Thomas E. Perez, asst. attorney general for Justice’s Civil Rights Div. speaking before the hard left American Constitution Society
This time, the lawsuit is against Phoenix area Maricopa Community Colleges for (if you can believe this) requiring noncitizens to provide their green cards before they could be hired for jobs.
No I’m not making this up.
This is from The Washington Post, okay?
The Justice Department filed another lawsuit against immigration practices by Arizona authorities, saying Monday that a network of community colleges acted illegally in requiring noncitizens to provide their green cards before they could be hired for jobs.
The suit against the Phoenix area Maricopa Community Colleges was filed less than two months after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R) over the state’s new immigration law. It also comes as the department is investigating Joe Arpaio, the sheriff in Maricopa County, who is known for tough immigration enforcement.
In Monday’s lawsuit, Justice officials said the colleges discriminated against nearly 250 noncitizen job applicants by mandating that they fill out more documents than required by law to prove their eligibility to work. That violated the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, the department said.
The law’s anti-discrimination provision “makes it unlawful to treat authorized workers differently during the hiring process based on their citizenship status,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
He said the government “is acting now to remedy this pattern or practice of discrimination.”
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The government is asking a judge within the Justice Department unit to order the Maricopa colleges to pay a civil penalty of $1,100 for each of the 247 non-U.S.-citizen job applicants it says were required to produce the additional documents. It says the colleges ended the practice in January.
As Doug Ross notes, this lawsuit will intimidate employers into more permissive hiring practices:
A quarter of a million dollar fine will definitely have employers thinking twice about checking job candidates’ bonafides. And that is the intent.
And it’s but one step among many.
Keep reading. Among other things, the Justice Dept is investigating Joe Arpaio for enforcing immigration laws.
Up is down, black is white, night is day…I’m not sure how much more of this the country can take.
Byron York filed this report on Thomas E. Perez, few weeks ago:
There’s no doubt Tom Perez is hopping a lot these days. Of all the transformations that have taken place in the Obama administration, perhaps none is so radical as that within the Civil Rights Division. Under Perez, it is bigger, richer and more aggressive than ever, with a far more expansive view of its authority than at any time in recent history.
Perez is playing a leading role in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s new immigration law. He is promising a huge increase in prosecution of alleged hate crimes. He vows to use “disparate impact theory” to pursue discrimination cases where there is no intent to discriminate but a difference in results, such as in test scores or mortgage lending, that Perez wants to change. He is even considering a crackdown on Web sites on the theory that the Internet is a “public accommodation” as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
To do all this, Perez has come up with some novel ideas. For example, in a recent lending discrimination case, he forced the defendant — who settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing — to pay not only the alleged victims but to funnel $1 million to unrelated “qualified organizations” to conduct social programs.
In 2008 Perez worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and then served on the transition team after Obama’s electoral victory. On March 31, 2009, President Obama nominated Perez to be Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRD). The U.S. Senate confirmed Perez in October 2009. Perez stated that, by his reckoning, CRD’s mission was to help those Americans who were “living in the shadows” – a reference not only to illegal aliens, but also to “our Muslim-American brothers and sisters subject to post-9/11 backlash”; “communities of color disproportionately affected by the subprime meltdown”; “LGBT brothers and sisters … forced to confront discrimination”; and “all too many children lacking quality education.”Once he began his post with the Obama administration, Perez pledged to greatly expand DOJ’s prosecution of alleged hate crimes, which he depicts as a predominantly white-on-black phenomenon. Perez also made it clear that he would view “disparate impact” — such as when a company makes its promotion decisions based on exams where whites as a group score higher than blacks — as prima facie proof of discrimination.
In Perez’s view, compensatory payments to plaintiffs who win judgments in civil-rights cases should not go only to the actual victims of discrimination, but additionally to “qualified organization[s]” approved by the Justice Department. Such a policy enables DOJ to funnel cash into the coffers of activist groups that share the presidential administration’s political agendas.
In 2009, Perez and CRD pressured several universities to discontinue an experimental program whereby students could purchase their textbooks in digital formats which they could read via the Amazon Kindle. Perez complained that the Kindle was not yet fully accessible to blind students; i.e., while the device’s text-to-voice feature permitted the visually impaired to hear the content of their books spoken aloud, its menu options were not available in an audible format and thus required the user to be able to see. Until the Kindle rectified this injustice, said Perez, universities that made their textbooks available on the e-reader would be investigated for possible violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Perez has emphasized CRD’s “critical work” of “monitoring federal, state, and local elections across the country to ensure that voting takes place free of unlawful intimidation.” But in June 2010, J. Christian Adams, a five-year DOJ veteran, resigned to protest the “corrupt nature” of DOJ’s dismissal of a case involving two Philadelphia-based members of the New Black Panther Party who had intimidated white voters with racial slurs and threats of violence on Election Day, 2008. Adams cited Thomas Perrelli (the Associate Attorney General) and Thomas Perez as the two DOJ officials most responsible for dropping the case. In July 2010, Adams gave damning public testimony about how Perez and other Obama DOJ officials believed that “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.”
Also in 2010, Perez and CRD led the fight against an Arizona bill deputizing state police to check the immigration status of any criminal suspects who they believed might be in the U.S. illegally.
On April 20, 2010, Perez, who views discrimination as a widespread problem in the U.S., testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He identified “fair housing and fair lending enforcement” as “a top priority” for CRD; cited his commitment to eradicating the “discriminatory practices” that had resulted in “discrimination against African American borrowers”; boasted that CRD’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section had already initiated 215 matters (including 46 lawsuits and 42 consent decrees) during the Obama administration; trumpeted the fact that in the first year of Obama’s presidency, CRD had filed a record number of employment-related lawsuits; contended, falsely, that women were not compensated equitably for their work in relation to men; announced his intent to “hol[d] law-enforcement accountable” for “discriminatory police practices … and excessive use of force”; and pledged “vigorous enforcement of the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act.”
See also:
Van Helsing, RWN: Amnesty Is Already Happening
Our leftist rulers are starting to figure out that they can’t impose their radical agenda openly without paying a heavy political price, as they will for ham-fistedly seizing control of the healthcare industry. This is why their major initiatives are now imposed in the shadows, by faceless bureaucrats rather than legislation. Granting amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens might cause open revolt. A safer approach is to quietly implement de facto amnesty.