Caudle Immigration Blog

Deportation plans could split up married lesbian couple in Vermont

2011-12-22T13:22:00.000-08:00

MONTPELIER, Vt. — Frances Herbert and her wife, Takako Ueda, were looking forward to the New Year’s Eve family concert at the Baptist Church, the town fireworks on the pond and then a night at home to celebrate the arrival of 2012.

But federal immigration authorities have told Ueda she needs to leave the United States for her native Japan by Dec. 31, a move that would split up a couple who have been together more than a decade and were married under Vermont law in April.

Camille Mackler's Photo Conversation

2011-12-22T12:05:00.000-08:00

Immigration Attorney, Camille Mackler has a unique way of communicating the issues surrounding immigration. As the 2012 elections are nearing, Camille has began to use pictures to highlight current immigration debates as well as the history in immigration throughout the United States. "I hope these images will put a human face on the issue and remind us all what immigration means to this country. My hope is that by having a conversation through images we can finally communicate in a meaningful way and remember what is at stake."

Follow her blog at http://www.immigrationinpictures.com/

Federal Probe Finds Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Office Violated Rights of Latinos

2011-12-16T17:17:00.002-08:00

According to the civil rights report by the United States Department of Justice, Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latino’s and that the agency’s immigration policies treat Latinos as if they are all in the country illegally.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio along with his office, known as MCSO, is under federal investigation for racial profiling and discrimination. Sheriff Arpaio denies the racial profiling allegations and believes that individuals who are stopped by deputies are done so because there is enough probable cause to believe they have committed crimes. The Justice Department disagree with Sheriff Arpaio’s and MCSO’S policies. “Arpaio’s own actions have helped nurture [a] culture of bias.”

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2011/12/15/federal-probe-find-arizona-sheriff-arpaio-consistently-violated-rights-latinos/#ixzz1gkZErNzO

Alice Clapman Explores the Consequences for Noncitizen Defendants Facing Removal Proceedings

2011-12-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

Padilla v. Kentucky was a major victory for immigrants because the United States Supreme Court issued a decision that requires counsel to inform their non-citizen clients of any immigration consequences that would result from pleading guilty.

Jose Padilla was arrested in 2001 after authorities discovered more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana in his truck. Originally from Honduras, Padilla was afraid that pleading guilty would revoke his legal permanent residency in the United States and have him deported, but his attorney advised him otherwise. Padilla agreed to plead guilty; however, his plea made it certain that he would be deported once he completed his time served.

The Kentucky Supreme Court believed that Padilla’s Sixth Amendment right was not violated because they felt that his lawyer provided him with effective assistance. Advice about deportation was a “collateral” consequence, which the court did not consider to be required information disclosed to Padilla. The United States Supreme Court disagreed with the Kentucky Supreme Court, reversing and remanding the lower court's decision. “Constitutionally competent counsel would have advised him that his conviction for drug distribution made him subject to automatic deportation.” The United States Supreme Court issued a decision that requires counsel to inform their non-citizen clients about immigration consequences that would result post conviction.

While Padilla was viewed as a major development for immigrants, many challenges still exist for non-citizens within the United States Criminal Justice System. Immigration deportation has arisen within the last few decades because non-citizens have lacked the benefit of counsel. Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Alice Clapman, has recently written the article, Petty Offenses, Drastic Consequences: Toward a Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel for Noncitizen Defendants Facing Deportation, exploring the decision from Padilla and how it can be used to protect non-citizens with misdemeanors that cause immigration consequences.

Advocacy Organizations Welcome DHS Policy Change Regarding NSEERS

2011-04-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

Advocacy Organizations Welcome DHS Policy Change Regarding NSEERS

Washington, DC | www.adc.org | April 27, 2011 - The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), along with the Arab American Institute (AAI), the National Immigration Forum (NIF) and the Rights Working Group (RWG), welcome the decision by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to modify the National Security Entry Exit Registration System (NSEERS). According to DHS through a notice published in the Federal Register, effective tomorrow, nationals and citizens of countries currently subject to NSEERS are no longer required to register. Read the notice

The NSEERS program was a counter-productive response in the wake of September 11, 2001, and required certain non-immigrants to register at ports of entry and local immigration offices; this process entailed fingerprints, photographs and lengthy questioning. One controversial aspect of the NSEERS program was a “domestic call-in” component that solicited registrations from more than 80,000 males who were inside the United States on temporary visas from predominantly Arab, South Asian, or Muslim-majority countries. The specific parameters of NSEERS revealed it to be a system that was a clear example of profiling: discriminatory, arbitrary, and, as DHS itself has stated, an ineffective national security measure.

DHS has notified key stakeholders about the delisting of countries from the NSEERS regulations, and suggested that individuals residing in the U.S. and facing removal or a denial of immigration benefits because of NSEERS will be addressed on a case-by-case basis. The groups look forward to working with DHS to ensure that favorable discretion is exercised toward individuals facing immigration consequences because of an NSEERS-related issue. It is critical that DHS view this rule as a starting point for granting relief retroactively for those affected by NSEERS. Ultimately, these groups believe that NSEERS must be repealed in its entirety.

Organizational Contacts:

Mr. Abed A. Ayoub, ADC

202-244-2990 | aayoub@adc.org

Mr. Omar Tewfik, AAI

202-429-9210 | otewfik@aaiusa.org

Mr. Martine Apodaca, NIF

202-347-0040 | mapodaca@immigrationforum.org

Ms. Pryia Murthy, SAALT

301-270-1855 | pryia@saalt.org

Ms. Samera Hafiz, RWG

202-551-3309 | shafiz@rightsworkinggroup.org

Ms. Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Esq., Penn State Law Center for Immigrants' Rights

814-865-3823 | ssw11@psu.edu

ON MEETING THE YOUNG DAUGHTER OF THE MAN TRYING TO DEPORT ME

2011-04-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

"I was invited, along with my friend Gaby Pacheco, to speak to 5th graders at the Georgetown Day School about the DREAM Act. I almost did not go but I can’t really say no to talking to young kids. Of course, I’m terrified of it as well — it isn’t anything I’ve ever done. Then again, I’ve never taken on the U.S. government either so I figure it cannot be that hard." (...)

Washington Senate Votes Down Driver's License Ban for Undocumented Immigrants

2011-03-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

A bill restricting access to driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants and to stop identification fraud was voted down Monday in Washington's state senate. The Republican backed motion to bring a vote on the bill resulted in a defeat, dealing a major blow to proponents of the measure.

In a procedural motion, Republicans asked the Senate to consider the bill, which had not been brought to the floor by Democrats, who hold the majority and control over which bills get a vote.

Obama's DOMA Turnaround Prompts New Strategy in Immigration Battle

2011-03-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Immigration advocates are seizing upon President Obama's decision not the defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and his conclusion that all laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation should be presumed unconstitutional, opening up a new front in the twenty-year battle for immigration equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Angry Arizona, Again

2011-02-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

Many states are doing urgent business: jobs, the economy, broken budgets. Arizona’s legislators are trying to give government new powers to strip away individual rights, to extend immigration enforcement into schools, public housing, hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Texas bill to make hiring illegal workers a felony

2011-02-25T13:01:00.001-08:00

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas bill that would make it a state felony to knowingly hire an illegal immigrant, unless the person is a domestic worker, has faced some opposition from critics who say it would crack down on businesses while allowing households to use such workers.

Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Houston, authored the bill that would penalize those who knowingly or recklessly hire or contract with an undocumented worker. But jobs like maids, landscapers and other domestic positions within a family home would be exempt.

The Problem With Question 36

2011-02-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

Last month, I became an American citizen, a tremendous honor and no easy accomplishment, even for a Canadian. After living here for 12 years, I thought I knew everything. Then I learned how we mint Americans.

Arizona Lawmakers Push New Round of Immigration Restrictions

2011-02-24T12:45:00.000-08:00

Arizona lawmakers are proposing a sweeping package of immigration restrictions that might make the controversial measures the state approved last year, which the Obama administration went to court to block, look mild.

A Risky Trip Leads to Stardom and Sanctuary

2011-02-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

A Honduran teenager gained fame as the star of a documentary film that showed the dangers faced by children who ride across Mexico atop freight trains to cross illegally to the United States. But the boy, Kevin Casasola, rode the trains again, and now he has been granted asylum in the United States, his lawyer said on Monday.

Dream Act Advocate Turns Failure Into Hope

2011-02-22T10:52:00.000-08:00

HARRISONBURG, Va. — Isabel Castillo was counting on the Dream Act, and when the Dream Act was defeated in December, it upended her dreams.

Winning Entry 2010 Creative Writing Contest | Community Education Center

2011-02-17T11:20:00.000-08:00

The AILA Santa Clara Valley chapter 5th grade creative writing contest is running for the 4th year. Last year, we had the national 5th grade winner, Julia Culbert. Please read her essay and comment. For information on this year's contest, please see: http://www.communityeducationcenter.org/community/winning-entry-2010-creative-writing-contest

Cool Places to Host Events

2011-02-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

Here you have some places to host events:

Fox Theatre in Redwood City and Sparky's Hot Rod Garage.

http://www.foxrwc.com/venue-rental/
http://www.sparkyshotrodgarage.com/

E-Verify "Self Check" to go live Mar. 18th

2011-02-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

"In accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974, the Department of Homeland Security proposes to establish a new Department of Homeland Security system of records titled, ‘‘Department of Homeland Security/United States Citizenship and Immigration Services—SORN DHS/ USCIS—013 E-Verify Self Check System of Records.’’ The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services E-Verify Self Check is voluntary and available to any individual who wants to check his own work authorization status prior to employment and facilitate correction of potential errors in federal databases that provide inputs into the E-Verify process.

Anti-immigrant activist convicted of murder of 9-yr.-old girl

2011-02-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

TUCSON -- The leader of an anti-illegal-immigrant group was convicted Monday in a home invasion that left a 9-year-old girl and her father dead in what prosecutors said was an attempt to steal drug money to fund the group's operations.

USCIS to Issue Employment Authorization and Advance Parole Card for Adjustment of Status Applicants

2011-02-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) today announced that it is now issuing employment and travel authorization on a single card for certain applicants filing an Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, Form I-485. This new card represents a significant improvement from the current practice of issuing paper Advance Parole documents.

Some States Applying Brakes to Legislation Denying Citizenship to U.S.-Born Children

2011-02-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a panel in South Dakota’s legislature voted to halt legislation aimed at denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. South Dakota’s bill—and others like it—propose measures which challenge the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which states that, with very few exceptions, all persons born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. While conservative lawmakers continue to introduce bills challenging the birthright citizenship clause, other states—like Arizona and Montana—are joining South Dakota’s lead in tabling these bills due to questions of constitutionality.

After a False Dawn, Anxiety for Illegal Immigrant Students

2011-02-10T12:37:00.000-08:00

After a False Dawn, Anxiety for Illegal Immigrant Students
Darren Hauck for The New York Times
Maricela Aguilar, a recipient of a full academic scholarship to Marquette University, was born in Mexico but has lived in the United States without legal documents since she was 3 years old.

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: February 8, 2011

MILWAUKEE — It was exhilarating for Maricela Aguilar to stand on the steps of the federal courthouse here one day last summer and reveal for the first time in public that she is an illegal immigrant.

Harry Potter is a DREAM Act kid

2010-11-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

Harry Potter is a DREAM Act kid.

I know nothing about Harry Potter, but this article is great. I may have to go see the movie now.

DREAM Act for Immigrant Children Derailed by Senate Republicans

2010-09-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

DREAM Act dies with rejection of defense bill

By SUZANNE GAMBOA (AP) – 19 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The chance for hundreds of thousands of young people to legally remain in the U.S. evaporated Tuesday when Republicans blocked a defense spending bill in the Senate.

Democrats failed to get a single Republican to help them reach the 60 votes needed to move forward on the defense bill and attach the DREAM Act as an amendment. The vote was 56-43. Arkansas Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor voted with Republicans. Majority Leader Harry Reid also voted to block the bill in a procedural move that allows the defense bill to be revived later.

The DREAM Act allows young people to become legal U.S. residents after spending two years in college or the military. It applies to those who were under 16 when they arrived in the U.S., have been in the country at least five years and have a diploma from a U.S. high school or the equivalent.

Several young people who would have benefited from the legislation watched the vote from the gallery, some wearing graduation caps and gowns. Many sat stone-faced when the vote tally was read. A young woman dressed in a gold cap and gown wiped away tears.

Most of the young immigrants knew victory was unlikely, but in the hours before the vote they walked the hallways of a Senate office building trying to drum up support.

"I was kind of speechless. It's something that hurt, but we are not stopping. They only gave us a chance and more time to get even bigger," said Diana Banderas, who graduated from high school in May and plans to go to community college after earning the money she needs to attend.

Republicans accused Democrats of playing politics with the defense bill and the DREAM Act. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has supported legislation legalizing illegal immigrants in the past, said Democrats were trying to galvanize Hispanics and energize their voters by trying to tack the DREAM Act onto the defense bill.

The bill also included a measure to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays.

"I don't think anyone in the country will hold it against us for voting against their way of doing business," Graham said.

Reid, D-Nev., said Republicans were "putting partisan politics ahead of the best interests of the men and women who courageously defend our nation" by blocking the bill, which would have authorized $726 billion in defense spending, including a pay raise for troops.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the majority whip, said repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and passing the DREAM Act were a matter of justice and fairness.

"We do not in this country hold the crimes and misdeeds of parents against their children," Durbin, D-Ill., said in reference to the DREAM Act. He has been trying to pass the legislation for about a decade.

Earlier Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he sent a letter to Reid and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., backing the DREAM Act.

"America is the only country they know ... they deserve every opportunity to go further in life. Our country needs the benefits of their skills, their talent and their passion," Duncan said.

Congress has failed to take up a comprehensive immigration bill the past two years. President Barack Obama has been under fire in the Hispanic community for failing to keep his promise to tackle immigration reform in the first year of his presidency. Some have feared Latino voters will stay home in November because of the inaction.

Graham had been working with Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to draft an immigration reform bill but dropped out of the process as he took criticism in his state. Democrats were unable to persuade any other Republicans to take his place.

In April, Obama said Congress lacked the "appetite" to take on immigration, essentially removing it from the legislative agenda.

As the prospects for a sweeping immigration bill looked bleak, young activists began lobbying Democrats to separate the DREAM Act from the immigration reform package and try to pass it on its own.

The students, risking deportation, protested at lawmakers' offices and tangled with immigration reform advocates who did not want the comprehensive immigration bill divided.

The Obama administration has deferred the deportation of some of the young people while the politics of the bill played out, drawing heavy criticism from some Republicans.

Graham said laws should be followed in regard to deportation of the students.

"What am I going to tell people in South Carolina when I legalize 2 million people here, when we haven't secured the border?" he said.

This summer, Obama signed a bill providing $600 million to pay for the deployment of 1,200 National Guard troops to the border and to beef up other border and immigration enforcement.

Associated Press Writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Japan Immigration Bars Paris Hilton from Entering Japan

2010-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Japan bars Paris Hilton after Las Vegas drug plea

Associated Press -

September 22, 2010 12:42 PM PDT U.S. socialite Paris Hilton speaks to the media as she leaves the departure lounge of Narita International Airport, east of Tokyo, Japan, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2010. Hilton was denied entrance into Japan and is returning home to the U.S. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)Associated Press

NARITA, Japan - Paris Hilton canceled her Asia tour and returned home when she was denied entry at Tokyo's airport Wednesday following a drug violation in the U.S. — running afoul of strict Japanese laws that have tripped up celebrities from Paul McCartney to Diego Maradona.

"I'm going back home, and I look forward to coming back to Japan in the future," a smiling Hilton told reporters before departing on her private jet.

The 29-year-old celebrity socialite had arrived at Narita International Airport, outside the Japanese capital, two days after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor drug charge in Las Vegas. Japan has strict immigration laws that bar entry to those convicted of drug offenses, although exceptions are occasionally granted.

Hilton was to appear Wednesday at a news conference in Tokyo to promote her fashion and fragrance lines. She arrived Tuesday evening, but was stopped at the airport and spent the night at an airport hotel after being questioned by officials.

"I'm really tired," said Hilton, wearing a black baseball cap and a navy sweat suit.
Hilton also abruptly canceled planned appearances in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Jakarta, Indonesia.
Her publicist, Dawn Miller, said Hilton plans to make the trips at a later date.

"Paris is very disappointed and fought hard to keep her business commitments and see her fans, but she is forced to postpone her commitments in Asia," she said in a statement. "Paris understands and respects the rules and laws of the immigration authorities in Japan and fully wishes to cooperate with them."
A Japanese immigration official said she was denied entry Wednesday after a total of about six hours of questioning over the two days.

The country has taken a tough line with famous figures in the past.
Soccer icon Maradona was initially banned from entering the country during the 2002 World Cup finals for past drug offenses, but was eventually given a 30-day visa as a "special delegate."

The Rolling Stones struggled for years to gain entry to Japan and were eventually allowed in despite drug convictions among the group's members. In January 1980, former Beatles member McCartney was arrested for marijuana possession at Narita airport. He was deported without carrying out a planned concert tour by his rock group Wings.

Kazuo Kashihara, an immigration official at Narita International Airport, said if Hilton had applied for an entry permit farther ahead of her arrival, there might have been a chance for Japan's justice minister to consider an exception in her case. "She just showed up the day after (pleading guilty)," he said.
Just before taking off, Hilton tweeted a message to her fans.

"Going home now. So disappointed to miss my fans in Asia. I promise to come back soon. I love you all! Love Paris xoxo."

CBP Boarding Trains & Asking for Papers!

2010-09-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

Editorial

On the Lake Shore Limited

Published: August 31, 2010

To see what immigration hard-liners really have in mind, ride the Lake Shore Limited between Chicago and New York or Boston. It is a daily Amtrak train that is regularly boarded and searched by the Border Patrol, even though it does not cross any international border.

The Hard Way Home

2010-09-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

My friend and immigration attorney colleague, Jody Santiago, is quoted in this article.

September 01, 2010

Arizona Living

The hard way home

by Richard Ruelas - Aug. 31, 2010 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic

When Oscar Vazquez left the United States as an illegal immigrant a year ago, leaving behind a wife and baby daughter, it was so he could try to do the right thing - become a legal resident of the country he called home.

Even as he crossed into Mexico, the Arizona State University engineering graduate knew it could be years before he could legally be allowed to return.

But on Monday, Vazquez, 24, was visiting his old high school, his wife at his side and legal documents in his pocket. It was an unexpected outcome for the now-legal U.S. resident.

"Even though it took a year, I feel it came out good," said Vazquez, who had lived in the U.S. since the age of 12 when he and his mother crossed the border near Douglas.

The prospects for Vazquez's return were slim, as he initially was denied re-entry, his case deemed not strong enough. But publicity about his struggle and the intervention of a high-ranking U.S. senator spurred the government to allow Vazquez back in.

Vazquez graduated from ASU in 2009. He was one of three graduates whose stories were told before the crowd at Sun Devil Stadium and in front of that year's commencement speaker, President Barack Obama.

But Vazquez knew that his legal status meant he wouldn't be able to use his degree. And he was weary of politicians dragging their feet on the promise of immigration reform.

So he took matters into his own hands. Shortly after his graduation, he deported himself, asking for legal permission to return. His story was told in The Arizona Republic, on CNN and on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Vazquez said he was contacted by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. Durbin, the Senate majority whip, supports the DREAM Act, legislation that would grant legal status to illegal immigrants who entered as children and had attended college or joined the military.
With Durbin on board, Vazquez said, "it was fast."

A Durbin aide, who spoke only on the condition his name not be used, confirmed that the office made the Department of Homeland Security aware that the senator was monitoring the case.

Vazquez expects to receive his Social Security card in about two weeks and will start looking for work in the engineering field.
Vazquez was on the Carl Hayden High School team that beat out several colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an underwater-robotics competition in 2007. The triumph of the four undocumented high-school students was featured in Wired magazine. On Monday, Vazquez showed up at the Phoenix high school to talk with his robotics coach, Faridodin Lajvardi. Two other members of that four-person team were there, making for an impromptu reunion of that victorious team.

Lorenzo Santillan, one of the four, said he had tried to gain legal status but found he couldn't. He doesn't have the family ties that Vazquez does.

"He's an example of what can happen," Santillan said of Vazquez, "but it's hard."

It was an unexpected ending to a story that began last summer when Vazquez applied for residency. His application was denied, and he was asked to submit additional evidence of hardship to his wife and daughter, both U.S. citizens. He was told a final decision would come in March.

So Vazquez waited, living in Magdalena del Kino, a dusty town in Sonora, Mexico, working at an auto-parts factory. Karla Vazquez visited regularly with Samantha, 2.

Vazquez's story was told July 4 in The Republic. Durbin got involved soon after.

Senator was key

Without Durbin, Vazquez likely would still be waiting. Because he stayed in the U.S. so long after he turned 18, Vazquez faced a 10-year wait to apply for legal status. Waivers of that bar are difficult to obtain, said Jody Santiago, an immigration lawyer who grew up in Mesa and now practices in San Francisco. Applicants must prove that their absence from the United States causes an extreme hardship to family members who are citizens.

"It's nebulous," she said of the standard. "It's a term of art which no one really has an exact definition of."

Santiago said that "getting the story out in the paper and getting the attention of senators and representatives really helps."

Just 10 days after Oscar's story appeared, Karla Vazquez, received the letter saying her husband's visa waiver had been approved.

Karla was about to head to Mexico for another visit when she checked the mail.

"It just said, 'Your waiver was approved,' " she recalled.

Karla told her husband the good news as soon as she arrived.

"We were just looking at it (the letter)," he said, "just to make sure it was true."

The couple kept the news to themselves; even their Facebook posts made no mention of the government's decision. They didn't want to jinx their good fortune.

Vazquez met with the U.S. Consulate on Thursday and received paperwork Friday that allowed him to cross back into the United States.
Little fanfare

It was a much different entrance from Vazquez's first one when, at age 12, he and his mother dashed across the border near Douglas into a van waiting in a Walmart parking lot.
His entry as a legal resident was short on ceremony. Vazquez said a clerk simply stamped his passport and told him that his visa allowed him to live and work in the United States.

Vazquez stepped onto U.S. soil and waited for the bus to Phoenix. In the meantime, he ate at KFC.
His wife met him at the Phoenix bus station.
"It's just hard to describe," Vazquez said about seeing his family, holding documents that mean he no longer has to look over his shoulder. "It's amazing just to be back home."

Vazquez said he realized his was a unique case and that he was aided by political pressure. Had it not been for Durbin's intervention, he thinks his waiver would have been denied.

"A lot of people think that, 'Why don't you do it the right way?' " he said. "But many people can't."

If his waiver had been denied, the Vazquezes had discussed moving to Mexico City, Canada or Europe.

Instead, they spent a weekend together at their home in south Phoenix, the happy reunion starting as soon as Vazquez stepped off the bus early Saturday.
On Monday, Vazquez and his wife went to surprise Lajvardi, the man who got Vazquez started in robotics. Lajvardi gathered his current students around him and introduced Vazquez. His students had seen video of Durbin telling Vazquez's story on the Senate floor.

"All that time, I kept telling you how you need to fight, fight, fight," Lajvardi told the students. "It worked."

The team gave Vazquez a group hug.

Ariz. Immigration Law Is A Challenge For Police

2010-07-29T10:13:00.001-07:00

Even the people who would be charged with enforcing Arizona's controversial new immigration law can't agree on the question of whether it's a good idea.

EnlargeScott Olson/Getty Images

Tucson Police officer Angel Ramirez and a man suspected of trespassing, in May. While many law enforcement officials support the new Arizona immigration law, others worry it will hurt relations with the community.

The law takes effect Thursday — but only after a last-minute judicial ruling that blocks some of its most controversial provisions, including the requirement that officers check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws if they have reason to suspect that person is in the country illegally.

According to The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton today put that part of the law on hold while courts consider challenges to its legality. She also put on hold provisions requiring that immigrants carry their status papers at all times and barring undocumented workers from soliciting work in public places, the AP says.

The Arizona Sheriffs' Association supports the law and the controversial provision about checking a suspect's immigration status, saying it will give deputies needed tools to combat crimes associated with illegal immigration, such as human smuggling.

"If we can remove them from the community with an immigration charge, we'll do the community a favor," says Cochise County Sheriff Larry A. Dever.

Some of the key language in the new Arizona immigration law:

— "For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person."

— "A law enforcement officer, without a warrant, may arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States."

Source: www.azleg.gov

But rank-and-file opinion is mixed and many police chiefs — inside the state and around the country — say the law would prove a costly distraction. "It drives a wedge between us and the community, where we have to get our information," says Roberto Villasenor, Tucson's chief of police.

Race As A Factor

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law, known as Senate Bill 1070, in April, saying that the state had been overwhelmed by an influx of illegal immigrants and could no longer wait for Congress to address the issue. That is the argument numerous states have made in recent years in passing dozens, if not hundreds, of laws relating to immigration.

But none has gone so far as Arizona. The Justice Department has sued to block SB 1070, arguing that it infringes on federal authority over immigration matters. Several immigrant and civil rights groups have sued as well, saying it will inevitably lead to abuses such as racial profiling.

Supporters of the law dismiss such concerns, noting that it specifically precludes local law enforcement officers from using race or national origin as a factor in determining whether they suspect someone of being an illegal immigrant.

Police and sheriffs can't stop people to question them based solely on immigration concerns, but once they are investigating other violations they are required, if suspicious, to check.

Dever, the Cochise County sheriff, says the law will aid law enforcement officers in dealing with serious criminals — notably those who cross the border repeatedly with impunity.

"This gives cops tools to get these guys off the streets," says Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports SB 1070 and stricter immigration laws in general. "They may not be able to prove a felony just yet, but if they can get a guy off the street before he commits a crime, that works to the benefit of the community."

Breaking A Bond?

But the potential ill effect on community relations is something many police chiefs are warning about. If people come to fear the approach of law enforcement officers, they say, individuals are less likely to come forward with information about crimes.

"Any beat cop will tell you that the No. 1 asset in preventing crimes or apprehending criminals is cooperation from the community," says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, which conducts policy research on Latino issues. "When that bond is broken, it's difficult to recover."

EnlargeJohn Moore/Getty Images

The Arizona law has sparked protests like this one in Phoenix on May 1.

The other specter that SB 1070's opponents raise concerns racial profiling. The law's potential for triggering civil rights violations has already provided fodder for lawsuits — and will lead to more once it actually takes effect.

"Without a doubt, we're going to be accused of racial profiling on this, no matter what we do," Villasenor, the Tucson police chief, says in a training video sent to officers throughout the state.

The video, produced by the Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training Board, seeks to guide officers on ways to avoid racial profiling. But SB 1070's critics say it treads awfully close to the line anyway.

"Even though the law says that racial profiling is not to take place, the reality is that it's going to be very difficult for officers to aggressively enforce the law without crossing the line," says San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon, who previously headed the police department in Mesa, Ariz.

EnlargeMark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

At a protest in Phoenix on May 29.

Factors that officers may consider when enforcing the law include inability to speak English; avoiding eye contact; traveling in a crowded vehicle; and wearing layers of clothing in hot weather, which suggests chilly desert crossings at night.

Dever, a sheriff whose county shares borders with Mexico and New Mexico, says that simple demographics will determine who is most likely to be charged under SB 1070. "Most of the people we encounter in the drug smuggling and human smuggling trades are of Mexican nationality. Most of the people we arrest are going to be Mexican," he says. "Is there anything racist about it?"

Does ICE Have The Capacity?

Assuming SB 1070 works as intended and local law enforcement agencies detain more illegal immigrants, that raises the question of what will be done with them. Sheriffs and police already complain that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can barely handle the caseload it now has, leading many illegal immigrants to languish in local jails — or be released.

EnlargeJohn Moore/Getty Images

Some supporters of the law have also come out at rallies, as happened in Phoenix on April 23 when Gov. Jan Brewer signed the measure.

ICE officials have told local law enforcement officials that, at best, they have the capacity to deport 400,000 individuals a year. Last year, they deported 387,790.

"We don't always take action on every individual that's referred to us," says Gillian M. Brigham, an ICE spokeswoman. "In a world of limited resources, we have to prioritize."

A Rock And A Hard Place

Police chiefs worry not only about how likely the feds will be to take a rising number of illegal immigrants off their hands and out of their facilities, but whether the law will prove a further drain on their resources owing to the need to defend against legal challenges.

Whatever its potential benefits, it's clear that SB 1070 places local law enforcement between a rock and a hard place. The law gives any citizen standing to sue if he or she feels that local police or sheriffs are not enforcing the law with sufficient vigor. On the other hand, strict enforcement will be bait for further lawsuits alleging racial profiling.

The one thing critics and supporters of the law seem to be able to agree upon, in fact, is that it will offer a field day for lawyers.

"Because of the posture of our own Department of Justice," says Dever, the Cochise County sheriff, "with the federal government threatening to file suit against officers for civil rights violations, you know there's going to be a flurry of those complaints."

SMU Documentary to Depict Plight of Undocumented Students

2010-07-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

Daniela Balderas and Erik Burgos have seen the struggles that fellow students can go through if they are in the country illegally – and they wanted others to see those hardships, too. So, the two Southern Methodist University seniors decided to make a documentary about those students in North Texas. "Typically, when we think of 'undocumented' we always think of an individual that's doing lawn work, washing dishes," Burgos said. "But rarely does the thought of a college student or college graduate cross our mind. We want to capture that side of a broken immigration policy"

Americans Mistakenly Deported

2010-07-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

"Researchers say that every day, an American is wrongfully deported, and some worry the problem could get worse." CNN video, July 26, 2010.

Come Thursday, will ICE cooperate with Arizona?

2010-07-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

Arizona's tough new immigration law is slated to take effect Thursday, but the nation's immigration enforcement agency has not indicated whether it will cooperate with police who are trying to enforce it.

Without cooperation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, much of the law would become unenforceable: Police would have no way of determining, from federal authorities, the legal status of suspected illegal immigrants as the state law requires. And that would severely hamper efforts to arrest them for violations of the law.

As a result, local police officers might have to release suspected illegal immigrants if they can't determine their status.

"If the Department of Homeland Security says, 'SB 1070 is unconstitutional, don't cooperate,' . . . then much of what is going on here shuts down. Not necessarily all of it, but a lot of it," said Gabriel Jack Chin, a University of Arizona criminal-law professor who co-authored a legal analysis of the law.

Police officers sometimes contact ICE to check the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants, and if ICE determines the people are in the country illegally, it usually responds to pick them up.

But officials from Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and the Border Patrol, have refused to disclose the agencies' plans for dealing with SB 1070, which is expected to launch a flurry of calls for assistance from local police. They will say only that they are monitoring a federal lawsuit that is seeking to block the law.

The law makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally. It states that an officer engaged in a lawful stop, detention or arrest shall, when practicable, ask about a person's legal status when reasonable suspicion exists that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

State Rep. John Kavanagh, who sponsored the House version of the law, said ICE's role, as its name implies, is immigration enforcement, so it should assist and take any illegal immigrants apprehended by state and local police enforcing the new law. But he said the Obama administration is trying to block the agency from cooperating for political reasons. The Department of Justice has sued to keep the law from taking effect, saying it usurps federal responsibility.

"ICE is caught between a 'Barack' and hard place, pun intended," said Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills. "The Obama administration is clearly putting ICE in the middle of a political battle, and when you do that to law enforcement, that is extremely dangerous and I really object to that."

Kavanagh said lawmakers, when writing the law, did not anticipate that federal authorities might not to cooperate.

"But I will tell you this," Kavanagh said, "every suspected illegal immigrant that we refer to ICE and ICE declines to assist with, we will record the name of that individual if we have to release them, and any crimes, any murders, and rapes they commit will be on Barack Obama's administration's conscience and not ours."

The law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, includes a provision that allows people to sue law-enforcement agencies that refuse to enforce the law. But the provision, Kavanagh said, applies only to state and local agencies, not federal authorities.

ICE position

ICE officials said they are waiting to see whether the law survives court challenges contending that the law is unconstitutional and could lead to racial profiling.

"The DOJ has filed a lawsuit in regards to this law and the outcome of that suit will inform the government's action going forward," the immigration agency said in a statement emailed to The Arizona Republic.

The statement also said that the agency's priority is to go after illegal immigrants who pose a danger to communities.

"ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that focuses first on criminal aliens who pose a threat to our communities. ICE uses lawful discretion on a case-by-case basis to en- sure that throughout all our programs we are meeting our priorities," the statement said.

John Morton, the director of ICE, has indicated he doesn't like the law. In May, he told a Chicago newspaper that his agency would not necessarily process illegal immigrants referred to them by Arizona police under the law. And earlier this month, Morton said he understood the frustration many communities feel over the issue of illegal immigration, but he did not think it was a good idea for more states to pass similar laws.

"I don't think that 50 different immigration enforcement laws is the answer to our immigration problems," Morton told the Associated Press.

In its written statement, the agency said that ICE works every day with local law enforcement in Arizona and around the country.

The agency has signed so-called 287(g) agreements with nine law-enforcement agencies in Arizona that either allow local officers to enforce federal immigration laws or allow jail officials to identify illegal immigrants booked into jails to be processed for deportation. Only one other state, Virginia, has as many.

ICE also is using a federal database in jails in seven counties in Arizona to identify illegal immigrants previously removed from the United States or wanted for a serious crime in another country. ICE plans to expand the program to jails throughout Arizona by next year, officials said.

In 2006, ICE created a unit to respond to calls for assistance from local police, primarily when they encounter groups being held in drophouses or being transported in smuggling vehicles. The unit, staffed 24 hours a day, was created after former Gov. Janet Napolitano and some law-enforcement agencies complained that police were being forced to release suspected illegal immigrants into the community because ICE often lacked the manpower to respond.

During the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the Law Enforcement Agency Response unit has responded to 892 calls for assistance from local police in the Phoenix area and made 3,528 arrests, according to ICE officials.

The unit, however, mainly responds to calls from law-enforcement agencies in the Phoenix area, and along Interstate 17 between Phoenix and Flagstaff, and Interstate 40, which are well-known human smuggling corridors.

History of cooperation

Officials from several law-enforcement agencies in Arizona said they have a good working relationship with ICE, and they do not expect that to change if the law takes effect.

In general, when police officers encounter suspected illegal immigrants, they can call ICE's 24-hour hotline to check the person's status. Police also transport suspected illegal immigrants to ICE's detention center on Central Avenue near downtown Phoenix. In southern Arizona, police also turn over suspected illegal immigrants to the Border Patrol.

At some jails in Arizona, including Maricopa County's jails, immigration status is checked for every person booked on a state or local charge. Those found to be in the country illegally are held to be processed for possible deportation.

Every person sentenced to state prison in Arizona also has his or her immigration status checked. Illegal immigrants and legal immigrants convicted of deportable offenses are turned over to ICE after completing their sentences.

"I am sure they are going to be overwhelmed with phone calls, but I am sure we will just take it as it comes," said Sgt. Robert Bailey, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department, said officers frequently contact ICE when they encounter smuggling vehicles loaded with illegal immigrants as part of crime investigations or other situations. Whether calls to ICE will increase under the law "remains to be seen," Thompson said, but he expects ICE will continue to respond.

"We are assuming that if we contact ICE, they will be there," Thompson said.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has conducted a controversial crackdown on illegal immigrants for the past several years, said ICE continues to take custody of immigration violators netted during his crime suppression operations and worksite raids even though they were not charged with any state crimes.

"I'm concerned that they might change their policy and not pick up these people unless they are accused of a violent crime," Arpaio said.

New York City Bar Report Finds Arizona Anti-Immigration Law Unconstitutional

2010-07-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Arizona Anti-Immigration Act is unconstitutional on a number of grounds and should not be adopted by other states, according to a report released by the New York City Bar Association. The report, prepared by the Association’s Committee on Immigration and Nationality Law, examines the principal provisions of the Act and finds that they are pre-empted by federal law and violate the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

The Arizona law creates a scheme to enforce civil immigration statutes that conflicts with the federal enforcement regime. The statute creates state crimes of violating federal immigration laws, including registration by aliens and carrying of registration papers. It requires law enforcement personnel, during any lawful “stop” of an individual, to determine the person’s immigration status if “reasonable suspicion” exists that the person is an alien unlawfully present in the U.S. As a stop can be for any violation and the law criminalizes not carrying registration papers, any time an officer “reasonably suspects” an individual who should be carrying papers is not doing so the officer can stop the person, inquire, and make a warrantless arrest. The law also bans certain soliciting of people to work, or to harbor undocumented immigrants, and permits any citizen to sue an official he or she believes is limiting enforcement of federal immigration laws.

The report finds the Arizona law invades the exclusive province of the federal government to set foreign policy, under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The Constitution grants the federal government the power to “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization” and “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”. These powers are necessary in order for the U.S. to function within the community of nations. Indeed, according to the report, if a state could regulate immigration, it “would have the authority to raise an international crisis through implementation of its own statutes without the corresponding responsibility to redress the resulting concerns in any meaningful way.”

The report also finds that the federal government has pre-empted the field by establishing a comprehensive system of immigration regulation. The federal government’s establishment of a system, together with “the national government’s interest in promoting uniform laws in the immigration field” should negate Arizona’s attempt to establish a parallel regulatory structure.

The federal pre-emption interest is more pronounced, according to the report, where a state seeks to regulate the civil enforcement of immigration laws. Here, Arizona’s intent is clear. The statute requires agencies to enforce federal civil immigration laws, purports to regulate a substantial range of activity, including registration and employment of aliens, and “requires police agencies to treat administrative violations of the immigration law on the same level as serious felonies.” However, that range of enforcement squarely conflicts with the responsibility of the federal government, as established by its vast regulatory system. Court decisions have made clear that, while there may be some role for states in the criminal enforcement of immigration law, only the federal government can engage in the civil enforcement of immigration. Arizona ignores that distinction and unconstitutionally overreaches its authority.

The report also addresses additional ways in which the Arizona statute violates the federal constitution and law by:

Exceeding the limits on state enforcement of civil immigration law set by the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996;
Violating the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable stops;
Violating the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process requirements, as the terminology of the law is vague, including permitting stops based on “suspected” violations regarding documentation;
Violating the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection provisions by posing a serious risk that the law will discriminate on the basis of alienage, which the Supreme Court has said is “inherently suspect and subject to close judicial scrutiny.”
Raising serious First Amendment concerns, by risking a conflict with the federal harboring statute and conflicting with free speech protection provided to solicitation of work.

The Report notes that defenders of the Arizona law point out the statute’s language that race, color or national origin may not be considered in determining immigration status. However, according to the report, the risk of racial profiling is great:

With the incorporation of failure to register or carry documentation into the state’s criminal jurisdictional base, anyone appearing foreign can arguably be lawfully stopped and asked about his or her registration documents as a pretext for determining immigration status.

In addition, “the vagueness of the term “suspected” documentary evidence raises particular concerns in light of Arizona’s checkered history with respect to making pretextual “stops.”

The full report is available at http://bit.ly/cXpm7w

For Those Deported, Court Rulings Come Too Late

2010-07-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

Under the ruling last month, which echoed decisions by four federal circuit courts, including the one covering New York, legal residents with minor drug convictions are eligible to have an immigration judge weigh their offenses against other factors in their lives and decide whether to let them stay.

But deportees who were denied such a hearing have no means to get one now. The Board of Immigration Appeals says it has no jurisdiction over any case after deportation. Government regulations prohibit any motion to reopen the case of someone who has left the country; judicial circuits are divided over that interpretation of immigration law, and a request that the Supreme Court consider the matter is pending.

The Obama administration, which is on track to deport a record 400,000 people this fiscal year, according to government statistics, has shown no eagerness to open the door. Now two dozen legal rights groups are calling for a process that would let immigrants reopen their cases under the ruling last month.

“American principles of justice — fairness, due process and discretion — require that these immigrants now receive their day in court,” the groups wrote in a June 18 letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security.

The Justice Department referred questions about the letter to the Department of Homeland Security, where a spokesman, Matthew Chandler, declined to comment on the issues it raised.

But Jan Ting, a Temple University Law School professor and a former assistant immigration commissioner, called the idea of letting deportees return for hearings “far-fetched,” adding, “The federal government has already incurred significant costs in executing the removals of these individuals in a procedure that was certainly legal at the time.”

No one knows just how many cases could be affected, but analyses by state and federal public defenders’ associations suggest they could number several thousand. More than 34,000 noncitizens were deported for drug-related offenses in 2008; in New York alone, from 1995 to 2004 more than 258,000 citizens and noncitizens served little or no jail time for misdemeanor possession convictions.

Among the most compelling cases for redress, the advocates say, are those of New Yorkers who were transferred by immigration officials to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. There, the detainees came under the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which approved the automatic deportations long after the Second Circuit, which includes New York, had rejected them.

Grassroots Leadership Issues “Green Paper” On Operation Streamline

2010-07-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

Austin, TX – Grassroots Leadership today issued a “green paper” of the report Operation Streamline: Drowning Justice and Draining Dollars along the Rio Grande. Operation Streamline is a controversial policy that mandates the criminal prosecution of border-crossers in certain areas. Before Streamline, immigration was usually enforced in the civil immigration system. The report analyzes the impact of Streamline on two border districts in Texas.

“Operation Streamline has clogged federal criminal courts with prosecutions of border-crossers,” said report co-author Tara Buentello. “Our report shows that Operation Streamline has had little deterrent effect on migration while it has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars.”

Key findings include that federal districts along the Texas-Mexico border have spent more than $1.2 billion in government dollars on the criminal detention and incarceration of border-crossers since the onset of Operation Streamline in 2005. More than 135,000 migrants have been criminally prosecuted in these two border districts since 2005 under two sections of the federal code that make unauthorized entry and re-entry a crime.

The vast majority of these costs have been funneled into for-profit private prisons contracted by U.S. Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Prisons. “The human costs of Operation Streamline fall squarely on immigrant families,” said Donna Red Wing, Executive Director of Grassroots Leadership. “Meanwhile, private prison corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group are quietly profiting from this broken system.”

Today’s green paper follows Grassroots Leadership’s 2006 report Ground Zero: The Laredo Super-Jail and the No Action Alternative that demonstrated that federal detention expansion along the Texas-Mexico border is driven almost exclusively from increased prosecution and detention of border-crossers. Today’s report shows a staggering 2,722% increase in prosecutions for entry, and a 267% increase in prosecutions for re-entry, compared to corresponding data for 2002.

“The criminalization of immigration did not begin with Arizona’s SB1070,” said Bob Libal, Grassroots Leadership’s Texas Campaigns Coordinator and a report co-author. “Operation Streamline has subjected undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border to unprecedented rates of detention. It has also overburdened the federal judiciary. It’s time to end this Bush-era policy.”

The “green paper” is intended to stimulate debate and launch a dialogue on Operation Streamline. Grassroots Leadership is also launching a blog to accompany the report at www.grassrootsleadership.org/OperationStreamline. A final white paper will be released as more data is collected.

International groups join together, ask U.S. government to lift ban denying visa to Colombian journalist Hollman Morris

2010-07-16T09:52:00.001-07:00

In a show of international solidarity, journalism and human rights organizations from throughout the hemisphere are calling on the U.S. government to reverse its ban prohibiting renowned Colombian journalist Hollman Morris from entering the United States to take his place as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

The Progressive first broke the story in June that the U.S. embassy in Bogotadenied a visa for Morris, whose award-winning television program Contravía(loosely translated as "against traffic," or "the wrong way") has been a harsh critic of Colombia's armed conflict and the government. Contravía's investigative work has revealed links between paramilitary leaders and Colombian officials, resulting in the imprisonment of 30 Congress members, according to a feature story about Morris in theColumbia Journalism Review.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- his stories and human rights work, Morris has been deemed permanently ineligible for a visa under the "terrorist activities" section of the U.S. Patriot Act, the Associated Press (AP) and the Washington Post reported.

"We were very surprised. This has never happened before," Nieman curator Bob Giles told the AP. "And Hollman has traveled previously in the United States to give speeches and receive awards." For example, Morris participated in the Knight Center's Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas in September 2009, where he spoke about "The other side of digital technologies: how governments are use technology to spy on journalists and human rights advocates—the case of Colombia."

The Inter American Press Association, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the Dart Society, and Investigative Reporters and Editors are among the journalism organizations that are asking the U.S. government to reverse its decision.

"Anti-terrorism laws are a threat to democracy if they can lead to the perverse and shocking victimisation of genuine human rights defenders like Hollman Morris," said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary.

CPJ warned that denying a visa to Morris, who has been the victim of death threats and a campaign to discredit him, could put his life even further in danger. According to CPJ, Morris has had his phone tapped, been spied on by Colombia's national intelligence agency, and been accused by President Alvaro Uribe of having ties to the guerrilla group Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), which is considered by the U.S. and Colombian governments to be a terrorist organization.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN American Center have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to lift the ban against Morris.

Earlier this year, Clinton lifted visa exclusions for South African political science professorAdam Habib and Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic studies professor from Switzerland. "The recent news that Mr. Morris has been denied a visa runs counter to this administration's decisions in the Habib and Ramadan cases," the letter to Clinton stated.

Also according to the letter, "No legitimate interest is served by the exclusion of foreign nationals on ideological grounds. Ideological exclusion impoverishes intellectual inquiry and debate in the United States, suggests to the world that our country is more interested in silencing than engaging its critics, and undermines our ability to support dissent in politically repressive nations."

The U.S. groups National Association of Hispanic Journalists and UNITY: Journalists of Color have written letters of support for Morris to the U.S. ambassador in Bogata, asking him to review his decision.

Morris recently was celebrated in Colombia for demonstrating courage in his fight for truth, peace, and democracy, according to the Center for Investigation and Popular Education (CINEP), one of the organizations responsible for the homage.

Governor orders investigation into immigrant list

2010-07-14T09:39:00.001-07:00

LAYTON -- Gov. Gary Herbert has ordered an investigation into the release of 1,300 names of people purportedly living in Utah as illegal immigrants.

The anonymous release of the 30-page package of detailed private information arrived in the postal mail at various locations starting late last week.

Copies were sent to at least a half dozen agencies, including law enforcement and media outlets in the Top of Utah.

Gov. Herbert has instructed state agencies to conduct an internal review to determine if the document originated within an agency, said Angie Welling, the governor's communication director.

"If evidence of wrongdoing is discovered, that information will be forwarded to the attorney general's office for possible action," said Welling.

The governor has also directed the Utah Department of Technology Services to assist the agencies with any technology needs they may have to discover if the release came from state records.

The list of names, with addresses all across the state, included birth dates, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and even notes on pregnancies.

Tony Yapias, a former director for the Office of Hispanic Affairs under former governor Michael Leavitt, began calling for investigation once he learned about the packet.

"My suspicion is that this is people inside state government who have certain prejudices," said Yapias, currently director of Proyecto Latino de Utah, an organization that focuses on the needs of Utah's Latino immigrant community.

The packet included two letters, one describing the senders as a group of people concerned about immigration enforcement.

"It is troublesome ... we must hide in the background in order to expose those who would cross our borders illegally and take advantage of the system," wrote the unknown author.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have confirmed they received a copy of the list in April.

But federal officials said, for both privacy and investigatory reasons, they cannot confirm they have or will take action on the list.

"Like any law enforcement agency, ICE has a finite number of resources," wrote Lori Haley, ICE spokeswoman in answering a Standard Examiner question about the list.

"As such, we are focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes efforts first on those dangerous convicted criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately," she added.

The DREAM Act

2010-07-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

The Immigration Policy Center and the American Immigration Council have created a FAQ for the DREAM Act. If (and hopefully when) the act is passed by Congress, undocumented immigrants would gain the ability to obtain US citizenship through college or service in the armed forces. Questions addressed in the FAQ are listed below:

What Would the DREAM Act Do?
Who Would Benefit from the DREAM Act?
What are the Economic Benefits of the DREAM Act?
What are the Additional Benefits of the DREAM Act?
The DREAM Act in Congress
Why has the DREAM Act Failed to Become Law?
Who Supports the DREAM Act?
DREAMs Coming True in the States
Conclusion

Appeals Court Orders Review of Guatemalan Woman's Asylum Case

2010-07-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

A Guatemalan woman who argued in an asylum case that she would be in danger if she were to be returned to her native country because of the high rate of murders of women there can have her case reviewed, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

The court sent the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals to consider whether Guatemalan women make up a "social group" and should be eligible for asylum based on that. In the ruling, the court ordered the board to determine whether Lesly Yajayra Perdomo has demonstrated a fear of persecution based on her membership in that group.

To obtain asylum, applicants must show that they are unable or unwilling to return home because of persecution or fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

U.S. Citizen’s Wife Deported

2010-07-12T09:19:00.001-07:00

The undocumented wife of this U.S. citizen was deported as a result of being pulled over for a minor traffic violation. Set in Queen Creek, Arizona, this story provides a window into the impact that new state laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 will have on the lives of undocumented residents and citizens alike. Even tough SB 1070 will become effective on July 29, some law enforcement agencies are already putting it into practice.

Reunited Boy May Be Deported

2010-07-08T09:33:00.002-07:00

Nearly a decade had passed since Zulma Arevalo last laid eyes on the baby boy she left behind in El Salvador. She always knew that someday they would be reunited — and that moment came last year, after Enrique, then 9, was caught crossing illegally into the United States to join her. Because of Enrique's age, authorities summoned Arevalo, who was in Omaha. “It was so strange,” the mom recalled. “I left my son as an infant, and I didn't recognize him. We just stood there staring at each other. “Then we hugged.” Arevalo, who has temporary protected status in the United States, was able to take the boy, pending the federal government's final decision on his deportation. Enrique, who turned 11 this past weekend, easily transitioned into a household of mixed U.S. citizenry. He has lived there since March 2009, the middle of five kids. His family time here could end, however, after a Monday immigration hearing. Cindy Gonzalez, Omaha World-Herald, July 6, 2010.

Immigration issue hits close to home

2010-07-08T09:33:00.001-07:00

LUBBOCK, TX (KCBD) – From coast to coast, and right here on the South Plains, immigration is a controversial subject with many opinions and many stories.

In his first major speech on the issue of immigration, President Obama called for a major overhaul of the nation's immigration laws. "Fixing our broken immigration system is not only a political issue, not just an economic issue, but a moral imperative," he said.

President Obama said people who enter the country illegally should register with authorities, learn English and pay back taxes and a fine. He says employers who hire illegal workers should be held accountable.

KCBD NewsChannel 11 sat down with a recent high school graduate who understands the risk of telling his story, but decided it was worth sharing.

Luis graduated number five in his high school class of nearly 300. He is an honors student who was recognized by Governor Rick Perry for his service to others. He is a mentor at his church and by many standards a standout kid. "I grew up with my friends thinking I was the same but really not, not knowing it," said Luis who breezed through school rising to the top. "I realized investing my efforts and time in education really meant a lot."

It was on his quest to go to college that he learned the truth. "I was brought at age 3," he said. Luis is not an American. He is an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

"I really did not know what undocumented meant as I grew up. People ask me ‘haven't you applied for citizenship?' But they don't understand there is not a block for us students. There isn't a certain way we can get a visa," he said.

But there may be a way for Luis soon and it is called the DREAM Act. Version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors act have circled congress for several years but have yet to make it out. There are currently copies in congressional committees. "What I like about the dream act is it has certain guidelines that only the brightest kids will stay and only the best that have proven themselves," added Luis.

Some of the conditions to the proposal, you must have entered the United States before you 16th birthday and have spent five consecutive years in America. It is also a requirement to have graduated a U.S. high school or earn a GED. Qualified applicants would have six years to complete their college degree or serve two years in the military.

"There are thousands of children who have been brought by parents at age of two, three or four at time when they couldn't make decisions for themselves, and find themselves faced with difficulty that it is impossible for them to get a pathway for them to become legal," said Lubbock attorney Robert Hogan who recently expanded his practice to include immigration law.

Hogan does not represent Luis but is familiar with teens like him. He says the proposal would give kids who were brought here illegally the chance to earn citizenship. "The other alternative is to go home and it may be a country where they don't speak language. It is cruel and harsh to deport kids who in their hearts and souls are Americans and have lived here since they were young," added Hogan.

Immigration lines are years long and Hogan adds there are conditions in the DREAM Act that would ensure students did not use it as a back door to get a visa. Good moral character is a requirement and committing a crime disqualifies you. "If I commit a crime throw me back. I don't deserve to be here," said Luis who refers to that as 'justice'.

Luis is just one of an estimated 64,000 undocumented students who graduate each year from U.S. high schools but were born somewhere else. He knows there are probably people listening and thinking he should go back to Mexico. "I'd just like to ask them to stand in my shoes. I think some compassion has to go into this."

Luis is working on a documentary on the DREAM Act that he hopes will raise awareness about the proposed legislation. "I think that if people know we just want the chance to be here and be productive we could prove them that we are," he said.

Luis was accepted to college. The 19-year-old wants to become a youth minister and an accountant. The issue of immigration is complex, and Congressman Randy Neugebauer says the laws need updating. But, while sympathetic to Luis' situation he does not believe the DREAM Act is the answer. "Some folks would say these are just some kids who came in with their parents, but here is the problem if you set that precedent you are going to reward parents who do that what is then to stop flow of parents who want to continue process down the road," said Rep. Neugebauer.

Rep. Neugebauer wants reform to be consistent and only rewards people who take the legal pathway to citizenship.

ABA President Says “An Extraordinary Law … Requires Extraordinary Action.”

2010-07-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

The American Bar Association today filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the federal district court in Arizona to bar enforcement of the state’s recently enacted law authorizing police to stop individuals who they suspect are in the United States illegally and to detain them if they are unable to produce proof of citizenship or legal immigration status.

ABA President Carolyn B. Lamm said it is “extraordinary” for the association to file an amicus brief in a case at the district court level, rather than waiting for it to reach an appellate court, but “an extraordinary law … requires extraordinary action.” She vowed the association will “oppose, very strongly, any incursion on equal protection [or] substantive due process, by such things as racial profiling and segmenting groups out.” The law runs afoul of fundamental ABA positions opposing racial profiling and supporting federal preemption of immigration law, she added.

The brief was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona in the case of Friendly House v. Michael B. Whiting. The brief lists four reasons to block enforcement of the state law.

By requiring that police officers with a “reasonable suspicion” that an individual is unlawfully present in the United States verify the person’s immigration status, the law will increase use of racial profiling, according to the brief. A qualification purporting to limit use of race, color or national origin in applying the law “will not inhibit the use of racial profiling in apprehension and detention,” it says, noting that “racial profiling undermines respect for the rule of law and the criminal justice system.”

By mandating detention of suspect individuals until their immigration status can be verified, the law will cause unlawful and unreasonable detentions, according to the brief. “[T]he ABA is deeply concerned that these detentions will take place without the basic due process protections and the checks and balances that should be taken for granted under our legal system,” it says. Also, because U.S. citizens are not required to carry identification, the law “will necessarily result in the detention of citizens who have committed no criminal offense but do not have identification on their persons when stopped.”

Because “Arizona will not — and cannot claim that it will — be operating under a delegation of authority from the federal government,” the state will be required to appoint defense counsel at state expense for individuals who cannot afford to hire their own. This “will necessarily result in an increased burden on Arizona’s defense attorneys and indigent defense system,” as well as on courts and prosecutors, says the brief.

Finally, “[t]he U.S. Constitution has vested exclusive power over naturalization matters with the federal government,” and the Arizona law represents a state attempt to usurp that authority, the brief argues.

Citizenship: It's a birthright

2010-06-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

In 1848, the discovery of gold brought hordes of prospectors to California. In 1889, millions of acres of free land set off a rush of settlers into Oklahoma. Today, we are told, the chance to get U.S. citizenship for their unborn children is rapidly filling the country with illegal immigrants.

Critics see this as a malignant phenomenon that ought to be stopped. So Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, author of the new law directing police to check the immigration status of people they stop whom they suspect of being here illegally, has another idea: denying citizenship privileges to anyone born in his state to undocumented parents.

He plans to offer legislation refusing a birth certificate to any child unless a parent can prove legal residence, a clever attempt to nullify birthright citizenship. He says the change would eliminate "the greatest inducement for breaking our laws," since having an "anchor baby" yields all sorts of benefits.

A Rasmussen poll found a plurality of Americans favor repealing birthright citizenship. Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul has endorsed legislation to that end, which has attracted 91 sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. Groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform are all for it.

But the idea fails on a couple of grounds. The first is constitutional. The policy originates with the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Pearce and his allies say illegal immigrants can be excluded because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But that provision was included only to exempt children born to foreign diplomats.

The Supreme Court has left little room for argument. In 1898, it ruled that birth on American soil is "declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship."

In 1982, it concluded that illegal immigrants are indeed "within the jurisdiction" of the state where they are present. To deny a U.S.-born child a birth certificate would almost certainly violate the right to the equal protection of the laws.

It would be bad for common-sense reasons as well. To start with, it would call into question the status of every new baby. A report by the Immigration Policy Center pointed out that "all American parents would, going forward, have to prove the citizenship of their children through a cumbersome bureaucratic process."

This obligation is not something "we" are going to impose on "them." It would be a burden on all new parents, including those whose ancestors debarked at Plymouth Rock.

Supporters of the change regard birthright citizenship as an irresistible magnet for foreigners to sneak in. But the effect is vastly exaggerated.

One study cited in Peter Brimelow's 1996 anti-immigration screed, "Alien Nation," found that 15 percent of new Hispanic mothers whose babies were born in Southern California hospitals said they came over the border to give birth, with 25 percent of that group saying they did so to gain citizenship for the child.

But this evidence actually contradicts the claim. It means that 96 percent of these women were not lured by the desire to have an "anchor baby."

That makes perfect sense. The value of a citizen child is too remote to compete with the other attractions that draw people to come illegally — such as jobs and opportunity unavailable in their native countries.

True, an undocumented adult can be sponsored for a resident visa by a citizen child — but not till the kid reaches age 21. To imagine that Mexicans are risking their lives crossing the border in 2010 to gain legal status in 2031 assumes they put an excessive weight on the distant future.

Nor are the other alleged freebies very enticing. Some of the main benefits available to undocumented foreigners, such as emergency room care and public education for children, don't require them to have a U.S. citizen child. Illegal immigrant parents are ineligible for welfare, Medicaid, food stamps and the like. They can be deported.

Barring citizenship to their newborn babies wouldn't make these families pack up and go home. It would just put the kids into a legal jeopardy that impedes their assimilation into American society — without appreciably diminishing the number of people going over, under, around or through the border fence.

Punishing innocents without accomplishing anything useful? The opponents of birthright citizenship need an anchor in reality.

Denying citizenship for illegal immigrants' children is a bad idea

2010-06-28T09:32:00.001-07:00

They are called "anchor babies" -- the children born in the United States of illegal immigrant parents -- and pressure is growing to change the meaning of the 14th Amendment so as to deny them automatic citizenship.

Ninety-one members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors of a bill to do just that. It was submitted in the House last year by Georgia Republican Nathan Deal. Backers of Arizona's harsh anti-immigrant measure are drafting legislation that would withhold birth certificates from these babies. Similar measures are being proposed in other states.

The United States is one of the few countries in the world that bestows "birthright citizenship." Opponents of the practice say that it induces immigrants to enter the country illegally with the devious strategy of having a baby as a citizen "anchor," through which the rest of the family can petition to stay and get access to American jobs and welfare.

But ending birthright citizenship might be the worst idea of the immigration debate. It strikes at the core of American identity, punishes all Americans by requiring them to prove their citizenship, overthrows two centuries of legislative intent and court rulings, and accomplishes next to nothing in resolving illegal immigration.

The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

The abrogationists would reinterpret the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." They argue that unauthorized immigrants are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction and that Congress, acting in 1866 at the end of the Civil War, meant for the amendment to apply only to recently freed slaves.

Go back, however, and read the transcripts of the 1866 debate in the Senate and you find that both those for and against the amendment readily acknowledged its application to illegal immigrants. A Pennsylvania senator, for example, objected to granting citizenship to the children of aliens who regularly commit "trespass" within the United States. The concern then was with babies of gypsy or Chinese parents.

But Congress and the ratifying states opted instead to uphold a founding principle of the republic that was fundamental to the peaceful building of a multiethnic immigrant nation, however imperfectly. In a world plagued by bloody ethnic conflicts, that concern remains valid.

The Supreme Court has regularly upheld birthright citizenship, most recently in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe, in which all nine justices agreed that the 14th Amendment applied to legal and illegal immigrants alike, and a majority ruled that Texas had to offer public school education to children of illegal immigrants.

Abrogating birthright citizenship additionally would create practical chaos. All Americans would have to prove their citizenship. Birth certificates would no longer do. Yet we lack a national registry of who is a citizen.

As West Point professor Margaret Stock says: "The government would have to adjudicate the citizenship status of every child born within U.S. borders based on the exceedingly complex rules of derivative citizenship, or citizenship by blood. Currently, [it] takes more than a year to make such determinations, and the process is expensive and fraught with error."

The abrogationists confuse the historical ecosystem on the U.S.-Mexican border with illegal immigrants in general. Pregnant Mexican women from border towns do commonly cross just to have a baby in the United States. But their extended families have often straddled the border for a century or more. The women tend to be middle class, pre-pay the hospitals in cash and go home, though their children can someday return.

A handful of tourists do the same, but the total of all these is minuscule. Significant are the 4 million children in 2008 with one or more unauthorized immigrant parents spread throughout the country, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Repeated studies, however, show that their parents came for jobs or to join family. The children were normal byproducts of life, and not an immigration strategy. The parents are not eligible for welfare or for citizenship until after the child turns 21.

Improved enforcement has dramatically slowed the flow of illegal immigration. What's needed now is comprehensive immigration reform to finish the job. Talk of birthright citizenship is an unwise diversion.

Edward Schumacher-Matos is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is edward.schumachermatos@yahoo.com.

100 co-sponsors sign on to immigration measure

2010-06-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

Pro-immigration House Democrats on Thursday marked what they called a "milestone" of 100 co-sponsors for a comprehensive reform bill that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Flanked by a group of immigrants, Democratic lawmakers said at a news conference that achieving 100 co-sponsors shows that immigration reform has the momentum necessary to become law. Still, the bill faces an uphill battle in Congress. House members are wary of facing voters in November who are split on what to do about immigration. The stringent but popular anti-immigrant law in Arizona is adding considerable fuel to the fire.

The Melting Pot

2010-06-24T13:46:00.002-07:00

The World Cup decides the best in the world in soccer, but the “world” in World Cup has another meaning. Players, no matter what team they are on, are from all over the world.

On the U.S. team, there are a number of players who are either immigrants themselves or whose parents are immigrants. Any of them, at least in theory, could have chosen to represent the country of their birth or the country of their parents.

Benny Feilhaber is Brazilian. His grandparents fled Austria for Brazil when Hitler’s Germany took over. His family migrated again, to California, when he was six years old. Through his grandparents, he was able to obtain an Austrian passport in order to play for a time for a German team.

Stuart Holden is from Scotland, and came to the U.S. when he was 10. He gained his citizenship four years ago.

Jose Torres, a Texan of Mexican descent, gave up a chance to play in the Olympics on the U.S. team in order to play with the Pachuca, Mexico, club team. He is now back with the U.S. team in South Africa.

Goalkeeper Tim Howard (who was key to keeping England to one goal in the opening game for the U.S.) could theoretically have represented Hungary, the country of his mother’s birth.

The parents of Oguchi Onyewu came to the U.S. from Nigeria, and his father played soccer for Howard University.

Jozy Altidore’s parents are from Haiti, and earlier this year he raised more than 100,000 pounds (from England, where he was playing on the Hull city team) for Haitian earthquake relief.

Other players with immigrant parents or who are dual citizens on the U.S. squad are Carlos Bocanegra (father is from Mexico); Jonathan Spector (both grandparents on his mother’s side are German and he has a German passport; Maurice Edu (both parents are from Nigeria); Landon Donovan (father is from Canada); and Hercules Gomez (both parents are from Mexico).

A People's Guide to U.S. Immigration Law

2010-06-24T13:46:00.001-07:00

NYC mayor, major CEOs lobby for immigration reform

2010-06-24T13:42:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK — Chief executives of several major corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney and News Corp., are joining Mayor Michael Bloomberg to form a coalition advocating for immigration reform — including a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants now in the United States.

The group includes several other big-city mayors and calls itself the Partnership for a New American Economy. It seeks to reframe immigration reform as the solution to repairing and stimulating the economy.

Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., appeared together Thursday on Fox News to discuss the effort.

"We're just going to keep the pressure on the congressmen," Murdoch said. "I think we can show to the public the benefits of having migrants and the jobs that go with them."

Bloomberg added, "Somebody has to lead and explain to the country why this is in our interest."

The CEOs said Thursday in statements that their companies — and the nation — depend on immigrants.

"It's our great strength as a nation, and it's also critical for continued economic growth," Walt Disney Co. Chairman and CEO Robert Iger said in a statement. "To remain competitive in the 21st century, we need effective immigration reform that invites people to contribute to our shared success by building their own American dream."

The group says it intends to make its point to policymakers by "publishing studies, conducting polls, convening forums and paying for public education campaigns."

The tactics are similar to those used by Bloomberg's coalition of mayors who support gun control.

Bloomberg has for years criticized the federal government for its immigration laws, proposing in 2006 a plan that would have established a DNA or fingerprint database to track and verify all legal U.S. workers.

The billionaire mayor, a former CEO of the financial information company Bloomberg LP, also said at the time that all 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States should be given the opportunity for citizenship, saying that deporting them is impossible and would devastate the economy.

Lawmakers who wanted to deport all illegal immigrants were "living in a fantasy world," he said.

He has recently taken up the fight again, declaring this week that U.S. immigration policy "is national suicide."

"I can't think of any ways to destroy this country quite as direct and impactful as our immigration policy," he said Wednesday. "We educate the best and the brightest, and then we don't give them a green card."

The group's main immigration goals are to secure the borders, develop an easy system for employers to verify work eligibility, hold companies accountable for breaking the laws and improve the use of technology to prevent illegal immigration.

The group also wants more opportunities for immigrants to join the U.S. work force and a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants.

Bloomberg spokesman Jason Post said no money has been spent on the effort yet, and he could not say whether the group will be a standard nonprofit, a political action committee or a group known as a 501(c)4 nonprofit, which can operate outside the more strict limits governing political action committees.

The business leaders in the coalition employ more than 650,000 people and make more than $220 billion in annual sales, combined.

The effort marks Bloomberg's return to national issues after he spent 2009 campaigning for a third term, focusing mostly on New York City's municipal concerns.

The Republican-turned-independent spent about two years testing the waters for an independent 2008 presidential run, but ultimately he gave up the idea.

By recruiting business leaders and mayors into a national-issue coalition, he is highlighting both of his backgrounds in running a city and running a business, which could be seen as an early move to dust off his presidential aspirations.

A Questionable Excuse on Immigration

2010-06-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

Get ready for a big news week on immigration. Unfortunately, a lot of it will be political posturing from both sides, with the serious debate over the important issues hard to find.

For starters, the Obama administration will file suit against Arizona’s new law, which allows local cops to request citizenship papers or green cards from suspects. The law has sparked heated debates in neighboring states over whether they should adopt similar laws, an issue sure to figure in the November elections. It has also prompted a national debate. Polls show a majority of Americans back the law even though a majority also think it will lead to racial discrimination. They’ve apparently decided it’s worth the price.

At the same time, Obama has formally asked Congress for $600 million for additional border security, and he’s promised to send 1,200 National Guard troops to help. Administration officials will travel to Arizona on June 28 to detail their plans to GOP Gov. Jan Brewer.

Not much progress, though, on the broader question of a comprehensive immigration bill -- one that would combine tough border measures with both a guest worker program to alleviate labor shortages and a path to legal status (after paying fines and back taxes and waiting in line) for the 11 million or so illegal immigrants already in the country. Hispanic groups are demanding action on the whole package, and Democrats who need their votes this fall, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose home state of Nevada has a healthy proportion of potential Latino voters are promising to try.

But action is unlikely because Republicans and conservative Democrats don’t want to go near the issue. Even past advocates of a comprehensive bill -- Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) -- are shying away from bills very similar to the one they supported and President George W. Bush pushed a few years back.

The GOP cry is that securing the border must come first. “Once we get the border secured, then we can support a lot of other things,” says Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Fine, but what exactly does that mean? The U.S.-Mexico border is already far more secure than it was a few years ago, with double the number of agents, 510 miles of fences and barriers, and much more technology to guard against illegal crossings. In Arizona, for example, there are now 10 guards for every mile of border. As a result, by every measure, illegal crossings are down significantly.

The truth is that many who oppose immigration reform will never be satisfied until the border is sealed tight -- which is obviously impossible. It’s a goal the U.S. can never reach, and they know it. They’ll keep using it as an excuse so they can oppose legislation forever. Dennis Wagner explored this question of how to define “secure enough” in The Arizona Republic this week in what was an eminently reasonable argument. The comments it attracted -- 864 the last time I checked -- were much less reasonable. Leaving aside those who called Wagner names, many argued they just never accept amnesty for illegals, insisting that’s what comprehensive legislation provides. For the record, that’s not true. The dictionary defines amnesty as a pardon, which is not what the proposed bill offers. Making illegals pay their debts to society is akin to the way we treat other criminals, and no one calls that amnesty.

But the posturing goes on, with no sign of a compromise. Eventually, conditions may change enough to allow progress. A more robust economy will prompt businesses to demand a solution to labor shortages, and the ever-growing political clout of Hispanic voters will force politicians to take notice. But that’s still a long way off.

Baseball Teams Prep Rookies for Arizona’s SB1070

2010-06-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

New recruits for Major League Baseball teams are headed to Arizona this week for the Arizona Rookie League, and teams don’t want their players getting into trouble with the law. Not because they’re worried players will commit a crime, but because many are from Latin America, and teams fear their players’ brown skin could attract the attention of law enforcement officers who are getting ready to start enforcing SB 1070 when it goes into effect on July 29.

AP reports that both the Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Indians equip their players with photo ID cards that have contact information for a representative from the team for police to contact, should a player be stopped. Teams are also holding seminars so players know about the political and social environment of the state.

The program, a rookie-level professional league, starts today in the Phoenix area, and will host 150 players from Latin America alone through August.

Latino players make up a significant part of the MLB ranks. Many are from the Dominican Republican, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba. And in the weeks immediately after Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, players of all nationalities spoke out against the law, which allows law enforcement to detain and question any person they have “reasonable suspicion” to believe is in the country without papers. San Diego Padres’ star Adrian Gonzalez has said he will boycott the 2011 All-Star game in Phoenix if the MLB does not respond to calls to move the game.

New York Mets' catcher Rod Barajas told the NY Times: "“If they happen to pull someone over who looks like they are of Latin descent, even if they are a U.S. citizen, that is the first question that is going to be asked. But if a blond-haired, blue-eyed Canadian gets pulled over, do you think they are going to ask for their papers? No.”

A coalition of groups including MALDEF, the ACLU, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the NAACP and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center filed a lawsuit challenging the law in May. And in early June the same coalition filed for injunctive relief to stop the law from going into effect.

But MLB teams aren't waiting to hear back from the judge. "We brought in a local police officer to explain the situation and issued each player an ID card so they don't have to rely on carrying around their visas and paperwork with them," Cleveland Indians' player development Ross Atkins told the AP. If only every other immigrant in the state had the confidence of that kind of protection.

Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigrants

2010-06-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO — Residents of a small city in eastern Nebraska voted Monday to banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes, defying an earlier decision by the city’s leaders and setting off what is all but certain to be a costly and closely watched legal challenge.

In Fremont , a meat-packing town of about 25,000 people, unofficial results from The Associated Press late Monday showed that 57 percent of voters approved a referendum barring landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and obliging city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the new law, including some business and church leaders, had argued that the City of Fremont simply could not afford the new law, which is all but certain to be challenged in court. In a flurry of television commercials and presentations by opponents in the final days before Monday’s vote, opponents said paying to defend such a local law would require a significant cut in Fremont city services or a stiff tax increase — or some combination of the two.

“There were a lot of tears in this room tonight,” said Kristin Ostrom, an opponent who gathered with others in an old V.F.W. building to await the results. “Unfortunately, people have voted for an ordinance that’s going to cost millions of dollars, and that says to the Hispanic community that the Anglo community is saying they are not welcome here. They thought they were coming to a small-town community with small-town values.”

But advocates argued that federal authorities had failed to enforce their own immigration restrictions, leaving places like Fremont — with a small but growing Hispanic population — to take care of such matters themselves. They complained that illegal immigrants were causing an increase in crime, taking jobs that would once have gone to longtime residents, and changing the character of their quiet city, some 30 miles of farm fields from Omaha.

Within minutes of the results being announced, officials from the A.C.L.U. Nebraska pledged to file a lawsuit as quickly as possible.

“If this law goes into effect, it will cause discrimination and racial profiling against Latinos and others who appear to be foreign born, including U.S. citizens,” Laurel Marsh, executive director of A.C.L.U. Nebraska , said in a statement issued late Monday. “The A.C.L.U. Nebraska has no option but to turn to the courts to stop this un-American and unconstitutional ordinance before the law goes into effect. Not only do local ordinances such as this violate federal law, they are also completely out of step with American values of fairness and equality.”

Fremont’s Hispanic population, practically nonexistent two decades ago, has grown to about 2,000 people, according to some estimates. No one knows how many illegal immigrants live in Fremont, and the estimates (depending on which side of this debate one is on) vary enormously.

Still, some in Fremont point, with worry, to other Nebraska towns — places like Schuyler and Lexington — as communities that no longer look or feel the way they once did.

In recent years, numerous towns and cities around the nation have considered adopting laws restricting illegal immigrants. But in most cases, political leaders and town councils have been the ones to pass the provisions — not the voters. And the laws have proven politically-tangled: measures in towns like Hazleton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Tex., are still being fought in court, while some other cities (facing the prospect of drawn-out legal battles) have dropped the issue.

That almost happened in Fremont. Two years ago, a City Council member in Fremont suggested the city should pass a law on illegal immigrants. But after two emotional hearings — with what both sides said was participants from all over the state, the Council voted 4 to 4 on the proposal. The longtime mayor then voted against it, saying that he, too, was opposed to illegal immigrants but had come to believe that the question was one that had been, legally speaking, left to federal authorities, not Fremont.

Some residents were outraged by the choice, and began collecting signatures on a petition to put the question to a vote — the vote that ultimately came on Monday.

As residents of Fremont began considering what the decision would now mean, details of the new law were a new matter for debate. Some noted, with puzzlement, that the law would not apply to the area’s two biggest meatpacking plants (including Hormel, the largest employer) because they are just outside the city’s official boundaries, and that the law would also not apply to “casual labor for domestic tasks” around Fremont homes. But some said they believe the housing requirements — and new $5 occupancy license rule — might apply to people living in nursing homes.

Clinton says Ariz. to be sued over immigration law, but Justice Dept. won't confirm plan

2010-06-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Obama administration has decided to sue Arizona over the state's controversial immigration law, according to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Justice Department declined Thursday to confirm such a plan.

In a June 8 interview with an Ecuadorean television station, Clinton said the department, under President Obama's direction, "will be bringing a lawsuit" over the measure. A video of the interview was distributed Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union, which urged the administration to go to court.

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the department "continues to review the law'' and declined to comment further.

The Arizona legislation empowers police to question anyone who authorities have a "reasonable suspicion" is an illegal immigrant. The Justice Department has been considering for nearly two months whether to sue the state to stop the law from taking effect this summer.

Federal officials have given strong signals in recent weeks that a lawsuit is almost certain, and one official involved in reviewing the law said Thursday that "there is no reason to think" that Clinton's assertion was wrong. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because no decision has been announced.

Arizona officials have urged the administration not to file suit, and Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said in a statement Thursday: "If our own government intends to sue our state to prevent illegal immigration enforcement, the least it can do is inform us before it informs the citizens of another nation."

Migrant Backers See No Relief

2010-06-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

For Leslie Cocche, the morning of March 12 began like any other school day.

She stood at the Fort Lauderdale Tri-Rail station listening to music through her ear buds while awaiting the train to Miami, where she attends Miami Dade College.

Suddenly, a U.S. Border Patrol agent began questioning her, eventually discovering that the 18-year-old Peruvian was in the country illegally. Cocche was arrested, handcuffed and handed over for deportation proceedings.

Cocche's detention, along with many other recent arrests of undocumented immigrants in South Florida and across the country, have raised questions about whether the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is misleading the public about enforcement.

In contrast to the controversial Arizona state law that would allow police officers to request immigration papers from individuals only after they stop them for suspicions activities, federal immigration agents are allowed to demand documents from any foreign national at any time.

After President Barack Obama took office, Homeland Security said that immigration authorities would focus on removing convicted foreign criminals -- a shift that initially encouraged those who saw it as a prelude to legalization of the nation's estimated 10.8 million undocumented immigrants.

But now Homeland Security is under fire by disillusioned activists who believe the Obama administration is only paying lip service to a different strategy, and that in reality it is detaining criminal and noncriminal immigrants the same way the administration of George W. Bush did.

``The situation has not changed,'' said David Leopold, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, who will take office July 1. ``It's a failure in the field to follow the administration's stated enforcement priorities.''

Officials of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Homeland Security agency in charge of deportations, say the critics are wrong. They acknowledge that deportations of noncriminal immigration-law violators are continuing, but say the agency now views them as ``low-priority.''

ICE released figures last week saying they indicate a downward trend in removals of noncriminal foreign nationals in the past year and a half.

Figures from Oct. 1 to June 7 show that the number of criminal and noncriminal removals are almost even, at more than 113,000 each.

The number of noncriminal removals still exceeds that of criminal deportations, but only by 257 people.

That is a change from the last two fiscal years, when annual noncriminal removals outpaced criminal removals by more than 100,000 people.

ICE officials said figures for criminal deportations reflect removals of "foreign nationals convicted of crimes'' in the United States, but they did not specifically explain what kinds of crimes they were convicted of.

Nicole Navas, an ICE spokeswoman in Miami, said that though her agency's priority is to remove convicted "criminal aliens," it is still detaining and deporting noncriminal foreign nationals who violate immigration laws. "ICE is charged with and mandated by Congress to enforce the nation's immigration laws," said Navas. "As a law enforcement agency, ICE never said we were going to cease arresting noncriminal aliens. Noncriminals are simply the lowest priority. ICE still detains and removes noncriminals, but ICE's priority as an agency is to remove criminal aliens with convictions."

She added: "ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes efforts first on those convicted criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately. Across the country, we exercise lawful discretion in order to focus our efforts on violent and dangerous criminals in order to make our streets safer."

Immigrant-rights activists said they were skeptical about ICE's figures and the agency's statement that they represent a downward trend.

``Unfortunately, ICE has a history of playing fast and loose with statistics,'' said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. ``The ICE definition of criminal includes people found guilty of minor violations, like an expired driver's license and illegal entry into the United States. ICE even has classified people who weren't convicted as criminals.''

ICE officials said figures for criminal deportations reflect removals of foreign nationals convicted of crimes in the United States, but they did specify what kinds of crimes they were convicted of.

Critics expected a dramatic -- not a gradual -- reduction in the number of detentions and deportations of noncriminal immigrants under the Obama administration.

``The Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center is seeing more people than ever without criminal histories being targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,'' Little said. ``Unfortunately, the kinder, gentler immigration policies that were promised by this administration are woefully lacking.''

Some immigration attorneys contend enforcement under the Obama administration has become even more aggressive.

``The situation is worse today,'' said Coral Gables immigration attorney Eduardo Soto, who has practiced immigration law for almost 20 years. ``There seems to be pressure on immigration officials to remove as many aliens as possible, no matter whether they have criminal records or not.''

Tania Galloni, an immigration attorney in Little's organization, is representing Cocche and her family.

After Cocche was arrested, Galloni wrote a letter to ICE noting that proceedings against her client contradicted the administration's public statements that criminals were now the priority.

``This is not only harmful to an exceptional young woman,'' Galloni wrote, ```but would also fly directly in the face of the administration's public statements that its immigration enforcement priority is to target dangerous criminal aliens.''

The Cocche case is particularly galling to immigrant rights advocates because she is a criminal-justice student at Miami Dade College, and is in the country not by choice but because her parents brought her here when she was a child.

Legislation repeatedly introduced in Congress as the DREAM Act would grant young undocumented students green cards.

When Cocche arrived at the Fort Lauderdale Tri-Rail station, as on past occasions, she saw two Border Patrol agents on the boarding platform, and paid them little attention.

This time, an agent asked Cocche for her immigration documents, which she could not produce.

``She was found to be illegally in the United States, arrested and placed in removal proceedings,'' said Victor C. Colón, the U.S. Border Patrol's assistant chief patrol agent for the Miami Sector.

Cocche was detained at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach for 11 days. Subsequently, her sister and parents were placed in deportation proceedings as well. Cocche was eventually released with the promise that she and her family would report later to immigration court in Miami. ``If they lose their case they could all be deported, all because Border Patrol singled Leslie out that one . . . morning,'' Galloni said. ``And deporting Leslie and her sister Kellyn would not be in our interest since they are star students who would have a very bright future here.''

Bill to deny birthright citizenship would face obstacles Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subje

2010-06-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

Challenging the 14th Amendment is among the goals of some immigration reform activists and is being considered by lawmakers.

The amendment was adopted after the Civil War to define who is a citizen of the U.S. The amendment in effect overruled the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case that denied citizenship to blacks.

In part, the law states that any person born or naturalized in the U.S. is a citizen and "no state shall make or enforce any law" denying that right.

A group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Randy Terrill, R-Moore, have stated that they are thinking of filing a bill in the next session that mirrors the controversial Arizona immigration law and goes a step further, including preventing children from becoming citizens at birth if both parents are illegal immigrants.

The Arizona law makes it a crime to be in that state illegally and requires law enforcement officers to check documents of people they reasonably suspect to be there illegally.

A challenge to birthright citizenship has been proposed in Congress as recently as 2009. Arizona lawmakers have stated plans to introduce a law denying citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.

If Oklahoma were to pass legislation restricting citizenship, it likely would be challenged in the federal courts.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association, Immigration Policy Center and legal scholars cite judicial rulings and precedent, executive branch interpretations, congressional law and Supreme

Court rulings in arguing to uphold birthright citizenship.

These groups say altering the amendment or its interpretation would create a subclass of citizens and lead to discrimination.

Ian Bratlie, an immigration attorney, said challenges have gone in favor of immigrants going back to the 1800s.

"Legally, it's a nonstarter," Bratlie said. "There's court case history and a long legislative history supporting it."

The reform activists argue that the amendment was to grant citizenship to former slaves, not illegal immigrants.

Carol Helm, the founder of the Tulsa group Immigration Reform for Oklahoma Now, said it supports the challenge. She said the states should change the practice to what is done internationally when a U.S. citizen gives birth in another country.

"I believe what we would call a certificate of live birth instead of a birth certificate will withstand scrutiny of a lawsuit," Helm said. "Birth certificates are state-issued papers. It's controlled by the states, meaning the states should be the ones to pass certificates of live births for that child."

The notion that a U.S.-born baby can serve as "an anchor" to allow the illegal immigrant parents to remain in the country is "a myth" and "totally impossible," Helm said.

Immigration lawyers also dismiss the term "anchor baby" as false. It is typically a derogatory term used to refer to children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants.

"But that myth is lingering and is encouraging people to come here," Helm said. "That an illegal mother and dad made the choice to step across the border means they need to be responsible for those choices."

A U.S.-born child does not change the immigration status of a parent, and a child cannot legally petition for a parent until age 21.

An illegal immigrant must return to the home country pending a petition, which may trigger a 10-year ban from re-entering the country. The process involves eligibility based on congressional quotas and sponsor relationships.

Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20100620_11_A8_DMnsra471080

City in Nebraska Torn as Immigration Vote Nears

2010-06-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

FREMONT, Neb. — In this city of 25,000, far from any international border, the fight over illegal immigration has boiled over.

Enlarge This Image

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Yuliana Magana, center, with her daughter Ashley, 3, at a rally in Fremont against a crackdown on illegal immigration.

This is ordinarily a serene place with polite politics and votes that sail through City Hall 8 to 0. But in a special election Monday, residents will decide whether to ban businesses from hiring illegal immigrants and bar landlords from renting to them. Residents demanded the vote, fighting off challenges by some of their elected leaders all the way to the State Supreme Court.

The election has opened a rare and raw divide. There are awkward silences for some who fear offending their neighbors (whose position they cannot be certain of), and, for others, volleys of suspicion.

Wanda Kotas, who pushed for the special election, said her family’s cat, Mr. Sippi, was killed by a pellet gun not long after her efforts, an act she suspects is related. Kristin Ostrom, who has spoken against the referendum, said a rock was heaved through her front window, an old barbecue grill was dumped at her doorstep, and, this week, an e-mail message arrived promising in red letters to “shed blood” to take back the country. And Alfredo Velez, who once worked at one of Fremont’s meatpacking plants and now owns a Mexican grocery, received an anonymous letter accusing him of harboring illegal immigrants, and said someone screamed at him on these neatly kept streets: “Go back to Mexico!”

The Hispanic population, while growing, still makes up less than 10 percent of Fremont, yet some say they blame illegal immigrants for what they see as a rise in crime here, the loss of good jobs for local residents and a shift in the culture.

Some complain about shoppers speaking Spanish at the Wal-Mart, businesses with phone messages saying “Press 1 for English,” and the need for two interpreters last fall at the annual “kindergarten round-up” where children meet their teachers.

Perhaps these are ordinary growing pains for Midwestern cities like Fremont, anchored by meatpacking plants with many immigrant workers, some of whom residents here suspect of being in this country illegally.

But the struggle has taken an unusual turn. After Fremont’s political leaders rejected an ordinance intended to keep illegal immigrants out, residents fought back and insisted, finally getting approval in the Nebraska Supreme Court to take the matter straight tovoters.

This is a legally complicated realm given the federal role in handling immigration; a lawsuit is all but certain if it passes. In other places where such immigration laws have been pondered (and often contested later), state lawmakers and local governing bodies have usually made the call, not citizens by referendum.

“In this very quiet little town where this hasn’t been an issue, it’s uncomfortable,” said Michelle Knapp, who opposes the anti-illegal immigrant law but acknowledges that she has at times only whispered her view. “You don’t know what people are listening.”

The battle began two years ago when a City Council member suggested that the city should take on illegal immigration. As in other towns, leaders here said they were frustrated by what they viewed as a failure by federal authorities to manage the problem.

By July 2008, a second hearing on the City Council’s proposal drew such a crowd that the meeting was moved to the high school auditorium (for the first time in memory) and the large crowd (under the watch of the police) voiced pointed views on all sides. The City Council waived plans for another hearing and instead voted, 4 to 4. Donald B. Edwards, the longtime mayor, gave an emotional speech, then voted no, to cheers and hoots.

“Everyone including myself is strongly against illegals,” Mr. Edwards told the crowd. “That’s not the issue.” Every legal mind he consulted led him to believe that immigration was a federal matter and that city action would lead to costly litigation. “I can’t change the law.”

This 1850s-era railroad and farming town, about 30 miles northwest of Omaha, included 165 Hispanic residents in 1990 by some estimates. The number is closer to 2,000 now. No one really knows how many illegal immigrants live here, but peoples’ claims about statistics vary wildly.

Dean Skokan, the city attorney, who spoke on behalf of city officials who he said were barred by statute from voicing opinions on city time regarding ballot questions, says crime has risen over time. But he says he knows of no data compiled here on crimes by ethnicity or national origin.

But that is little comfort to residents like Jerry Hart, a retired Internal Revenue Serviceworker who recalls a time when Fremont’s doors did not need locks.

The area’s meatpacking plants — including Hormel, the largest employer and a presence since 1947 — look different, he said.

“How can you be against following the law,” said Mr. Hart, who spent months helping to collect more than 4,000 signatures to put the question on the ballot.

If the population changes have shifted the way Fremont feels, so has the coming anti-illegal-immigration referendum. Hispanic residents say they once felt welcomed here — or, at least, not noticed — but the increasingly loud political fight, they say, seems to have changed the tone.

“I know what they’re thinking when they look at me: Am I legal? Am I illegal?” said Luis Canahui, who came here from Guatemala. “I can feel it.”

A woman who asked not to be identified because her legal status has run out grew tearful at what Fremont had once felt like to her. “I like this town, but this is the place for my kids, not for me anymore,” she said.

Opponents of the immigration law here nearly always cite practical considerations — the likely cost of litigation, above all — as the reason to reject it. One television spot, playing up the costs, shows a blank check signed by “Citizens of Fremont” and a narrator’s booming voice: “Say no to needless spending! Say no to cuts in community services!”

City officials have said the cost of fighting court challenges — presumably, claims that the law would improperly infringe on federal authority — would probably run into the millions. Laws in towns like Hazleton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Tex., remain in court, and other cities have, faced with legal fights, repealed laws or dropped plans for them.

Fremont’s proposal, which was written with help from an author of Arizona’s new anti-immigration law, would require Fremont businesses to use a federal database, E-Verify, to check new employees’ information, and landlords to rent only to those who get a new city occupancy license (for $5) after turning over information to the police.

Skeptics, like Les Leech, the president of the Fremont Beef Company, said plants here already use E-Verify, but that does not stop those using stolen Social Security numbers. In March, immigration officials arrested 17 workers from Fremont Beef. “This ordinance will not change the complexion of this county one bit,” Mr. Leech said, “because E-Verify doesn’t work.”

Oddly enough, the meatpacking plants, including Hormel, are just outside city limits, and would not be subject to the new law.

Supporters say it does not matter. “We have to start somewhere,” said John Wiegert, a resident. “Hiding under your desk in a city office isn’t going to help.”

Brent McDonald contributed reporting.

Fitting the Formula for Judicial Review: The Law-Fact Distinction in Immigration Law

2010-06-18T09:41:00.001-07:00

Abstract:
The ill-defined law-fact distinction often stands as the gatekeeper to judicial review of an agency deportation order, restricting non-citizens facing deportation to raising only questions of law when appearing before an appellate court. The restriction on review most affects cases whose dispositions typically turn on the resolution of factual issues, including claims under Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture and claims for discretionary relief from deportation like cancellation of removal. Convention Against Torture claims, for example, often involve extensive fact-finding on the part of the immigration judge regarding conditions in the applicant’s home country and the applicant’s personal circumstances. At the same time, these claims raise a plethora of issues that arguably are not purely factual, including such critical questions as: Does the feared mistreatment rise to the level of torture? Is the mistreatment likely to happen? Has the judge followed the standards governing factual adjudications? Whether or not a federal appellate court can answer these questions depends on which side of the law-fact divide they fall. This article demonstrates that the basic, analytical concept of a question of law in immigration court decisions is more expansive than is typically understood. It focuses on questions that involve the application of law to facts that have already been established - questions that are commonly called mixed questions. The article briefly traces the history of immigration judicial review, culminating with the REAL ID Act of 2005 and the jurisdictional savings clause contained in it. It discusses the concept of a mixed question of law and fact, offering a basic formula that captures the concept of a mixed question as a question of law. It also proposes a meta-rule formula for mixed questions that offers a way to identify and categorize mixed questions involving a breach of the rules of decision-making. Also addressed is the interplay between the concepts of law-fact and discretion, as this has been a focal point of confusion. The article concludes with thoughts about how courts and litigators should proceed in their thinking about the law-fact distinction.

Witnesses: Law against racial profiling needed

2010-06-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — Azaad Singh cried when he entered the glass enclosure at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., airport for extra screening.

He was patted down. His bag was searched. And then the security officer went through his prized possessions: his first Elmo book, his second Elmo book, his mini-mail truck.

Azaad, whose name means "freedom," is an American and a Sikh.

He's 18 months old.

Azaad's father, Amardeep Singh, told a House hearing Thursday that he's not sure how he'll one day explain to Azaad why he and his Sikh family seems to always need extra screening.

The House Judiciary civil rights subcommittee is exploring potential legislation to stop racial profiling. Witnesses proposed that Congress require studies to document how often particular groups of victims are stopped or arrested and whether they were threats to the United States. Legislation also should provide for legal redress for those who were wronged.

Witnesses told the committee that profiling remains a national problem for African-Americans; Hispanics are increasingly victims, especially in states and communities that have cracked down on illegal immigrants; and, since Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims and Sikhs have been regularly targeted.

Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office, said the civil rights group has more than 2,200 membership units in every state, "and I would wager that every NAACP unit has, at some point, received at least one complaint of racial profiling. Many NAACP units report receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of complaints."

"It's not fair. It's not safe. It's not American," said Singh, who was returning from a family vacation in Mexico two months ago when the incident occurred in Fort Lauderdale. He's director of programs of The Sikh Coalition. He testified wearing a traditional Sikh turban.

The police chief of Salt Lake City, Chris Burbank, said profiling will only get worse in communities where police are required to enforce immigration laws. "By increasing our role in civil immigration action, state and local law enforcement is placed in the untenable position of potentially engaging in unconstitutional racial profiling, while attempting to maintain trust within the communities we protect," Burbank said. "Officers are forced to detain and question individuals for looking or speaking differently from the majority, not for their criminal behavior. How is a police officer to determine status without detaining and questioning anyone who speaks, looks or acts as if they might be from another nation?"

A Utah law that takes effect July 1 allows local police officers to enforce federal immigration law. State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said that participation in the enforcement provision is optional and that many local police departments are opting out.

Arizona citizenship bill targets children

2010-06-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

an Diego, California (CNN) -- And then they came for the children.

Just when you thought Arizona lawmakers couldn't stoop any lower, these cowardly and shameful politicians grab a shovel and put in a basement.

This fall, the Arizona legislature is expected to debate a bill that would deny birth certificates to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants -- the "anchor babies" that some Republicans have been trying to marginalize for years.

The lawmakers are cowards because, first, they go after illegal immigrants who don't vote, lobby or contribute to political campaigns. And now they're going after children who don't vote, lobby or contribute to political campaigns.

Whom are they not going after? Employers of illegal immigrants. You know why? Because they vote, lobby and contribute to political campaigns.

Video: Targeting children of illegal immigrants

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By the way, the term "anchor babies," which refers to the tots that supposedly increase the chances that mommy and daddy can stay in the United States even if mommy and daddy are in the country illegally, isn't just offensive and crude. It's also misleading.

The fact that Elvira Arellano, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was famously holed up in a Chicago, Illinois, church, had a U.S.-born son didn't stop federal officials from deporting her in 2007. Some anchor.

The real anchor is a job, the kind eagerly provided by U.S. employers who thumb their noses at federal law prohibiting the hiring of illegal immigrants.

In fact, right-wingers acknowledge as much when they argue that if we dry up the jobs, illegal immigrants will self-deport.

What about their kids, some of which were born in the United States? Why not stay for them? Simple: Employment takes precedence. Thus, according to conservatives' own arguments, there aren't anchor babies -- only anchor jobs.

Also, you can bet that some of the same people who oppose citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants also oppose the idea of granting a pathway to earned legalization -- what they call "amnesty" -- to illegal immigrants. Why?

Because, they say, you can't willy-nilly convert those who are illegal to legal. Then how can those folks be so cavalier about making that conversion in the opposite direction by changing legal to illegal?

Lastly, one of the things you hear from amnesty opponents is that illegal immigrants should certainly not be given U.S. citizenship. It's just too valuable, they say. Agreed. But if it's so valuable, then why are some on the right so quick to strip it away from the children of illegal immigrants? Don't U.S. citizens deserve more respect than that? Apparently not.

In the late 1990s, the member of Congress leading the crusade against "birthright citizenship" was Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-California.

The San Diego-area congressman proposed a bill to limit the privilege to the children of U.S. citizens. The legislation didn't go anywhere. It couldn't even get a hearing from some of Bilbray's fellow Republicans, who cringed at the idea of visiting the sins of the parents onto the children.

The same was true for another failed attempt by Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Georgia, who, in 2005, proposed a bill that explicitly denied citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. The bill didn't go anywhere either, in part because not enough Republicans would even agree to give it a hearing.

That same year, I discussed the idea with Rep. James Sensenbrenner, who was then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the author of a sweeping piece of legislation called "The Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Immigration Control Act of 2005." Among other things, the bill would have made unauthorized presence in the United States a felony. Yet even Sensenbrenner, not exactly a softhearted liberal, wouldn't touch the idea of denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. When fellow Republicans tried to insert such language into his bill, he was careful to keep it out.

There was a time when Republicans knew better than to handle radioactive material. My, how times have changed.

And now all the opponents of birthright citizenship have to do is change the Constitution. The 14th Amendment makes clear that anyone born in the United States, with the possible exception of the children of foreign diplomats, is a U.S. citizen.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Grasping at straws, restrictionists and nativists claim that illegal immigrants aren't "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.

So what? My concern isn't that critics don't know how to read the law. It's that they don't know how to read -- period.

Jurisdiction applies not to the parents, but to the children. As U.S. citizens, they're subject to U.S. laws, but they also enjoy the protection of the U.S. Constitution. The closed border / closed mind crowd may not like it, but that's the way it is.

I'm not surprised that this escapes the state of Arizona.

Given all that's happened in recent weeks in its jihad against not illegal immigrants but Hispanics in general, the Grand Canyon State seems to have more than its share of people who slept through high school civics, and they're being advised by lawyers who were obviously absent the day they taught "law" in law school. That's not a good look.

The U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are legally entitled to U.S. citizenship. What part of "legal" don't the critics understand?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Analysis: Enforcing Arizona immigration law will be hard Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2010/06/17/20100617arizon

2010-06-17T09:36:00.000-07:00

A legal analysis by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office asserts that Arizona's new immigration law will be difficult to enforce because it is based on outdated sections of federal law with very narrow legal parameters.

The analysis was presented Friday to 16 prosecutors from across the state during a training session for the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys' Advisory Council, known as APAAC.

Neither interim County Attorney Rick Romley nor the deputy county attorneys who made the presentation would comment. The Arizona Republic obtained a copy of it through a public-records request to APAAC.

The analysis resembles an evaluation made by law professors at the University of Arizona, which also pointed out potential enforcement problems with Arizona's new immigration law.

"I am of the opinion right now that it's going to be difficult to enforce, but as with any new law, we're going to do our best," said Chief Deputy Yavapai County Attorney Dennis McGrane, who attended the APAAC meeting by telephone.

According to the wording of the new statute, its misdemeanors are charged if the defendant is in violation of certain federal statutes. Those federal statutes say the violator must be over 14 years old, that he or she has 30 days to register as an alien, and is in violation if willfully failing to carry registration documents.

That specificity creates potential state prosecution problems.

Most illegal immigrants are prosecuted under a federal statute against illegal entry into the country, not failure to provide documents.

According to the University of Arizona evaluation, the registration cards referenced in the U.S. Code are not currently used.

The county attorney's presentation raised concerns prosecutors will have to address with the police agencies they counsel.

Among them is whether asking about immigration status is practicable when an officer doesn't speak Spanish and the nearest Spanish-speaking officer is two hours away.

The county attorney's presentation also raised issues prosecutors will have to consider in court.

The phone call to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, which the law's supporters tout to show how easily enforced the law would be, has no evidentiary value when it comes to prosecuting someone for failing to carry documents.

Of particular concern for prosecutors is how Arizona's new law interacts with the federal immigration law on which it is based.

The pertinent section of the U.S. Code was passed in 1940, just before World War II, to monitor certain foreign nationals who were in the country legally but were suspected of sedition. Few, if any, cases have been brought under the law in many years.

That law requires immigrants to register if they are in the country for more than 30 days and are older than 14. Under current conditions, however, no one who entered illegally could possibly register.

"If they didn't go through the actual border crossing, and there's no proof of when they came through, how do I show how long they've been here?" asked John Pombier, a prosecutor in Mesa.

Furthermore, the analysis suggests that only those over age 14 could be charged, and prosecutors would have to prove a willful attempt to evade registration to make their case.

Greenlee County Attorney Derek Rapier said prosecutors' scrutiny of Arizona's immigration law is not unusual. It's an exercise they go through with new laws after every legislative session. But more people are paying attention to how this bill plays out on the street and in courtrooms.

Yuma County Attorney Jon Smith compared the new bill to another of Arizona's efforts to curb illegal immigration.

Lawmakers passed a bill targeting those who smuggle humans for profit with similar intentions, but it was ultimately more difficult to get a conviction than first thought, he said.

For example, it's a legal given that prosecutors cannot base a case solely on a confession of being in the country illegally. There has to be a body of other evidence to show that a crime was committed.

"On paper, you were able to see it, but in practice it was difficult," Smith said. "With (the law against willful failure to carry documents) you could look at a major impact or you could see a minimal impact, I don't know. It'll be one of the more difficult ones to enforce."

Reach the reporters at michael.kiefer@arizonarepublic .com and jj.hensley@arizonarepublic.com.

Supreme Court rules in favor of deported immigrant

2010-06-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — A single tablet of an anti-anxiety drug got Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo 10 days in jail in Harris County and a quick deportation to his native Mexico.

Too quick, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court said Monday in a ruling that could affect thousands of legal immigrants who face deportation over minor criminal records.

The lone Xanax tablet that Carachuri-Rosendo had without a prescription was his second minor drug crime, a year after he received 20 days in jail for possessing less than two ounces of marijuana.

When the federal government began deportation proceedings, it said Carachuri-Rosendo could not appeal for leniency because his second conviction amounted to a serious, or aggravated, felony. But Justice John Paul Stevens said that although local prosecutors could have charged Carachuri-Rosendo with being a repeat offender, they didn't, so he was not convicted of a crime that would have made his deportation automatic.

In the unanimous opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "The conviction itself is the starting place, not what might have or could have been charged."

"Carachuri-Rosendo, and others in his position, may now seek cancellation of removal and thereby avoid the harsh consequence of mandatory removal," Stevens wrote for the court. He noted that immigrants may still be deported in such instances but that immigration judges have the discretion to allow people to remain in this country.

Alina Das, a supervising attorney with the immigrant rights clinic at the New York University law school, said Congress intended automatic deportation to apply to drug traffickers, not people convicted of simple possession crimes.

Carachuri-Rosendo, in his early 30s, had been in the United States legally since he was 5. His wife, four children, mother and two sisters all are U.S. citizens, Stevens said.

Geoffrey Hoffman, a law professor at the University of Houston who represented Carachuri-Rosendo throughout the deportation proceedings, said after the ruling that the Supreme Court had viewed the government's argument as "too speculative and too far from removed from the intent of Congress."

Hoffman said he was unsure if Carachuri-Rosendo, who is thought to be living in Mexico, was aware of the ruling, which he called a "victory for due process."

He said attorneys were working with family members in the Houston area to locate Carachuri-Rosendo to determine the next step.

"My understanding is that we're going to do everything we can to follow through with his case and continue to represent him in terms of getting him the remedy he deserves," Hoffman said.

In other decisions Monday:

The court said that lower courts should look again at an appeal from a death row inmate in Florida whose lawyer missed the deadline for asking federal courts to stop his execution.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta had ruled that the only way the deadline could be extended is if a defendant can prove that his lawyer showed "bad faith, dishonesty, divided loyalty, mental impairment, or so forth" instead of just being "grossly negligent."

"In our view, this standard is too rigid," said Justice Stephen Breyer, writing the 7-2 judgment for the court.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Scalia said Congress did not give justices the ability to extend the appeals deadline. He also said that in federal appeals, the client is responsible for his lawyer's actions.

"Thus, when a state habeas petitioner's appeal is filed too late because of attorney error, the petitioner is out of luck," Scalia said.

The court said it will review whether California must cut its prison population by nearly 40,000 inmates by December 2011 to improve medical and mental health care, escalating a legal battle that has been playing out for two decades.

The state argues that a panel of three federal judges overstepped its authority in ordering the cuts.

The administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledges the state's 33 adult prisons are filled beyond their intended capacity but says it has been making progress to improve inmate care. The case involves lawsuits that stretch back to 1990.

At one point, a federal judge said incompetence and malfeasance in California's prison medical system was the cause of one inmate death per week.

Additional material from Hearst Newspapers.

Mayors group condemns Arizona immigration law

2010-06-15T09:25:00.001-07:00

OKLAHOMA CITY — The U.S. Conference of Mayors has approved resolutions condemning Arizona's new immigration law and asking Congress for an overhaul of federal immigration policies.

Conference spokeswoman Elena Temple-Webb says both resolutions were approved on a voice vote, with some opposition.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon sponsored the first resolution opposing the Arizona law that makes crossing the border illegally a state crime and requires police to verify people's immigration status. The law goes into effect July 29.

A second resolution by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa calls for the repeal of the Arizona law and for Congress to pass comprehensive changes to immigration law.

An estimated 200 mayors attended the conference Monday in Oklahoma City.

Arizona's Next Immigration Target: Children of Illegals

2010-06-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

Anchor babies isn't a very endearing term, but in Arizona those are the words being used to tag children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. While not new, the term is increasingly part of the local vernacular because the primary authors of the nation's toughest and most controversial immigration law are targeting these tots — the legal weights that anchor many undocumented aliens in the U.S. — for their next move.
Buoyed by recent public opinion polls suggesting they're on the right track with illegal immigration, Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation this fall that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona — and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution — to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens. The law largely is the brainchild of state senator Russell Pearce, a Republican whose suburban district, Mesa, is considered the conservative bastion of the Phoenix political scene. He is a leading architect of the Arizona law that sparked outrage throughout the country: Senate Bill 1070, which allows law-enforcement officers to ask about someone's immigration status during a traffic stop, detainment or arrest if reasonable suspicion exists — things like poor English skills, acting nervous or avoiding eye contact during a traffic stop.(See "The Battle for Arizona: Will a Border Crackdown Work?")
But the likely new bill is for the kids. While SB1070 essentially requires of-age migrants to have the proper citizenship paperwork, the potential "anchor baby" bill blocks the next generation from ever being able to obtain it. The idea is to make the citizenship process so difficult that illegal immigrants pull up the anchor and leave.(See TIME's photo-essay "The Border Fence Rises in the Southwest.")
The question is whether that would violate the U.S. Constitution. The 14th Amendment states that "All persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." It was intended to provide citizenship for freed slaves and served as a final answer to the Dred Scott case, cementing the federal government's control over citizenship.(Comment on this story.)
But that was 1868. Today, Pearce says, the 14th Amendment has been "hijacked" by illegal immigrants. "They use it as a wedge," he says. "This is an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we've created." Pearce says he is aware of the constitutional issues involved with the bill and vows to introduce it nevertheless. "We will write it right." He and other Republicans in the red state Arizona point to popular sympathy: 58% of Americans polled by Rasmussen think illegal immigrants whose children are born in the U.S. should not receive citizenship; support for that stance is 76% among Republicans.
Those who oppose the bill say it would lead to more discrimination and divide the community. Among them is Phoenix resident Susan Vie, who is leading a citizen group that's behind an opposing ballot initiative. She moved to the U.S. 30 years ago from Argentina, became a naturalized citizen and now works as a client-relations representative for a vaccine company. "I see a lot of hate and racism behind it," Vie says. "Consequently, I believe it will create — and it's creating it now — a separation in our society." She adds, "When people look at me, they will think, 'Is she legal or illegal?' I can already feel it right now." Vie's citizen initiative would prohibit SB1070 from taking effect and place a three-year moratorium on all related laws — including the anchor-baby bill — to buy more time for federal immigration reform. Her group is racing to collect 153,365 signatures by July 1 to qualify for the Nov. 2 general election.
Both sides expect the anchor-baby bill to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court before it is enacted. "I think it would be struck down as facially unconstitutional. I can't imagine a federal judge saying this would be O.K.," says Dan Barr, a longtime Phoenix lawyer and constitutional litigator. Potentially joining the anchor-baby bill at the Supreme Court may be SB1070, which Republican Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law in April. It is set to take effect July 29, but at least five courtroom challenges have been filed against it. Pearce says he will win them all.
Read "Arizona May Target Children of Illegal Immigrants."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1996064,00.html#ixzz0qsK6Fe7G

Academics condemn Arizona immigration law

2010-06-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

To Gov. Brewer, the state Legislature, and the people of Arizona:

We wish to express our deep concern with and unequivocal condemnation of Senate Bill 1070, which you signed into law April 23. By making it a state crime to be in Arizona without federal authorization, and making it a punishable offense to support someone without the appropriate documents, SB 1070 criminalizes countless decent human beings who live, work, pay taxes, and raise families in Arizona. The enforcement of such a constitutionally problematic law threatens everyone’s civil rights in the process, and undermines the potential for fostering an environment based on peace and social justice. We unanimously denounce this law and strenuously urge that you rescind it in the name of compassion and human dignity.

The decision to join together in issuing the open letter below represents an unprecedented and historical moment of collaboration. As academics and professionals concerned about social and environmental justice, human rights, and due process, we add our collective voices to those of many others from across the country calling for the immediate rescission of SB 1070 (and, as amended, HB 2162) and HB 2281 in the name of equity, compassion, integrity, constitutionality, and sound public policy.

We are all non-partisan professional organizations of scholars, educators, and practitioners with a collective membership of more than 10,000 people committed to and knowledgeable about a wide range of social justice and environmental issues, including some of the nation’s most knowledgeable professionals on the subjects of immigration and our legal and political systems. While immigration reform in the United States may be overdue, we also know that using this to justify state laws that usurp federal authority over immigration will create many more legal and social problems than it resolves.

The combined effect of SB 1070 with the prohibition on ethnic studies contained in HB 2281 creates an atmosphere of legislated intolerance and racialized politicking that is simply untenable, unwise and unjust. The simple fact that SB 1070 had to be amended, under pressure following its passage, by HB 2162 (which sought to qualify the conditions for officer contact) demonstrates quite clearly the inherently flawed and potentially racist implications of this piece of legislation. The purported “remedy” of requiring a “stop” before officers can inquire further about legal status based on a “reasonable suspicion” is equally expansive in its application, and thus equally problematic. These alterations, again adopted in haste following public pressure, will not provide sufficient protection against racial profiling.

Police officers are not immigration officers. Putting them in the position of enforcing federal immigration law will destroy the trust between police officers and communities so essential for effective law enforcement. It will also lead to unwarranted and prolonged detention of citizens and legal residents, increasing the likelihood of civil rights litigation against police departments, cities and towns, and potentially damaging family units across the state.

Despite language ostensibly prohibiting racial profiling, this will be the de facto reality of the law’s implementation. Physical appearance, particularly being of Hispanic background, will unavoidably remain the primary factor determining whether someone is or is not asked to prove her or his citizenship or residency status. For all these reasons, many law enforcement leaders across the country, as well as in Arizona, oppose this law. It would be wise to heed the objections of the law enforcement officers who are now faced with enforcing this unjust law.

For some, the stated intent of SB 1070 is to cleanse Arizona of its undocumented immigrants and their families, among them children and other relatives born in the United States. Legislative supporters of this law have repeatedly and proudly described this as part of a strategy to make life so unbearable for undocumented residents and their families that they will leave the state. Any law whose goal is to drive an ethnic population to leave its place of residence is a crime against humanity under current international law. The law will also separate cohesive family units and lead to increased marginalization among communities facing grave challenges. This bill risks making Arizona a pariah state on the national and international stages.

Whatever the intent, at minimum this law will create a climate of fear so intense as to make low-wage workers even more vulnerable, and therefore much easier to exploit by unscrupulous employers. Denying immigrant workers protections or otherwise making them more vulnerable does not stop them from coming. Rather, it simply drives them further underground and makes them more exploitable.

The climate of fear and hostility that this law will create is antithetical to the aims of promoting a more just and peaceful world. By institutionalizing chauvinism and magnifying differences of race and ethnicity, SB 1070 promises to enlarge the gulf between diverse communities and pit groups against one another, rather than encouraging people to work together to find mutually beneficial solutions to challenging issues. Sadly, the net effect of SB 1070 will be precisely what is sought to be prohibited under HB 2281 – it will in practice and principle serve to “promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.”

Opposition to this law has been rapid and strong, and is likely to become even stronger, as more and more groups and individuals boycott the state of Arizona and businesses based in Arizona. We are aware as well of the ostensible support in the state for the law, and therefore recognize the political pressures that led to passage of this law.

But widespread support for a law does not make it just; not long ago the majority of Southerners supported segregation laws. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail: “An unjust law is no law at all. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” It is in instances like these that strong moral leadership is needed, and we are appealing to the governor, state legislators, and all concerned Arizonans to provide it.

Please choose to be on the right side of history and work to overturn this patently unjust law. We thank you for your time and attention in this important matter.
– The Consortium of Professional and Academic Associations, including the following:

American Studies Association (ASA)
Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS)
Chicano/Latino Faculty and Staff Association, ASU (CLFSA)
Justice Studies Association (JSA)
Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS)
National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies (NACCS)
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)
Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA)
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR)
Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS)
Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA)
Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP)
Sociologists Without Borders (Sociologos Sin Fronteras) (SSF)

Immigration Fees Set to Rise

2010-06-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

The nation's immigration chief is proposing several fee increases for green cards and visas in an effort to plug a revenue shortfall at his agency, caused in part by a decline in applications.

The fee increases—proposed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and likely to go into effect this summer after a public comment period—would be the first since 2007. They would raise by an average of 10% the cost of filing petitions for permanent legal residency and temporary residency for foreign skilled workers and foreign entrepreneurs.

The move could cause applications to rise as people rush to get their paperwork in ahead of the increase. Applications surged in 2007, although that fee increase was much sharper.

View Full Image

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Former refugees and asylum seekers are sworn in as citizens in March in Washington, D.C.

Among those who would be affected are U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents who are seeking to bring immediate relatives into the country. About 650,000 of these applications were filed in 2009. The proposed increase for these applications, to $420 from $355, is substantial in percentage terms—18%—but an increase of $65 is unlikely to deter many people, given the application's purpose.

The proposed increases don't change the cost of applying to become a U.S. citizen—$675. That fee went up 69% three years ago.

"This is certainly better than last time, when increases averaged 66%," said Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. But "we continue to be plagued with poor-quality service."

Instead, fees for applications for H-1B, L and O visas, which are required of foreigners who come to the U.S. to work in jobs in high-tech companies, universities and the arts, would rise slightly. The fee for processing an application for the first step toward citizenship, a green card, would increase to $965 from $930, plus $85 for required electronic fingerprints, an increase of $5.

Other increases would be stiffer. For example, the initial cost to process a petition for a foreigner seeking to earn the right to live in the U.S. by investing at least $500,000 and creating at least 10 jobs, under a program known as EB-5, would rise to $1,500 from $1,435. But another fee associated with the program, which must be paid about two years later, would jump to $3,750 from $2,850.

Operators of so-called regional centers, projects designated to receive investment by the foreigner entrepreneurs, would have to pay $6,230 to qualify for those funds, according to the new fee structure. Currently, there is no fee.

Mr. Mayorkas said at a news conference that "we have worked hard to minimize the size of the proposed increase through budget cuts and other measures." However, he said, revenue generated from fees in the last two years was much lower than projected, and revenue in fiscal year 2010, which ends Sept. 30, remains low.

While the agency received appropriations from Congress, budget cuts of approximately $160 million haven't bridged the remaining gap between costs and anticipated revenue. The agency, which is required by law to recoup its expenses with fees, hopes to collect $200 million a year in new revenue as a result of the increases. It needs about $2.3 billion annually to operate, the director said.

Mr. Mayorkas has been traveling around the country to meet with business leaders, immigrant advocates and agency employees as he completes what he calls a "top-to-bottom review" of the agency ahead of an overhaul, which started with the creation of a new fraud detection unit.

Feds propose Green Card Fee Hike

2010-06-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

Federal officials want to increase fees for immigration documents by 10 percent, but are making an exception for the price of citizenship, which already costs aspiring Americans nearly $700.

The cost of getting a green card, a work permit and some visa forms must rise for the first time in three years to make up for a budget shortfall, said Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, in a news conference Wednesday.

The fee proposals face a 45-day public comment period, which many California immigrant advocates say they will use to express their opposition to the proposed rates. A green card application, which allows a person to become a legal permanent resident of the United States, would rise in cost by 6 percent to $985, not including the $85 fingerprint fee that comes with it.
"It's already a ridiculously high fee," San Francisco immigration lawyer Randall Caudle said. "There was the promise back in 2007 that they wouldn't raise fees for a long time, and 2007 wasn't a long time ago."

USCIS is required by law to review its fees every two years. Mayorkas said the proposed increases are cost-based and are closely associated with how much money the government incurs for different kinds of applications.
The proposed increases, which average 10 percent across the board, include additions of fees that never existed before, such as a $6,230 charge for the EB-5 visa program, which is for wealthy immigrants willing to invest at least $500,000 in the American economy. The fee would be paid by anyone who files an application to create one of the regional centers that attract immigrant investors and pool their investments. California already has more than 20 such centers that would not be affected because they have already been government-approved.

Mayorkas stressed that to encourage civic values, he wants to keep the price of citizenship flat, given its "significant public benefit to the nation and the nation's proud tradition of welcoming new citizens."
The cost of obtaining citizenship rose to $675, including the cost of fingerprinting, following a sudden 69 percent hike in 2007. That increase, along with excitement among aspiring voters in advance of the 2008 presidential election, led millions to rush to apply for citizenship before the fee spike took effect.

"They realize how important citizenship is to a lot of people and what good it does for the country," said Mark Yoshida, a lawyer at the Los Angeles-based Asian Pacific American Legal Center who was pleased that the citizenship fee will remain the same after the dramatic rise three years ago. But he was not enthused about the proposed increases for other immigration fees.
Although they differ with Mayorkas on the proposed hikes, many Bay Area immigrant groups give high marks to the immigration and citizenship director, whose family fled Cuba when he was a boy. Mayorkas was raised in Southern California, earned a degree from UC Berkeley and served as a federal prosecutor in California before President Barack Obama appointed him last year.

In an interview this spring, Mayorkas said he was trying to build morale and efficiency in the immigration agency. He made similar comments in April during a gathering of Bay Area lawyers, advocates and other immigration stakeholders, telling a story about his Cuban aunt who reused many of her belongings because she was trying to save up money to become a citizen.
"He understands and he's coming from outside the agency," Caudle said. "He talked about instilling in the USCIS officers the fact they're doing something very important. They're not paper pushers."
at a glance

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is proposing increases in immigration document fees:
Application for green card: $985 (from $930)
Application to replace green card: $365 (from $290)
Application to be temporary resident: $1,130 (from $710)
Application for work permit: $380 (from $340)
Petition for alien relative: $420 (from $355)
Immigrant visa: $165 (from $0; immigrants already pay visa fees to State Department)
Biometric/fingerprinting: $85 (from $80)
Civil surgeon designation: $615 (from $0)
regional center for immigrant investors: $6,230 (from $0)
Naturalization (citizenship): $595 (no change)
details: Go to www.regulations.gov or www.uscis.gov to learn how to comment on the proposals.
Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

The Price That We Pay: Undocumented Immigrants and Taxation

2010-06-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Rita, a 47-year-old Hispanic woman, may in fact be the blueprint for a growing number of Mexican-American immigrant lifestyles: Rita is an undocumented immigrant, and a taxpayer.

According to her 2009 tax return, the divorced mother of three, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of prosecution, made $18,295.68 of which $1,170.41 was withheld for Social Security tax and $273.73 for Medicare - benefits that Rita is unlikely to ever see.

A poll conducted in 2006 by ABC News and The Washington Post found that a third of all Americans said their biggest objection to undocumented immigrants is their use of "more public services than they pay for in taxes." Many of these same people oppose comprehensive immigration reform for this reason, and among conservative pundits such as Bill O'Reilly the notion that undocumented immigrants pay tax at all has been derided as "crap."

But reports by the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security Administration confirm that undocumented immigrants in fact pay many different types of taxes, including sales tax, property tax, Social Security tax and income tax.

Francine Lipman, a professor of tax law at Chapman University, says the disinformation about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants can be attributed to both "confusion about the system generally and . . . that we have a history of scapegoating people when times are tough, and maybe also when times are good."

FBI Probes Fatal Shooting at Mexican Border

2010-06-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

FBI Probes Fatal Shooting at Mexican Border

Extra-Ordinary Mexicans

2010-06-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

ERNABE MENDEZ originario de Guerrero trabaja limpiando vidrios en los rascacielos de Nueva York. Manda $500 al mes.

ALVARO CRUZ originario del Estado de México trabaja como cocinero y corre con el equipo Los Compadres de Nueva York. Manda $300 al mes.

MINERVA VALENCIA originaria de Puebla trabaja como niñera en Nueva York. Manda $400 a la semana.

JUVENTINO ROSAS originario del Estado de México trabaja limpiando pescado en Nueva York. Manda $400 a la semana.

Check out more of the photos from the Photo Essay series by Dulce Pinzón!

Why We Need Comprehensive Immigration Reform

2010-05-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

by Carl Schusterman (INS Trial Attorney)
What part of "illegal" don't you understand?

This question is the traditional refrain of the anti-immigrant crowd. What they don't seem to understand is that in the same family, one spouse may be illegal while the other spouse is a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident. Their children may also be U.S. citizens.

In such cases, does it make sense to arrest and deport the illegal spouse, and separate the family for weeks, months or even years?

I just received a phone call from the husband of a registered nurse. He is a U.S. citizen. He and his wife have been married for years and are the parents of a U.S. citizen child. Since he became a naturalized citizen only recently, his wife who was present in the U.S. on a student visa decided to pursue her green card application through her job. She takes care of patients at a local hospital.

The wife originally entered the U.S. as a visitor, changed her status to student and once she obtained an RN license and an offer of employment, she applied for adjustment of status to permanent resident.

A few months ago, the USCIS scheduled her for an interview. At the interview, she learned for the first time that she had been ordered deported by an Immigration Judge years before. She was stunned. Why had USCIS approved her application to change her status from visitor to student? Government mistake. Why had USCIS accepted her application for adjustment of status and issued her a work permit? Government mistake.

After the interview, the USCIS denied her application for adjustment of status. Fortunately, her husband soon became a naturalized citizen, and submitted an immigrant visa petition on her behalf. The USCIS approved the petition.

The next step was for her to apply for a green card.

However, as her husband informed me today, ICE agents appeared at their home this afternoon and arrested his wife.

Does this make any sense to anyone? Certainly, it makes no sense to me.

Maybe this is the part of "illegal" that I don't understand.

Protecting the DREAM

2010-05-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

Arizona’s conservative immigration law, which is scheduled to go into effect this July, has spurred a slew of protests around the country, including a statement of opposition by the city of Richmond, which voted to impose a moratorium on conducting public business in that state. It has also inspired similar legislation proposals in states that believe that local law enforcers have the responsibility to report illegal immigrants to federal officials.

In the midst of this debate, and the larger question of how the United States should deal with the nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants living within its borders, it is easy to overlook the stories of individuals who are stuck within the quagmire of ineffective immigration policy.

Many undocumented immigrants were brought to the U.S. by their parents as minors. They have attended school in the U.S., speak English fluently, and yet are still treated as foreigners without rights.

Critics of illegal immigration often demand that the undocumented “get in line” to obtain lawful status. But for many immigrants, including those who are college-educated, financially supporting U.S. citizens, and/or have been living in the U.S. for 20 years or more, there is no “line” for them. There is no lawful way for them to remain in the U.S.

Or if there is, the wait may be several decades, despite having a spouse or child who is a U.S. citizen. This is why advocates of comprehensive immigration reform say that systemic changes are so urgently needed.

Click here to read the interviews have been conducted with immigrants represented by lawyers belonging to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Many of these lawyers have seen their clients needlessly suffer, and are therefore in favor of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. The names of some of those profiled have been changed in order to preserve their anonymity.

Governator fears deportation to Austria, cancels Arizona speech

2010-05-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

Afraid, Mr. Schwarzenegger? And you should be...

An Opportunity of Two (and then some) Lifetimes

2010-05-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

SCENARIO: You are a naturalized American citizen, who has legally immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and have the opportunity to be reunited with your brother / sister / mother / father by petitioning for them to join you as a legal immigrant.

How many years would it take for a simple I-130 application (Petition for an Alien Relative) to the USCIS take?

Factor in the time it takes for the the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process your fee of $355, the petition documents and you will eventually receive a receipt notice stating that you have been put in a waiting line. O.K. Fair enough. There are numerous petitions to process, time must be allowed.
What the USCIS does not state on the receipt notice is that it can take up to 13 years to approve the immigrant visa application. Excuse me, 13 years is a typo. I really meant 131 years.
Let's suppose the immigrant relative you are petitioning for is still alive, and you are not (knock on wood), can the relative still be eligible to be approved by the USCIS?
No. The relative would have to find another U.S. citizen relative to petition for him or her. So the 131 year-cycle begins anew.

This scenario is very real and is based on a review of the immigrant visas issued and adjustments of status for the past five years for Mexican applicants. It is also based on a review of current visa applicants from Mexico already in the queue for immigrant visas based on approved petitions by their U.S. relatives.

So, to put it another way, a Mexico-born brother or sister of a U.S. citizen must wait the equivalent of two lifetimes to immigrate to the United States. Given the choice of waiting more than 100 years for an immigrant visa that will never arrive or slipping illegally across the border to be reunited with family members, many Mexican immigrants have come to the obvious conclusion ... why wait?

Read the entire report published by Attorney at Law, Prakash Khatri here

5 Myths About Immigration

2010-05-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

MYTH: Immigrants take jobs from American workers.
FACT: Although immigrants account for about 12% of the U.S. population, and despite the fact that immigrants and their children have accounted for 58% of the U.S. population since 1980, they currently constitute less than 15% of the workforce. That 15% tends to be concentrated in high-skilled and low-skilled occupations, which complements (NOT competes with) jobs held by native workers.

MYTH: Immigration is at an all-time high, and most new immigrants came illegally.
FACT: The historic high was recorded in 1890 (more than a century ago), when immigrants made up 14.8 of the population. Check out this nifty interactive map to see how immigrants settled throughout the United States over time.

MYTH: Today's immigrants are not integrating into American life like past waves did.
FACT: The integration of immigrants remains a hallmark of America's vitality as a society and a source of admiration abroad (that's right Europe, admiration). Case in point: today's immigrants consistently seek English instruction in such large numbers that adult-education programs cannot meet the demand, especially in California. Furthermore, I've abstained from writing this blog in any other language but English... for now...

MYTH: Cracking down on illegal border crossings will make us safer.
FACT: Protecting the nation's 7,500 miles of land borders and 12,380 miles of coastline and vast network of sea ports, international airports and various port of entry along the Canadian and Mexican border is no easy feat. Since 9/11, we have dramatically strengthened border security through the use of biometrics at ports of entry, intelligent gathering, integrated database and increased international cooperation.
However, seasoned enforcement officials argue that if we provided enough visas to meet the economy's demand for workers, border agents would be more available to focus on protecting the nation's borders from truly dangerous individuals and activities, such as DRUG-TRAFFICKING, SMUGGLING and CARTEL VIOLENCE.

MYTH: Immigration reform cannot happen in an election year.
FACT: You're right. It can happen ANY year! And the most significant immigration bills enacted in recent decades were passed in election years.
1) REFUGEE ACT OF 1980, which established our systems for humanitarian protection and refugee and asylum admissions.
2) REFORM AND CONTROL ACT OF 1986 made it illegal to hire unauthorized immigrants, and provided amnesty for 2.7 million illegal immigrants.
3) IMMIGRATION ACT OF 1990 increased the number of visas allotted to highly skilled workers.
4) ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION REFORM OF 1996 charged immigration agencies with implementing significant new law enforcement mandates.

Not Gringo Enough

2010-04-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Who will be next in line for deportation?
Apparently rounding up legal permanent residents with previous crime records is not enough. At a tea party rally in Ramona in San Diego County over the weekend, Republican Representative Duncan Hunter fielded a question about the issue.
"We just can't afford it anymore," Hunter said. "That's it. And we're not being mean. We're just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It's within our souls."
It's within our souls to deport natural-born American citizens. Mind you, not just ANY legal American citizens, that would not be a humanitarian thing to do. "Just the natural-born American citizens that are the children of illegal immigrants," Hunter said.
As far fetched as it may sound, there are about 90 House Republicans who are co-sponsoring a bill that would eliminate citizenship rights for children of illegal immigrants who are born in the United States. You can read the bill in its entirety by clicking here.

San Francisco calls on its citizens to boycott Arizona products

2010-04-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

Arizona's new legislation, signed into law Friday, makes being in the country illegally a crime punishable by up to six months in jail and a $2,500 fine.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said that his office already has started investigating if any contracts between San Francisco and Arizona could be severed without penalty.

This tactic has been used against Arizona before with success, he said.

Arizona was one of the last states to adopt a holiday honoring Martin Luther King - a reluctance that led to a boycott in the 1980s that cost the city hundreds of conventions and Super Bowl XXVII in 1993. The pressure, and the financial pinch, led the state to put the holiday on the ballot. Voters approved the measure, making Martin Luther King Day a holiday.

Steps like the one proposed by San Francisco would remind the state's lawmakers their decision could have economic and political consequences, Herrera said.

Some of the companies headquartered in Arizona include Best Western, U-HAUL, Cold Stone Creamery, PetSmart, and U.S. Airways

Iraq war veteran could be denied citizenship

2010-04-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

Photo Source: Los Angeles Times
As part of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, noncitizens who serve in the military one year during peace time or one day during wartime are eligible to apply for fast-tracked citizenship. In 2002, President George W. Bush issued an executive order and invoked the wartime law as of Sept. 11, 2001.

Shortly after 9/11, Mexico-born Ekaterina Bautista decided to enlist in the U.S. Army, serving the United States for six consecutive years, including a 13-month tour of duty in Iraq. So what exactly prompted her adoptive country to put her application for naturalization on hold, despite the completion of all the paper work and civics exam as well as a clean record and exemplary patriotism that earned her a Combat Action Badge? She had served under a false identity because she had been told that her Mexican passport would not suffice in order to enlist.

Arizona's New Immigration Law Deemed Unconstitutional

2010-04-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

When I first read that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer had signed the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act" (commonly known as SB 1070) into law in Arizona, the first and only thought that could cross my mind was how over 30% of the residents in Arizona were about to be robbed of their basic rights as human beings.

- How will this affect the Arizona voters who backed SB 1070? Negatively, unless they thrive on having their taxes increase, because there is no other way a state with a budget deficit of over $3 billion can afford such a financially demanding immigration law.

- How will this affect the Republican primary in August? Brewer might survive through the summer and again in the fall, but in signing a partially unconstitutional law that seems to regard Hispanics as presumptively criminal, it's unlikely that she did her party any long-term favors.
The law will take effect in 90 days after the current legislative session, unless there is a successful legal overturn before then.

Yet, amidst all this injustice, there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. Arizona's initiative in reforming immigration law has prompted the rest of the nation to look at the flaws in the current national immigration measures.Time magazine reports that President Obama, who took the unusual step of commenting on a state law when he called SB1070 "misguided" on Friday, ordered the Justice Department to look into the legislation. Some experts say that under Article 1 of the Constitution, only Congress has the right to set immigration law. There is a good reason for that, say opponents of the bill: Even if Arizona is successful in its crackdown, illegal traffic will move to other border states, shuffling the burden elsewhere without solving the national problem. Call me an optimist, but the abominable step that Arizona has taken may just be enough to propel Washington into implementing a comprehensive immigration reform.

If you go to Arizona, carry your U.S. Passport, do not listen to ethnic music, do not talk to anyone if you have an accent, and do not wear "un-American" clothing!

2010-04-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

Arizona is out of control and mandates racial profiling!

Stay out of this state unless you have a current U.S. Passport on you, you do not have an accent, you wear only American clothing (whatever this is - jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap?! oh wait, all of these are made in foreign countries!). Oh, and do not listen to ethnic music or be too tan, you could be mistaken for being illegally in the U.S.!

Arizona Republicans Make A Mistake of “Prop. 187” Proportions

Washington, DC – The Arizona State House of Representatives just voted in favor of Draconian legislation that declares open season on immigrants and Latinos in the state. If signed into law by the governor, S.B. 1070 – the so-called “Safe Neighborhoods” bill -- would make every undocumented worker in Arizona guilty of a criminal offense and require state and local police to go after them. Supporters of the legislation have cited clothing, music or an accent as details that should prompt a criminal investigation—a suggestion that should send chills through the entire population, not just Latinos, for its blatant endorsement of profiling by appearance instead of behavior.

According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
"Arizona Republicans have just made a mistake of ‘Proposition 187’ proportions, by voting along party lines to support a piece of legislation that treats every immigrant and Latino in Arizona like a common criminal and does nothing to fix our broken immigration system. The Governor must veto this irresponsible legislation that will undermine community policing, cost millions for Arizona to defend in the courts, and take us further away from the goal of a rational, controlled, and smart immigration system."

Mexican actress faces real-life drama over alleged marriage scam

2010-04-19T14:24:00.001-07:00

L.A. NOW

Southern California -- this just in

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Mexican actress faces real-life drama over alleged marriage scam

April 17, 2010 | 8:25 am

Maria Fernanda Romero Martinez has appeared in numerous Spanish-language movies and soap operas.
But now, federal authorities claim she was at the center of a real-life drama that has landed her and a Los Angeles man in court.

Mexican actress faces real-life drama over alleged marriage green card scam

2010-04-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

Mexican actress faces real-life drama over alleged marriage scam | L.A. NOW | Los Angeles Times

If USCIS and ICE want to stop marriage green card fraud, which is estimated by USCIS to be approx. 10% of all cases, they should go after the U.S. Citizen spouse who can be prosecuted criminally and fined. Then, massively publicize the arrest of the U.S. Citizen. This would be a deterrent.

Instead, ICE goes after an act...ress who is likely eligible for a green card based on her success as an actress.

I grill my potential clients before representing them, to make sure it is a valid marriage. Maria should have consulted me first!

Rescued from Haiti Only to be Detained for Lacking Visa

2010-04-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

After the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, about thirty survivors were rescued from the rubble by U.S. Marines and were promptly ushered into U.S. military personnel planes and were promised security and medical care once they would arrive in the United States.
However, what sounded like a heroic rescue mission after the suffering they had endured, soon turned into a nightmare. Shortly after landing, the survivors were handcuffed and detained in a privately operated immigration prison in Pompano Beach, Florida. Despite numerous legal advocates' attempt to persuade government official to release the innocent detainees, no action was taken to provide medical treatment for the thirty Haitians.
The survivors were finally released two months later, after the New York Times published an article regarding their unjust imprisonment.
"Rather than being welcomed in the U. S. of A, and getting the refuge that they expected, they were detained for two months here at the Broward facility," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.

One is left to wonder what would have been their fate without media coverage.

To read the rest of the article, click here.
To read the Times article that prompted their release, click here.