'Just News' Blog

"Until her death on May 16, Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez was another undocumented farmworker at the bottom rung of California's farm production chain.

On Wednesday, nestled in a white satin coffin, the 17-year-old girl became to farm labor advocates more a symbol of what they say are secretive and abusive conditions in some of the state's orchards and vineyards.

California occupational safety authorities are investigating the girl's death in Lodi as a heat-related fatality. The United Farm Workers Union is calling her treatment an "egregious" violation of safety regulations put into effect three years ago after three farmworkers and a construction worker died of the heat.

"Maria's death should have been prevented," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement released Wednesday afternoon."

SUSAN FERRISS in the Sacramento Bee.

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"Border Stories is re-imagining the documentary, one with no beginning, middle, or end. Its only linear aspect is the border itself. We produce short, focused video installments. Isolated from the whole, these pieces may seem disparate, but together they form new meanings that transcend their individual subject matter. In this way, we hope to show - but not get lost in - the complexities of the U.S.-Mexico border region. Each story is important, but there is larger meaning in the mosaic as a whole.

Our crew will travel the length of the U.S.–Mexico border, from Brownsville, Texas to Tijuana, Mexico in search of stories that portray the human face of this politically and emotionally-charged region. Through this website, we invite a world-wide audience to interact and connect with these subjects. Our hope is that these voices will carry beyond the border towns and into the interiors of both countries to deepen the understanding of the unique challenges the region faces.

The U.S.-Mexico border traverses an entire continent, forming the longest land border between the developed and the developing world. Debates about immigration, international trade, cultural change, terrorism and security, environmental quality, and the drug trade converge on this international boundary. These debates keep the border in the national consciousness of both countries, but often fail to consider the complexity and diversity its residents describe."

BEN FUNDIS, CLARA LONG, JOHN DREW and SOPHIA DENGO online at www.borderstories.org.

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"Groups instrumental in bringing attention to conditions at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention center urged Congress on Wednesday to oppose legislation to build another such facility for families and children.

Joined by about 20 supporters outside the J.J. Pickle Federal Building, protesters said the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement Act disregards previous congressional recommendations that family detention be used only as a last resort. The bill, H.R. 4088, is in committee."

JUAN CASTILLO in the Austin American-Statesman.

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"Robert Hildreth, a self-made multimillionaire who built his fortune trading in Latin American bonds, wants to create a national fund that would help post bail for undocumented workers seized by immigration authorities.

Hildreth began posting bail out of his own pocket after seeing what he considered to be "un-American" images on TV of shackled workers being deported. Hildreth , the son of high school teachers, called the Greater Boston Legal Services and told them to contact him if they needed help posting bonds for undocumented workers."

WENDY SEFSAF in New America Media.

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""We have American flags, we recite the national anthem. But what do we have to do to be plugged in?" Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president at the university, asks effusively."

MICHELLE GARCIA in the Washington Post.

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"Ricky Walters, a 43-year-old hip-hop pioneer known for the rap classic “The Great Adventures of Slick Rick” and was convicted of attempted murder in 1991, has received a full pardon from Gov. David A. Paterson. The governor said in a statement that he decided to pardon Mr. Walters, who was released from prison in 1997, to prevent him from being deported to Britain, where Mr. Walters was born and lived until the age of 11."

SEWELL CHAN in the New York Times.

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"Eddie "Piolín" Sotelo, the popular Spanish-language disc-jockey who helped catapult half a million people to the streets over immigration reform, took his oath Thursday as a new citizen of the United States in a record-setting naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles.

Sotelo, who spent his teen years in Santa Ana after crossing the border from Mexico, was sworn in with about 6,000 other immigrants at the Los Angeles Convention Center – many who hugged him, asked for his autograph and snapped his photo with their cell phones after the ceremony.

The 37-year old radio host has become a figure for hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants after he helped organize a massive march in defense of immigrants’ rights two years ago. Since then, he has been encouraging immigrants to become citizens on his nationally syndicated radio show, contributing to the unprecedented surge in naturalizations this year."

AMY TAXIN in the Orange County Register.

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"The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the proposed plan to open new family detention centers.

"After the horrible conditions that were revealed at the Hutto facility, it is very disappointing that the government appears to want to produce more immigration prisons for families and children," said Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney at the Southern California office.

Arulanantham said most families do not pose a safety or flight risk and should not be detained. Instead, he said, they should post bonds, wear electronic monitors or be part of an intensive supervision program.

"There are other ways to deter illegal immigration without imprisoning children," he said. "This shows that we have become addicted to incarceration as a method to solving our problems, which it is obviously not.""

ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.

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"Ms. Celestin, 23, told a South Florida court in March that she was brought to the United States from Haiti at the age of 14 and never attended school. She recalled for jurors how she was hit with a broom or shoe, worked 15-hour days, and was forced to sleep on the floor and eat table scraps.

Her recollections persuaded jurors to convict members of her adoptive family, Evelyn Theodore, 74, and Maude Paulin, her 52-year-old daughter, of conspiring to violate Ms. Celestin’s civil rights and compelling her to perform forced labor."

CARMEN GENTILE in the New York Times.

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"The nation's largest single Immigration raid, resulting in nearly 400 arrests, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday."

AMY LORENTZEN for the Associated Press.

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Kansas is a leader in a spreading national effort to make parole more effective and useful — to reduce violations and reincarcerations as it protects the public and seeks to help more offenders go straight.

A similar transformation of the parole system has begun in several states including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas. It has been prompted in part by financial concerns: more than one-third of all prison admissions are for parole violations, helping to drive an unsustainable surge in prison-building.

It has also been driven by evidence that conventional parole supervision is often a waste of resources. “If we sent him back to prison for 90 days, he’d have to start all over with his life again,” Kent Sisson, parole director for southern Kansas, said of Mr. Kemp. “Instead, he’s working, paying child support and getting a G.E.D.” ERIK ECKHOLM in The New York Times.

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Imagine a hurricane bearing down on you and your family.  A federal bus pulls up to help you evacuate.  Terrified, grateful for the rescue, you start to get on board, but before you can step on the bus a Border Patrol agent blocks your way and says, "Papers, please."

Sick science fiction?  Nope.  Reality, according to Rio Grande Guardian reporters JOEY GOMEZ and STEVE TAYLOR on May 14, 2008 and May 15, 2008.

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The Los Angeles Police Department was one of the first in the nation to institute a procedure that prohibits officers from initiating contact with people for the sole purpose of learning their immigration status. The procedure, known as Special Order 40, was designed in part to reassure illegal immigrants who historically had shied from reporting crimes and assisting police investigations.

But in the context of contemporary immigration politics, the procedure is now perceived in black neighborhoods and beyond as a roadblock to using immigration laws as a tool against Latino gang violence. A push to reverse the procedure is viewed by many as a symbol of deeper racial conflicts in South Los Angeles and has inflamed tensions between many blacks and Hispanic immigrants, as shifting demographics and a smattering of racially motivated killings have racked South Los Angeles. JENNIFER SEINHAUER in The New York Times.

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A fight has erupted in Arizona, pitting the state’s governor against a county lawman known as "America's Toughest Sheriff,” and the hunt for illegal immigrants against the hunt for felons on the loose.

According to several reports, Gov. Janet Napolitano has signed an executive order shifting $1.6 million out of the budget for a task force set up to unravel human smuggling networks in the state, and reassigning the money to a new effort to round up tens of thousands of fugitives.

The cutbacks were not shared across Arizona’s 15 counties. Rather, they were aimed at just one county — Maricopa — and its controversial sheriff, Joe Arpaio. MIKE NIZZA for the Lede in The New York Times.

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"You can walk to the U.S. border, Francelia Menchaca's immigration lawyer advised her, but don't put your fingers through its fence. It may hinder her immigration paperwork, the lawyer said."

ASHLEY SURDIN in the Washington Post.  [And be sure to watch the slide show.]

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Follow this 4-day series on immigration jails by award-winning Washington Post reporters DANA PRIEST and AMY GOLDSTEIN including links to videos, graphics and background documentation.

"The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse."

Link to full package.

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"[T]he younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white--and black--children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants."

ROBERTO LOVATO in The Nation magazine.

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"The FBI has withdrawn a secret administrative order seeking the name, address and online activity of a patron of the Internet Archive after the San Francisco-based digital library filed suit to block the action.

It is one of only three known instances in which the FBI has backed off from such a data demand, known as a "national security letter," or NSL, which is not subject to judicial approval and whose recipient is barred from disclosing the order's existence."

ELLEN NAKASHIMA in the Washington Post.

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"“The private prison industry was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, until the feds bailed them out with the immigration-detention contracts,” said Michele Deitch, an expert on prison privatization with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin."

LESLIE BERESTEIN in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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According to ICE, 71 people have died in the agency's custody since the beginning of 2004. Of these, 57 were in contract facilities that ranged from private detention centers to county jails, raising questions about whether a lack of government oversight played a part.

Three people have died at Otay Mesa since 2003, including Yusif Osman, 34, a Ghanian man who died in his cell in 2006 after complaining of chest pain.

According to the county medical examiner's report, it took personnel more than an hour to call 911 after Osman's cellmate began asking for help. The report claims that Osman was seen on his knees, and that a medical supervisor, upon finding no medical history on him, “informed the control officer to have Mr. Osman file a request to seek medical assistance.”"

LESLIE BERESTEIN in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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"As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong."

NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.  [See also a related story, a video, a government statement, and the list of deaths in custody.]

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AUSTIN, Texas: "For the past 30 years, federal immigration agents have regularly popped in the Travis County Jail and other correctional institutions, combing records and quizzing inmates to identify deportable immigrants and those with criminal records.

But sometime in the future — apparently for the first time ever, and with the blessing of Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton — the periodic visits will grow into a permanent presence, as federal agents work around-the-clock in a roughly 8-foot by 10-foot office in the downtown jail.

There, they can question people brought in on any charges — from traffic offenses to murder — about their immigration status. If agents believe someone is in the United States illegally, they can place a "hold" to detain the inmate for possible deportation after the original charges are adjudicated."

JUAN CASTILLO in the Austin American-Statesman.

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"On each of the nearly 10,000 days he spent in jail, James Woodard held out hope that someone would believe he was innocent. Some people finally did believe him, but it was 27 years later and they were from an unlikely place: the office of the Dallas County District Attorney, the same entity that railroaded him for the 1980 murder of his girlfriend.

Woodard was freed this past Tuesday and is the longest-serving wrongfully convicted inmate to be released with the help of DNA in U.S. history."

TOM ANDERSON and JENNY DUBIN for CBS News.

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The three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must decide whether the Board of Immigration Appeals was right to deny asylum to the women and permit them to be returned to Guinea.

At the hearing, the judges seemed particularly upset at a conclusion by the government that it was fair to return the women to Guinea because they could not suffer further persecution since mutilation had already occurred. At times, all three judges raised their voices or cut off lawyers to make a point.

Other asylum cases built on other forms of persecution did not require that the individual seeking asylum prove that the persecution could be repeated, the judges said.

"Supply me any case in which a well-founded fear of persecution was not sustained because the same leg couldn't be amputated or the same organ removed," demanded Judge Rosemary Pooler."

LARRY NEUMEISTER for the Associated Press.

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Less than three weeks after a Supreme Court ruling ended a seven-month moratorium on lethal injections, at least 14 execution dates have been set in six states between May 6 and October.

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Experts say the resumption of executions is likely to throw a strong new spotlight on the divisive national — and international — issue of capital punishment. RALPH BLUMENTHAL in The New York Times.

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"Thousands of workers waved American flags, marched to mariachi music and rallied for labor and immigrant rights in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, as May Day gatherings drew light but peaceful crowds.

Turnout across Southern California and the nation was markedly lower than in the last few years, when millions of marchers in more than 100 cities hit the streets on May Day to urge a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and other reforms."

TERESA WATANABE, ANNA GORMAN and ARI B. BLOOMEKATZ (Tony Barboza, Howard Blume, Jessica Garrison, Evelyn Larrubia, Jill Leovy, Rong-Gong Lin II, Robert Lopez, Sam Quinones and Joel Rubin, contributing) in the Los Angeles Times.

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"Immigrants who spent time in detention while fighting deportation filed a federal suit on Wednesday against Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, demanding that the agency issue legally enforceable regulations for its detention centers.

No enforceable standards now exist for the immigrant detention system, a rapidly growing conglomeration of county jails, federal centers and privately run prisons across the country.

The lawsuit, filed by the immigrants and their advocates in United States District Court in Manhattan, contends that the lack of such regulations puts hundreds of thousands of people a year in substandard and inconsistent conditions while the government decides whether to deport them, leaving them subject to inadequate medical care and abuse."

NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.

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"Anne Hobbs was angry. The head of the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission had just learned of a Hispanic couple who said their landlord asked for their driver's licenses — but didn't ask the same of non-Hispanic tenants.

Hobbs said it sounded like the couple were "treated differently than everybody else because of national origin," and sent the case to the state's top prosecutor, hoping he would sue on their behalf under fair housing laws.

When Attorney General Jon Bruning received the case, he was angry, too — for a different reason than Hobbs.

"I'm not going to use taxpayer dollars to file lawsuits for illegal aliens," said Bruning after learning the couple was in the U.S. illegally. "You're not going to get a free lawyer" from his office, he said, "if you're not a citizen of this country.""

NATE JENKINS for the Associated Press.

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