'Just News' Blog

"The federal agents came at dawn on June 6, 2007, pounding on doors, yelling in an unfamiliar tongue, storming bedrooms, lining up the men on one side of the room and the women on the other. In three hours, they raided eight apartments and homes in New Haven’s predominantly Latino neighborhood of Fair Haven, making 29 arrests. Five of them were the intended targets; the rest were detained along the way.

Word of the raid broke in the local press in the late morning of June 6. By noon it was crawling across the news ticker in Times Square.

“This was a symbolic act of law enforcement by an agency that is not able to control its mission or how it executes its responsibilities. This was an act of intimidation,” Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said through clenched teeth, his face lighted by flashbulbs and the patchy afternoon sun poking through the shady canopy of Wooster Square Park at 4 p.m. In the heart of the city’s historic Italian-American neighborhood, he stood before a podium saddled with six microphones, flanked by community, religious and political, saying the immigration agents had “terrorized” Fair Haven."

ISAAC ARNSDORF in the Yale Daily News; Part 1 and Part 2.

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"Judge Roger L. Gregory, the vehement but sole dissenter in July, requested the rehearing and objected to its denial as contrary to settled law.

“There is…one basis for asylum that is clearly established in both this Circuit and the other federal courts: protection from female genital mutilation,” Gregory wrote Monday."

CARYN TAMBER in the Maryland Daily Record.

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"The number of people apprehended illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is down more than 25 percent, according to Customs and Border Patrol, but the rate of people dying while trying to cross is up."

TED ROBBINS for NPR.

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"Oscar Peralta thought he'd found a secure place to live with his wife – the San Grande Mobile Home Park. He purchased title to property but never moved in after the property owners association demanded Social Security numbers from him and his wife."

DIANNE SOLíS in the Dallas Morning News.

"Angry owners faced off with board members Friday over the immigration policy at the San Grande Mobile home park in Grand Prairie.  The property owners’ association board is demanding proof of legal residency from buyers who want to live at the park on Shady Grove Road near Belt Line.  "It’s just not right," said property owner Ramona Bledsoe.  "They didn’t ask it from white people.  But they’re asking it from Latino people."  Board Vice President Nola Wolfe denied the policy is enforced only for Latinos."

KEN KALTHOFF for NBCDFW.com.

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"An academic study of the Criminal Alien Program in Irving released Wednesday by a California law school said there is "strong evidence" that Irving police racially profiled Hispanics and probably referred lawful residents to Immigration and Customs Enforcement."

BRANDON FORMBY and KATHERINE LEAL UNMUTH in the Dallas Morning News.

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"Immigrants detained in a short-term processing center in the basement of a Los Angeles federal building can no longer be held for weeks without access to drinking water, clean clothes or items such as sanitary napkins, according to a settlement announced Wednesday.

The settlement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities resulted from a lawsuit filed in April by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Immigration Law Center and the Paul Hastings law firm."

ROBERT J. LOPEZ in the Los Angeles Times.

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Classmates at his East Texas elementary school began taunting him about his brown skin — several shades darker than that of his fair-skinned siblings.

"They called me a Mexican," he said. "It was the first time I had heard that in my life. I remember going home and asking my mom, ‘What’s a Mexican?’"

Now, 35 years old and a bear of a man, the question still plagues him.

Adopted by an American family the day after his birth in Ciudad Juarez, Chih., Whiteley has only been to Mexico on short trips to Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey. He doesn’t speak the language. He doesn’t know anyone there.

But according to the U.S. government, he remains to this day a Mexican national with no legal right to be in the United States."

JEREMY ROEBUCK in the Brownsville Herald.

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"Holding tight to her sister’s hand in the bustling streets of New York’s Chinatown last week, Xiu Ping Jiang looked a little dazed, like someone who has stepped from a dark, windowless place into a sunny afternoon.

In a sense, she has. For a year and a half Ms. Jiang, a waitress with no criminal record and a history of attempted suicide, was locked away in an immigration jail in Florida. Often in solitary confinement, she sank ever deeper into mental illness, relatives say, not eating for days, or vomiting after meals for fear of being poisoned.

With no lawyer to plead for asylum on her behalf, she had been ordered to be deported to her native China, from which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at age 20. Too ill to obtain the travel documents needed for the deportation to take place, she was trapped in an immigration limbo: a fate that detainee advocates say is common in a system that has no rules for determining mental competency and no obligation to provide anyone with legal representation.

Then, through a fluke, her case came to the attention of The New York Times, which published an article on May 4 about her ordeal and the efforts of her sisters in New York to help her. An immigration judge in Florida reopened the case."

NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.

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"Even though a federal court tossed out the deportation order in 2002, bureaucrats at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere won't let him return to the States. Gerbier's case was even cited in a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that rejected the Bush administration's push to deport legal immigrants for relatively minor drug convictions.

Yet Gerbier's entreaties to return have been ignored."

SANDRA HERNANDEZ in the Miami New Times.

This report was supported by the Justice and Journalism Fund, established by the University of California Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, with Ford Foundation Funding.

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"A few months ago, Herta Llusho was just another college student. Then the government ordered her deported, and Llusho became an Internet celebrity almost overnight.

An army of supporters - including more than 2,800 Facebook fans, and counting - quickly launched a campaign on her behalf, and the 20-year-old immigrant from Albania recently won a three-month reprieve to remain in the United States. Now, she has become so popular that a stranger in Michigan recently spotted her in a restaurant and said, “Hey, you’re the girl that they’ve been talking about.’’

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"Two weeks ago, a federal court jury in Miami found the Key Biscayne couple guilty of various civil charges and granted Ramos and María Onela Maco Castro, the servant who replaced her, $125,000 total in damages as compensation.

In an unprecedented verdict, the jury also found the couple guilty of violating federal laws against human smuggling when they took away their passports and threatened to have them deported if they disobeyed them."

GERARDO REYES in the Miami Herald.

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