'Just News' Blog

"While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.

As a result, cases often take months if not years to complete, leading to more immigrants being held in a growing network of detention facilities and jails. On any given day there are more than 30,000 people in immigration lockup."

ANDREW BECKER and HUGO CABRERA in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

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"The Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that the state acted improperly when it terminated a Guatemalan woman’s rights to her two American-born children after she was detained on charges of falsely identifying herself to a police officer and then deported."

GINGER THOMPSON in the New York Times.

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ARIVACA, Ariz. — "“Somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband!” the woman shouted to the 911 dispatcher. “They’re coming back in! They’re coming back in!”

Multiple gunshots are then heard on a tape of the call.

The woman, Gina Gonzalez, survived the attack after arming herself with her husband’s handgun, but both he and their 10-year-old daughter died.

The killings, last month, have terrified this small town near the Mexican border, in part because the authorities have now tied them to what they describe as a rogue group engaged in citizen border patrols."

JESSE McINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN in the New York Times.

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"Paulo Monte admits contemplating suicide several times as an escape from the "nightmare" he lived through under the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Monte, 40, a legal permanent resident of the United States since he was five months old, spent the last 18 months in jail fighting relentlessly against his deportation to Portugal.

In addition to the complex legal battle he faced trying to preserve his right to stay in this country, he claims he was subject to abusive treatment and inadequate medical care during his detention and often threatened with retaliation if he sought to seek medical attention.

"No one wants to listen to us in there [ICE detention]," Monte told O Jornal. "I thought of suicide. My family and daughter kept me going."

On June 1, he was released after a U.S. Immigration Court judge terminated his case without prejudice, finding him "not removable" from the United States and waving an appeal.

Monte said the whole experience has left him deeply disturbed."

LURDES C. da SILVA in O Jornal.

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"Janet Reyes graduated magna cum laude from the University of Houston in May with a master’s degree in social work.

And then, the 26-year-old said, her life essentially came to a standstill.

Like tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, Reyes found that her job prospects after graduation are nonexistent without legal status.

“We’ve got a diploma in our hands, but we are unable to use it,” said Reyes, whose parents brought her to the U.S. from Mexico illegally when she was 8 years old."

SUSAN CARROLL in the Houston Chronicle.

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"The federal government will no longer detain illegal immigrants caught driving without a license in Nashville. Instead, the federal system wants to use its bed space to house and deport the most dangerous offenders."

KATE HOWARD and CHRIS ECHEGARAY in The Tennessean.

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"A national commission blasted the federal government for its tactics in a series of workplace immigration raids, saying in a report released Thursday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had violated workers' rights and traumatized communities."

TYCHE HENDRICKS in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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"A city can prohibit its police from stopping or arresting people to find out if they are illegal immigrants, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday in a Los Angeles case with implications for San Francisco's sanctuary ordinance."

BOB EGELKO in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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"Ronald Soza celebrated his 10th birthday Wednesday with cake and a serenade by more than 100 other children and their parents.

His own family: absent. His mother was recently deported back to Nicaragua. His father rarely ventures out in public in fear of a similar fate. Now Soza and the other children — all U.S. citizens whose parents could be or have been deported — are demanding a say in the immigration debate.

They are suing President Barack Obama, asking a court to halt the deportations of their parents until Congress overhauls U.S. immigration laws."

LAURA WIDES-MUñOZ for the Associated Press.

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"The report, by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan group that analyzes data about federal government performance, found that the shortage of judges had contributed to a 19 percent increase in the backlog of cases since 2006 and a 23 percent increase in the time it takes to resolve them."

JULIA PRESTON in the New York Times.

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"You don't need to go to Iran or North Korea to find secret courts. They're alive and well right here in the United States."

JACQUELINE STEVENS in The Nation.

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"U.S. civil rights leaders said yesterday that an increase in hate crimes committed in recent years against Hispanics and people perceived to be immigrants "correlates closely" to the nation's increasingly contentious debate over immigration."

SPENCER S. HSU in the Washington Post.

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"Word of the deal spread swiftly among Ecuadorean immigrants, along a robust grapevine from New York City out to Long Island and into Westchester County. In Peekskill, N.Y., a gas station worker named Henry León heard about it through a friend of his wife’s: The pastors of a storefront Pentecostal church in Corona, Queens, had the inside track on a special allotment of green cards the government had earmarked for church congregations.

Mr. León and his wife made the two-hour trip by train and subway to Corona to meet with one of the two pastors, Gregorio Gonzalez. He told them that all they had to do was to fill out a form and provide $8,000 each in cash and some personal identification documents, Mr. León recalled. The green cards would be ready in a month.

It seemed too good to be true. And it was, according to prosecutors in the Queens district attorney’s office."

KIRK SEMPLE in the New York Times.

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"Under federal law, gay and lesbian U.S. citizens are not entitled to apply for legal status for their partners, even if their marriage is recognized by state law. That has left an estimated 36,000 binational, same-sex couples like Roland and Racicot with few options to legally build lives together in the U.S., according to Immigration Equality, a New York-based advocacy organization."

SUSAN CARROLL in the Houston Chronicle.

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"[T]he U.S. government is aggressively fighting Ledezma's petition on the grounds that the threat that caused him to flee is inherent to police work, according to his lawyer, Eduardo Beckett. U.S. immigration officials said they could not comment because asylum cases are confidential.

As drug violence has worsened in Mexico, businesspeople, journalists and other professionals have been seeking refuge in the U.S. But few have as much at stake as law enforcement figures who defy the cartels."

ANDREW BECKER in the Los Angeles Times.  This report is published in cooperation with the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, where Becker is a staff reporter. 

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"Williams has what she says is an original birth certificate listing her birthplace as Jefferson Parish. She has lived sporadically in New Orleans, Houma and Houston.

She was deported to Honduras in January after being detained by federal agents in Houston.

She pleaded her case with the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, and was issued a provisional passport allowing a return to the U.S. March 31, after her family sent a copy of her birth certificate and other information to officials there."

ROBERT ZULLO in the Daily Comet.

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"A judge has dismissed a case against four immigrants caught up in a controversial Fair Haven raid, saying the feds trampled on their rights.

Judge Michael W. Straus of U.S. Immigration Court in Hartford threw out the cases against four immigrants swept up in the June 2007 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid. He ruled that government agents were in “egregious violation” of the immigrants’ Fourth Amendment rights."

THOMAS MaCMILLAN in the New Haven Independent.

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"Maria Mena and her husband, Felipe Angelus, were driving home from the grocery store with their three children on April 30, 2008, when federal agents brandishing guns surrounded the car, ordered Angelus out, handcuffed him and led him away.

It was the last time the children saw their father."

GREGG KRUPA in the Detroit News.

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"Gustavo Rodriguez Adulfo could be dead for years before national leaders debate this question: What should the United States do with illegal immigrants who become seriously ill?"

TONY LEYS in the Des Moines Register.

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"A Tucson man convicted of littering on federal land said he will continue to leave out water for illegal immigrants walking through the desert, even if that means risking further citations.

Staton, a Web designer and volunteer with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, faces up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine when he is sentenced Aug. 11 by U.S. District Magistrate Judge Jennifer Guerin. 

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"Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. yesterday overturned a Bush administration ruling in January that immigrants do not have a constitutional right to effective legal counsel in deportation proceedings."

SPENCER S. HSU in the Washington Post.

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"In April, a federal jury acquitted him on charges of transporting explosives during a road trip with a friend who had packed model rocket propellants in the trunk. But three days later, in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Tampa, Mr. Megahed was arrested again in connection with the case, this time by immigration authorities.... Several federal jurors who acquitted him have also made the rare move of publicizing their outrage at their verdict’s being second-guessed, while Arab-American groups, civil rights organizations and churches have lobbied the Obama administration for his release."

DAMIEN CAVE in the New York Times.

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"For more than a decade, arriving asylum-seekers have faced the possibility that they will be detained while immigration authorities oppose their admission, under stricter laws passed in 1996. But a new study by the international advocacy group Human Rights First, shows that it has become harder for them to win release while their cases are considered."

JENNY MANRIQUE in the New York Times.

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