Immigration Raids
New Report Details the Chilling Effects of Immigration Enforcement on Workers’ Rights
ICED OUT: How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered with Workers' Rights, a new publication by the AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work Education Fund, and the National Employment Law Project (NELP), tells the often ignored story of our country's broken immigration system and the collateral damage immigrants and U.S. workers experience when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prioritize enforcement over workers' rights. Read More
Risky Business: Our Broken Employment–Based Immigration System Jeopardizes the American Economy
BY CHARLES H. KUCK* Does Congress's continued failure to fix our broken employment-based immigration system jeopardize our economy, now and in the future? Yes, it does. If we don't have enough employment-based immigrant visas, the best and brightest from around the world will start going somewhere else. We are not only a nation of immigrants; we are a nation of successful immigrants. We attract those who are willing to work hard, better themselves, and strive for success. However, our legal immigration system has made the process of immigration to the United States so difficult, so full of uncertainty, and so lengthy, that folks are now choosing not to come. Read More
Our Immigration System Needs Solutions, Not Villains
This week, American Apparel is slated to lay off 1,800 workers from its clothing factory in Los Angeles. The impending layoffs are the result of a federal investigation which turned up irregularities in the documents workers presented when first hired by the company. The investigation itself represents a new direction in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration enforcement, one which focuses on audits of employment records rather than mass roundups and S.W.A.T.-team raids—raids which inflicted abuse and trauma on immigrants, their families and our communities. Read More
Anti-Immigrant Minutemen Join White-Supremacist Militias on the Radical Right
Anti-immigrant groups like the “Minutemen” vigilantes are not only proliferating, but are rapidly beginning to resemble the white-supremacist and anti-government militias that have populated the netherworld of the Radical Right since the early 1990s. Adding insult to injury, the farcical conspiracy theories that circulate among both extreme nativist groups and right-wing militias are now being mainstreamed by commentators on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. Although the various strains of far-right extremism have by no means coalesced into a single movement, the ideological lines that once distinguished them have begun to blur. Read More
Quadrennial Homeland Security Review: Is DHS Asking the Right Questions?
If you go to the National Dialogue on the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) website and click through to the Smart and Tough Enforcement of Immigration Laws section, you will find a bit of surprise. Despite a title that panders to the enforcement first crowd, implying that immigration policy is all about being “tough,” there is actually a remarkably thoughtful effort to capture a broader set of immigration policy goals. Take a look at the mission statement: A secure, unified, fair, adaptive, and responsive immigration system that protects the public, enriches our society, and improves our economy. Read More
What’s Law Got To Do With It? Sheriff Arpaio Defies New DHS Enforcement Guidelines
The Department of Homeland Security recently standardized its 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements with local law enforcement, which allows specially trained local enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws. Among the new DHS rules, local law enforcement must now prioritize immigrants with serious criminal records, rather than spend scant time and resources going after undocumented immigrants who are charged with no other crime. These new enforcement provisions, however, leave long-time immigration enforcement abuser, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, with some important decisions to make. Read More
Republicans on the Road to Demographic Self-Destruction
A slew of data from the 2008 election, released late last month by the U.S. Census Bureau, underscores—yet again—that Latinos constitute the fastest growing share of the electorate in the United States. Yet many Republican politicians seem to be going out of their way to alienate Latino voters. In an effort to appeal to the “base” of ultra-conservative whites needed to win Republican primaries, many in the GOP are trampling upon the Latinos they very well might need to win general elections. As the political theater surrounding the Sotomayor nomination illustrates well, a growing number of Republicans are trying their hardest to swim against the demographic tide. It is unlikely that they’ll be able to keep their heads above water for very long. Read More
Kicking Down Doors, Stomping on Rights: New Report Reveals Disturbing Details of ICE Raids
Last week the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York published a disturbing study that documents ICE’s home raid operations. Constitution on ICE: A Report on Immigration Home Raid Operations found that over the last several years, ICE has increasingly conducted home raids, meaning that they gone to private homes to arrest people rather than doing it in public settings. The report finds a pattern of constitutional violations occurring during home raids including agents kicking in doors and forcing their way into private residences during pre-dawn hours without warrants or other legal authority. ICE agents also seize non-target residents, or “collaterals” from their homes, even if there is no legal authority to take that individual into custody. According to the report, these arrests are based on racial or ethnic profiling. Finally, the authors also found that ICE was illegally searching homes. The stories speak for themselves... Read More
A Mandatory Employment Verification System without Reform is a Recipe for Disaster
Unabashed promoters of E-verify have had a busy week, moving from hearings in the Senate and House to Rep. Heath Shuler's (D-NC) pep rally for the 2009 version of his fatally flawed SAVE Act—a bill that continues to promote the deportation-only version of immigration reform. Step back from all this activity, however, and two things are clear: 1) serious problems continue to plague a wide-scale implementation of an electronic employment verification system (EEVS); and 2) those problems won't be tackled except in the context of comprehensive immigration reform. Read More
All gifts are matched dollar for dollar
No one should face the immigration system alone
