Migrant workers who flocked to New Orleans to rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina were routinely cheated out of wages and faced other abuses while the U.S. Department of Labor made little effort to police the contractors employing them, a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney told a House subcommittee today.
Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center testified on June 7 before the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor about the widespread abuse of foreign guest workers, who are systematically cheated out of wages and denied the most basic protections of the marketplace, such as the right to change jobs.
For the second time, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance program has won the highest honor from the Association of Educational Publishers.
The shackling of teenage girls at a Mississippi juvenile prison has shocked state officials and prompted calls for immediate closure of the facility. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) attorneys first exposed the incident in a letter demanding that officials investigate and immediately rectify abuses, unsafe conditions and violations of federal law at Columbia Training School, the state's juvenile prison for girls.
Before the Subcommittees on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security and on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives
June 12, 2007
Testifying before two House Judiciary subcommittees today, Center President Richard Cohen urged legislators to put their full weight behind a bill that would enhance the ability of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI to investigate and prosecute civil rights-era slayings.
On his first day of kindergarten, Lavonta Anderson was asked if he knew his address. When he said that he did not, his teacher pulled out a paddle and hit him repeatedly.
In an ongoing campaign against exploitation of migrant workers, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a class action against one of the Southeast's largest employers of foreign guestworkers.
Even as a shaky legislative agreement on immigration reform is debated in the halls of Congress, poisonous and untrue propaganda continues to leak into the national dialogue on undocumented migration to the United States.
Lou Dobbs' anti-immigration tirades have made him a darling of nativist and white supremacist groups.
