Aggregated Immigration Stories

"The American Bar Association created ProBAR more than two decades ago to assist asylum-seekers detained in South Texas through the confusing patchwork of immigration court proceedings, said Meredith Linsky, director of the ABA’s South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project.  Touring La Posada this week, ABA members and local immigration lawyers heard the stories of refugees from all over the world who fled their homes to seek asylum in the United States. In telling his story, one Brazilian man looked toward Linsky, repeating, “They aren’t lawyers, they’re angels.”  Unlike in criminal cases where defendants are appointed public defenders if they can’t afford a lawyer, those who go before immigration courts must pay for their own, hope to find pro-bono help or go the proceedings alone, often with limited English and little-to-no understanding of how the system works, Linsky said.  The same goes for unaccompanied children, explained Karen Grisez, chair of the ABA’s Commission on Immigration."

MICHAEL BARAJAS in the [Harlingen, Texas] Valley Morning Star, Nov. 28, 2010.

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The Fresno Bee is running an 8-day package on immigration:

"The Fresno Bee spent months interviewing more than a hundred farmers, public officials, experts and illegal immigrants. The goal: to explain how inconsistent laws, policies and attitudes have made illegal immigrants a central — yet hidden — part of the San Joaquin Valley’s economy."

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"The case has drawn widespread attention nationally and internationally. It's a clash of two seemingly unrelated interests — those concerned about the aftermath of immigration raids that often lead to split families, and those who are fighting for the rights of adoptive parents. And both sides argue they only have the best interests of the child in mind."

TONY MESSENGER and NANCY CAMBRIA in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Nov. 10, 2010.

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"The message on Secure Communities and whether or not counties could be removed from the program has changed multiple times in the last six months, as local officials in Arlington, San Francisco and Santa Clara sought to determine how they could opt out of sending fingerprints to immigration enforcement. Now, even after ICE held meetings with the three counties confirming that opting out is impossible, a coalition of civil rights groups is fighting to get more information on the program and how communities can avoid joining it."

ELISE FOLEY in the Washington Independent on Nov. 10, 2010.

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"Republican state lawmakers, buoyed by their party’s resounding victories on Election Day, are signaling just how far they're willing to go in cracking down on illegal immigration in the upcoming legislative session. A slew of bills filed Monday includes measures that would sanction businesses that hire undocumented workers, require state agencies to report on the costs of providing services to illegal immigrants and allow police to check an individual's immigration status on “reasonable suspicion.” ... If lawmakers do pass some of the strongest anti-immigration measures, they will wind up on the desk of Gov. Rick Perry, who must sign or veto the bills. Perry supports an end to any sanctuary city policies and criminal penalties for businesses that "knowingly hire" illegal immigrants but has said the Arizona immigration law is not right for Texas. "DPS and local law enforcement should not be responsible for the federal government's failure to secure our border," says Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger."

ELISE HU in the Texas Tribune on Nov. 9, 2010.

Posted by Dan Kowalski at 06:15 AM | Permalink

[Alan Bersin is the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection ("CBP,") a component of the Deparment of Homeland Security.]

Dear Commissioner Bersin:

In my 25+ years of practice as an immigration lawyer I've seen hundreds of tragedies and horror stories.  I won't bore you with those.  This is not a "heartstrings" letter.  This is a letter about training, common sense...and poker.

A few days ago a group of your line officers at the U.S.-Canadian border barred a champion professional Canadian poker player from entry, even though he'd been to the U.S. many times before and has a "clean slate."  The reason?  Section 214(b) of the Immigration & Nationality Act.  Or, put another way, your officers' misunderstanding and misapplication of 214(b).

Section 214(b) says: "Every alien ... shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the ... immigration officers, at the time of application for admission, that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status."  In plain English, before you can enter the country as a tourist, or student, or poker player, you have to prove you aren't coming to the U.S. to stay.

The Canadian pro in question, Terrence Chan (a.k.a. "Unassigned,") made two trips to the border, even showing your officers documents such as property deeds and utility bills to prove he lives abroad and has no intention of taking up residence in the U.S.

Not good enough.  Chan is barred.  And who's the loser?  Not Chan.  As he explains on his blog:

"Could I try one more time, get all six months of documentation they want, hell, hire an immigration lawyer?  Yeah, I could do those things. I could continue to jump through their hoops. But I have no assurances the hoops will not just be higher and farther back every time, and I have no desire to spend five hours at the border just to find out.  I am a law-abiding, honest, wealthy and mobile Canadian who wanted to come for two months, rent a property, buy groceries, pay fees to a school, spend money on entertainment, and leave. For this, I get treated like a criminal. Well, no more. I'm done with the United States."  [Emphasis mine.]

This is an embarrassment.  Your border guards make us Americans look like fools, or worse.  Now, I don't expect all your CBP agents to have your education - Harvard, Oxford, Yale Law - but a little training, please, to separate the wheat from the chaff, the terrorists from the tourists, and the champs from the chumps.  Just a little more training for your border guards.  That's all I ask.

Sincerely,

Dan Kowalski

Posted by Ian Chestnut at 08:45 AM | Permalink

"One of the best Limit Hold’em players on the planet might never again step foot in the United States. Canadian poker pro Terrence “Unassigned” Chan, winner of two PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) Limit Hold’em events on the same day in 2009, was turned away from entering the States by U.S. Customs and Immigration officials late last week – twice."

BRETT COLLSON in Poker News Daily, Nov. 4, 2010.

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How soon we forget.  Or maybe we just weren't paying attention from the beginning.  For many it seems the current obsession with "anchor babies" and birthright citizenship came out of nowhere.  But this report by researcher Scott Keyes reminds us that "Republicans have been pushing this idea for nearly two decades, introducing 28 separate bills to eliminate birthright citizenship since 1995."

Most recently, what started out as isolated rumblings has morphed into a unified movement spanning several states.  A key player in the movement is none other than law professor Kris Kobach, a candidate for the office of Kansas Secretary of State.  Kobach is an architect of Arizona's SB 1070 and has litigated other anti-immigrant cases around the country.

The issue is simple: the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."  That amendment was added to the Constitution in 1866 not to add something new, but to restore something old that had been torn from our legal fabric by the "Dred Scott" Supreme Court decision of 1857.

Noted constitutional scholar (and conservative Republican) James C. Ho explains it very simply: "The Citizenship Clause was no legal innovation. It simply restored the longstanding English common law doctrine of jus soli, or citizenship by place of birth. Although the doctrine was initially embraced in early American jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court abrogated jus soli in its infamous Dred Scott decision, denying birthright citizenship to the descendents of slaves.

Congress approved the Citizenship Clause to overrule Dred Scott and elevate jus soli to the status of constitutional law."  (Ho's 2006 article, "Defining American: Birthright Citizenship and the Original Understanding of the 14th Amendment," is a key piece of the puzzle, easily accessible by non-lawyers.)

Critics of birthright citizenship make the claim - ridiculous on its face, if one thinks about it for more than two seconds - that unauthorized immigrants are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the federal government, and, therefore, their U.S.-born children are lumped in with the U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers.

This nonsensical assertion flies in the face of common sense and everyday practice: if unauthorized immigrants are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the federal government, then by what authority does the federal government arrest and deport them?

Margaret Stock and others convincingly demonstrate that abolition of birthright citizenship would require the creation of a huge new federal "birth police" bureaucracy to adjudicate the lineage of every newborn, and would create an underclass of stateless children.

Is that what advocates of "limited government" really want?

Now that Republicans have made solid gains in the House, we can expect more hearings on birthright citizenship. Let's hope the committee members first read these background materials prepared by the Immigration Policy Center.  Maybe they'll take their "limited government" mantra to heart, cancel the hearings, and leave the 14th Amendment alone.

Posted by Ian Chestnut at 04:07 AM | Permalink

Seven recent articles by Tom Barry at the TransBorder Project, a project of the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC:

1.  Time to Rein In Border Security Bandwagon (Sept. 27, 2010)

2.  Outsourcing Texas Border Security (Oct. 24, 2010)

3.  New Consulting Firm at "Epicenter" of Border Security in Texas (Oct. 25, 2010)

4.  Consultants as the Commanders of Texas Border Security (Oct. 26, 2010)

5.  New Strategy for Border Control (Oct. 27, 2010)

6.  Intelligence and Muscle in Texas Border Security (Oct. 28, 2010)

7.  Evolution of Border Security in Texas (Oct. 29, 2010)

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Franc Contreras reports from the Mexican city of Tonatico, where many are following the ongoing US political debates to see what type of an impact the election would have on their hopes to migrate across the border for a better life.

FRANC CONTRERAS for Al Jazeera English, Oct. 25, 2010.

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