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For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars, according to a new report.
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, after three decades of growth that has seen the prison population nearly triple. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. ADAM LIPTAK in The New York Times.
"In Texas, Fuentes worked as a machinist, earning about $100 a day. Each month, he sent home about $500. "I want my children to be professionals," he said. "Earning $5 a day in my country, I couldn't do that. That's why I came."
But a few years after settling in Houston, he met and married a Colombian woman who has a green card as a legal U.S. resident. Fuentes became stepfather to her daughter, Natalie, and the couple had a son, Sebastian. Both children are U.S. citizens by birth.
For several years, Fuentes had temporary legal status that was granted to many Salvadorans. But on the morning of Jan. 10, immigration agents showed up at his door. They told him he had a deportation order for failing to appear at an immigration court hearing in 2006. Fuentes told them he had moved and never received the notice."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
When the number of kids locked up at San Francisco's juvenile hall reached record numbers last spring, Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the population at the hall to be reduced and the city to recommit to partnering with community groups that work intensively with troubled youth while allowing them to live at home.
Nine months later, however, executives with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a leading private funder of such initiatives around the country, say the $587,500 it has given San Francisco since 2001 to help achieve that very goal has been wasted and that change is happening at "a snail's pace." HEATHER KNIGHT in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"A U.S. citizen who was wrongly deported to Mexico is suing federal and local authorities, alleging his civil rights were violated simply because of his appearance.
Lawyers for Pedro Guzman, known to his family as Peter, allege he was singled out for deportation "solely on the basis of his perceived race and national origin," according to a complaint."
SANDRA HERNANDEZ in the Daily Journal.
"Immigrants in California, including those without documents, are "far less likely" than the native-born to end up incarcerated for crimes, according to a study released Monday by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Analyzing prison records, researchers found that native-born men in California are incarcerated in state prisons at rates that are 2 1/2 times greater than the foreign-born.
Immigrants are 35 percent of California's adult population, the study notes, but only 17 percent of the state's prison population."
SUSAN FERRISS in the Sacramento Bee.
"Despite public perception and stepped-up enforcement of immigration laws in recent months in Maricopa County, undocumented immigrants are not charged with a disproportionate number of crimes in Maricopa County."
MICHAEL KIEFER in the Arizona Republic.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas: "Ten young men have filed a lawsuit against more than a dozen individuals, private companies, and governmental agencies associated with the Away From Home facility in Nixon, Texas for abuse suffered while in civil immigration detention."
"It seems counterintuitive. The government pulls people suspected of being here illegally out of airplane lines and then pays to detain, prosecute and deport them to the country they were headed to in the first place."
MARY FLOOD in the Houston Chronicle.
"The government has started cracking down on illegal border crossers in the Tucson Sector. But limited resources in Arizona's federal-court system are blocking the goal of prosecuting everyone who enters the country illegally.
The Border Patrol has referred 757 cases to authorities since the government began prosecuting illegal crossers in the Tucson area on Jan. 14. Up to 42 are prosecuted daily, and there are plans to prosecute up to 100 cases a day in the busiest human-smuggling area on the border.
But federal courts in Tucson can hold only 60 immigration defendants a day, and even if they could handle the 100-a-day workload, that amounts to prosecuting only 10 percent of those arrested by the Border Patrol."
SEAN HOLSTEGE in the Arizona Republic.
"As the U.S. Department of Homeland Security marches down the Texas border serving condemnation lawsuits to frightened landowners, Brownsville resident Eloisa Tamez, 72, has one simple question. She would like to know why her land is being targeted for destruction by a border wall, while a nearby golf course and resort remain untouched."
MELISSA DEL BOSQUE in the Texas Observer.
ROSWELL, N.M.: "This conservative city on the barren eastern plains of New Mexico long had been spared the acrimonious debates over illegal immigration that have racked so much of the Southwest.
That is, until December, when immigration enforcement entered the murky terrain of the local high school.
A school security officer stopped Karina Acosta, an 18-year-old pregnant Roswell High School senior, and discovered she was in the country illegally. He called federal immigration authorities, who swiftly deported her.
The district superintendent protested and the officer was removed from the school and transferred back to the city Police Department. About three dozen angry students and parents marched on police headquarters -- a notable event in a town not accustomed to controversy -- and were met by a handful of counterdemonstrators who backed the officer."
NICHOLAS RICCARDI in the Los Angeles Times.
Six-part series in the Charlotte Observer on the plight of poultry workers - many undocumented - in the Carolinas.
"As a group, they are compulsively compliant, ever-conscious that one complaint could lead to their firing or arrest or deportation."
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez on Thursday issued a ruling ordering Minneapolis-based Target Corp. and the plaintiffs to submit the case to mediation.
The unpaid wages and damages are estimated to be between $1 million to $2 million, which includes the San Antonio workers and a companion case pending in Houston federal court, said Bill Beardall Jr., lead attorney for the workers."
MELISSA S. MONROE in the San Antonio Express-News.
After an arrest in the rape of a 6-year-old boy at the New Bedford, Mass. city library late last month, the mayor drafted an ordinance to bar high-risk sex offenders from entering or coming within a certain distance of numerous public places.
Offenders caught inside a so-called safe zone would be fined and asked to leave it immediately. Those who refused would be arrested. David M. Siegel, a professor at the New England School of Law in Boston, said such a ban could raise constitutional issues. KATIE ZEZIMA in The New York Times.
Supporters say such a law is necessary because of what they believe is a growing trend among illegal immigrants to register to vote. Opponents see it as anti-Hispanic legislation that's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. CARL MANNING in the Kansas City Star.
EL CALABOZ, Texas: "In the 240 years since the Spanish Crown granted Eloisa Tamez's colonial ancestors title to this flat, grassy expanse along the Rio Grande's northern bank, her family has steadily lost its holdings to the Mexican War of Independence, the U.S. annexation of Texas and the Great Depression.
Now Tamez faces what could prove the final blow: The Department of Homeland Security has proposed building a section of the U.S-Mexico border fence mandated by Congress directly through the last three acres of the family's original 12,000-acre tract.
But the 72-year-old nursing professor has a message for any government officials who expect her to leave quietly. "I'm not going down without a fight," Tamez said, her dark eyes narrowing as she gazed beyond her back yard toward a field where she used to pick tomatoes as a child. "My father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather farmed this land. This is the land that gave me my life and my spirit. . . . I will fight this all the way.""
N.C. AIZENMAN in the Washington Post.
"In the Seattle area, more than a dozen churches have pledged to take in sanctuary seekers. Scores more places of worship in San Diego, Los Angeles, New York and other immigration hubs have also declared their willingness to host men and women facing deportation."
SASHA ABRAMSKY on the New Sanctuary movement in The Nation magazine.
"The testimony before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law came after immigration advocates told McClatchy that they'd seen a small but growing number of cases of U.S. citizens who've been mistakenly detained and sometimes deported by ICE. They accuse agents of ignoring valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to deport more illegal immigrants."
MARISA TAYLOR for McClatchy-Tribune."You really have to work hard at it to destroy our state's economy, but we found a way," said state Sen. Harry Coates, the only Republican in the [Oklahoma] state Legislature to vote against the immigration law. "We ran off the workforce."
HOWARD WITT in the Chicago Tribune.
If present trends continue, within two decades the nation’s foreign-born population will surpass the historic 19th-century peak of nearly 15 percent of all residents, according to projections released Monday.
What such an outcome could portend, other analysts have said, is a nation riven politically between older, whiter, voting retirees who are increasingly supported by a younger, darker, working population that, as immigrants, may be disproportionately ineligible to vote. SAM ROBERTS in The New York Times.
By 2050, nearly one in five of the projected 438 million Americans is expected to be foreign-born, a proportion higher than at any other time in U.S. history. Whites will lose their majority status, a milestone marked by California nearly a decade ago. LORI WEISBERG and LESLIE BERESTEIN in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
""If a foreigner who is illegally in the United States breaks their leg and seeks medical care, should the hospital treat them?"
Olga Gonzalez says she clearly remembers the debate that question generated in a social studies class during her junior year at University Liggett School. She listened in horror as one of her classmates gave his opinion.
"Let them die," he said. "They don't deserve to be here."
Wary of making the issue too personal because of the problems she could face, Gonzalez, who is Mexican, spoke up anyway. She had family who could be in that situation, she told the other students at the exclusive Grosse Pointe Woods school she attended on scholarship. Would they want them to die?
She didn't change anyone's opinion.
"What if you were in Europe skiing and you broke your leg and the hospital wouldn't treat you because you weren't European?" she asked the class.
That made the class at least pause. They could see the humanity missing from their opinions. Gonzalez breathed more easily."
SANDRA SVOBODA in the Metro Times.
“You have many people moving out, but they are not all illegal,” said Terry Feinberg, president of the Arizona Multihousing Alliance, a trade group for the apartment and rental housing industry. “A lot of people moving are citizens, or legal, but because someone in their family or social network is not, and they are having a hard time keeping or finding a job, they all move.”
RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD in the New York Times.
Mayor Boughton, who governs Danbury,a city of nearly 80,000 residents — 90,000 when illegal immigrants are included — and the Common Council are expected to approve a plan that would require the local police to work with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in rounding up workers who are in the country illegally. The plan is the mayor's latest effort in string of measures over his past six years in office that seek to limit the liberties of Danbury's undocumented workers. JILL CAPUZZO in The New York Times.
This year, two new museums and a new traditional gate marking the city’s Chinatown will be completed, formally acknowledging the role minority groups have played in shaping Seattle and the region — even as those roles are changing. The new touchstones will meet dueling misperceptions: that the city has had a bland racial past and that tolerance and unity are among the local natural resources.
In fact, the locations of the new museums — the Northwest African American Museum at the edge of the Central District and the newly expanded Wing Luke Asian Museum in what is now called the International District — are directly linked to the city’s troubled racial history. The neighborhoods became concentrated with minorities beginning in the 19th century because discriminatory housing policies prevented Asians, blacks and other groups from living elsewhere. WILLIAM YARDLEY in The New York Times.