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"Miriam Mendiola-Martinez, an undocumented immigrant charged with using someone else’s identity to work, gave birth to a boy on Dec. 21 at Maricopa Medical Center. After her C-section, she was shackled for two days to her hospital bed. She was not allowed to nurse her baby. And when guards walked her out of the hospital in shackles, she had no idea what officials had done with her child."
VALERIA FERNÁNDEZ for New America Media.
"Though Los Angeles County law enforcement agencies and community organizations have made advances in responding to domestic violence in immigrant communities, attorneys and advocates say many victims still face obstacles in reporting abuse and seeking help.
Language barriers, financial dependence and lack of information keep victims from coming forward. And those here illegally worry about being sent back to their native countries.
Many victims do not know that they may be eligible for special visas for victims of crime and domestic violence."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
"The woman lowered her head and looked away, her shoulder-length dark hair covering her round face. More than a year had passed since her uncle, a former Mexican state police commander, was kidnapped along with eight soldiers and beheaded by hit men working for a drug cartel. But she still could not bear to look at the gruesome newspaper photos of the killings her lawyer had just spread on a table."
DANIEL GONZÁLEZ in the Arizona Republic.
"The rust-colored, steel-and-cement wall has become a surreal fixture on Brownsville’s skyline. It cleaves downtown Hope Park, built as a symbol of unity between the United States and Mexico. It stops and starts, without rhyme or reason, along the Rio Grande River’s levees, leaving miles of gaps. It highlights the city’s economic divide: It’s the first thing folks in the poorer barrios see when they look out their windows, while richer folks enjoy unaltered views of palm trees and manicured fairways when they tee off on private golf courses. It zigs and zags through residents’ backyards, through citrus orchards—an ugly red scar on a green, subtropical landscape."
MELISSA DEL BOSQUE in the Texas Observer.
"Six years after using the Patriot Act to revoke the visa of a prominent Muslim academic, the United States State Department reversed itself and said Wednesday that it would no longer bar the scholar from entering the United States. ... The State Department’s order also applies to Adam Habib, deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa."
SARAH LYALL in the New York Times.
"For years, those who died in immigration detention went unnamed and uncounted. But behind the scenes, the deaths generated thousands of pages of government documents, including critical investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that showed officials working to stymie outside inquiry. Here are a few of the records obtained over recent months by The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act. They relate mostly to two of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003."
NEW YORK TIMES, Jan. 2010.
"Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry."
NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.
"It's taken Maria, a Mexican immigrant, a decade to build a life in the United States. Now a single arrest after a fight with her boyfriend could force her to abandon him and their children.
“All these years I’ve just been taking care of my kids, working and going home,” Maria said, sobbing in between sips of coffee at a North Austin café.
Austin-based immigration attorney Daniel Kowalski said ICE is using little to no discretion in determining which immigrants should be processed for deportation. “They’re not targeting people who are really dangerous. They’re just catching everyone who is removable for the largest offense or smallest offense,” he said. Not only does that create fear of police, Kowalski said, it has also generated a massive backlog in immigration courts."
BRANDI GRISSOM in the Texas Tribune.
He had all the cards, and played them cruelly, as she recalls. He would not let her go to school or work, dragged his feet on supporting her citizenship request, and called her fat and ugly after she became pregnant.
She endured it all — until she caught him romancing a 13-year-old girl from their church choir. When she complained, he beat her bloody, tried to rape her, and fled, with the girl, to Arizona, she said in an affidavit that is now part of federal immigration records.
Today, he is in prison, and she is caring for her children in San Francisco, with a driver’s license and a legal job baby-sitting. Her legal status came about through what is known as a U visa — a humanitarian “island of niceness,” as one advocate called it, in a sea of restrictive United States immigration laws."
KATHERINE ELLISON in the New York Times.
"Can people change?
This question is at the heart of a fight between Homeland Security and Jean Montrevil. The answer has major implications for the reforms that lawmakers propose when they take up immigration reform after health care.
The feds charge that Montrevil is a hardened criminal alien. Montrevil claims he’s paid for past mistakes. He has a colorful rap sheet for crimes he committed 20 years ago. He’s now a community leader and the father of four American-born children, ages 2, 6, 11 and 19."
AARTI SHAHANI and MIZUE AIZEKI for New America Media.
"In a letter to Mr. Alrais in November, Donald P. Ferguson, the Chicago field office director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Mr. Alrais had not met the residency requirement because he had not been in the United States for a full year after he arrived. Because of his work with the military in Iraq, he was away from Feb. 19 until Sept. 11, 2009.
Mr. Ferguson wrote that being on an American territory on a military base in Iraq did not count toward residency. “The service is unable to consider your time working in Iraq to fulfill the physical presence requirement for adjustment of status purposes,” he wrote."
KATIE FRETLAND for the Chicago News Cooperative.
"Even during the ongoing recession, immigration reform legislation that legalizes undocumented immigrants would boost the American economy, according to a new study out of UCLA."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
"The Mexican government says it is concerned by the fatal shooting of a Mexican migrant by a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Mexico's Foreign Relations Department says it will closely watch investigations into the case, and has expressed the government's "deep concern" over the shooting.
The department identified the shooting victim as Jorge Alfredo Solis Palma.
Solis Palma was shot and killed Monday after he reportedly attacked a U.S. Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona with rocks.
The incident is being investigated by the Cochise County, Arizona Sheriff's Office, the FBI and the Border Patrol.
The area is frequently used by undocumented migrants. The Foreign Relations Department's statement did not say what Solis Palma was doing there."
Associated Press, Jan. 6, 2010.
"Life in the United States has been an endurance contest for Jaime Chavez. The Mexican immigrant spent two years, eight months and three days in jail after a false arrest in 2000 in what was one of the biggest scandals to ever hit the Dallas Police Department. But last month, after two more years spent trying to clear his name again, the 30-year-old received an authentic Social Security number to go with his new green card." DIANNE SOLIS in the Dallas Morning News.
"After years of fearing she could be deported at any moment, immigration officials have granted a Houston middle school teacher a one-year reprieve.
Marie Baptiste, 30, said she was told just before Christmas by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that she had been granted “deferred action” for one year, meaning they will not try and deport her during that time.
“I thank God,” said Baptiste, whose relatives brought her to the U.S. from Haiti when she was 9 years old. “We're a little bit less tense.”
Baptiste, now a middle school science teacher in Houston, said she didn't realize she was in the country illegally until she was about to graduate from high school. She went on to earn a degree from the University of Houston and then a teaching certificate."
SUSAN CARROLL in the Houston Chronicle.