How can anyone, particularly a union (AFSCME) that represents workers, “appreciate Janet Napolitano’s years of public service and congratulate her on becoming the next President of the University of California?”

Under Napolitano’s policies, we have had dozens of immigration work-place and residential raids by ICE and the Border Patrol in the work-place, in people’s homes, and in the streets.

Under Napolitano’s immigration policies, close to 400,000 deportations have occurred nationally on a yearly basis.

Under Napolitano, locally, we have seen the use of the 287G and Secure Communities programs where local law enforcement officers are carrying out the screening of people, that should be the work of federal officers. Under the pretext that these policies are meant to arrest hard core criminals, the policies have led to arbitrary arrests for minor offenses and violated the due process rights of both citizens and non-citizens.

Under Napolitano, we have seen the expansion of E-Verify — an existing program of employee immigration-status verification that has been criticized for using a database that contains thousands of errors and has led to as many as 19,000 people – of 6.4 million checked – that have been mistakenly identified as being deportable.

— Rather than putting an end to these discriminatory policies, Napolitano has been consistent in calling for these programs, especially Secure Communities, to be expanded to every one of the nation’s 3,100 state and local jails — although these programs have been shown to be fundamentally flawed, incompetently administered, and prone to target, not only immigrants, but Latino citizens.