re: #476 Rancher

Founded in 1968 in San Antonio, Texas, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is the leading nonprofit Latino litigation, advocacy and educational outreach institution in the United States.
MALDEF’s mission is to foster sound public policies, laws and programs to safeguard the civil rights of the 45 million Latinos living in the United States and to empower the Latino community to fully participate in our society.

MEXICAN AMERICAN LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND (MALDEF)

MALDEF favors the issuance of drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. While acknowledging that this confers de facto citizenship and rewards lawbreaking, the organization nonetheless maintains that the measure is necessary to prevent “discrimination” against immigrants. In MALDEF’s view, biases against minority immigrants pervade virtually every aspect of American life, as expressed in MALDEF’s denunciation of the “customary practice of workplace discrimination” against Latinos.

Trumpeting the value of immigrants who currently reside in the U.S. in violation of immigration law, MALDEF states that America’s “failed immigration policy … has resulted in a complete lack of legal recognition of millions of immigrants who are the backbone of the U.S. economy … doing the jobs that U.S. citizens and residents do not want.” On the basis of these purported contributions to American society, MALDEF has exhorted Congress “to consider legalization” for all “undocumented persons living and working here in the U.S.”

Education is another focus of MALDEF’s activism. The organization has repeatedly filed lawsuits aimed at forcing states to mandate bilingual education in public schools, and has sought to suppress successful ballot initiatives — such as California Proposition 227 and Arizona’s Proposition 203 — to ban bilingual education. After California voters passed Proposition 227 in 1998, MALDEF, along with the ACLU, filed for a temporary restraining order to keep the state’s largest school district from implementing the will of the voters. MALDEF has also waged a prolonged legal battle to lower educational standards to accommodate Latinos.