Guatemalan Confused as Mexican, Confirms Theory That All Latinos Look the Same
Now come on. I know we’re all hotter than you, but why you gotta make us the Asians of the brown world?
Man mistaken for felon can sue the state
The California high court rules for a legal resident who was jailed by L.A. County and threatened with deportation.SAN FRANCISCO — A man who was mistaken for a deported felon and held in a Los Angeles County jail for 25 days may sue the state for negligence, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday.
Rejecting lower court rulings, the state high court said Lenin Freud Perez-Torres, 35, may sue on the grounds that authorities knew or should have known they had the wrong man.
Perez-Torres was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in April 2000. Two months later, immigration agents and a parole agent burst into his home at 7 a.m. and threw him in jail for parole violation and possible deportation because a state database identified him as another man — Lenin Salgado Torres, a parolee deported to Mexico two years earlier.
“He is sitting in jail and they are threatening him with deportation to Mexico,” said Perez-Torres’ lawyer, Robert Mann.
Perez-Torres is not Mexican. He is Guatemalan. He came to the U.S. in 1988 and was a legal resident and factory worker, his lawyer said. State prison records also revealed that Perez-Torres was 4 inches shorter (ahem…it’s happened before) and 40 pounds lighter than the man authorities thought they had captured.
When a state parole agent began doubting the man’s identity, an immigration agent assured him that a photograph of Salgado Torres confirmed they had arrested the right man, the court said. Perez-Torres also saw that photograph. “That is not me,” he protested.
It was not until Perez-Torres’ wife retained a lawyer that the parole agent asked for a fingerprint comparison, the court said. The comparison revealed the mistake, and the state dropped its case against Perez-Torres. But the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to release him for five more days.
“If they cared one iota, they could have fingerprinted him and compared his fingerprints to the guy they thought he was when he was arrested,” Mann said.
I know, I know. It’s really really hard to tell us apart. Well, white people, when Rodolfo gets his way, we can wear a golden taco, pupusa or tostón to tell us all apart. Vale?
Themocracy
With a family background that’s Puerto Rican and Peruvian, I just don’t know what to wear!
I might just stick with pastelas. Love to grind that yautia.
Off topic:
Did you see how the owner of the mine employs immigrant labor to work those unsafe mines? My coblogger Phoenix Woman caught it, though I’m not saying she’s the first. It’s just the first place I saw it.
I don’t know if it’s dcoumented labor or not, but but if it’s undocumented labor, it’s probably another nice case study in corrupt businesses using labor with no rights to compete with others to keep people from organizing, and keep everybody down.
This feeds the Lou Dobbs movement to pit working class whites into a nativist frenzy against immigrants, dividing and conquering potential progressive allies.
What do you think?
Yeah, we actually blogged about that too here:
http://redbloguera.net/hispanicaucus/?p=498
cool. thanks, I missed that!
[...] Ah well it’s a good thing that Latinos don’t have to deal with that crap. We take our bleach internally! In comfortable daily doses of Destilando Amor! Oh wait, I forgot, we’re already white because we’re all straight descendants from La Reina Isabel, which explains why we all look the same… but if we all have the same single descendant it also kind of implies that we are sleeping with our relatives…which is gross… Oh wow, we can’t wait until Telemundo makes a telenovela out of that! For now, though, we’ll settle for what comes out of their brand new material. A young woman with big city dreams who was really just rich and didn’t know it because her aunt wanted Villarraigosa for her daughter. [...]
[...] Oh wait! And the prosecutor appears to be Latino or Italian or Spanish or whatever. All brown people look the same anyway. Self defense argued in hunter’s trial [...]
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.