PHOENIX — A judge on Tuesday sentenced more than a dozen immigrant rights advocates to one day in jail stemming from a protest last year over Arizona’s controversial immigration law, but they got credit for the day they spent behind bars at the time of their arrest.

Justice of the Peace David Seyer handed down the sentence about three weeks after finding the group of protesters guilty of a misdemeanor charge of disobeying police orders. They had faced up to four months in jail and a maximum $700 fine.

The group was arrested July 29, 2010, when dozens of protesters took to Phoenix streets on the day Arizona’s new immigration law was set to take effect. They also were speaking out against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who organized an immigration patrol the day the law took effect.

The protesters massed outside one of Arpaio’s jails, beating on a metal door and forcing sheriff’s deputies to call for backup. Officers in riot gear opened the doors, waded into the crowd and hauled off those who didn’t move.

A judge ended up putting the most contentious parts of the law on hold. The dispute over the law will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Among the protesters was the Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Association. Morales lives in Arvada, Colo., and Salem, Mass., and was elected as the first Latino president of the association in 2009.

“The sentence was as lenient as it could be without dismissing the charges,” Morales told The Associated Press from Arvada after attending the hearing by phone. “So I believe that the judge was clearly moved and affected by the character and the idealism and the comportment of the defendants.”

Arpaio said regardless of the length of the sentence, he’s happy the judge found the demonstrators guilty.

“I’m not going to criticize the judge,” he said. “Let’s just say it’s a conviction and it sends a message out that anybody that violates a law is going to be arrested and go to jail.”

The sheriff said Morales and the other protesters are welcome to sit down with him in his office anytime to discuss illegal immigration.

But, Arpaio said, “If he violates the law, he will be arrested. Period.”

Morales said he had no immediate plans to return to Phoenix for a protest, but he said the Unitarian Universalist Association was holding its general assembly in Phoenix next June and will hold an immigration protest at that time.

“Joe Arpaio hasn’t seen anything yet,” Morales said. “We will make our disagreement and displeasure known.”

He said the protest likely wouldn’t involve the kind of civil disobedience that led to his arrest last year.

jonathan-cunningham:

Today the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement held a hearing on “H.R. 1932, Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011,” new legislation that would result in incarcerating even more people like Reverend Soeoth who pose no danger to anyone.

The purpose of immigration detention is to ensure that immigrants appear for their deportation hearings and, if they lose, their removal. Immigration detention is not meant to punish people for crimes. Indeed, more than halfof the people in immigration detention have never been convicted of a crime at all. But the sad reality is DHS detains more than 33,000 people on any given day, for months years. Thousands of these people present no flight risk danger to the community, whose deportation is unlikely…

This detention comes at great cost to taxpayers: $45,000 per detainee per year, for a total of $1.9 billion in this fiscal year, with $100 million more than that requested in the fiscal year 2012 budget. H.R. 1932 proposes to detain even more people unnecessarily.

H.R. 1932 makes a bad situation worse by making two crucial changes to current immigration law: First, it authorizes DHS to detain individuals like Reverend Soeoth for months years while they await the outcome of their cases, and simultaneously denies them a prompt bond hearing before an immigration judge. Second, H.R. 1932 authorizes DHS to indefinitely lock up people who have lost their cases — potentially for a lifetime — even in cases when the government cannot deport them (e.g. because the person is stateless, because we have no repatriation agreement with the home country).

I was just thinking to myself, “boy, our prisons aren’t crowded enough! I sure wish the government would imprison more nonviolent offenders”. Thank goodness for Lamar Smith, the Republican representative from Texas that introduced the bill.

impudentchit:

IMMIGRANTS FOR SALE

Hmm.

Privatization of prisons, extended.

Excellent. Please watch. - Dyne

“Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative. ‘We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.’”

Dyne: Is this bitch serious????? How did someone this ignorant get a teaching job? Somebody enroll her in a sociology class, please. (a non-Functionalist one. That kind of thinking is so simplistic that she managed to arrive at Functionalist conclusions all on her own while still being incredibly ignorant.) Or a history class. It’s not like People of Color have had any obstacles to overcome in the USA, right? And it’s not like immigrants have to master a second language in addition to the one they’re already fluent in to do just as well as the other kids in the new country, right?  Oh, and sitting in an air conditioned office is so much harder than hunching over in a field picking strawberries for 14 hours a day under the blazing sun. I would love to see her say this kind of bullshit in the inner city. Say it to our faces. See what happens.