“Instead of the dramatic, large-scale raids that snagged hundreds of illegal immigrants, including at a New Bedford factory three years ago, federal officials say they are focusing more on the businesses that hire them. The aim is to eliminate the job opportunities that attract illegal workers,” the Boston Globe reports. “‘They get off with, at most, a slap on the wrists,’ said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based organization that favors tougher restrictions on immigration. ‘ICE does nothing to apprehend the illegal workers. They go down and get a new set of documents from the street corner and they get a new job. It becomes a game of musical chairs.”’
“Ever wonder where illegal aliens who get arrested for additional crimes work - which employers are hiring illegal labor? Investigative reporter Randy Travis from Fox Five TV has done a terrific job of using public records from 287(g) authorized county jails to derive the names of some of the employers who use black-market replacement labor while Americans suffer staggering unemployment,” says DA King. Click to get the lists for some Georgia counties of employers of illegal aliens.
The Houston Chronicle this week reported that federal courts in Texas were dismissing hundreds of deportation cases. Dismissals of such cases were up 700 percent between July and August of this year, according to The Chronicle, and were the result of unsolicited motions by federal prosecutors, not the defendants. (The Houston Chronicle, Oct. 17, 2010) All signs indicate that the broad-based dismissal of deportation cases is the result of a new policy Homeland Security adopted in August. While Homeland Security didn’t officially announce the policy shift, immigration attorneys in Houston began to report that cases against their illegal alien defendants were being dismissed, allowing them to remain in the United States. The American Immigration Lawyers Association liaison to the U.S. DOJ, Raed Gonzalez, told reporters that Homeland Security had personally briefed him on the new policy, which would seek dismissal of deportation cases against illegal aliens who had been in the U.S. for more than two years and with no felony convictions. (See FAIR’s Legislative Update, Aug. 30, 2010) Read the rest of this article here.
OneAmerica Votes, an organization that aims to increase immigrant voter turnout, is actively recruiting illegal aliens to campaign for Democratic incumbent Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). (Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2010) The organization’s director, Pramila Jayapal, says the campaign is about empowering those who may not feel like they can contribute to a campaign because they can’t vote. “Immigrants really do matter,” Jayapal said. (Id.) One of the illegal aliens knocking on doors, Maria Gianni, is open about her illegal status. “There’s always a risk,” she said. “But if there’s a change, I would feel like I contributed, even in a small part … .” (Id.)
Read the rest of this article here.
At the direction of Governor Paterson, the State of New York is currently reviewing hundreds of pardon applications from criminal aliens who want to avoid deportations based on their criminal acts. Governor Paterson announced in May of this year that he intended to pardon certain criminal aliens in order to prevent the U.S. government from deporting them. To that end, he ordered the creation of a Special Immigration Pardoning Board to review applications.
Read the rest here.
“Lawmakers in 14 states are joining to restore the intended meaning of the 14th Amendment: that being a U.S. citizen requires more than just your mother sneaking past the Border Patrol. The architect of Arizona’s immigration law, SB2070, announced Tuesday a new crusade to correct what he perceives as an unfortunate misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment that allows children of illegal immigrant parents to be considered U.S. citizens if they’re born on U.S. soil,” notes Investors Business Daily in an editorial. “A careful reading of the legislative history of the 14th Amendment tends to back up Pearce and his colleagues. Passed after the Civil War, it was intended to provide a national standard for citizenship so that individual states could not deny citizenship rights to freed black slaves. It was not intended to bestow citizenship on those who enter the country illegally.”
Back in June the Congressional Research Service looked at worksite enforcement data provided by ICE to see how the agency was conducting raids and other enforcement actions at workplaces around the U.S. What the CRS found were declines of 50 percent or more in key areas such as:
The inevitable endpoint of sanctuary cities desire to protect illegal aliens is now in sight - a halt of all fingerprint sharing by localities with state and federal authorities. The Huffington Post has a report from Santa Clara county, California, where supervisors are plotting on how they can prevent ICE from deporting illegal aliens taken into custody. “The county is also looking into ways to put limits on the fingerprints sent to the state’s database, which is monitored by ICE. This has been done in El Paso County, Texas, where the sheriff says he only shares fingerprints from Class B misdemeanors and above.” The end point of these types of policies will mean an end to effective criminal identification once criminals realize they can commit crimes in Santa Clara and other counties without worrying that a check of their records will reveal outstanding warrants or other reasons to hold them. The move to stop fingerprint sharing will not stop with low-level crimes; the inevitable push will be to allow cities to withold any and all fingerprints from being sent to state and federal fingerprint identification centers.
The inevitable endpoint of sanctuary cities desire to protect illegal aliens is now in sight - a halt of all fingerprint sharing by localities with state and federal authorities. The Huffington Post has a report from Santa Clara county, California, where supervisors are plotting on how they can prevent ICE from deporting illegal aliens taken into custody. “The county is also looking into ways to put limits on the fingerprints sent to the state’s database, which is monitored by ICE. This has been done in El Paso County, Texas, where the sheriff says he only shares fingerprints from Class B misdemeanors and above.” The end point of these types of policies will mean an end to effective criminal identification once criminals realize they can commit crimes in Santa Clara and other counties without worrying that a check of their records will reveal outstanding warrants or other reasons to hold them. The move to stop fingerprint sharing will not stop with low-level crimes; the inevitable push will be to allow cities to withold any and all fingerprints from being sent to state and federal fingerprint identification centers.
As the 2010 elections draw near, candidates across the country are debating the nation’s most current and pressing issues—especially immigration. In two neck and neck races in particular, the Nevada senate race and the Maryland gubernatorial race, candidates quarreled over America’s broken immigration system.
