'Just News' Blog

"A workplace lawsuit filed by a group of immigrant laborers against a cleaning contractor popular with posh Strip restaurants is the latest controversy over how third-party operators conduct business in the strictly-regulated atmosphere of casinos.

The workers allege that Bravo Pro Maintenance made them work 13 hours a day, seven days a week, cleaning hip spots such as CatHouse at the Luxor and Trader Vic’s at Planet Hollywood — without breaks and without overtime. They say they were promised $1,300 every two weeks but were paid far less, an average of $4.40 per hour.

The workers’ attorney, Matthew Callister, says the company held its mostly-Mexican workforce in a form of “indentured servitude,” squeezing more labor out of frustrated workers by promising to make them whole one day. Many tired of waiting and quit. Others, undocumented and desperate for work, remain silent."

MICHAEL MISHAK in the Las Vegas Sun.

"Bravo Pro representatives, former workers say, circulate through the Hispanic community, talking up the availability of janitorial jobs. There's been no shortage of workers willing to put in long hours for the promise of $7 per hour.

"They catch them in a kind of perpetual indentured servitude," Callister says. "It's a huge embarrassment, and it does appear to be, tragically, a case of Mexicans targeting entry-level Mexicans ... with the full knowledge and complicity of the owners of the restaurants who knew better or should have known you could not provide that service at that price."

The case not only invites scrutiny from the Department of Labor, which has a history of interest in such issues, but also opens the door for criticism from a savvy labor organization willing to raise workers rights issues on resort properties.

Meanwhile, the number in the phone book for Bravo Pro Maintenance has been disconnected."

JOHN L. SMITH in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

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"The U.S. government admitted in April that it had wrongly deported an N.C. native, but newly released documents show that federal investigators ignored FBI records and other evidence showing that the man was a United States citizen.

At the time of Mark Lyttle's deportation, immigration officials had criminal record checks that said he was a U.S. citizen. They had his Social Security number and the names of his parents. They had Lyttle's own sworn statement that he had been born in Rowan County.

None of this stopped them from leaving Lyttle, a mentally ill American who speaks no Spanish, alone and penniless in Mexico, where he has no ties."

KRISTIN COLLINS in the Charlotte Observer.

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"The owners of a Kapolei farm known for supplying a rich variety of Asian vegetables, melons and other produce to the state's largest wholesalers and grocers have been indicted on charges alleging the forced labor of 44 Thai nationals brought to Hawai'i under a federal agricultural guest-worker program."

JIM DOOLEY and CHRISTIE WILSON in the Honolulu Advertiser.

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"Can the U.S. government take a woman's baby from her because she doesn't speak English? That's the latest question to arise in the hothouse debate over illegal immigration, as an undocumented woman from impoverished rural Mexico — who speaks only an obscure indigenous language — fights in a Mississippi court to regain custody of her infant daughter."

TIM PADGETT with DOLLY MASCAREÑAS in Time Magazine.

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"A vagabond musician from who lived illegally in Canada for 20 years has earned a dubious distinction, becoming one of the few Americans Canada deports each year to the U.S. Now he's like a man without country, lacking the ID he needs to get work or drive."

LORNET TURNBULL in the Seattle Times.

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"In a city with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to immigration status, it may come as a surprise to many that the New York Department of Correction routinely gives a list of foreign-born inmates at Rikers Island to immigration authorities, who use it to question, detain and try to deport thousands of them."

NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.

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"As U.S. control of the border has strengthened since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it has become harder for people to cross illegally. That has spawned a boom in hostage-taking as smuggling cartels have realized that they can extort money from illegal immigrants' families in the United States, many of whom wire the ransom instead of risking their own deportation by contacting police.

Although the cartels hold captives in the southwest border states, the crimes have reached into the Washington [DC] region, where established immigrant communities include undocumented people who left their families behind in Central America. The kidnappers prey on working-class, Spanish-speaking immigrants because they are especially vulnerable: They would do almost anything to free their loved ones, and they are sometimes equally fearful of U.S. authorities.

Two recent cases, involving victims who received extortion calls in Alexandria and Prince William County, highlight how reporting such crimes can lead to daring rescues. ICE officials and local police hope the cases encourage others receiving extortion calls to come forward, both to save lives and to help them make inroads into the sprawling criminal organizations."

JOSH WHITE, DAGNY SALAS and MEG SMITH in the Washington Post.

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"Two years ago today, an illegal immigrant threatened with deportation found sanctuary at a tiny church in Simi Valley. The news is there is no news."

JACKY GUERRERO and TOM KISKEN in the Ventura County Star.

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Will The Border Patrol use hurricane evacuations to snag undocumented immigrants in South Texas?

KEVIN SIEFF in the Texas Observer.

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"Today, Martha’s Vineyard – summer retreat for the likes of Bill ­Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Spike Lee and now the Obamas – depends on thousands of Brazilians to do the hard labour. Unlike earlier influxes, these newcomers are mostly illegal (estimates are as high as 70 per cent); but until recently, their efforts were welcome and their legal status largely ignored. The immigrants build, garden and scrub the summer residents’ trophy homes – so that they can build their own trophy homes back in Brazil. Nobody, including the immigrants themselves, expected them to put down roots on the island.

But that’s what they did. An estimated 3,000 Brazilians live on ­Martha’s Vineyard, a considerable presence on an island with a winter population of 15,000 (rising to 100,000 in the summer). For the most part, the Brazilians have created a parallel society."

DANIELA GERSON in the Financial Times.

Reporting for this story was supported by funding from the Institute for Justice and Journalism.

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"Six days ago, a Pakistani journalist on the run from Taliban militants landed in the United States holding a valuable key to sanctuary: a visa granting him the right to work for the Voice of America radio service for one year.

But today Rahman Bunairee is in an immigration lockup in Virginia after being detained upon his arrival at Dulles International Airport.

"We are concerned and upset" about the detention, said Joan Mower, a spokeswoman for the VOA, which is funded by the U.S. government. "We are trying to find out what happened and working to get it resolved with other government agencies.""

SEBASTIAN ROTELLA in the Los Angeles Times.

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"The policy shift might not have been possible, according to some analysts, if not for the work of an unlikely but effective patchwork alliance of attorneys and community activists that emerged after Hines' and Valdez's unsettling initial visits to the Hutto center. The partnership quickly mushroomed to include hundreds, if not thousands, of people, including twenty-somethings and senior citizens, Williamson County residents, immigration reform advocates, human rights groups, documentary filmmakers, immigration clinic students and faculty and the American Civil Liberties Union. Though participants say they were not always on the same page, they were unified in their unrelenting calls for the government to close the center and to stop detaining families there."

JUAN CASTILLO in the Austin American-Statesman.

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T. Don Hutto Residential Center will no longer house immigrant families.

"A 2007 settlement agreement ordering the government to maintain improved conditions at an immigrant detention center in Taylor has been extended, the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday.

A copy of a modification to the 2007 agreement, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Austin and provided by the ACLU on Friday, said the plaintiffs and the government determined that an extension "would be appropriate" after Aug. 29, when the agreement was set to expire."

JUAN CASTILLO in the Austin American-Statesman.

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"A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to clearly tell property owners affected by the fence along the Mexican border how they will be able to access their land."

CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN for the Associated Press.

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"By the time Willian Toj reached El Rosario, news of his arrival had spread and most of the Guatemalan village had gathered to welcome him back in gloomy silence.

Friends and relatives comforted him as he returned to his shack with his family in tow. Like Toj, others from El Rosario had left the village to find work in the United States. Many were supporting entire families by wiring money home from one small town in the American Midwest. They too would soon be deported, penniless and laden with debt.

On May 12, 2008 U.S. Federal agents arrested nearly 400 undocumented workers in a raid on Agriprocessors Inc., the country's largest kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, a small farming town in northeastern Iowa.

It was one of the largest single roundups in U.S. immigration history and dramatic images flashed across the nation as workers were led out in chains. The plant's management was jailed on charges ranging from harboring illegal workers to bank fraud.

Meanwhile, up a winding dirt road in Guatemala, an economic disaster was unfolding."

GREG BROSNAN and JENNIFER SZYMASZEK for PBS Frontline World - Rough Cut.

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