"Several Chilean students were leaving a quiet gathering early Thursday morning when a man approached the window of the townhome where they were and opened fire with his rifle, killing two and injuring three. Sheriff Mike Adkinson said ... Dannie Baker, 60, approached Unit 12 in the Summer Lakes townhome complex and opened fire through a window. ... [A] neighbor recalled Baker asking 'if I was ready for the revolution to begin and if I had any immigrants in my house to get them out.'''

ROBBYN BROOKS in the Northwest Florida Daily News.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 06:33 PM | Permalink

"The economic downturn may have pushed immigration reforms down the ladder of concern, but the Obama administration's policies will bring a positive change, a panel of immigration experts said at a seminar at the University of Southern California last Thursday."

NEWLY PAUL in Neon Tommy.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 12:55 PM | Permalink

Juan Gómez is a freshman on scholarship at Georgetown University. He has lived in the U.S. since he was two years old. And he could be deported any minute.

PHUONG LY, a freelancer, writing in the Washington Post Magazine.

[Research for this story was supported by the Institute for Justice and Journalism.]

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 05:50 AM | Permalink

"An immigration judge has dismissed the case of a Mexican man facing deportation after ruling that federal agents violated his rights during a work site raid last year in Van Nuys.

Los Angeles Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor issued a written decision that immigration agents failed to follow their own regulations when they detained Gregorio Perez Cruz without reasonable suspicion that he was illegal."

ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 10:43 AM | Permalink

"The November death of a Prince William County man in immigration custody at Piedmont Regional Jail has prompted Immigration and Customs Enforcement to suspend placing detainees at the facility, three hours south of the District near Farmville, Va."

NICK MIROFF and JOSH WHITE in the Washington Post.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 05:12 AM | Permalink

""I don't care where you get more arrests, we need more numbers," he said, according to one account in a summary of an internal investigation. The boss then added that the agents could go to any street corner and find a group of illegal immigrants, according to the summary, not previously made public. About an hour later, the nine-person team went to a nearby 7-Eleven and arrested 24 Latino men."

N.C. AIZENMAN on the front page of the Washington Post.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 07:14 AM | Permalink

"Juan Obed Silva was one of the English speakers in Immigration Court in Los Angeles last week. He arrived in his wheelchair and told Judge Anthony Giattina that he wanted to stay in the United States, though the official position of our government is that he should be deported to Mexico.

"My plan is to pursue my doctorate," he said, before pausing to correct himself. "That is, if I am allowed to stay in this country."

Readers of this column may remember the story of Silva, known to his friends as Obed. Now 30 and a legal U.S. resident, he was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. as a baby."

HECTOR TOBAR in the Los Angeles Times.

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"They are the men still rebuilding New Orleans more than three years after Hurricane Katrina, the head-down laborers from Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala who work on the blazing hot roofs and inside the fetid homes for a wad of cash at the end of the day.

But on the street, these laborers are known as “walking A.T.M.’s.”"

ADAM NOSSITER in the New York Times.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 05:14 AM | Permalink

"While DHS is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. Although only one piece of the broader story of immigration, it’s all a part of the new political economy of immigration."

TOM BARRY in Dollars & Sense.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 06:37 AM | Permalink

"More than 100,000 parents whose children are U.S. citizens were deported over the decade that ended in 2007, a Department of Homeland Security's investigation has found.

"I am saddened, but not surprised to learn that our government, in its harsh anti-immigrant stance, has split hundreds of thousands of families apart over the past decade," said Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y."

SUZANNE GAMBOA for the Associated Press.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 05:48 AM | Permalink

"At Angel Island Immigration Station, the walls really can talk. Until now, though, they haven't told the whole story of this notorious West Coast entry point in the heart of San Francisco Bay.

Their first words were in Chinese, stately poems of longing and revenge carved into the wooden barracks by desperate detainees between 1910 and 1940 and discovered by accident more than a generation later."

MARIA L. LA GANGA in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 06:21 AM | Permalink

NPR's JENNIFER LUDDEN has filed four stories on immigration this week:

Immigration Crackdown Overwhelms Judges;

Debate Over Video In Immigration Court;

Immigration Transfers Add To System's Problems; and

Immigrant Detention Centers Face Opposition.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 03:10 PM | Permalink

Hiu Lui "Jason" Ng (HYEW' Lew Eng), a 34-year-old computer engineer accused of overstaying his visa, died of liver cancer in August, weeks after being taken to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls. His cancer went undiagnosed until days before he died."

HILARY RUSS for the Associated Press.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 05:46 PM | Permalink

Two years later, he's jobless and barely getting by while he waits for his immigration case to be resolved."

IVAN MORENO for the Associated Press.

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"A sheriff on northwest Washington's Olympic Peninsula - the site of recent increased immigration enforcement by the U.S. Border Patrol - has decided not to seek federal money offered under a program that requires applicants to accept Border Patrol terminology that describes illegal immigrants as "criminal aliens.""

MANUEL VALDES for the Associated Press.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 07:18 PM | Permalink

"After years of political pressure and legal wrangling, a court settlement reached Friday allows Mexican laborers brought in to stem World War II-era labor shortages to collect on pension funds they earned decades ago."

GARANCE BURKE for the Associated Press. [NOTE: Link is to a "drop" including the AP story and a PDF of the settlement order.]

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 04:18 PM | Permalink

"Immigration reform and border control will not be the first items on the new Congress’ agenda, says U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who has been a staunch opponent of the border fence. And with an economic crisis and two wars being waged, they’re not high on the Obama administration’s agenda, either. “There’s a shift in priorities now with the economy,” Grijalva says. “Throwing $450 million at a fence pales in comparison to fixing our economy.”

The shift in focus away from border security might give Napolitano some much-needed time to evaluate and reinvent a department that has been taxpayers’ worst nightmare, and private contractors’ idea of heaven, ever since its creation after 9/11. In 2006, the agency estimated that a mile of fence would cost $1 million. By August 2008, the price tag had shot up to $7.5 million per mile."

MELISSA DEL BOSQUE in the Texas Observer.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 04:14 PM | Permalink

"The Department of Homeland Security posted an online notice saying that the center would be within 120 miles of downtown Los Angeles and owned and operated by a contractor, which would provide the facilities, personnel, management, equipment and services. In recent years, the government has increasingly contracted out its immigration detention services nationwide to private companies such as the Corrections Corp. of America and the GEO Group.

The move toward privatization has been criticized by immigrant rights advocates, who say that detention has become a lucrative business and that detainees are often kept in unsafe conditions without access to adequate medical care. Eighty-three detainees have died while in immigration custody since 2004, according to the immigration agency, prompting congressional inquiries about detainee medical care."

ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 08:43 AM | Permalink

"Obed will face an immigration judge who will decide whether he should be deported to Mexico, the country he left as a baby, for shooting his rival, a crime he committed when he was a teenager.

Obed is a legal U.S. resident. But even a green card holder can be expelled from the U.S. for a crime committed a decade or two or three earlier.

It's one of the many ironies of Obed's life that the 1998 crime for which he may be forced to leave the United States also marks the beginning of his transformation from gang member to English scholar."

HECTOR TOBAR in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 06:56 AM | Permalink

"For a week or more, Newbrough's requests for medical attention were ignored, according to his family and fellow detainees later interviewed by phone inside the jail. The last time they saw him, detainees said, guards were dragging Newbrough across the floor and yelling at him to stop faking illness.

On Thanksgiving night, Newbrough's parents got a call at their Manassas-area home telling them their son was in critical condition at a Richmond hospital. He died the next day."

NICK MIROFF in the Washington Post.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 08:40 AM | Permalink

GREELEY, Colo. — "For the past decade, thousands of Hispanic men and women who settled here went to Amalia’s Translation and Tax Services to pay their annual income taxes.

Whether these people were in the United States legally mattered little to Amalia Cerrillo, who runs the business out of her home in this northern Colorado farming town. The Internal Revenue Service, Ms. Cerrillo knew, requires everyone, regardless of immigration status, to pay taxes on income earned in this country.

“My clients wanted to do what any other American does,” Ms. Cerrillo said. “And they wanted to show that they paid their taxes if there is ever a chance for amnesty or a green card.”

That all changed Oct. 17, when investigators with the Weld County Sheriff’s Office, armed with a search warrant, seized thousands of confidential tax returns from Ms. Cerrillo’s business. They told her they were looking for people with fraudulent Social Security numbers, commonly used by illegal immigrants to get work."

DAN FROSCH in the New York Times.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 08:32 AM | Permalink

SANTA ANA, Calif. — "U.S. Border Patrol agents working about 100 miles north of the Mexican border say they have been given arrest quotas at odds with agency practices and threatened with punishment if they fail to meet the number.

Agents stationed in Riverside reported being ordered to arrest at least 150 suspected illegal immigrants in January and that two such arrests must lead to prosecutions, said Lombardo Amaya, president of Local 2554 of the National Border Patrol Council."

AMY TAXIN and EILEEN SULLIVAN for the Associated Press.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 07:17 AM | Permalink

"After her husband of eight months died in the Staten Island ferry crash of Oct. 15, 2003, Osserritta Robinson, a Jamaican immigrant, decided to stay in the United States and proceed with her application for permanent residency.

But at Ms. Robinson’s interview for residency in 2005, the immigration official had some more bad news: Mr. Robinson’s death had disqualified her application."

KIRK SEMPLE in the New York Times.

[UPDATE: The NYT article is dated Feb. 1, 2009.  Today, Feb. 2, 2009, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled 2-1 against Ms. Robinson.]

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 07:02 AM | Permalink