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Immigration News
September 2, 2010
The first of 532 National Guard troops are set to begin their mission in the southern Arizona desert today under President Barack Obama's plan to beef up U.S.-Mexico border security, although they won't have any law enforcement authority. About 30 troops will start their jobs on the border today, and waves of more troops will be deploying every Monday until all 532 are expected to be on the Arizona border by the end of September. In May, Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to boost security along the border. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said the first of 224 National Guard troops allocated for his state have finished their training and are expected to be deployed to the state's border on Wednesday. Troops in New Mexico were in different stages of training and don't yet know when they'll be deployed on the border. A Texas National Guard spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.
The U.S. government will have unmanned surveillance aircraft monitoring the whole southwest border with Mexico from September 1, as it ramps up border security in this election year, a top official said on Monday. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said U.S. Customs and Border Protection would begin flying a Predator B drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday, extending the reach of the agency's unmanned surveillance aircraft across the length of the nearly 2,000 mile border with Mexico. "With the deployment of the Predator in Texas, we will now be able to cover the southwest border from the El Centro sector in California all the way to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, providing critical aerial surveillance assistance to personnel on the ground," Napolitano said during a conference call. "This is yet another critical step we have taken in ensuring the safety of the border and is an important tool in our security toolbox," she added.
Suppose the US Supreme Court largely upholds Arizona's tough immigration law and, as a result, Arizona police pick up an extra 5,000 or 10,000 unlawful immigrants next year. Then what? Beside the moral, humanitarian, and legal issues surrounding illegal immigrants, their apprehension poses a sizable financial cost. In Arizona, police could arrest them under the new state law, but keeping them in already crowded jails costs roughly $100 a day per person. For 5,000 people, imprisonment costs could add up to $182.5 million a year. That's a hefty charge for a state struggling with a budget deficit of at least $368 million. Presumably Arizona could save money by handing illegal immigrants over to the federal government for deportation. In fiscal 2008, the US deported 369,221 people. Deportations rose to 389,834 in 2009 under the Obama administration, and are predicted to reach 400,000 this fiscal year. Whether Washington will pay for more deportations is problematic. The United States deports each year less than 4 percent of its estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. At that rate, it would take more than two decades to deport all of them.
The Justice Department filed another lawsuit against immigration practices by Arizona authorities, saying Monday that a network of community colleges acted illegally in requiring noncitizens to provide their green cards before they could be hired for jobs. The suit against the Phoenix area Maricopa Community Colleges was filed less than two months after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer (R) over the state's new immigration law. It also comes as the department is investigating Joe Arpaio, the sheriff in Maricopa County, who is known for tough immigration enforcement. In Monday's lawsuit, Justice officials said the colleges discriminated against nearly 250 noncitizen job applicants by mandating that they fill out more documents than required by law to prove their eligibility to work. That violated the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, the department said. The law's anti-discrimination provision "makes it unlawful to treat authorized workers differently during the hiring process based on their citizenship status," said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for Justice's Civil Rights Division. He said the government "is acting now to remedy this pattern or practice of discrimination." The law's anti-discrimination provision "makes it unlawful to treat authorized workers differently during the hiring process based on their citizenship status," said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for Justice's Civil Rights Division. He said the government "is acting now to remedy this pattern or practice of discrimination."
The Obama administration is moving to release thousands of illegal immigrants detained at facilities across the country if the immigrants have a potential path to legal residency. The move could affect as many as 17,000 immigrants who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. It comes amid a push by ICE to focus on illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, rather than seek to deport all illegal immigrants. Officials say that the shift is needed to reduce massive clogs in the nation's immigration courts - where detainees wait for months or years before their cases are decided - and to use deportation as a tool for public safety. "ICE is dedicating unprecedented resources to the removal of criminal aliens," said Richard Rocha, deputy press secretary at the immigration enforcement agency. "The focus now is clearly on criminal aliens. . . . We want to ensure convicted criminal aliens are not only removed from the community, but from the country as well." While immigration advocates applauded the move and said it reflected a more humane approach to illegal immigrants in detention, Republican lawmakers and groups that favor stricter limits on immigration denounced it as a form of back-door amnesty.
The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September. The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs. “It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”
September 1, 2010
Additional National Guard troops assigned to the Mexican border under President Barack Obama's border security initiative have started reporting to their posts, officials said Monday.
More than 30 National Guard members have begun their deployment as part of the administration's border protection plan, according to Special Agent Mario Escalante with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Troops will continue to arrive over the next two months, with an expected force of 532 members by the end of October, said Lt. Valentine Castillo of the Arizona National Guard.
Top Republicans -- including Arizona Sen. John McCain and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer -- have repeatedly accused Obama of failing to provide sufficient security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The president signed a bill on August 13 providing $600 million in emergency funding to help secure the border.
Among other things, the bill provides for roughly 1,500 new law enforcement agents, new unmanned aerial vehicles, new forwarding operating bases, and $14 million in new communications equipment.
Predator Unmanned Aerial System flights will begin Wednesday out of Corpus Christi, Texas, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Monday. Those flights will give the department unmanned aerial capabilities from California to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas.
Castillo said the troops participating in the operation will be assisting Customs and Border Protection with criminal intelligence and entry identifications. They will not have law enforcement powers, he said.
August 26, 2010
While President Obama has moved away from the controversial workplace raids that characterized the Bush era of immigration enforcement, the Obama administration has ramped up audits on employers that hire illegal immigrants. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is now relying heavily on civil complaints and fines to threaten companies found to hire significant numbers of illegal immigrants. In a prominent case last year, American Apparel ended up firing some 1,800 immigrant employees -- about a quarter of its workforce -- after an ICE investigation found irregularities in identity documents. The rationale is that such crackdowns will help deter companies from hiring illegal immigrants -- and curb exploitative labor practices that result in low wages and poor working conditions for immigrants. This week, Fox News seized upon a new report that arrests and deportation of illegal immigrations taken into custody at work sites has dropped more than 80 percent from George W. Bush's last year in office. Fox News cites one former Bush official who slammed the approach as "de facto amnesty," accusing the Obama administration of "turning a blind eye to entire categories of aliens" fand failing to arrest and deport the illegal immigrants who turn up on these workplace audits. But even if tougher immigration enforcement is the goal, simply arresting and deporting these immigrant workers en masse doesn't seem to be a sensible policy solution
Latino voters made a difference in yesterday's Arizona and Florida primaries, advocates for comprehensive immigration told reporters today. Arturo Vargas, director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and Republican strategist Ana Navarro pointed to low turnout among Hispanic Republicans in Miami-Dade County as part of the reason Bill McCollum lost the Republican gubernatorial primary. His shift to the right on immigration reform late in the primary season alienated Hispanic supporters, they said, and those voters didn't show up at the polls. "The lesson to be learned from yesterday's primary in Florida is that a Republican candidate can't win without Hispanic Republicans," Navarro said. Lynn Tramonte, deputy director at the immigration reform group America's Voice, explained that there are two storylines surrounding Latino voters and immigration in 2010. The first is of Republicans who are forced to move right on immigration in primary battles, she said, and the second is of Arizona's "papers please" law, which she said is extremely unpopular among Latino voters.
The lawsuit against the Arizona immigration law aside, Obama has devoted nearly all his efforts on immigration to ramped up enforcement, and his administration is on track to deport a record number of illegal immigrants. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects the number of deportations to increase by 10 percent above Bush's 2008 total -- and 25 percent above the 2007 total. But this number would be far higher were it not for the record number of immigrants who remain in legal purgatory, as there's an unprecedented backlog of deportation and asylum cases that have yet to be heard.
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