Audio By Carbonatix
About a dozen or so activists protested an American Bar Association conference at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio resort in north Phoenix, demanding that the participants walk out of the conference and join the nationwide boycott of Arizona over SB 1070.
Organized in part by Linda Brown of the Arizona Advocacy Network, the group was blocked from entering the main conference room by Pointe Hilton staff, but the demonstrators did manage to make attending lawyers run the gauntlet as they handed out fliers and sang an animated version of the 1970s Village People hit Y.M.C.A., with lyrics that got their point across.
Here’s a sampling:
Lawyers! Why are you here ?
I said…Lawyers! Arizona loves fear!
I said…Lawyers. You should boycott AZ
Because ra—cist laws are cra—–zy
Save for one incident where an attendee was apparently hit
inadvertently by a protester who threw fliers into the door of the
conference room, the demonstration was peaceful and disbanded as soon
as a Phoenix police detective showed up to shoo demonstrators away.
The ABA’s Equal Justice Conference
is an annual event wherein lawyers discuss the “delivery of legal
services to the poor and low-income individuals in need of legal
assistance,” according to the ABA’s Web site.
Though the
conference was planned at least a year in advance, it has been dogged
by controversy since Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law.
The co-sponsor of the event, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association officially withdrew from the conference May 5,
citing its opposition to SB 1070, which encourages local cops to
enforce federal immigration law and check the status of those they
suspect of being undocumented during any stop, detention or arrest.
According
to a spokesman for the ABA, some 265 persons canceled their plans to be
at the conference, leaving about 500 lawyers still attending the three
day event.
“I had a lot of friends and colleagues who decided not to come,” said Karen Grisez, a lawyer with the D.C. firm Fried, Frank, et al.,
who’s also Chairwoman of the ABA’s commission on immigration. “Or on
the NLADA side, to pull out. I don’t condemn people for making the
decision not to come, but for us to come here – aside from all the
logistical difficulties of canceling so close — the ABA was in a
position where it couldn’t readily move this conference to another
location
“For a lot of the groups that attend this is their premier
annual training event. They plan their calendars, clear their schedules and
budget their training expenses to be here. A lot of those people were clamoring
to go forward.”
Grisez said she helped the ABA retool the conference’s program to address immigration issues. As a result, the conference now features a
presentation on SB 1070 by the Tucson-based Border Action Network.
But protest organizer Linda Brown was having none of it. She said the ABA was warned they would be protested if they didn’t withdraw. And she said the conference planners had the option of doing an Internet-based
Webinar, if finding a new location was too difficult.
“We can’t
give a pass to one organization while all these others are taking a
hit,” said Brown. “They clearly don’t understand the depth of the
seriousness here. If they had done a Webinar, it would have generated a
lot of respect.”
Brown said it was disingenuous of the ABA not to
cancel the conference. She also asserted that the ABA’s membership had
been lobbying the leadership to ax the Pointe Hilton event.
“It shows a real level of cluelessness,” Brown said of ABA’s decision to go foward.
Interestingly, the keynote speaker for the conference was Los Angeles Times
reporter Sonia Nazario, who gave a slideshow presentation based on her
reporting for what eventually became the best-selling book Enrique’s Journey,
which charts the journey of a young Honduran boy traveling north
through Mexico in an attempt to join his mother in the United States.
Ironically,
Nazario was giving her address even as the activists demonstrated
outside. She was booked to give the keynote speech before the
controversy ensued.
Grisez told me she was opposed to Arizona’s
new “papers please” law and said she believed the legislation was
unconstitutional. She also stated she thought the law had a good chance
of being stopped by a preliminary injunction before it goes into effect in late July.
The ABA’s President Carolyn Lamm has issued a statement on the ABA’s Web site condemning the law as “draconian” and based on “prejudice and fear.” Lamm is scheduled to speak Friday at the ABA’s awards luncheon.
