet Reno and echoed by other U.S. officials and pro-police "experts." Clinton praised Reno, stating: "When all efforts failed, there was no alternative but to enforce the decision of the INS.... The law has been upheld, and that was the right thing to do."

Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Albert Gore blamed the Cuban government for the conflict, opposing administration statements that Elian and his father should be reunited. Bush denounced the raid, claiming, "The chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America."

New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani took the opportunity to accuse the Clinton administration of police brutality, comparing the federal agents in the raid to "storm troopers." On April 24, Giuliani held a news conference denouncing "Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, and Janet Reno"—repeating the three names three times—and the INS agents' use of force. "The action was unprecedented and unconscionable," he said.

Hillary Clinton, the main Democratic contender for U.S. Senate in New York state, who is running against Giuliani, condemned her opponent and praised Reno. She argued that the INS action "was accomplished rapidly and without injury." In a campaign appearance, she urged Juan Miguel Gonzalez to defect with Elian and the rest of his family, declaring, "I don't have any liking for Fidel Castro and the Cuban government."

'What happens if you defy the law'

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that it "warmed his heart" to see "a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez." Friedman said the picture should be put "in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: 'America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that."

Friedman, in a front-cover feature in the March 28, 1999, New York Times magazine, advocated similar course in U.S. foreign policy. "The hidden hand of the market will never work," he stated, "without a hidden fist—McDonalds cannot flourish with McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

The recent column, titled, "Reno for President," ran April 25 after two Times editorials opposed the raid. "The Justice Department acted rashly and unwisely in ordering the raid, and its decisions now require the most careful evaluation by Congress and the American people," an April 24 Times editorial said. The government "must exhaust other remedies first and insure that it obtains the unambiguous authorization of a court to take action." Noting that "these steps may not be required by law in an immigration case," the paper cautioned that "they are necessary to reassure the public that the government is not acting arbitrarily or using excessive force—even if it has a search warrant—when it invades someone's home in the middle of the night."

Harvard constitutional law professor and Democratic Party stalwart Laurence Tribe asks in a guest column in the New York Times, "Where did the attorney general derive the legal authority to invade that Miami home in order to seize the child?" The "government's actions," he wrote, "appear to have violated a basic principle of our society, a principle whose preservation lies at the core of ordered liberty under the rule of law."

Tribe points out that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the executive branch from entering "people's homes forcibly to remove innocent individuals without taking the time to seek a warrant or other order from a judge or magistrate." Reno's decision, he says, "to take the law as well as the child into her own hands seems worse than a political blunder. Even if well intended, her decision strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty."

Record of Clinton administration

Under the guise of fighting terrorism, drugs, and crime, the Clinton administration has overseen sweeping attacks on democratic rights and the beefing up of police forces across the country. These measures include:

The actions of the Clinton administration since November when Elian Gonzalez was rescued at sea through the brutal and unconstitutional April 22 raid, were all aimed at reinforcing and advancing this course upon which the capitalist rulers have been propelled for several decades. The forced entry into the home of a U.S. citizen, without an adequate warrant, in the dark, with a massive police mobilization is another watermark in this drive.

Small turnout at protests

After failing to stop the seizure of the boy, or to mount any effective resistance to the INS raid, a few thousand opponents of the return of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba gathered on the streets of Miami the day after the INS assault, in crowds of up to a few hundred at a time, shouting and burning tires and trash bins.

The protests were called by rightist Cuban-American organizations and were given some support by Democrat Alex Penelas, mayor of Miami-Dade County, and Joseph Carollo, Republican mayor of the city of Miami, and many other local politicians.

The police, however, didn't hesitate in quickly breaking up the protests and keeping roads clear. Seven hundred Miami police, 650 Miami-Dade County cops, highway patrol officers, and a SWAT team from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were on the streets, pumping tear gas canisters into crowds and taking away dozens in handcuffs. In the first 24 hours after the INS raid, the police reported 303 arrests, including a few journalists, and 304 fires, mostly trash fires in the streets.

Small actions took place in a few other cities that day, including one of a couple of hundred who briefly slowed traffic into New York's Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey side.

Leaders of 21 rightist Cuban-American organizations, including the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and the Democracy Movement, denounced the INS raid, calling the federal agents "shock troops, reminiscent of the Gestapo." They issued a statement calling for a "general strike" for April 25. The call, directed mainly at the 800,000 people of Cuban origin in the area, asked that people stay home from work and for businesses to shut down, to make Miami a "dead city" for the day. The CANF is run by millionaire Cuban-American businessmen and has enjoyed U.S. government support and financing over the years.

Weak response to strike call

Large numbers of Cuban-owned retail businesses, mainly in Little Havana and Hialeah, where the large majority of the population is Cuban-American, shut down april 25. In these areas, many gas stations, coffee shops, and other stores were locked that day. But the work stoppage had little impact in the rest of Miami, or at area factories.

For example, at Aerothrust, an aircraft engine repair plant of 200 workers where a two-week-strong strike recently ended, one Cuban-American mechanic was considering joining the work stoppage, saying, "The kid belongs with his father, but they never should have done it the way they did at gunpoint in the middle of the night." Later in the day, a worker holding right-wing views brought in flyers with the photo of the gun-wielding Border Patrol cop in front of the frightened six-year-old, with the caption, "Elian's first interview with the INS." But only a handful of workers heeded the call to stay home.

On the other hand, one of many garment shops in Hialeah was closed by the owner. The big majority of some 70 workers planned to go to work on April 25, but supervisors told them Cuban-American office workers were not going to show up and that because the plant is located in Hialeah the company would close for the day for workers' "security."

At another garment cutting plant of about 40 employees located in Opa Locka, an area with a largely African-American population north of Hialeah, not a single worker missed work to heed the strike call. at that factory, one employee who supports reunifying Elian with his father condemned the way the raid was carried out, a worker at the plant, Eric Simpson, reported.

Addressing some Cuban fellow workers, a worker originally from Haiti stated, "You finally got a whiff of the tear gas we Haitians have been smelling for years."

Prejudice against Cuban-Americans

This comment reflected to a degree a widespread prejudice that the big-business media and politicians have worked overtime to foster against Cuban-Americans by lumping them together as a monolithic "ethnic group" made up almost entirely of rightists. They obscure the real class differences and political divisions among Cuban-Americans here. These big-business forces promote anti-Cuban chauvinism among non-Spanish-speaking workers and resentment among other workers of oppressed nationalities—both Blacks and Latinos—by portraying all Cuban immigrants as privileged, thus letting the capitalist families of Florida off the hook.

One illustration of this myth promoted by the big-business press was an article in the April 25 issue of the New York Daily News titled "Huge ethnic rift in Miami."

"The uneasy peace that has long existed among Miami's ethnic groups has been shattered by the battle over Elian Gonzalez," the reporter said. "The problems could intensify today, when Cuban-American leaders try to bring the city to a standstill by urging supporters to stay home from work and businesses to close."

The article quoted local businessman Dan Ricker saying, "You have 450,000 anglos who are really disgusted with this whole thing, and the African-Americans are saying, 'You've been ignoring us for 20 years. You break down our doors all the time.'"

This was reflected to a degree in recent discussions among rail workers at the CSX freight yard and adjacent Amtrak coach yard in Hialeah. "SWAT teams knock down doors in the Black neighborhoods every day," said Joe Higgins, a CSX road conductor who is Black. "Why should the Cubans be treated any different?" a number of workers at these yards defended the INS raid.

Government effort to prettify INS image

Discussions among industrial workers here reflected some of the success of the Clinton administration in using this case to prettify the image of the INS among working people. Maria, a knitting department worker in one of the largest clothing factories here, who asked that only her first name be used, believes that Elian Gonzalez should return to Cuba because that is where his immediate family wants to live. She also stated her view that both the Miami relatives of the boy and the Cuban government were to blame for "making this political."

Maria had been expressing her anger for weeks at la migra (INS) for the way they have treated her and her family in their effort to gain residency status. But after the INS and Justice Department announced their decision to reunite Elian with his father, Maria said, "The INS and Janet Reno have the best position in the case."

At that same plant, where the majority of the workforce are Cuban-Americans, about 15 employees among 150 missed work on April 25 in response to the call for the "work stoppage." Most of the Cuban workers interviewed there supported reuniting Elian with his father. Several, who asked that their names not be used, expressed disagreement with the rightist protests and said they disliked the INS raid.

Mike Italie and Argiris Malapanis are garment workers in Miami; Greg McCartan contributed from New York. Bill Kalman, a member of the United Transportation Union; Eric Simpson, a member of Local 415 of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; and Rachele Fruit, a member of the International Association of Machinists, contributed to this article.


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