170: Immigration
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Tom Hodgson's one of those get tough on crime politicians, a Republican who was appointed to the job of Sheriff by a Republican governor. As soon as he became Sheriff in Bristol County, Massachusetts, he went right to work in the county jail. Before he came in, we had no control over this jail. The inmates had control of the jail. He changed all that. Carlos Carrero has worked in the jail for 10 years. He says Sheriff Hodgson imposed discipline on the inmates in the guards, changed the rules so that inmates had to go into classes, activities. If they wanted their time counted, it's a good time. He removed TVs from the cells, removed the weight room. Carlos gestures around his own office. I felt this office right here, this used to be a weight room right here where we were. He removed all that because to him, it made no sense for us to make people charge with crimes, to make him even stronger than when they command. I remember beforehand that we used to have requests every single day from different institutions of inmates who wanted to come to this institution. This was, this was a vacation run. This was where the only they could do whatever they want. Everything was going fine. No, it's the other way of run. Everybody wants to leave this jail. They don't want to stay here. It's a very strict institution. Within the laws. But not long after Sheriff Hodgson took office in 1997, Carlos Carrera started to tell him about something going on in the jail that seemed terribly unfair. There was a new immigration law put into place just a year before, which was sentencing lots of people to deportation who had never been eligible for deportation before this. Here's Sheriff Hodgson. When I took over this job, obviously one of the things that is fundamental whenever you're in public office is to make sure that the skills of justice are properly balanced. So if I see that somehow that the law is being applied in an unbalanced way, then shame on me if I don't stand up and try to correct that. First of all, there were certain offenses drunk driving, for example, that prior to '96 was not a deportable offense, that today would be a deportable offense. In fact, any crime that got a sentence of a year in length was suddenly bad enough to get you deported if you didn't have full citizenship. Drunk driving, petty theft, minor drug possession charges, all of these could suddenly get a person deported. But what made this especially severe was that it was retroactive. If you committed these crimes decades ago, served your time in a model community member ever since, suddenly you could be thrown out of the country. If for example, someone saying when they were 20 years old was arrested for drunk driving, got a year either probation or jail, finished their probation, was the only running with the law they had. And then at 20, 24 years old, decides to get married, has a job, a responsible pays taxes, has a couple of children, and now the kids are four and five years old. The law, 96 law kicks in the change in the law. The person decides, my son's three years old and my daughter's now five. I'm going to go ahead and get my citizenship. Or perhaps they heard about the changes in the law and thought, hey, the country is getting tougher on green card holders. I should finally get my full citizenship headed down to the immigration service to do that. When they get there, voluntarily to apply, they run their background check and find out that 15 years earlier, this person got arrested for drunk driving. INS says, I'm sorry, we're shipping you back to wherever. That to me is a law that clearly is unfair. The person had done their time, they volunteered to go get their citizenship. And here now they're being taken away from their family. And so this law and order Republican has found himself in the position of calling for Congress to change a law that he thinks is too harsh. He's traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby legislators. And for the people in his jail who are awaiting deportation, he's brought in teachers to prepare them for the new lives that we're seized. I thought that it was a big thing to all spend a dollar. So what do you have to pay for? Mr. County happens to be home to a large Portuguese population, which has seen over 400 people deported in the last four years under this new law. When any given date, 35 to 40 people are being held in the county jail, most of them waiting to be deported back to Portugal. Okay. Okay. Mario Madera drops some Portuguese money onto a desk for four inmates and explains to them how much each coin and bill is worth in the country that they will soon be deported to for most of them, a country they haven't even seen since they were small children.
Transcription truncated.