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GREELEY, Colo. - "Immigrant advocates say they've seen nothing like it before or since: A prosecutor looking for illegal immigrants seized thousands of confidential tax records from an income tax preparer popular with Hispanics in this northern Colorado city."
IVAN MORENO for the Associated Press.
The parents spoke at a news conference at the American Friends Service Committee office in the Stockton neighborhood. Along with Pedro Rios, director of the group's border program, they questioned whether authorities had followed proper procedure when they made the detentions about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Rios said agents with the Transportation Security Administration and the Border Patrol questioned a 16-year-old girl and two boys, ages 15 and 17, about their residency status at the trolley station before taking them into custody and sending them to Mexico later that day."
ANGELICA MARTINEZ in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
"Fernando Arteaga appeared last week in Immigration Court as part of a lengthy battle to stay in the United States. But just before the hearing began, immigration officers removed him from the courtroom, arrested him and took him into custody.
Several hours later, agents deported him to Mexico -- even though his court case was still underway."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
"Ann Menasche should be able to walk into any psychiatric facility at any time to investigate allegations of neglect and abuse. All the disability-rights attorney needs is probable cause. Except, it seems, when the allegations involve patients held by the federal government for allegedly violating immigration laws."
KELLY DAVIS in the San Diego CityBeat.
"Douglas Centeno, 31, was released from an immigration jail in April after a Chronicle story attracted fresh attention from immigration officials to his case. Now the government has abandoned its efforts to deport Centeno, accepting the evidence that he is, in fact, a U.S. citizen."
TYCHE HENDRICKS in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"For a group of farm laborers working in the U.S. illegally, it wasn't jail or deportation that scared them - it was their "contractor.""
FELISA CARDONA and KEVIN VAUGHN in the Denver Post.
[This link also leads to related court documents.]
Your doctor's office won't return your call. Your health insurance provider can't give you a straight answer. You can't get a live person on the line at the power company.
But usually in those cases, it's just your patience at risk -- not your life.
Attorney Brian Bates had a lot to lose in his epic battle to get someone, anyone, at the Houston ICE office to talk to him about a client."
MIZANUR RAHMAN in the Houston Chronicle.
[Full disclosure: Brian Bates is my law partner.]
"Thousands of impoverished elderly, disabled or blind legal residents of New York State, including refugees, will be limited to $352 a month in public aid — about half of what lower courts have said they should get — under a decision by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court."
NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.
"Los Angeles County plans to begin checking the immigration status of all inmates booked into its jails this month in an effort to identify and deport more illegal immigrants with criminal records."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
"Unable to attract local workers for the grueling job of milking cows and working the farm, Vermont, the nation’s 14th-largest dairy state, props up its dairy industry with perhaps thousands of immigrant laborers, many of whom are in the U.S. illegally."
WILSON RING for the Associated Press.
"The struggle of newly arrived refugees in the United States has always been difficult. But now, with a refugee system that hasn't changed in 30 years, a failing economy and an influx of thousands of Iraqi refugees, advocates say many Iraqis are being resettled into institutional poverty."
BRIGID SCHULTE in the Washington Post.
"Miwa is one of the more than 200 widows and widowers who have contacted Brent Renison, the pro bono counsel for the Oregon-based Surviving Spouses Against Deportation, since 2004. After their spouses died, so did their dreams for a life in the United States, as they were either deported to their home countries, or told by immigration authorities that they could not return to settle in America."
LAUREN NICOLE MARIACHER, a graduate journalism student at Columbia University, in the Gazette-Mail. The door closes behind them and the woman follows Zamani down a long, empty hallway of locked doors. They arrive at his office, sparsely decorated with stacks of files, a world map and a miniature Statue of Liberty. A white legal pad and the woman's thick file sit neatly on the desk.
She raises her hand and swears to tell the truth."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
"The immigration lawyers’ national bar association called on the Justice Department on Tuesday to consider dismissing the guilty pleas of nearly 300 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a meatpacking plant raid in Iowa last year, one day after the Supreme Court rejected a statute that prosecutors used to pressure them"
JULIA PRESTON in the New York Times.
"Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said in a concurring opinion that a central flaw in the interpretation of the law urged by the government was that it made criminal liability turn on chance. Consider, Justice Alito said, a defendant who chooses a Social Security number at random.
“If it turns out that the number belongs to a real person,” Justice Alito wrote, “two years will be added to the defendant’s sentence, but if the defendant is lucky and the number does not belong to another person, the statute is not violated.”"
ADAM LIPTAK and JULIA PRESTON in the New York Times.
Instead, the U.S. has branded him a terrorist."
MARISA TAYLOR and Tish Wells for McClatchy Newspapers.
"Swine flu backlash against Mexicans flew furiously over talk radio airwaves and Web sites last week.
Civil rights groups and media watchdog organizations are condemning the links being made between swine flu and the political debate on illegal immigration."
DIANNE SOLíS in the Dallas Morning News.
"She grew up in a single parent family among the burned out tenements of one of New York’s toughest district.
Now Sonia Sotomayor, who was raised by Puerto Rican immigrants on a Bronx housing project, is set to make history after being tipped to become the US Supreme Court’s first Latina justice.
Mrs Sotomayor, 59, is thought to be the preferred choice of President Barack Obama to replace Justice David Souter, who announced his resignation from America’s highest court on Friday."
LEONARD DOYLE for the Telegraph (UK).