Diversity Headlines

UPDATE 5/16/2012 1:16pm EST: Conservative Examiner writer Granville Ampong has published a new story on his column stating "Pacquiao never said nor recited, nor invoked and nor did he ever refer to such context." Ampong says he included the reference to simply remind readers of his column "how God made it clear in the Old Testament time that such practice of same-sex marriage is detestable and strictly forbidden."

The same week that President Obama and rapper Jay-Z came out for gay marriage, boxer Manny Pacquiao referenced scriptures that say a man who lies down with another man "must be put to death."

In a recent interview with the National Conservative Examiner the beloved boxer cited Leviticus 20:13 when asked what he thought of President Obama's support for same-sex marriage (Pacquiao referenced Bible verse, the writer of the story expanded with the scripture):

If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

Pacquiao went on to say:

God only expects man and woman to be together and to be legally married, only if they so are in love with each other. It should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of Old.

Up until recently Pacquiao was seen as a charming man who lived his life with integrity and was respectful in and out of the boxing ring. That admirable lifestyle got him endorsement deals with the likes of Nike, Hewlett Packard and Hennessy Cognac.

Now, after his recent anti-gay comments, gay-rights advocates are questioning why anybody would want to endorse him.

"I do think that American sponsors are going to have to look very carefully about whether they can continue to pour money into his apparently rather empty soul," Rick Jacobs, founder and chair of the Courage Campaign told the LA Weekly. "Not only does he live in L.A., he makes a lot of money thanks the United States and sponsors here in particular."

Pacquiao holds a record eight world titles in as many weight divisions and is often referred to as the pride of the Philippines. The 34-year old boxer is seen as a humane human being who gives back to his country--he serves in his native country's House of Representatives, he often cites God as the source of his ongoing success and wears a rosary around his neck before and after fights.

In the 11th round of a 2010 fight against boxer Antonio Margaritom, Pacquiao signaled to the referee and asked him to stop the fight because his opponent was having trouble keeping up.

Up until recently there was no doubt on anyone's mind that Pacquiao was a likeable guy.

"I often don't get political but when human beings (especially elected officials like Mr. Pacquiao) wish death to another human being because of their sexual orientation - I will get vocal," Ryan Palao, who is widely recognized by his drag queen persona Ongina, told Colorlines.com.

"I'm not a fan of boxing but many are and this man is looked up to by children and adults in the Philippines and all over the world and being Filipino - I am extremely disappointed with him. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions - but to quote the bible suggesting death to a man who lies with another man is extreme and sends the wrong message," Palao went on to say.

A message that Palao says Nike should revisit.

"Nike - who endorses this man - a company that supports the LGBT community - should drop his endorsement," Palao went on to say, echoing the words of Courage Campaign's founder.

Colorlines reached Nike and Hewlett-Packard for a statement but there was no response by publication time.

When Martha Wright's grandson was moved to a prison outside of her hometown of Washington, DC., she didn't expect that a short 5-minute conversation with him could cost up to $18.

"You just have to get everything out in one line," she laughs.

For Wright, phone calls and writing letters are the primary ways she can stay in touch with her grandson, Ulandis Forte, who has been in prison for nearly 20 years. Forte was 19-years old when he was charged with murder in a Washington, DC court. According to Wright, he was home from school on break when a birthday brawl took a turn for the worse and another boy wound up dead. "He did the time," says Wright. "I told him he has to go forward and repent for that."

Now 38-years old, Forte is set to be released on parole this August. In the two decades since he's been imprisoned, Wright has been among the only constants in her grandson's life. His mother died in 2006 and his father is paralyzed from a basketball accident. She's 86-years old, retired, blind and has "all kinds of illness," she says. When she was in better health, Wright would visit her grandson in prison. She traveled to see him after he was transferred from a DC-owned prison in Virginia to one in New Mexico, and then bounced around from Arizona to Ohio. He's now housed at the Allenwood Correctional Facility in White Dear, Pennsylvania. 

She's too fragile to make the four hour trip to visit her grandson in person, so she's only able to manage the trip twice a year. Between visits, they talk for about five minutes twice a week. But that contact comes at a steep price.

"It's terribly expensive," she says. "It's awful." In 2000, Wright, along with other families of prisoners, filed a class-action lawsuit against Corrections Corporation of America seeking federal action to get relief from what they considered exorbitant phone call charges. In 2007, after the case failed to end in a settlement, the petitioners filed another proposal that would put a limit on how much companies could charge prisoners and their families for phone calls, and eliminate costly connection fees. The Federal Communications Commission has yet to make a ruling on the proposal.

On Mother's Day, a campaign launched by a trio of media justice and prison reform groups aims to force the FCC's hand in the matter. The Center for Media Justice, along with Prison Legal News and Working Narratives, are leading an effort to get prison phone rates onto the FCC's legislative to-do list. Last week, the groups encouraged supporters to submit stories about their hardships communicating with loved ones in prison to then be turned over to the Commission in hopes that it will finally move toward regulating the private companies that oversee prison phone calls.

For the activists who are involved, it's an issue that falls clearly along racial lines. About 35 percent of prisoners are Latino and 37 percent are Black, according to March statistics from the Bureau of Prisoners. And many of them are poor. About 88 percent of people awaiting trial or serving time in jail had no income or made less than $1,200 a month, according to Bureau of Justice. While incarcerated, prisoners make only cents an hour. Because Forte doesn't have a livable income, Wright sends him $275 to help him out with basic expenses.

"Communities of color are most directly impacted by the high cost of prison phone calls," says Steven Renderos, national organizer with the Center for Media Justice. "What's at stake is not just the price of a phone call, it's the health and well being of our families and loved ones struggling to stay connected."

Prisoners can usually call home in two ways: they can call collect or use a debit card issued by the prison. Debit cards are usually the cheaper options, but they're not available in all states and still costly. In March, Wright's grandson didn't have enough money on his card for their usual phone calls, so they only spoke about three minutes one week, she says. That call cost $18, including taxes.

"He buys so many minutes and when his minutes run out, they cut off on you," says Wright.

The "they" in this case is Global Tel*Link, a private Alabama-based phone company contracted with Pennsylvania to provide prison phone services. Last year the company acquired three of its competitors and now contracts with over half of state prisons to provide phone services. In 2008, the company gave Pennsylvania over $7 million in additional state revenue. Over $82,000 of that revenue was generated by roughly 21,000 interstate calls like Forte's to his grandmother in Washington, DC. The practice is known widely as a "kickback", a percentage of the phone call profits collected by the state. The companies inflate the phone rates to cover the cost of the commission and still make a profit.

For years, states have contracted with private companies to provide telephone services through a typical bidding process administered through the state's Department of Corrections or, like in Pennsylvania, the Governor's Administration Office. In some states the public utilities commission approve of the final phone rates and commission. But in others like Maine, the Department of Corrections has no oversight from the commission, or any other agency on how it sets up the rates. Nationwide, only seven states and the District of Columbia have stopped accepting kickbacks - California, New Mexico, South Carolina, Nebraska, Michigan, Rhode Island and Missouri.

Because most state prisons are located far away from any metropolitan area, many prisoners pay long distance fees to stay in touch with family members and friends.

"Quite honestly I don't know anyone, middle class or not, who could afford the cost of these calls," says Nick Szuberla, a media artist with Working Narratives, a national multi-media social justice organization. "It's not even just because people are low-income. I don't think anyone could afford these calls."

Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections told Colorlines.com that the kickbacks are placed in their Inmate General Welfare Fund which is used to purchase items like weight lifting equipment, sports equipment, satellite radio, religious supplies and visiting room supplies. Before New York ended kickbacks in 2007, the Department of Corrections used the revenue to provide health services for prisoners living with HIV/AIDS. But health services are something that prisons are required to provide by law, and that fact was hammered home by activists in New York who led a successful campaign to end kickbacks and reduce prison phone rates back in 2007.

In order for inmates to successful re-integrate into society, it's crucial for them to maintain ties to their families while incarcerated, say advocates. A 2005 report by the Anne E. Casey Foundation found that prisoners' first and last resort for housing and support are their families. When prisoner's maintain contact with family during their incarceration, they're also less likely to return to prison, according to a report from the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center.

"A vast majority of those people are going to come back to the community," said Deborah Golden, an attorney with the D.C. Prisoners' Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee and counsel on the Wright case. "Every piece of research we have says that stronger family ties increase the odds that someone will have a successful reintegration."

Now, the focus on the FCC to finally act. But that's much easier said than done, according to some observers.

"Apparently, the biggest reason for the failure of the Commission to act in recent years is the lack of adequate interest and staffing," said Lee Petro, a volunteer attorney on the Wright case, in an email to Colorlines. "With the resolution of the other long-pending matters, the recent additions of two new Commissioners, and new technologies developed by the service providers that has decreased their costs of service, prompt action now will give relief to struggling families in these tough economic times."

Although the telecom industry is a strong influence in Washington, the campaign has already garnered the support of Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. In a recent speech at Catholic University, she asked the commission to review the languishing documents which "have significant implications for making phone service affordable for inmates and their families who are currently making unbelievable economic sacrifices in order to keep their families connected."

For Wright and her grandson, that connection has proved pivotal for nearly two decades. 

"He wants to be a counselor [when he gets out]," Wright says of her grandson. "He wants to go around and help people in jail."

Leticia Miranda is a writer and researcher at New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. 

Who knew that Manny Pacquiao’s toughest opponent wasn’t Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Timothy Bradley, but the entire lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) community?As far as gay-rights advocates are concerned, it’s a knockout.The consensus on the Net is that the Filipino boxing champion has... Bayani San Diego Jr. http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103

The "Manhood" poster series was created by artist, and San Francisco native, Deborah Enrile Lao as a way to inspire young Asian American boys and men. The series consists of screen printed posters of five iconic Asian American men--Richard Aoki, George Takei, Jeremy Lin, Bruce Lee and DJ Qbert. In Lao's artist statement, she writes:

This piece challenges the unkind, one dimensional portrait of Asian American men in mainstream Western media. By exuding strength, creativity, leadership and masculinity, these five icons buck characterizations of Asian American men as meek nerds who never get the girl (or guy). Bold paper colors and a minimal illustration style reclaims the one dimensional space into one that portrays these men as "superheroes" that young boys and men can aspire to be like.

I chatted with her on the phone to talk about her poster series and the inspiration behind them.

What inspired you to create these posters?

I had just finished an advanced screenprinting class which pushed me to explore and experiment with my personal ideas. I have a young brother--he was an inspiration behind creating the posters. I wondered about how the younger generation of Asian American boys would feel when they grow up, who do they have to look up to? So I came up with the "superhero" concept using primary colors and simple faceless outlines. I want people to be able to see themselves in these icons. The posters represent the ideals behind the people more than just the people themselves. And it started with Bruce Lee.

Why Bruce Lee?

A documentary about him was coming out when I was starting this project. When I was thinking of Asian American male sexuality and virility, Bruce Lee was the first person who came to mind. He was the first cross-over actor who appealed to both black and white audiences, and had international fans. 

Asian Americans are always the ones being made fun of, the butt of jokes in mainstream media, and Bruce Lee defies that stereotype. He was well-respected and no one messed with Bruce Lee. 

And the others?

I had a hard time thinking of men outside of Bruce Lee. So the purpose of the project was to think of men who had made an impact and remember them. I wanted to create positive portrats of Asian American men. Jeremy Lin seems to be "it" at the moment. He is really living his dream, yet humble, honest and seems really rooted. It's inspirational to see an Asian American male figure so accepted and revered who is just being himself. To me, he represents the idea of being yourself, living out your dream, and being respected. 

After Jeremy Lin, I did George Takei then Richard Aoki and lastly DJ Qbert. 

Why DJ Qbert?

I felt like the series needed a fifth person to make it more substantial. Hip-hop has been inclusive within the movement. When the Invisibl Skratch  Piklz came out, they were the first Asians in hip-hop. It didn't matter what race they were, what mattered was that they could really scratch. And the fact that Qbert is Filipino resonated with me since I'm Chinese-Filipino.

Now you see Asian American hip-hop groups like Far East Movement on MTV, and all these Asian American boys crews winning dance competitions. I feel DJ Qbert lead the way for Asians in hip-hop.

Do you think you will do more with this series? Possibly something with API women icons?

That's a possibility. I would like to have more representation of Pacific Islanders and  Southeast Asians. But I want the ideas to come organically, naturally, and use people who really resonate with me. I've been thinking of extending this to Asian American women such as Patsy Mink. While working on this, names of iconic API women kept coming up.

**************

(Below are the five posters in the series.)

Richard Aoki

George Takei

Jeremy Lin

Bruce Lee

DJ Qbert

According to a medical report obtained by ABC News, Trayvon Martin's murderer George Zimmerman was diagnosed with a "closed fracture" of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation.

The three page document compiled by Zimmerman's family physician could be used as evidence by his defense team.

ABC News describes more details of the medical report written the following day after Martin's death:

The record shows that Zimmerman also suffered bruising in the upper lip and cheek and lower back pain. The two lacerations on the back of his head, one of them nearly an inch long, the other about a quarter-inch long, were first revealed in photos obtained exclusively by ABC News last month.

But the report also shows Zimmerman declined hospitalization the night of the shooting, and then declined the advice of his doctor to make a follow-up appointment with an ear nose and throat doctor.

The news comes after local news sources in Florida report FBI investigators are actively questioning witnesses near the murder site seeking evidence for a possible federal hate crime charge.

Kelley Williams-Bolar is giving a speech in the dark. The Ohio mom is rattling off the standard remarks she's delivered in public appearances since being catapulted onto the national stage last year. It's an unseasonably warm day and the lights in the room are off, her face lit only by the glow of the computer screen in her father's home. The address on the door outside is the one she used on her now-famous falsified documents--the ones that landed her in jail for nine days for illegally enrolling her daughters in a neighboring public school district.

"First, I talk about how I received my indictments, and then I give the laundry list of stipulations for my probation," says Williams-Bolar, who is halfway through her two-year sentence. The 42-year-old single mother, with an otherwise spotless criminal record, is not allowed to drink, must submit to drug tests and reports monthly to a probation officer. She had to perform 80 hours of community service and pay $800 in restitution, as well as the cost of Summit County's prosecution against her.

"I had to do a DNA test and swab my cheek like I was a bank robber," Williams-Bolar says. She reaches for the letter outlining the terms of her probation. "I start with this everywhere I go, because I don't ever want this to happen to another parent."

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As she moves into the rest of her speech, her voice, already warm and friendly, slows into a smooth, practiced delivery. Her remarks are broad but forceful. She calls for an end to educational inequality and the policies that landed her in jail. She wants more choices for parents whose kids are stuck in under-performing or unsafe schools. In February, she announced the formation of the Ohio Parents Union, part of a growing national network dedicated to giving parents exactly that kind of power. In the past year, Kelley Williams-Bolar has morphed from a desperate mom to an impassioned activist at the center of one of the nation's most talked about shifts in education reform: the rapidly expanding role of parents in shaping dramatic overhauls of public schools.

Parents are no longer running just the bake sales and attending PTA meetings. All over the country, parents are joining--or being organized by--a movement that aims to spur more competition between schools and, ostensibly, better academic results for kids. Williams-Bolar, radicalized by her brush with the law, has joined the fray.

But as a mother, public school staffer, and now an activist, Williams-Bolar's ordeal is also a bracing case study of a system that treats high-quality education as a commodity to be earned and parceled out, instead of the public good it's commonly thought to be. In an era when more and more struggling school districts are turning to the private sector to solve their problems, the question everyone is grappling with now is basic: Can free market principles save public schools?

Tale of Two School Districts

Before her name became a fixture in the local newspaper, and before some activists declared her the "Rosa Parks of education," Kelley Williams-Bolar was a regular parent trying to look out for her daughters.

"I was just a mom," Williams-Bolar insists.

She works as a classroom aide for students with special needs in Akron Public Schools, and has been employed by the district on and off in some capacity since 1992. "From Asperger's to Downs to autism, we deal with it all," she says. She says that helping students with disabilities comes easy to her in part because her mom did similar work, and it seems true. She still spots students past and present in her neighborhood and tracks their progress. In the parking lot of an Applebee's, she stops a former student and they exchange warm hellos. "He's done well for himself, he's in college now," she says. She talks about their educational challenges and the progress that they worked to overcome. She rattles off their siblings' names. It's work she plainly enjoys.

Williams-Bolar did this work part-time for years, because she was married and in school herself part-time. But after getting divorced and moving into a home with the help of Akron's public housing authority, she had to begin looking for full-time work to support her daughters. That changed things in her life; suddenly, she wasn't around as often to mind her daughters, Kayla, then 13, and Jada, then 9.

It wasn't until someone broke into their home in 2006 that Williams-Bolar started considering other school options. No one was home when it happened, but it left her rattled. "I worried about their safety. I've got two girls and they're growing up. I couldn't have them walking home alone from school," Williams-Bolar said, careful not to indict Akron Public Schools, her employer. "I had taken care of my father, and he has taken care of me. I knew that he would be home to look after the girls."

Williams-Bolar insists she was motivated primarily by these safety concerns when she took her kids out of Akron schools, not by the district's poor academic performance. But the difference between its record and that of the Copley-Fairlawn School District, where her father's house is located, is stark.

For the 2010-2011 year, Akron Public Schools met state-prescribed performance goals on just five of 26 categories of performance--such as high school graduation rates and standardized testing scores for reading and math--while Copley-Fairlawn School District met all 26 of its state benchmarks. That same academic year, Akron Public Schools failed to meet its yearly goals for test score improvement, which are set by the federal No Child Left Behind law. It was the seventh consecutive year that the district failed.

In the fall of 2006, Williams-Bolar enrolled Kayla and Jada in Copley-Fairlawn, using her father's address. The district's enrollment forms are extensive. It does not have open enrollment; to go to school there a student must either reside within its borders or pay a $9,000 annual tuition. Williams-Bolar, who last year made $28,000, couldn't afford that kind of fee. So she listed her father's address on the forms. When it came time to renew her driver's license, she put down her father's address as her primary one. Eventually, she also listed her father's address with her credit union and with her employer. Her daughters were enrolled in the district for two school years, from 2006 through 2008.

By the time Williams-Bolar was indicted for this act, and later sentenced to 10 days in jail, her mug shot had been splashed across TV stations and newspapers for months. Her name would stay in the media for many weeks more as the nation erupted in shock over her case.

Williams-Bolar became a lightning rod for education reformers of all stripes. Petitions were set up by online organizing groups like Moms Rising and Color of Change, and together with one organized by a Massachusetts woman named Caitlin Lord garnered 180,000 signatures calling for Gov. John Kasich to pardon Williams-Bolar. The Taiwanese tabloid news animation group Next Media Animation even documented her story in one of their popular videos--something that Williams-Bolar is bemused by to this day. After being released from jail, she flew out to Los Angeles for a brutal taping of the Dr. Phil Show.

Williams-Bolar recounts all of this while sitting on the front stoop of her home more than a year later. Her life as a parent, and now an activist, is a far cry from the loud headlines her prosecution attracted. As she talks, she's interrupted by a neighbor who's amusing his toddler son by rolling his pickup truck in reverse, then neutral, then reverse, then neutral and back again. Together, they roll up and down the driveway, to the boy's unending delight. Williams-Bolar and the father chat a bit, and the child's silly, drooling grin is too precious to turn away from.

These days, say "Kelley Williams-Bolar" in Ohio and she represents a whole lot more than this affable neighbor. Most folks know who she is and at least a bit about her case, more if they have strong opinions about what she did for her daughters. Since being released from jail, she's tried to keep to herself. She says that her political activism has made her unpopular on her job, at Buchtel High School. Still, she moves with ease throughout her community. She is at home in Akron, but fighting to move past the memories of her case.

Williams-Bolar's attempt to ease her family from Akron to Copley came at precisely the wrong time. Copley-Fairlawn had been waging an aggressive war against parents who committed this kind of school residency fraud. The state consistently rates the district as "excellent," which is the second-highest evaluation among six possible ratings. That makes it a popular magnet for parents all over the county. To its administrators and many of its parents, people like Williams-Bolar are thieves, literally stealing their "excellent" schools.

Copley-Fairlawn deployed a range of tactics to root out illegal enrollments. Among other things, the district hired private investigators to track parents, which is a common move for school districts taking a hard line on enrollment. In San Francisco, administrators did a similar thing, and forced offending parents to pay the cost of the investigation. In Washington D.C., City Council Chairman Kwame Brown introduced a bill last year that would set up a hotline for parents to report commuters who drive in from out of state and drop their kids off at D.C. schools.

School residency fraud is common, but criminal prosecutions are rare. Still, when they happen, they tend to happen to people like Williams-Bolar. Last year Tanya McDowell, a Connecticut parent who also happened to be a poor black mom, was convicted of larceny for literally stealing her son's education when she enrolled him in a neighboring school district. "I just want to know: When does it become a crime to seek a better education for your child?" McDowell asked at the time, the Norwalk Patch reported.

School districts have answered by repeating a similar line: their coffers are only so deep, and because so much of public school funding comes from local property taxes, educating out-of-district students is an unfair burden for actual residents.

In 2008, Copley-Fairlawn stepped up its campaign by announcing a $100 bounty to anyone who turned in another family. Williams-Bolar remembers receiving a postcard in the mail announcing the reward to families throughout the district. "I guess it's not just me, then," Williams-Bolar recalls feeling. Plus, she was already deeply immersed in a process to make her daughters' enrollment legal.

But by the time the postcard arrived, the district had been investigating Williams-Bolar for some time. A private investigator assigned to tail her kept watch outside her Akron home for months, documenting her family's nights spent away from their father's Copley address.

A Marketplace of Reforms

This past March Williams-Bolar packed her probation letter and headed off to speak at a Connecticut school reform rally. It was to be her most high-profile event as a newly minted education reform activist. The event was aimed at parents advocating Gov. Daniel Malloy's reform agenda, which is rooted in a school choice model that deregulates public education, and it had drawn education reform celebrities. Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor who found national fame by carrying the mantle of aggressive school reform, was there. Gwen Samuel, founder of the Connecticut Parents Union, helped organize it.

Williams-Bolar remembers the rally only in hazy, nervous moments. "I had to talk to myself onstage. I said, 'Look. You're here for a reason. Get yourself over to the mic and say what you came to say.' " The Hartford Courant reported that around 75 people were in the crowd that day. "People told me afterward that I brought people to tears, and I was like, 'Did I?' I don't even remember seeing anyone in the crowd."

But not everyone has been moved to tears by the controversial Parent Union movement to which Willams-Bolar has lent her story and energy. She says one of her first and most surprising realizations as a new activist has been just how polarized the school reform debate is. "You think everything is for a common cause, but it's not. I was naïve about the conversation," she says.

The day the announcement of her new Ohio Parents' Union hit the local news was a hard one, she says. "The very next day at work, staff didn't talk to me," she recalled. "After the Parent Union was announced it didn't take a lot to realize some of them were opposing it."

The suite of school reform policies that dominate the mainstream discourse today, from school choice schemes and charter school expansion to teacher evaluation overhauls and the weakening of collective bargaining agreements, are fundamentally grounded in principles of market-based competition. Schools are products, teachers are laborers and students and parents are consumers.

In the case of vouchers, if parents are unhappy with the quality of the education at a school, they can pick up capital via their taxpayer dollars and move to an approved private school. In Ohio, that amounts to $4,250 annually for students from kindergarten to the eighth grade, and $5,000 per year for high school students who take part in the state's EdChoice program. Ohio's voucher system caps participation in the program at 60,000 students, but voucher advocates in the state point out that the program is at capacity. Parents are demanding still more options for their children.

Akron Public Schools received a "continuous improvement" designation in the Ohio state evaluations--the third from worst of six possible designations. As a result, it has been losing both students and the state money that comes with them to the voucher program. Four thousand of the district's 23,000 students now take part in the voucher program, and the district is set to forfeit more than $25 million in state aid this year alone--money that instead has gone to charter schools and private schools.

Some schools in the district are waging an aggressive marketing campaign to hold onto, or win back, families in the neighborhood. In the beginning of the year, Akron Public Schools sent out a 12-page brochure to parents who had removed their children to advertise the district's offerings, including open enrollment, which makes the district open to even students who don't live within its borders, and vocational programs and stable schools. Sending out the mailer, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, cost $6,000.

Williams-Bolar says she saw the symptoms of all this in staff meetings in Buchtel Public Schools, where administrators worried about the hemorrhaging of students encouraged staffers to think of the school as a business and to treat parents and students with outstanding customer service.

"I never thought of it that way," Williams-Bolar says, remembering sitting in a staff meeting perplexed at the idea. The thing is, Kelley Williams-Bolar, who went to ridiculous lengths to be an informed and aggressive education consumer, could well be the poster child for the problems with the paradigm.

The worry of many is that voucher programs and school choice schemes amount to the privatization of public schools. Public tax dollars are being siphoned away from institutions that have historically been considered a public good, and not a commodity. And, critics argue, even the most comprehensive research on vouchers and school choice schemes show that they don't lead to any meaningful gains in test scores.

Yet to parents fed up with the slow-moving bureaucracy of public schools, school choice schemes have an important narrative appeal. That fact is not lost on choice advocates, who have seized on parents as the new vanguard for pushing school choice, voucher and overhaul plans. The meme of parental empowerment has become a rallying cry, and wedge; who could be opposed to parental empowerment? But the role that some reformers imagine parents filling is narrowly defined, as are the intended reforms.

Privatization and competition in and of itself is not a problem, argues Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University. Outsourcing work that is "harnessed to public objectives" can often help public entities meet people's social needs, Henig says, and doesn't always come at the expense of the public good. But systemic privatization can lead to the long-term weakening of democracy when private entities operate without full transparency and outside of the full visibility of the public.

"Part of the problem is the simple notion of informed consumers as distinct from informed citizens," Henig said. "Both the government and private actors can impinge upon your sense of being able to control your life--most people need to be able to act in both realms, both as consumers and as citizens who act to exercise their rights within democratic institutions, to either create better schools or to more closely regulate private providers."

Williams-Bolar readily acknowledges that much of this hostile, increasingly arcane debate is new to her. "It's a bad issue. I wouldn't know how to even begin to solve it," she said one afternoon over iced tea. "But I do know we've got to stop blaming and get the ball rolling."

She knows as well that notions of democracy can be abstract ideas to parents who are fed up with their district schools. After pulling her daughters out of Copley schools, during her prosecution, Williams-Bolar enrolled her older daughter Kayla in a public high school and her younger daughter Jada in a private middle school, with the help of Ohio's EdChoice program. She's happy with the private school, and doesn't like the idea that any entity would limit her options.

"Akron Public Schools wants to keep us all here so we can suffer while they get it right," she said. "My daughters don't have a second chance at their education."

Winners and Losers

On Oct. 26, 2007, Williams-Bolar was called into a residency hearing with Copley-Fairlawn district staffers, who presented her with their evidence that she'd been stealing her daughters' public education. They offered her a set of options, each of which included significant costs. The one that seemed most feasible was for Williams-Bolar's father, Edward, to claim a Grandparent Power of Attorney, which is a legal designation that would name him as the girls' guardian for the purposes of their education. A week after the hearing, Williams-Bolar filed for the change in Ohio Juvenile Court. Soon thereafter, she started receiving invoices from Copley-Fairlawn, billing the family $850 a month each for Kayla and Jada. The family refused to pay these bills.

The Grandparent Power of Attorney was eventually denied in June of 2008, because Williams-Bolar's ex-husband didn't sign off on the agreement. Life can be messy that way. Still, she was confident she'd attempted to handle the situation in a legal manner. The official denial came just weeks before the school year ended, and she didn't enroll her daughters back in Copley-Fairlawn schools the following year.

Nonetheless, in October 2009, Williams-Bolar and her father were indicted for falsifying records.

"Kelley's point was she thought she was trying to get the Grandparent Power of Attorney," says her attorney David Singleton. "She didn't think she should pay tuition, which she couldn't afford anyway. She's not a wealthy person, which is beside the point."

Between 2005 and 2011, Copley-Fairlawn schools discovered 48 cases of school residency fraud; Williams-Bolar's was the only case that ever ended up in court. "Every family except Ms. Williams-Bolar agreed to either pay the non-resident tuition rate, move into the district or remove their children from the school," Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh said in a statement to Colorlines.com.

"Ms. Williams-Bolar repeatedly refused to cooperate for many months, thus her case was turned over to my office for prosecution," Walsh continued, underlining that falsifying information on government documents amounts to a felony offense. Walsh said she was compelled by the evidence. "Ms. Williams-Bolar refused the options presented to her that would have prevented felony charges."

The Copley-Fairlawn School District insists that its hands were tied as well. In an interview with Colorlines, Superintendent Brian Poe said the district went to great lengths to resolve the issue without legal action, but was forced to hand over evidence to Walsh's office.

Pinning down exactly who controlled the levers in Williams-Bolar's case is difficult, as everyone seemed interested in making her a household name. After the presiding judge Patricia Cosgrove handed down her sentence, she said she hoped Williams-Bolar's case would serve as an example to others. "I felt some punishment or deterrent was needed for other individuals who might think to defraud the various school districts," Cosgrove told ABC.

Cosgrove spoke an uneasy truth: prosecuting Kelley Williams-Bolar seemed like an easy way to warn off others. But not every family is as vulnerable as moms like Williams-Bolar and Tanya McDowell.

Take the case of Mark Ebner, a Columbus, Ohio, parent who illegally enrolled his children in a neighboring suburban school district. Williams-Bolar's attorney, Singleton, considers the case illustrative. The Ebner family's primary residence was a $1 million property just outside the suburban district's borders. When Ebner found out that private investigators were tailing him, the Columbus Dispatch reported, he arranged for a house swap with relatives inside the district--and then sued the district for spying on him. The same year that Williams-Bolar and her daughters were swallowed up by her court case, the Ebners were handily defeating the rules.

The point, Singleton said, is that school residency fraud--far from being limited to poor black parents--is an activity that parents of all classes engage in. But those with the financial means and social capital to finagle their way out of sticky situations escape the punishments and public shaming Williams-Bolar faced. Like in any marketplace, the more capital you have, the better you'll fare.

Williams-Bolar doesn't deny that she falsified the documents, and accepts full responsibility for what she did, but is also still confounded by the whole thing.

"They always treated [my family's homes] as his house or my house, his house or my house," Williams-Bolar said. "This is a family house. I help my father pay the bills, I help mow the lawn, I cook and clean for him. The girls have their own room here, I have my own room here."

In the economy of public education, though, it's less about squishy ideas of families and homes and more about concrete goods like houses and addresses.

"We have a community that has made it clear to us that they want to provide an education for students who live within our district boundaries," insists Superintendent Poe. He says that he was particularly disappointed in the way the case was handled by the media. "It was being portrayed as if we didn't care for the children. But we always sit down with families and are very open. We just want families to be forthright."

'I Turn No One Down'

Which is why advocates of parental power and choice all over the country are so compelled by Williams-Bolar's story. "There are hundreds, if not thousands of Kelley Williams-Bolars in Alabama," says Marcus Lundy, who works on workforce development and education reform issues in the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. "The intent is to try to get her to Birmingham to tell her story because her story is the story of many people who live in one area but are limited by their zip code into poor and underperforming schools."

Lundy wants Williams-Bolar to help advocate for HB 541, a hotly contested bill which would have authorized the creation of 20 charter schools in the state. It passed the Senate, but failed in the House in the waning days of the legislative session.

"If people take inventory of some of the maneuvering that parents have had to do historically to take advantage of the better school systems they would figure that there is no need to hide, to cheat, to lie, to stretch the truth when all they'd have to do is take advantage of parental choice or one educational option of what charter schools would allow," Lundy says. "And everything would be above the board."

Williams-Bolar is ready to lend her time to campaigns like Lundy's--and to any and everything that just may get the "ball rolling," as she put it. "I don't say no to anything," she says. "I turn no one down."

But her activism is something she has to juggle along with other basic struggles to keep her family afloat. Last week, Williams-Bolar's father, who Summit County also prosecuted, passed away in prison from complications related to a stroke he suffered in January. Williams spent much of his jail time hospitalized, and had just a month left in his yearlong prison sentence for unrelated fraud charges that arose during the fight with Copley schools.

In September of last year following an international outcry amplified by multiple groups' online organizing campaigns, Gov. John Kasich, who is a proponent of school choice and voucher schemes, went against the recommendations of the Summit County prosecutors and the Ohio parole board and reduced her convictions from felonies to misdemeanors.

In her father's living room, she keeps her pardon certificate in the center of the mantle. "I consider these my freedom papers," Williams-Bolar said. Prior to his passing away, she planned to move back in with him at his Copley Township home so she could be there to take care of him during his transition. Now with his passing, her plans are up in the air.

She still sees her future as an uncertain, but hopeful swath of new possibility. This month the family will celebrate Kayla's high school graduation. Jada, Williams-Bolar's younger daughter, is headed to a private high school next year and will qualify for tuition help from Ohio's voucher program. Williams-Bolar spent months preparing an application to the exclusive Catholic all-girls' school in Akron, and when the acceptance letter arrived she was decidedly happier than her daughter, who wanted to go to a co-ed high school. The tony girls school is tucked away on a verdant campus, and is a top-performing school. 

"I told her even one year here will help set you up for good things to come down the line," Williams-Bolar said. "I told her, 'You'll see.' "

If you think in-depth stories like this are important, please donate today to support Colorlines.com.

George Zimmerman, the volunteer neighborhood watchman from Florida charged in the killing of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin, could face federal hate crime charges, Orlando's WFTV reports.

FBI investigators are actively questioning witnesses in the retreat at the Twin Lakes neighborhood, seeking evidence for a possible federal hate crime charge.

If Zimmerman is convicted of the second-degree murder charge, he could face life in prison, but a hate crime charge could mean he would face the death penalty, WFTV reports.

WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said, "What the government would have to prove is that Mr. Zimmerman acted out of hatred toward African Americans. That's why he came into contact with him. That's why he shot and killed him."

Philadelphia's public school system is on the brink of insolvency, and the city has no choice but to dismantle what's left of its public education system and hand over schools to private operators, according to school district leaders. But it turns out the quickest way to bring the wrath of an outraged public raining down on a city is to propose the wholesale privatization of a school district, Philadelphia has found out in recent weeks.

The beleaguered school district's proposed plan to dramatically overhaul the city's school system by shutting down 64 schools in the next five years has sparked a continuous stream of bitter anger from parents, educators, students and activists since it was announced on April 24. The debate has forced the district to back off its compressed timeline. But for Philadelphia students, and education watchers around the country, the announcement from Philadelphia fit a yearslong trend decades in the making. In an era of public divestment in education and against a backdrop of a seemingly unending economic recession, more and more school districts are turning to privatization as a solution to their economic woes. While plenty of money is changing hands, students are not the ones reaping the benefits of these plans, community advocates argue.

Under the "Blueprint for Transforming Philadelphia's Public Schools" (PDF), 40 schools will be set for closure in the coming year, and the city's central office will be slashed in half. The remaining schools will be distributed among so-called "achievement networks," which would be responsible for roughly 25 schools apiece. The system will bring efficiency to the struggling school district, said the district's Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen, a former gas industry executive.

"What we do know through lots of history and evidence and practice is that the current reform structure doesn't work, said Pedro Ramos, the chairman of Philadelphia's School Reform Commission, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. "It's not fiscally sustainable and it doesn't produce high quality schools for all kids."

Indeed, the district is facing a $312 million budget shortfall for the next school year alone. The budget shortfall has been years in the making; the district has been struggling for years financially, and the situation was exacerbated by poor fiscal management from prior school administrations. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett slashed the state K-12 education budget by $550 million last year.

But dealing with the fiscal issue by dramatically remaking the school system is not the way to deal with the issue, say activists. The issue has reignited a longstanding debate in Philadelphia, a city well-accustomed with being the guinea pig for plenty of fads in school reform for the last 30 years. Families, lawmakers and reformers are grappling with the question: can the private sector save public education?

For some activists, the answer is a definitive no. "[Knudsen] has zero experience in public education," said Helen Gym, a founder of the Philadelphia-based activist group Parents United for Public Education. "We were promised someone who was going to bring efficiency to Philadelphia schools but instead he decided to play God and exploit a crisis to completely restructure the schools." To Gym, and many education activists, the financial crisis is too convenient an excuse to force the overhaul of the school system when the state should take more responsibility for the school district.

"This isn't a financial plan at all," Gym said.

Others put it more gently. "No one would debate that there are financial problems in the district, said Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, the pastor of Mother Bethel AME Church, which has joined together with a coalition of faith-based groups to voice concerns about the plan. "But is it so bad that the only answer is to shutter 64 schools and remove the remaining 20 percent to charter schools?"

"We've already privatized the prison system, and now it seems we're going to turn over to corporations the responsibility of educating America's children," Tyler said.

"Is this the dissolution of urban public schools? Is this treating schools as a commodity?" said James Lytle, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. "Are we essentially saying that if you're poor and of color, you're out of luck?"

Treating Schools Like Stocks

Philadelphia is not alone in its aggressive shift toward privatization. Cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans and Cleveland have experimented with different iterations of what, in school reform parlance, is called a "portfolio management" model. The model envisions schools and teachers as either effective or ineffective, and calls for schools to be treated like stocks in an investment portfolio whereby low-performing schools get jettisoned and effective schools get expanded and replicated. While portfolio management looks different from city to city, it generally calls for the decentralization of a school district and the deregulation of public education more broadly so that outside operators can take over the lowest-performing schools. Theoretically, students in schools that are slated for closure can move to better ones, and the competition between networks and schools is supposed to foster positive growth among everyone.

But it turns out that schools do not behave quite like stocks, experts say. "It's a pretty shaky analogy, because it's not always so easy in real life," said Katrina Bulkley, a professor of educational leadership at Montclair State University.

School closures cause a great deal of upheaval into students' lives, said Alycia Duncan, a tenth grader at West Philadelphia High School. Duncan's active with the Philadelphia Student Union, a youth organizing group that's fought back against the proposed plan. Asking students to leave a school, even a low-performing one, and go to one across town, where there may be territorial conflict, and where students are unfamiliar with a new school, distracts students from their schoolwork, she said. "It takes time to get used to staff members if you need help or you need recommendations. You need to know who you can go to," Duncan said. "Especially if you have problems at home, you need someone you can trust and talk to so you can focus on your schooling."

Under the proposed plan, Philadelphia would shut down 40 of its underutilized or low-performing school sites, and another six schools would close every year until 2017, when 40 percent of the district's current 146,000 students would be enrolled in charter schools.

Not only is shutting down low-performing schools a disruptive and politically fraught task, Bulkley said, but figuring out how to replicate the successes of one school in another site remains a stubborn challenge to education reformers. "From a research perspective we don't have a clear sense that you can take a school that is doing well and duplicate it with the same results and sustain that over time," she said, noting that in the last decade some groups in Philadelphia had had successes with transferring strong structures to other schools. Yet every school has its own unique quirks and educational culture.

"Nobody has figured out how to clone the principal," said Bulkley.

Does Privatization Work?

Experts say the jury's still out on whether portfolio management models actually lead to any academic gains for students. Indeed, researchers from Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based educational research group, say that based on the available research, there's no conclusive evidence that portfolio management models lead to measurable academic gains. Philadelphia has already tried the model, in fact. Ten years ago the state took control of Philadelphia schools, dismantling the publicly elected nine-member school board and creating a five-person School Reform Commission which first hired a CEO, then handed over dozens of schools to private corporations, non-profits and local universities for management. It was the largest experiment with private management of public schools. That push toward privatization did not lead to any measurable improvements in academic performance for Philadelphia students, Research for Action found.

And yet, school reformers and politicians around the country continue to turn to the model as a way to better their schools. Public frustration and fatigue with traditionally managed public schools and seemingly recalcitrant public institutions has created the political space for a surge of privately managed schools. Indeed, in 2008 just eight cities were using a version of the portfolio management model. As of last year, it was up to two dozen, according to Research for Action.

The model has been aggressively pushed by venture philanthropists like the Gates Foundation, which fund pilot programs and research, and are also involved in policymaking and talent development from the district level all the way up the the federal Department of Education. "Part of what's changed is the amount of high profile support for privatization and the charterization led by the Gates foundation and the Walton Family Foundation," said Lytle. "Particularly with Gates, there is the symbolic notion that if Gates supports it it must be good."

Portfolio management has become a popular tactic for states with big cities which, like Philadelphia, have high concentrations of poor kids and families of color. Philadelphia has 249 public schools, and 198 of them serve free lunch to the entire school--the rates of those who are eligible for free or reduced lunch are used as a proxy for poverty measures. Of Philadelphia's 146,000 students, a full 56 percent of them are black. And as it is, 25 percent of the city's schoolkids are enrolled in charter schools.

"For [portfolio management] to work, in this theoretical perfect world, everyone needs complete access to what their choices are and there need to be strong accountability systems in place," said Stephanie Levin, Research for Action's associate director. "Even if you've got all that it presumes that kids will get into schools they think are best match for them, and that hasn't happened in Philadelphia in recent history."

The mandate for communities is clear, advocates and researchers alike said. People need to organize themselves to speak up about the proposed plan, and keep up the public pressure to demand the changes they want to see in the plan. At hastily planned town hall meetings organized by faith and education groups and at community forums hosted by the school district, community members have been turning out in droves to protest the plan.

Duncan, the high school student, plans on taking part in upcoming community forums to voice her concerns. "My main question is: What if this all fails? What are they going to do then?"

On May 4 The Washington Post published what Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo called an "alarming -- and darkly ironic" story stating voter registrations have dropped for African-Americans and Latino Americans. WaPo reporter Krissah Thompson wrote in her lead:

"The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign in an election that could turn on the participation of minority voters."

By some accounts, it was true. Census numbers, which measured between the 2008 presidential and the 2010 mid-term elections, showed that the number of African-American registered voters had fallen from about 17.3 million to about 16.1 million nationally. But the Obama campaign and a number of academics disputed The Post's conclusion that Obama might be in trouble, instead saying the Census's methodology is flawed and that voter registration among African Americans and Latino Americans is actually up.

It's hard to tell which way is up when there have been so many laws passed recently mandating voters show ID cards, closing early voting periods, placing booby-trapped restrictions on voter registration groups and changing residency requirements for voter eligibility -- not to mention legacy felony disenfranchisement. Conservative advocates like Hans von Spakovsky have attempted to argue that voter ID laws actually help black and brown voter participation, though using flawed methodology.

So while there may have been a few hanging chads in The Post's report, does that change the reality that registering and turning out voters of color is more difficult now than it was in elections past? If the critics of The Post story are correct, then are people like von Spakovsky right?

The most glaring issue with The Post's story was that the reporter Thompson used Census Bureau voting data that stopped at November 2010. University of California Irvine professor Marty Wattenberg challenged the Census figures by comparing 2008 and 2012 elections figures in Florida and found that Latino-American registration increased by 9 percent. For Asian Americans, the increase was 14 percent. Further, Wattenberg told Hasen (and confirmed with me by email) that as recently as 2006, Republicans outnumbered Democrats among Hispanics, but by 2012 the reverse was true.

George Mason University professor Michael P. McDonald attacked the very DNA of the Census figures, saying that the Current Population Survey (CPS), upon which Census voter data is compiled, is flawed for relying on self-reporting from a single person in a household. Further, wrote McDonald, the Census Bureau classifies persons who gave no response -- because they refused, didn't know the answer or just failed to provide one -- as a "No" response on voting. Meaning, if a CPS rep called your house and your dad answered, if your father didn't know whether you voted or not then the CPS interviewer recorded his answer as a "no" you did not vote, whether you did or not.

Even more, wrote McDonald:

"There are troubling problems with the CPS in recent elections. Compared to 2004, the 2008 CPS turnout rate declined by 0.2 percentage points when the actual turnout rate increased -- and there is no way that it could have possibly declined since the increase in voters exceeded the increase in the voting-eligible population. Compared to 2006, the 2010 CPS turnout rate declined by 2.3 percentage points when again the actual turnout rate increased."

Finally, the Obama campaign, perhaps a bit sensitive around the edges, was quick to swat down the WaPo story. Clo Ewing, the campaign's director of constituency press, pointed out the aforementioned discrepancies in a May 7 blog saying WaPo "inaccurately claimed" dropping black and brown voter registration numbers, and that "There are more Americans of both backgrounds registered to vote today than there were when President Obama was elected."

Ewing's blog read like LeBron swinging on the rim after a dunk ("In yo' face, WaPo!"), but just days before the Obama campaign was less celebratory: "It is disheartening to see voting becoming harder in states across the country ... and doing the challenging work of registering voters, even when Republican legislation is trying to make it more difficult."

Thompson stood by her reporting when asked about the objections, telling me, "Studies by the Pew Research Center show that most Americans do not register to vote until 60 or 30 days before an election. According to the measure, the 2010 data remains a valid barometer. If you look at the relative drop in voter registration between presidential and mid-term elections, you will find the drop between 2008 and 2010 is steeper. You will also see that 2010 is the first time the growth of registered Hispanic voters has dropped by any significant measure."

That may be so, but even the Census's own press release led with the following observation: "Hispanics made up 7 percent of voters in the 2010 congressional election, the highest percentage for a non-presidential election since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting this information in 1974. Hispanics comprised 6 percent of voters in 2006. Blacks also increased their share of the electorate, going from 11 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2010."

There may be disagreement about the numbers used, but there's at least one things we all should agree on: The takeaway on African- and Latino-American voter registration is more complex than The Post's story suggested, but that doesn't mean that things will be any easier for black and brown voters in 2012.

Let's look at Florida, using figures through 2012 rather than the 2010 Census cutoff. The 2012 figures show 1,474,577 total African Americans registered to vote, up from 1,468,682 in 2008. For Latino Floridians, there are 1,473,920 registered, up from 1,355,270 in 2008.

However, when you separate by party, that's where you see some drops. Registered black Democrats dropped from 1,227,970 in 2008 to 1,222,639 in 2012. This is not a steep drop -- a little over 5,000 voters -- and probably explained by deaths, purges (due to voter inactivity, felony convictions, errors, ... FRAUD!), and maybe some defections to the Tea Party (Rep. Allen West does reach some people!). Meanwhile, there was a similar-sized drop in registered black Floridian Republicans between 2008 (62,906) and 2012 (58,759). Latino Democrats and Republicans buck that trend though with increases in registrations.

If Florida is any indication, it's not enough to look at the overall numbers of black and brown voters registered and say that Obama is screwed. But neither should one look at the instances where black and Latino voter registration have increased and start doing Jerry Springer-"It's not my baby!" dances.

The real truth is in what Thompson originally reported from the Obama campaign, which is that registering voters will be challenging especially in the face of new legislation that restricts voting rights. Florida's new voting law, passed last year, is like a carrier for a lot of bad voting diseases: a rule requiring third-party voter registration groups to register with the state and turnover new registration applications to the county within 48 hours, down from 10 days prior to the new law; a rule cancelling out early voting on the Sunday before Election Day, which was when black churches transported voters during "Souls to the Polls" campaign; and a rule making it harder to restore ex-felons' voting rights.

The Obama campaign is smart enough to know that they are up for a big fight in major states with restrictive voting laws, which is why they've sent battalions to states like Florida, where The New York Times reported that since May 2011, "81,471 fewer Floridians have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 presidential election." Black and Latino voter registration rates might be off the charts, but it's probably not a good look to present that in ways that make new voter laws look harmless.

Jose Barahona says that he would have been killed had he refused to open his door when the armed guerillas occupying his town demanded he let them use his kitchen and sleep on his floor. He says that's what happened to his father. Dead. And he says it was because of the fear of death during the war raging between the FMLN guerillas and the Salvadoran government that at the age of 24, with his new wife and baby boy, he left his Salvadoran mountain village and came to the United States where the couple would have two more children and where he'd spend the next two and half decades. He thought he'd left all the violence behind.

Twenty six years after that departure, on March 22nd 2011, now 51-year-old Barahona was shuttled from a Virginia immigration detention center to an immigration court where he listened in astonishment as a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security argued that when he opened the door all those years ago for the armed Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front guerillas, he'd acted in support of terrorism. He "provid[ed] material support for a group engaged in terrorist activities," the Department of Homeland Security attorney said. And then Barahona listened as the judge ordered his deportation to El Salvador.

Barahona, who will appear in a federal appeals court on Tuesday to challenge the immigration court's ruling, has found himself the target of the government's reaching application of counter-terrorism laws to compel the deportation or exclusion of immigrants and asylum seekers. Using laws meant to stop people who would do the country harm from entering or staying in the United States, Barahona and an unknown number of others who pose no threat to the country are treated as terrorists on the grounds that they'd provided "material support" to terrorist organizations. The laws often flip reality on its head, casting the terrorism appellation far beyond a reasonable scope and treating victims as victimizers, the terrorized as terrorists.

A Widely Cast Net

For most of the last 27 years, Barahona lived in the United States as a documented immigrant. He was granted permission to stay in the county in the late 1980's when he applied for Temporary Protected Status, a kind of immigration relief available to people from designated countries to which a return would pose a safety risk. For years he worked in the construction business, as a carpenter, and in restaurants, supporting his children, who are now in their 20s. In 2010, things turned for the worse for Barahona when he lost his authorization to stay in the country after he was convicted of a misdemeanor. Without permission to work, he fell on hard times, was cited for domestic violence, separated from his wife and after he was ticketed for trespassing by Prince William County, Virginia cops he found himself detained in an federal immigration jail facing deportation proceedings.

Barahona applied for relief from deportation under the NACARA law, which created a pathway to legal residency for asylum seekers from eligible countries including El Salvador. His case should have been a strong one. He'd lived in the US for two and half decades and the judge agreed that Barahona showed "good moral character" and that his deportation would cause him and his family significant hardship.

But the government's attorney was not having it. She arrived in court committed to Barahona's expulsion from the United States and she pulled no punches. To Barahona's astonishment, the attorney argued that his interactions half a lifetime ago with the FMLN guerillas "rises to the level of material support" for terrorism and that he was therefore ineligible to remain in the country.

A decade after September 11, 2001, the government is continuing to wield it's broad counterterrorism powers against people who pose no threat. Material support laws have led to the prosecution of people alleged to have the most negligible connections to groups designated as terrorist organizations, the criminalization of human rights groups that have engaged with designated terrorist groups and to the intentional circumvention of the justice system when no crime has occurred but the government nonetheless seeks punishment.

In the context of immigration and asylum, material support laws have had major implications for non-citizens applying to enter or for the right to stay in the United States.

In the 1990's, Congress added specific provisions to immigration law that barred anyone who provided "material support" to a terrorist group from gaining lawful immigration status. Material support was defined broadly-- providing a "safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other material financial benefit, false documentation or identification, weapons." The laws were meant to be applied to people who posed a real threat to the United States. But after September 11, 2001 the legal landscape changed when Congress vastly expanded the kinds of groups and activities treated as material support.

"2001 is the watershed year," according to Anwen Hughes, an attorney with the group Human Rights First and an expert on the material support bars in immigration and asylum law. She explained that the PATRIOT Act, the behemoth counter-terrorism law passed by Congress just six weeks after September 11, 2001 changed everything. "At that point, Congress swept a whole new range of organizations into this terrorist category," she said.

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The PATRIOT Act and a set of other laws passed several years later including the Real ID Act of 2005 changed the rules so that people who'd had even a remote association with a group construed as a terrorist organization became a material supporter of terrorism. And the law was applied to people who acted under duress.

"By 2004," said Hughes, "we started seeing cases where DHS implemented the material support bar systematically, applying it to everyone--people who were coerced." Medical providers who'd cared for wounded insurgent soldiers were denied their asylum claims. Child soldiers who were forcefully conscripted, Iraqis who in the 90's battled Saddam Hussain with the express support of the United States, Cubans who resisted the Castro government and countless others were denied asylum, relief from deportation or a green card.

The ironies in the application of the laws are endless.

At almost exactly the same hour of the same March day that the immigration judge told Barahona that he was to be deported because of his previous involvement with the FMLN under force, President Barack Obama was in El Salvador where he was visiting Mauricio Funes, the new Salvadoran President who hails from the FMLN political party.

Unused Discretion

In the March decision, the immigration judge in Barahona's case explained that his hands were tied by the Department of Homeland Security's seemingly arbitrary use of the material support bar.

"I want to make it clear," said the judge, "were it not for this material support issues I would have found the respondent meets the criteria of relief under ... NACARA."

In other words, the judge would have allowed Barahona to stay in the United States and to become a permanent resident were in not for the government's claim that he'd acted in support of a terrorist group. The judge admonished federal immigration authorities to change course.

"I would urge whoever is making the decisions, Department of Homeland Security, to allow the duress exception."

Asylum seekers and immigrants like Barahona whose cases have been viewed favorably by immigration courts are then put into legal limbo when the Department of Homeland Security asserts their past activity amounts to material support. Data released to advocates who attended a Department of Homeland Security meeting in March shows that as of the end of February, over 4,600 people had their immigration cases on hold, awaiting a decision from immigration authorities on whether they'll be eligible for an exemption to the material support bar.

Barahona is represented in court by the immigration clinic at the University of the District of Columbia law school. Kristina Campbell, the director the clinic, says that if Barahona did not have legal support, he'd already have been deported. The clinic appealed the immigration court's decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the appellate authority in the immigration system. In September, the Board agreed with the lower court that he must be deported as long as the government's material support bar remained.

Anwen Hughes says the use of the material support bar in a case like Barahona's reflects little more than the impulse on the part of "Federal agencies... to retain as much power as they can."

"Immigrants in this dynamic are collateral damage and causalities of a desire of the government to have very broad enforcement powers," says Hughes.

Congress provided federal immigration authorities vast discretion to exempt from the material support bar anyone who acted against their will but without an express exemption the courts are bound. In 2007, in response to outcry from advocates, the federal government did begin issuing exemptions in some cases where people acted under duress and against their will. But according to Hughes, "the discretionary process continues not to reach a lot of applicants."

"Though the statute gives broad authority to Secretary of Homeland Security to give discretionary exemptions to anyone who did not voluntarily have connections, it's not always applied. You would think that involvement under duress with the FLMN" would fit the bill for an exemption.

According to Campbell there is no way for those pegged with a material support bar to formally appeal to the Department of Homeland Security for an exemption. "I don't really know who makes the decision about who gets an exemption," she said. "The process is arbitrary and capricious."

Two months ago, on March 22nd, exactly one year to the day that the immigration judge first ordered Barahona deported on material support grounds, the Department of Homeland Security's Terrorism Related Inadmissibility Grounds Working Group, which apparently makes discretionary decisions about the material support bar, sent Barahona a letter. It reaffirmed that his interactions with the FMLN guerillas amounted to material support and there would be no duress exemption.

"Although we have determined that you provided this material support under duress," the letter read, the government has "determined it will not exercise favorable discretion in considering your case."

What's To Come

Barahona will appear today in the 4th circuit federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia where a panel of judges will hear arguments in his case.

Kristina Campbell plans to argue in court that what Barahona did cannot be construed as material support for terrorism, but that even if it could, the court should find that because her client had no choice in helping the FMLN, the bar should not be applied. If argument prevails, the decision could have significant implications for the breadth of the government's power to use the material support bar. If Barahona loses and the government gets its way, the case could help cement the government's ability to widely cast the material support bar in immigration cases.

The government's unyielding insistence on Barahona's deportation raises a set of questions about the possible misuse of the material support bar.

Campbell suspects that the working group charged with material support decisions denied Barahona an exemption because of his earlier misdemeanor convictions. "My clients crime was extremely minor," she said, "but the attorney wants him gone." What a few misdemeanor offenses have to do with support for terrorism is unclear.

Questions about the department of Homeland Security's use of discretionary power have been on the front burner of immigration debates recently. Memos from the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement instruct immigration agents and attorneys to consider dismissing deportation for immigrations who are clearly eligible to gain lawful status in the United States. Though Barahona initially faced deportation proceedings only because of his undocumented immigration status and the immigration judge was clear that were it not for the material support bar he'd be on his way to legal residency, federal officials have continued to pursue his deportation.

"They don't want to concede anything on my client," said Campbell. "The government's position is that any conduct makes you inadmissible on the material support grounds."

At the close of his March 2011 hearing, Jose Barahona asked the judge if he could say one last thing.

"We didn't lend our kitchen to the guerillas. I mean, we were forced to do that. ... We had no choice."

Sympathetically, the judge responded, "Sir, I clearly understand that."

The federal government seems not to care.

The extensive media coverage of Afghan women over the past few years has brought devastating stories: Gulnaz, the woman who was raped, impregnated and imprisoned for it; Sahar Gul, the young bride tortured by her husband and in-laws for refusing... Fariba Nawa http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103

Editor's Note: Cervical cancer is the second-most common form of cancer among women worldwide. In Los Angeles, according to the LA County Health Department, Latinas have the highest rates of cervical cancer. Maria Luisa Arredondo, editor of Latino California and... María Luisa Arredondo, Translated by Elena Shore http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103

Teenagers in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley can dance to anything – even two songs at the same time. Last week, Silicon Valley De Bug paid a visit to La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a community-organizing powerhouse created in... Raj Jayadev http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103

California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, formally introduced a revised version of AB 1081, the TRUST Act, to reform California's participation in the controversial Secure Communities program. Under Secure Communities, police are required to share fingerprint data of anyone they... New America Media http://publisher.namx.org/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=19&id=103

Potential DREAM Act beneficiaries and the government watchdog group Common Cause have joined as plaintiffs to sue the U.S. Senate for blocking DREAM Act legislation with the filibuster rule. The 52-page complaint argues that the filibuster allows senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population to prevent votes in the Senate.

"Most Americans have lost confidence in Congress and its ability to act in the best interest of the American public," Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause said in a statement. "They have good reason. Congress is mired in gridlock as partisan factions put political advantage over the national interest. Requiring 60 votes to do anything in the Senate is a big part of the problem. It creates a disincentive to compromise, and allows powerful special interests to call the shots behind closed doors."

Representing the plaintiffs is attorney Emmet Bondurant of Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore. The National Law Journal named Bondurant one of the top ten trial lawyers in the United States. He has litigated critical civil rights and constitutional law cases over his career.

Below are more details on the DREAMers involved in the lawsuit, via a press release by Common Cause:

Plaintiffs in the case also include members of Congress and three promising young people whose future in America is being held hostage because of the filibuster of the DREAM Act.

Congressional plaintiffs include U.S. Reps John Lewis, D-GA., Michael Michaud, D-ME., Hank Johnson, D-GA, and Keith Ellison, D-MN, all of whom have seen legislation they sponsored win overwhelming bipartisan support in the House only to be denied debate and a vote in the Senate because of the filibuster.

Plaintiffs Erika Andiola, Ceasar Vargas and Celso Mireles were brought as children to the U.S. from Mexico by their parents. Each earned a college degree with honors and would be on track to become a U.S. citizen under an immigration reform measure, the DREAM Act. Passed in the House of Representatives, and supported by a majority of Senators, the DREAM Act was killed when just 41 senators refused to end the filibuster blocking it.

Details on this case are emerging. Colorlines.com will bring you more information as it becomes available.

Newsweek Magazine isn't going let TIME Magazine steal all the headlines with controversial covers. Last week's TIME mag cover included an image of a mother breast feeding her son, now Newsweek's cover includes an image of President Obama with a rainbow halo above his head with the headline "The First Gay President."

The cover story is said to focus on President Obama's recent shift on gay marriage.

"Obama's earned every stripe in this haloed rainbow," Newsweek's editor-in-chief Tina Brown wrote on Twitter.

The cover story was written by openly gay Newsweek contributor Andrew Sullivan. Newsweek has released an excerpt in which Sullivan argues the president's move to support same-sex marriage was not just a political ploy.

"When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work," Sullivan writes.

Sullivan goes on to draw comparisons between Obama's growing up in a white household and the experience of gays who grow up in heterosexual families.

"He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family," Sullivan writes.

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On Monday, rapper Jay-Z told CNN's Poppy Harlow he supports gay marriage.

When asked what he thought about President Obama's recent endorsement of same-sex marriages, the hip-hop superstar said: "I've always thought it as something that was still holding the country back. What people do in their own homes is their business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That's their business. It's no different than discriminating against blacks. It's discrimination, plain and simple."

When asked if he thought Obama's comments would hurt his re-election campaign, Jay-Z said, "I think it's the right thing to do. It's not about votes. It's about people. It's the right thing to do as a human being."

In the interview Jay-Z also admitted to being unfamiliar with Romney, and said he did not "want to talk about the man."

An openly gay Indianapolis teen who made national headlines last week for bringing a stun gun to school to ward of bullies was attacked at a local mall Friday.

Darnell "Dynasty" Young, 17, says he was expelled because he fired a stun gun in the air to ward off bullies that were physically and emotionally abusive. Young's mother told Anderson Cooper last week she gave her son the stun gun after school officials repeatedly ignored her request to protect her son.

The teen's alleged attacker, Khyran R. Delay, 34, has been charged with battery.

Indianapolis' IndyStar.com with more details:

According to court documents, Delay told mall security officers that he recognized 17-year-old Darnell "Dynasty" Young from news coverage of his story and tried to talk to Young about it. He said Young got in his face and that he pushed Young.

But Young and Donald Richardson, a janitor who witnessed the incident, told police that when Young walked past Delay's table in the food court, Delay told Young to get away from him and used homophobic slurs. They said that Delay pushed Young and then hit him in the face, according to court documents. Richardson said he radioed for mall security, and then Delay came toward him because he was mad that Richardson had called security. Security officers arrived and detained Delay.

The IndyStar reports Young's supporters have organized a rally to raise awareness about bullying Tuesday night before an Indianapolis Public Schools school board meeting.

Despite opposition from the governors of New York and Massachusetts, federal immigration authorities are moving forward to implement Secure Communities in both states.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials e-mailed police and state leaders to inform them the controversial federal program that checks the immigration status of anyone booked in local and county jails would be activated "in all remaining jurisdictions" Tuesday.

Initially, ICE told localities and states that Secure Communities would be optional but then backpedaled and is now on track to implement finger print-based deportation program in every county in the country by next year.

"In many ways, tomorrow's activation is just more of the same--Secure Communities has been expanding to new states for four years and the states are just the lastest additions. But the states, especially New York, have huge immigrant populations, and so large numbers of people are likely to be deported once the government flicks the on-switch tomorrow," said Colorlines.com's investigative reporter Seth Freed Wessler.

Wessler points out New York City already has a relationship with ICE when non-citizens are arrested, but by implementing the Secure Communities program, the path from booking to detention will be streamlined and more people with even lower level charges are likely to be deported as a result. "It's well documented that the NYPD engaged in systemic practices of racial targeting in its stop and frisk program. The Secure Communities program will now feed on arrests from this profiling," Wessler said.