Over at Women of Color Blog, BFP outlines a scheme advanced by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to require an I.D. check for all evacuees as they return to their homes in the aftermath of the fires.  Not surprisingly, this inspection is linked to the border patrol/ICE policy and is resulting in many victims of the disaster being slated for deportation:

-Sheriff Kolender, who typically says the Sheriff’s Department does not have the resources to do the federal government’s job of immigration enforcement, has refused to drop his policy of nonetheless helping Border Patrol when identifying potentially undocumented persons despite the tremendous demands on the Sheriff’s Department and the highly unusual practice of setting up military-style checkpoints outside people’s neighborhoods.

- Sheriff Kolender also dismissed advice that people who are undocumented will be afraid to return to family and residences in the area due to the Sheriff’s checkpoints and policy of cooperating with Border Patrol.

I find this interesting because she compares the policy to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the right to return home for those displaced who were livin in public housing, as outlined in this entry at New Orleans: One Year On:

With tens of thousands of public housing residents displaced and dispersed by Katrina, HANO (The Housing Authority of New Orleans) and HUD (The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development) have spent over a million dollars boarding up units that were barely flooded and hiring security personnel and guard dogs to keep the legal inhabitants out. The Housing Secretary recently announced that 5,000 units would be destroyed, accelerating a gutting of the area's affordable housing stock that began years before Katrina.

Being made of brick (instead of wood, which is riven with mould after flooding), most of the housing units were left relatively undamaged after the waters rose. In many cases, the putrid swamp that enveloped the city barely reached the ground floor. So why the forced closures at a time when New Orleans is supposed to be encouraging and welcoming its scattered citizens back home? Some city officials argue that with only sporadic incidicences of residents returning to the developments the authorities cannot devote the basic services and amenities required to serve people in all areas of the city - it's hard to organise healthcare, schooling and waste collection to regions of the city where there are only isolated pockets of inhabitants.

The policies undertaken by law enforcement and developers in these regions of natural disasters, in my opinion, is part of a general scheme to displace the poor and minority property owners and renters.  The backlash against social programs designed to help people obtain affordable housing, combined with the expected pitfalls of subprime mortgage lending, have placed us in a crisis of vulnerable populations losing the small allowances of economic power and self-determination they've had.   Without aggressive organization of community advocates, racial awareness and support organizations, and political advocacy groups in Washington and at the state levels, we stand to lose more than we will gain as the demographics in both of these areas begin to shift. 

What do you think?