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"A group of California artists wants Mexicans and Central Americans to have more than just a few cans of tuna and a jug of water for their illegal trek through the harsh desert into the U.S.
Faculty at University of California, San Diego are developing a GPS-enabled cell phone that tells dehydrated migrants where to find water."
ELLIOT SPAGAT for the Associated Press.
"When Peter Aldeza first arrived in Illinois from the Philippines, he filed U.S. Immigration paperwork to allow his older brother and sister to join him. That was 26 years ago.
Just last month, his sister, Sionie Sales, finally arrived to live in the U.S., in what has been a bittersweet reunion of once-close siblings now trying to become reacquainted. She was an exuberant 26-year-old when he left home. She is a grandmother now."
ANTONIO OLIVO in the Chicago Tribune.
"When John Spears gets home from his sales job in New York, he sits down at his computer with a bottle of beer and starts patrolling the US border. And to do it, he does not need to stir from his sofa."
CLAIRE PRENTICE for the BBC News.
"Human trafficking – which encompasses forcing people to sell sex or drugs or subjecting them to abusive labor conditions – is second only to the drug trade as the world’s largest criminal industry. In 2007, human slave traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined. There are currently 27 million men, women and children enslaved globally. And, an estimated 200,000 young people are victims of sex trafficking in the United States, according to the Polaris Project, a national anti-trafficking organization."
MELODY FINNEMORE in the Oregon State Bar Bulletin.
There, Del Rio school district employees handed out fliers citing Texas educational and penal codes. “Upon conducting a check at the Port of Entry your child was observed crossing into the United State from Mexico to attend school. … Your child will be withdrawn from the school immediately,” the notices read in part. “Please come to the Office of Pupil Services … to provide proof of residence in the United States.”
About 200 notices were issued that morning. The orders had come from Del Rio’s new school superintendent, Kelt Cooper, who has made it a priority to root out Mexican residents attending school in his district."
MELISSA DEL BOSQUE in the Texas Observer.
"Under an unusual compact between the pastor and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Newark, four Indonesians have been released from detention in recent weeks, and 41 others living as fugitives from deportation have turned themselves in under church auspices. Instead of being jailed — as hundreds of thousands of immigrants without criminal records have been in recent years — they have been released on orders of supervision, eligible for work permits while their lawyers consider how their cases might be reopened."
NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.
"A study of more than 34,000 news stories that appeared in major media outlets finds that most of what the public learns about Hispanics comes not through focused coverage of the life and times of this population group but through event-driven news stories in which Hispanics are one of many elements."
Project for Excellence in Journalism, Dec. 2009.
"Growing numbers of noncitizens, including legal immigrants, are held unnecessarily and transferred heedlessly in an expensive immigration detention system that denies many of them basic fairness, a bipartisan study group and a human rights organization concluded in reports released jointly on Wednesday.
Confirmation of some of their critical conclusions came separately from the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, in an investigation that found detainee transfers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were so haphazard that some detainees arrived at a new detention center without having been served a notice of why they were being held, or despite a high probability of being granted bond, or with pending criminal prosecutions or arrest warrants in the previous jurisdiction."
NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.