Immigration

Just last year, an increasingly powerful grass-roots movement celebrated its success in killing an effort to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants. Its influence spread as a procession of presidential candidates proclaimed their support.

But now there are just two candidates for the nation’s top office, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). And both have taken immigration stands that restrictionist groups find appalling.”*

The National Guard troops sent to the U.S.-Mexican border two years ago have mostly been withdrawn, despite pleas from governors who were once skeptical of using soldiers to catch illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.

When the Guard was posted along the frontier in 2006 to help the strapped Border Patrol, critics warned that sending soldiers would be an insult to Mexico and that innocents could get shot by troops trained for combat, not law enforcement. “*

As William Jerry Hadden’s attorneys see it, the federal government is singling out their client to send a message to landlords: Don’t rent to illegal immigrants.

Hadden, 69, goes on trial Monday on 24 counts of harboring illegal aliens and 24 counts of encouraging illegal immigrants to remain in the country. Hadden and his son, Jamey, who is in Vietnam, rented to 60 undocumented immigrants at the Woodridge and Cross Keys apartments in Lexington’s Cardinal Valley”*

The American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern Friday about plans by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office to check the immigration status of anyone arrested in the county who is suspected of being in the United States illegally.

“We believe these kinds of policies are ill-advised in all circumstances, placing the federal responsibility to implement immigration laws in local hands and leading to hostile relations between local governments and their Latino communities,” Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter, said in a statement. “*

A federal lawsuit challenging the right of landlords to rent to illegal immigrants has stoked tensions over immigration that have been rising for years here.

A group opposed to illegal immigration filed suit against a Plainfield property management company this month, seeking to set a legal precedent by using a federal law normally employed against racketeers to punish landlords who rent to illegal immigrants.”*

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

- From “The New Colossus”

– a poem by Emma Lazarus, engraved on the Statue of Liberty

So strong is the nativist tide that has gripped a significant portion of Americans over the last few years that it’s almost as if some activists want to rip those words right off the Statue of Liberty.

For the masses of mostly Latino immigrants, legal and illegal, pouring steadily into America each day represent today’s version of the 19th Century tired, poor, huddled, wretched refuse that Lazarus and some of America welcomed when those 19th Century words were written. “*

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is going after Republican rival Sen. John McCain, questioning whether the Arizona senator is offering contradictory language on the hot-button issue of immigration reform following a closed-door meeting McCain held with activists during a recent trip to Chicago.

The criticism leveled by Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications director, marked a day of accusations between the Obama and McCain camps over which presumptive presidential nominee is more guilty of political doublespeak–a shorthand way to describe pandering versus truth telling. The Obama camp’s move may be aimed at deflecting criticism the Democratic candidate said one thing–promising to negotiate a pact with McCain on public financing–and did another by rejecting it.”*

Sheriff’s officials, who have been trained by federal authorities to screen for illegal immigrants at the jail, have interviewed nearly 20,000 inmates since the controversial program began more than two years ago. They have referred 10,840 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for possible deportation.

Last week, the Sheriff’s Department received $500,000 in county funding to expand the jail screening and to increase the number of interviewers from eight to 13. “*

Mexican citizens in North and South Carolina have been scrambling for documents out of concern over stricter identification requirements and the threat of deportation.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reported Friday the Mexican consulate in Raleigh is processing more than 3,000 passports a month. In 2005, the average was 571 passports each month.”*

Republican presidential John McCain assured Hispanic leaders he would push through Congress legislation to overhaul federal immigration laws if elected, several people who attended a private meeting with the candidate said Thursday.

Democrats questioned why the Arizona senator held the meeting late Wednesday night in Chicago. But supporters who were in the room denied that McCain held the closed-door session out of fear of offending conservatives, many of whom want him to take a harder line on immigration.”*

Imran Ahmad (a pseudonym), a 29 year-old Pakistani computer scientist who can see the Statue of Liberty from his studio apartment in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, says he no longer believes in the symbol of freedom cast in copper. “Freedom is relative. It depends on things like where you’re from and what you look like” says Ahmad. He reached this conclusion, he says, because of what happened to him as a orange-uniformed detainee held for more than 3 years in numerous federal detention facilities: the denial of habeas corpus (his constitutional right to plead his case before a judge), facing growling dogs, watching friends languish and die while in custody, the “subtle torture” of living for months in a tiny, windowless white room while a nearby TV set blared American Idol or “24.”

After a fellow detainee died under mysterious circumstances, which were covered up by detention facility authorities, Ahmad says he was threatened with lines like “We don’t want you to tell or speak to anyone about this” and “We have cameras and people [detainees] who are watching you, monitoring you.” Though Ahmad was released, he is still in deportation proceedings.”*

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced today that it will permanently shutter its field office in Tijuana, Mexico. Officials for the agency, part of the Homeland Security department, said the office is being closed as part of a larger effort to trim overseas costs and because the Tijuana office did not have “much of a workload.” The office will close on July 3, 2008. “Applicants should not be adversely affected by the office closures,” said Chris Rhatigan, an agency spokesman.”*

It’s never been a secret that the United States has a love affair with criminalizing people. Maybe it goes back to the days of the wild, wild West when it took brave men to stand up to train and bank robbers and cattle thieves.

All the early days of television that ran western shows idolized the guys wearing the badge and toting the gun.

Yet when this nation became industrialized, a.k.a. more civilized, the arrests of purported criminals just got worse. True, some deserved to be there — the killers, the robbers, the rapists, etc. But it’s always been a curiosity as to why U.S. society is so much more lawless compared to other countries.”*

The state legislature successfully passed what’s being touted as the toughest immigration law in the nation earlier this month, but questions remain as to how it will be enforced.

The measure requires businesses to either check the status of new hires using E-Verify — a controversial federal program used to determine whether workers are legal — or make sure those workers have valid state driver’s licenses or one from states similarly strict when it comes to obtaining a license. “*

Democratic state Rep. Scott Pelath of Michigan City will help lead a legislative committee’s study of illegal Immigration in Indiana.

Lawmakers considered legislation last session that was aimed at penalizing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. But the issue was contentious and legislators failed to reach a compromise. “*

BORSTAR consists of 44 agents. All are emergency medical technicians and six of them are paramedics. Each also has at least two years of Border Patrol experience, Escalante said.

In the past couple of years, more illegal immigrants have been carrying cellphones, which they are increasingly using to call for help.

Vince Hampel, BORSTAR’s deputy commander, said that so far this year, most of the 9-1-1 calls reporting illegal immigrants in distress have been made by the immigrants themselves.”*

The story about the charred body of a 14-year-old boy found in the desert by Native Americans got to her the most.

A grandmother herself, the thought that the teenage Mexican boy died in such a horrible way attempting to cross the United States border on foot was too much for Gail Creath of Lake Forest.

“They’ll never know what happened to him,” Creath said of the boy’s family. Creath spoke from her home earlier this month, four days after she and her husband Jim returned home from a week-long trip that took them one of the trails illegal immigrants traverse in the hope to enter the U.S. “*

European Union lawmakers voted Wednesday to allow countries in the bloc to hold undocumented migrants in detention centers for up to 18 months and ban them from EU territory for five years.

Approved in this medieval French border city, which is home to a significant population of North Africans and Turks, the legislation establishes common rules for expelling foreigners who are detained on EU territory without permission to be there.

Described by critics like Amnesty International as “severely flawed” and an erosion of human rights standards, but by supporters as a balanced approach, the so-called return directive passed in the European Parliament by a vote of 369 to 197, with 106 deputies abstaining.”*

Mexican officials said Thursday that at least 18 Cubans have reached Texas more than a week after masked gunmen hijacked an immigration bus in southern Mexico and seized them.

Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that the U.S. Border Patrol detained the immigrants in Hidalgo County in Texas.

At least six masked gunmen hijacked the bus along a remote jungle highway June 11. They forced seven unarmed immigration agents and two drivers to get off before they fled with 33 Cubans and four Central Americans who were being taken to a detention center for undocumented migrants.”*

Federal agents have arrested a fifth House of Raeford Farms supervisor and are still searching for others as they continue their investigation into alleged immigration violations at the company’s Greenville, S.C., poultry plant.

The latest supervisor arrested, Guadalupe Templos, has been charged with aggravated identify theft, as well as presenting a fake document and making a false statement to a federal agency. The charges were presented to him in federal court Wednesday.”*

A Washington state ferry worker has denounced the Border Patrol for using a plainclothes agent to monitor activity at the Anacortes ferry terminal, the same location where the federal agency has been widely criticized for conducting security spot-checks of domestic ferry runs.

John Norby, who works at the terminal directing traffic, said a plainclothes Border Patrol officer approached him in April and asked him if he’d be interested in sharing “intelligence.”

“This is a federal police force asking civilians to inform on civilians,” Norby said this week.”*

The number of suspected illegal immigrants arrested under the state’s felony human smuggling law surpassed 1,000 when Maricopa County deputies arrested 25 suspects earlier this week.”*

Frustrated by a steady flow of illegal Mexican immigrants into Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has decided to take matters into his own hands.

Arpaio dispatches teams of sheriff’s deputies into Hispanic communities where they stop people and arrest anyone who cannot prove he or she is a legal U.S. resident.

Now he faces an onslaught of criticism from Hispanic activists, local lawmakers and the Phoenix mayor, who call his crackdown on immigrants a clear case of racial profiling in which only people who look Hispanic are targeted.”*

Two-year-old Martin, a young Guatemalan, was found abandoned in an Frankfort, Indiana Wal-Mart store on Friday, June 13.

In the note found with Martin, his mother states that the young family arrived a year ago from Guatemala. It wasn’t long afterwards that her husband left her. According to the letter written in Spanish, the mother doesn’t have the means to buy her son food or provide a roof over his head.

So, she did what has been done by millions of women around the world since the beginning of time, or at least as far back as Moses, she left him at a place she knew to be relatively safe. Where there were people, fellow mothers, who would find him, protect him and help him.”*