Watching the war on terror.

Gonzales: What Racial Bias?

The media buzz over Alberto Gonzales' confirmation as Attorney General mostly focused on the lovely pairing of his racial identity and political orientation. Criticism focused on his Abu Ghraib torture memos and other dismissals of international law. But what impact has Gonzales' legal work had on people of color in the United States?

From 1995 to 1997, Gonzales was legal counsel to then Governor George W. Bush during the first few years of Bush's death penalty spree--he approved 57 executions. More than half of those ended the lives of people of color: 21 blacks, four Latinos, two Asian Americans and one Native American, according to data from the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. Of course, it comes as no surprise that more than 80 percent of those executed had white victims, and a significant number of the people of color executed had at some point been accused of sexual violence.

In each case, Gonzales was responsible for preparing a memo to help Bush decide whether or not to approve the execution. Alan Berlow, a freelance journalist who obtained the memos, has written that Gonzales "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." Such ineffective counsel included one black defendant's lawyer who literally slept through much of the trial's jury selection.

At the time of his confirmation hearings, Gonzales said he was not very familiar with racial bias in death penalty matters.

More Cash for the Prison Industry

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, passed last December, excluded a provision to severely restrict the access immigrants might have to drivers' licenses but kept another provision to double the number of agents on border patrol. What fewer media outlets picked up on was the legislation's call to expand detention facilities by at least 8,000 beds annually between 2006 and 2010. Should the cash be approved, the number of detention beds would double from just over 20,000 to around 40,000, according to Elizabeth Llorente, a reporter with the Bergen Record. But this didn't start with the war on terror.

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Prior to the 1996 Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, there were about 4,000 immigrants imprisoned in detention centers each day. Today, there are some 22,000, according to the online news source ZNet. To keep growing today, the private prison industry needs more beds, people and lives to warehouse.

And with the Intelligence Reform Act, industry giants are already drooling to get in on the action. This includes Corrections Corporation of America, the single largest private prison and detention center operator in the country. It holds contracts to operate over 64 facilities, or 70,000 beds. In a 2004 year-end financial review, president and CEO John Ferguson reflected that, "as we enter 2005, we continue to see a positive operating environment," citing the Intelligence Bill and Bush administration's push for "alternative means to government funding of prison construction."

Just When It Couldn't Get Worse

Recent battles from the Intelligence Reform Act--drivers' license provisions in particular--were resurrected in the REAL ID Act, which the House passed in February. At that time, Traci Hong, director for policy at the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, said she was not optimistic about the bill dying in the Senate.

As passed in the House, REAL ID would severely limit immigrants' access to drivers' licenses by imposing federal regulations; give the Secretary of Homeland Security the right to waive laws in order to build more fences along the borders; and empower bounty hunters and bail bondsmen to pursue, arrest, detain--or surrender--immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security if they are thought to be "flight risks."

REAL ID would severely limit opportunities for asylum from persecution and relief from deportation; limit habeas corpus review for the first time since the Civil War; and allow for deportations to happen before their judicial review is over.

Venessa Huang is an organizer, writer and Ethnic Studies student at Brown University.