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"A white Ford pickup with Arizona plates is driving north on U.S. 191 headed for the Utah border. Afraid of encountering police, the family inside is traveling at night. The pickup's headlights cut through a sea of darkness.
The family is in a hurry to get out of Arizona, to get away from the state's harsh new immigration law."
DANIEL GONZáLEZ in the Arizona Republic."A white Ford pickup with Arizona plates is driving north on U.S. 191 headed for the Utah border. Afraid of encountering police, the family inside is traveling at night. The pickup's headlights cut through a sea of darkness.
The family is in a hurry to get out of Arizona, to get away from the state's harsh new immigration law."
DANIEL GONZáLEZ in the Arizona Republic.
"Early one morning in March, two Chicago-area brothers were dozing on an Amtrak train when it stopped in Buffalo, N.Y. A pair of uniformed Border Patrol agents made their way through the car, asking passengers if they were U.S. citizens. No, the vacationing siblings answered honestly, with flat, Midwestern inflections: We're citizens of Mexico.
And so it was that college students Carlos Robles, 20, and his brother Rafael, 19 — both former captains of their high school varsity tennis team — found themselves in jail, facing deportation.
Their secret was out: Despite their upbringing in middle America, their academic success and their network of native-born friends, they had no permission to be in the United States. Their parents had brought them here illegally as children."
KEN DILANIAN and ANNA GORMAN in the L.A. Times.
"As the effective date of Arizona's new immigration law nears, new concerns are being raised by municipal officials about how to effectively enforce it without creating a legal and financial quagmire."
GARY NELSON and MICHAEL FERRARESI in the Arizona Republic.
"Immigration officials are reviewing whether a 19-year-old man deported last week from South Texas is actually a U.S. citizen born in Houston."
SUSAN CARROLL in the Houston Chronicle.
Wong, 32, in federal custody, has been moved as far as 2,000 miles from his family and the lawyer working to keep him from being deported to Nicaragua. He's among thousands of immigration detainees who have been moved around the country, federal officials say, for reasons like bed availability or medical care.
Critics complain the moves are unfair because they interfere with detainees' defense against deportation and separate them from their families. Immigration officials say they plan to implement a new transfer policy with those issues in mind."
DEEPTI HAJELA for the Associated Press.
"If Oklahoma were to pass legislation restricting citizenship, it likely would be challenged in the federal courts."
GINNIE GRAHAM in the Tulsa World.
"The Cocche case is particularly galling to immigrant rights advocates because she is a criminal-justice student at Miami Dade College, and is in the country not by choice but because her parents brought her here when she was a child."
ALFONSO CHARDY in the Miami Herald.
Twelve more counties in South Texas joined the program last week, bringing the total to 66 in less than two years since the program’s inception here. Run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the program allows local law enforcement to compare the fingerprints of anyone arrested against those in a Department of Homeland Security database to determine if the individual is removable under immigration laws."
JULIAN AGUILAR in the Texas Tribune.
"A debate over how local law enforcement should deal with illegal immigration has heated up in the wake of a new Arizona law that allows police to check the status of people they stop if they suspect them of being illegal immigrants. In Lake County and other areas where immigrant communities have swelled, it is a question that street cops face every day."
ANTONIO OLIVO in the Chicago Tribune.
"The letter appealing to was written in frustration in January, by a woman who saw her family reflected in his. She was a white United States citizen married to an African man, and the couple — college-educated professionals in Manhattan — were stymied in their long legal battle to keep him in the country.
Could the president help, asked the woman, Caroline Jamieson, a marketing executive. She described the impasse that confronted her husband, Hervé Fonkou Takoulo, a citizen of Cameroon with an outstanding deportation order from a failed bid for asylum.
The response came on June 3, when two agents stopped Mr. Takoulo, 34, in front of the couple’s East Village apartment building. He says one agent asked him, “Did you write a letter to President Obama?”
When he acknowledged that his wife had, he was handcuffed and sent to an immigration jail in New Jersey for deportation."
NINA BERNSTEIN in the New York Times.
He was patted down. His bag was searched. And then the security officer went through his prized possessions: his first Elmo book, his second Elmo book, his mini-mail truck.
Azaad, whose name means "freedom," is an American and a Sikh.
He's 18 months old."
LARRY MARGASAK for the Associated Press.
"Corrections Corporation of America, the largest contractor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has reached a preliminary agreement to soften confinement, free of charge, at nine immigrant facilities covering more than 7,100 beds — a deal that ICE officials see as a precursor to changes elsewhere."
MICHELLE ROBERTS and SUZANNE GAMBOA for the Associated Press.
"A federal judge has issued a lengthy opinion that shot down a government effort to have U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement dropped from a lawsuit filed by the family of a Chinese national who died while in the custody of the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls.
In a 16-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge William E. Smith said that the American Civil Liberties Union had presented enough evidence to keep ICE as a defendant in the case."
W. ZACHARY MALINOWSKY in the Providence Journal.
Too quick, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court said Monday in a ruling that could affect thousands of legal immigrants who face deportation over minor criminal records."
MARK SHERMAN for the Associated Press.
"Federal immigration agents visited Louisiana oil spill command centers and checked workers’ immigration status at the request of the St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s department, which said yesterday that it is “concerned about criminal elements” coming into the area. The sheriff’s office harked back to Katrina, arguing that criminals posing as immigrant workers came rushing into the area then, too, and vowed to continue probing oil spill workers."
BRENTIN MOCK in Colorlines.
Sophomore on full scholarship. Biology major. Been here since he was 4 years old. HS valedictorian. Feel safer now?
MARIA SACCHETTI in the Boston Globe.
VIANNA DAVILA and LYNN BREZOSKY in the San Antonio Express-News.
RUSSELL CONTRERAS for the Associated Press.
"The Mexican government Wednesday vigorously protested the shooting this week of a 15-year-old boy at Mexico's border with Texas. The boy, Sergio Hernandez Guereca, died of a wound to the face. U.S. officials say he died after a Border Patrol agent opened fire Monday night on a group of Mexicans throwing rocks at the agent, who was attempting to arrest suspected illegal immigrants. Mexican authorities accused agents of using excessive force, while U.S. officials promised a thorough investigation of the incident."
TRACY WILKINSON, RICHARD A. SERRANO and KEN DILANIAN in the L.A. Times.
"The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Tuesday it was probing a shooting by a U.S. border agent that witnesses said killed a 15-year-old Mexican high school student on the Mexican side of the border."
NICHOLAS CASEY in the Wall Street Journal.
- and - "The fatal shooting of a 15-year-old Juárez boy by a U.S. Border Patrol agent on the banks of the Rio Grande on Monday has sparked a diplomatic rift between the U.S. and Mexico. The teenager, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Güereca, was shot in the head, Mexican officials said." DANIEL BORUNDA and MAGGIE YBARRA in the El Paso Times.
"Reports by the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security Administration confirm that undocumented immigrants in fact pay many different types of taxes, including sales tax, property tax, Social Security tax and income tax."
YANA KUNICHOFF for Truthout.
"In late July 1997, police officers fanned out across this Phoenix suburb searching for illegal immigrants. Working side by side with Border Patrol agents, police demanded proof of citizenship from children walking home from school, grandmothers shopping at the market and employees driving to work.
At the end of what became known as the Chandler Roundup, 432 illegal immigrants had been arrested and deported. But during those five days, local police and federal officers also detained dozens of U.S. citizens and legal residents — often stopping them because they spoke Spanish or looked Mexican."
ANNA GORMAN in the Los Angeles Times.
"At a time when state and federal governments are focused on tightening the border to keep out immigrants who cross illegally from Mexico, Wallin and her colleagues help people who make the trip. They leave water and food along well-known foot trails. They distribute maps showing the water sites and search for trekking migrants. Sometimes, they find dead bodies."
PETER SLEVIN in the Washington Post.
"Federal immigration officials have been visiting command centers on the Gulf Coast to check the immigration status of response workers hired by BP and its contractors to clean up the immense oil spill."
ANNIE CORREAL for Feet in Two Worlds and El Diario / La Prensa.
"Despite fears that Texas would open its doors to thousands of Mexicans escaping violence at home and seeking a safe haven here, government data shows the number of asylum-seekers from Mexico has actually decreased."
JULIAN AGUILAR in the Texas Tribune.
It's the U.S.-Mexico border, and even as politicians say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn't so dangerous after all.
The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report. And an in-house Customs and Border Protection report shows that Border Patrol agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities."
MARTHA MENDOZA for the Associated Press.