'Just News' Blog

Now that "comprehensive immigration reform" is dead in Congress for the time being, observers expect border and interior (workplace) immigration enforcement to increase.  But will more enforcement stem migration?

Los Angeles Times projects reporter SONIA NAZARIO thinks not: "[S]uch a powerful stream will only change if it is addressed at its source, if the economies of these countries that are sending large numbers of people to the United States improve. I talked to one kid in southern Mexico who had made 27 attempts to reach his mother in the United States, and he was getting ready to make attempt number 28. You come to believe that no number of border control guards is going to stop someone like that."

Someone like Enrique. 

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In a widely anticipated decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today dealt a body blow to public school integration. Two community plans, one in Seattle and one in Louisville, both used race as a factor in assigning students to some schools as a tool for maintaining integration of their schools. A majority of the Supreme Court decided that schools, however much done in good faith, cannot use race consciousness to achieve integration, even if people know that ignoring race will lead to more racial segregation. NATHAN NEWMAN reports from TPM CAFE. MARK SHERMAN has more from the AP.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate, bowing to pressure from restrictionist pressure groups, has defintively killed off any chance of comprehensive immigration reform -- for this year as well as for next. MICHAEL SANDLER reports from Congressional Quarterly. IJJ Fellow DAN KOWALSKI has a good round-up on his Bender's Immigration Bulletin daily update.

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"[A]s the immigration detention system balloons to meet demands for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, deaths in custody — and the secrecy and confusion around them — are drawing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and from government investigators."

NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times, page 1, above the fold.

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"Frustrated with Congress's inability to pass an immigration overhaul bill, state legislatures are considering or enacting a record number of strongly worded proposals targeting illegal immigrants.

By the time most legislatures adjourned in May, at least 1,100 immigration bills had been submitted by lawmakers, more than double last year's record total, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures."

DARRYL FEARS in the Washington Post, page 1, above the fold.

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"[T]wo-thirds of guest workers are hired under ... subsection, H-2B, created in the small-government Reagan years to fill non-agricultural jobs. H-2B workers exist in a regulatory vacuum with few rights and no access to legal services. Program regulations state only that workers must be paid the prevailing wage in their industry, and the Labor Department claims it lacks authority to enforce even that. While the department doesn't keep statistics on how many H-2B employers violate labor laws, public-interest lawyers point to several cases where companies were permitted to continue importing workers for years despite a pattern of abuse."

FELICIA MELLO in The Nation magazine.

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"In the first three months of 2006, ICE's fugitive operations program arrested 3,222 people nationwide, according to information released last month, 10 months after the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request. That compared to the 2,174 people arrested in the same period of 2005. ...

ICE's numbers don't include worksite arrests, which jumped more than threefold between fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006, from 1,292 to 4,383. The agency refused to break down those numbers by quarter."

LAURA WILDES-MUñOZ for the Associated Press.

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"He enlisted in July 2003. Two years later, after he'd returned from Iraq, Angel was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. But things were different since he got injured there. Sitting in a wheelchair and wearing a plastic helmet to protect his brain, Angel and his parents faced an immigration official.

"Please raise your right hand," the official said. Angel couldn't — he's mostly lost the use of that arm. He rose his left hand instead and said a soft "I do" at the proper moment.

Angel was finally a citizen, but any hopes of going to college were all but dashed. He had to once again learn how to walk, to talk, and to live on his own."

MARY SPICUZZA in SF Weekly, June 20, 2007.

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"This week, [a] 24-year-old mother will be sentenced in U.S. District Court in Albany for using a forged passport to cross the U.S. border. Ultimately, she could be deported to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where executions, unexplained disappearances and government torture still occur. Her case raises questions about the efficacy of the United States as a safe haven for refugees of war and terror. It reflects a dilemma faced by other exiles who use fake documents to escape violence: Are they refugees or criminals?"

KATE GURNETT in the Albany Times Union.

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"There is a human toll to illegal immigration. The corpses of men, women, and children who perished trying to enter the country are routinely found in Brooks County [Texas.] They are photographed by law enforcement officials and private citizens. Police use the photos to investigate the deaths. Private citizens bring them to their elected officials and urge action. We include here a sample gallery of the dead, which we hope will illustrate the human cost of immigration policy. These images were not included in the Observer’s print edition because they are graphic and disturbing."

From the Texas Observer. 

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"Clutching a photo of her son, Maria Carvajal walks Tijuana’s sweltering streets searching for the mentally disabled man she says was deported more than a month ago despite being a U.S. citizen and then disappeared in this chaotic border city."

LUIS PEREZ for the Associated Press.

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"Hugo Vinicio Hernandez knew that immigration agents could detain him at any time for having disregarded a deportation order in 2001. But the Guatemalan man didn't think he would wind up in the custody of immigration agents as a result of a routine traffic stop."

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"The family of an American citizen who disappeared after apparently being mistakenly deported to Tijuana a month ago has filed suit asking the U.S. government to help find him. Pedro Guzman, 29, a Lancaster construction worker, is developmentally disabled and penniless, and he hasn't been heard from since May 11, said his family at a news conference in Los Angeles on Monday."

SAM QUINONES in the Los Angeles Times.

Read the lawsuit here and the ACLU press release here.

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When he came home to his wife and three children that day, after the bus to take him to the US never showed up, his wife burst into tears.

Two years later, he awaits a 36-hour bus journey from Nuevo Laredo along the US-Mexico border to the tobacco fields of North Carolina, where he'll work for the next five months. This time he has paid not a single fee nor left his wife with any debt.

The difference is due to new efforts by leaders in Mexico, through the Ohio-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), to protect migrant laborers from the thousands of unscrupulous recruiters who prey on them as they try to navigate the guest-worker program to earn a living in the US. But interfering in the recruiters' lucrative trade is proving difficult – and deadly."

Part One of a three-part series by SARA MILLER LLANA in the Christian Science Monitor.

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"The initial nine towers in SBINet are part of a $70 million contract awarded to Boeing last year. A tower half a mile from Arivaca and eight others south and west of the community were completed a week ago. The towers will begin operating in the next few days, officials said, in a test to determine whether the sophisticated technology can enhance the work of border agents who patrol a landscape of canyons, ravines and hills."

SYLVIA MORENO in the Washington Post, including a video.

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"At the Side Door Café in Falfurrias, Texas, body counts enter conversations as naturally as the price of feed, or the cost of repairing torn fences. “I removed 11 bodies last year from my ranch, 12 the year before,” said prominent local landowner Presnall Cage. “I found four so far this year.” Sometimes, Cage said, he has taken survivors to a hospital; mostly, however, time and the sun have done their jobs, and it is too late."

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"Mayor John DeStefano and other city leaders angrily accused the federal government of “terrorizing” the immigrant community. Many of them speculated that the mass arrests — the first of their kind in recent memory here — were retaliation for the acceptance of municipal identification cards and other immigrant-friendly city policies."

JENNIFER MEDINA in the New York Times.

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"For five days recently, Luis Duarte sat in the Prince William County jail, not knowing that he should be released, not realizing that because of someone else's mistake, he was sitting there, scared, confused and forgotten in a system that had lost someone like him before. ... For the second time in a year, a Hispanic immigrant who does not speak English remained in the jail after his release date."

THERESA VARGAS in the Washington Post.

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"An Egyptian Coptic Christian who was permitted to stay in the United States because of the probable threat of torture back home is now fighting deportation on a murder charge in Egypt. The office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has decided to deport the man, Sameh Khouzam, 38, of Lancaster, Pa., because Egypt’s government has given diplomatic assurances that Mr. Khouzam will not be tortured upon his return."

NEELA BANERJEE in the New York Times.

The ACLU says: “The Egyptian authorities are notorious for their routine use of torture. The U.S. government’s reliance on their word makes a mockery of its treaty obligations under the Torture Convention,” said Amrit Singh, ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project Staff Attorney. “It is illegal and immoral to send Mr. Khouzam back to a country where he will likely be tortured.”

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"In a strategy that immigration attorneys say is increasingly employed by former gang members facing deportation, Alvarado-Veliz and others have argued that their lawless pasts are precisely why they should not be deported to Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras, places where gang tattoos and mannerisms, they say, can mean persecution and certain death at the hands of police, prison guards and vigilantes.

In 2005, a U.S. immigration judge found Alvarado-Veliz credible and granted him the right to stay in the U.S. legally. Challenged by the U.S. government, the decision was reversed by the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals. Now Alvarado-Veliz is one of at least six former gang members with cases pending before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."

SONIA NAZARIO in the Los Angeles Times.

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"The bipartisan Senate immigration bill would drastically expand the ability to deport and detain certain immigrants in little-noticed provisions that could increase racial profiling, Los Angeles immigrant rights advocates said Thursday.

In coordinated news conferences in five cities nationwide, immigrant rights advocates said the bill would allow the indefinite detention of some immigrants, limit judicial review of legalization cases and expand detention facilities.

"These egregious provisions fly in the face of due process and constitutional law," said Stacy Tolchin, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild."

TERESA WATANABE in the Los Angeles Times.

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