By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California and Axel Caballero, Cuéntame

Where would you expect to find half-a-dozen patrol cars on New Year’s Eve? In Bakersfield, California, ranked in the highest ten percent of the most violent cities in America, you’d hope they’d be responding to incidents of violence and preventing murder, rape, and other violent crime. At the very least, you’d expect them to be patrolling for drunk drivers.

Not so. At least not when it comes to prioritizing such matters as “barking dogs.” On December 31, 2012, the Kern County Sheriff’s Department deployed six police cars and numerous officers at the behest of a white resident who called for help from, well, the sounds of two small barking dogs. Her neighbor, Ruth Montaño, a Latina farm-worker, and her three American children owned the dogs.

As Ruth poignantly describes in her own words, when she and her children returned to their trailer around 10pm that night from the grocery store, officers approached her and began shouting and cursing at her. They said they were responding to a neighbor’s complaint that her two small dogs were being noisy. Her dogs, a Chihuahua and a Shih Tzu, were enclosed in a fenced-in area outside her trailer. But when Ruth asked the officers what the dogs had done, they refused to answer. When she offered to put the dogs inside, they ignored her.

Instead, the officers questioned her about how long she had been in the United States and insulted her for not speaking English well. They called her and her children garbage and threatened to arrest her. When she pled with them to tell her why they were interrogating her, they again refused to say, growing even more hostile and agitated, and aggressively placing her under arrest. As they walked her over to the patrol car, her children cried and pled for them not to take their mommy. One officer violently bashed Ruth’s head into the side of the patrol car, before forcing her into the vehicle.

The dogs, meanwhile, remained outside, untouched. Barking.

The officers claim that they arrested Ruth for “having animals making excessive noise” and for resisting arrest. But, under Kern County law, “having animals making excessive noise” is neither an arrestable offense, nor is it within the authority of the Sheriff’s Department to investigate – rather it is an issue for Animal Control.

Ruth believes she was arrested for one sole reason: racism. We think she’s right. If not, what’s one other plausible explanation for what happened to her? Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high in places like Bakersfield, and law enforcement officers often target Latino residents. Officers know that all they have to do is make an arrest – whether lawful or not – to turn any suspected “illegal immigrant” from today’s contributing resident into tomorrow’s deportee.

This is because under the federal government’s disastrous Secure Communities (“S-Comm”) program every person who is arrested is immediately screened and identified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) for possible deportation, regardless of their charges.

Dragnet federal immigration enforcement programs, like S-Comm, increasingly are to blame for abusive and unlawful police conduct that target Latinos, violate their civil rights, and undermine public safety. The program encourages police to take action based on race, language, and perceived immigration status – knowing that any arrest could lead to deportation – rather than doing their jobs to ferret out threats to public safety.

Stories like Ruth’s only reinforce the urgent need for California to finally adopt the TRUST Act, a bill that would ensure that the police can no longer detain for ICE people like Ruth who have done no harm to our communities. And it demonstrates the need for Congress to pass common-sense immigration reform to ensure that residents like Ruth are put on a road to citizenship, not a highway to family separation.

Ruth still faces deportation. Do your part and tell ICE to take her out of deportation proceedings. Call (202) 732-3000.

On the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision on Arizona anti-immigrant law SB1070, we need now more than ever, to stand together and send a strong & united message: In this country – We Are All “Illegals”!

The decision, while hopeful in some areas, leaves a huge gap – one in which allows for the discrimination, persecution on profiling of our community. The underlying problem is that as a culture we have defined immigrants as “illegal” entities.

We use the word often, spreading it in every day life – in the media, in our conversations. We have to move away from this frame of mind. Actions are “illegal”, human beings ARE NOT!

This is why Cuéntame partnered with Outernational, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Residente of Calle 13, Pop/Latin Producer Thom Russo as well as video & photo submissions from over 100 fans worldwide to produce a powerful, creative and important music video.

This release highlights the absurdity and obsolescence of the very notion of human beings deemed “illegal” in the year 2012.

The video highlights the obscenity in this day an age on our attitudes about the border, and a system that criminalizes those who create the wealth it rests upon. It penalizes immigrants, locks them up and make a profit.

Furthermore, it uses our community as scapegoats for personal and machiavellian political agendas. This electoral cycle is an opportunity to put an end to it once and for all.

Miles Solay, the lead singer for Outernational best puts it when he says, “See that border ain’t sacred or chosen, the land we stand on, every inch of it stolen, how obscene that there’s people ‘illegal’, vilified survival, the journey is lethal.”

The release f this video also comes behind the backdrop of President Obama’s “administrative relief” for young undocumented Americans, a recognition of the immense contribution of these brave AMERICANS.

It is against the backdrop of heightened drama around issues of immigration, race, and class that Cuéntame makes it clear that we stand alongside and in solidarity with undocumented peoples and say, “Todos Somos Ilegales/We Are All Illegals.”