Via CNSNews.com

A draft copy of the GOP platform, which was obtained by CNSNews.com on Wednesday, says “We oppose amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party, has been a leading proponent in Congress for giving illegal aliens a “pathway to citizenship.”

The GOP platform is being written in Minneapolis this week in preparation for the Republican National Convention, scheduled for early September.

“It [the rule of law] does not mean driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, nor does it mean that states should be allowed to flout the federal law barring them from giving in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens. We oppose amnesty,” the draft says.

“Amnesty has to be an important part of [any immigration solution] because there are people who have lived in this country for 20, 30 or 40 years, who have raised children here and pay taxes here and are not citizens. That has to be a component of it,” McCain reportedly told the Tucson Citizen on May 29, 2003.

In June, McCain told the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials that comprehensive immigration reform is his “top priority — yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

In 2006, McCain worked with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to ensure passage in the Senate of a “comprehensive” immigration reform bill that would have given illegal aliens a path to citizenship while allowing 200,000 new “guest workers’ to enter the country each year.

Sources in Minneapolis told CNSNews.com that the GOP platform should be completed by Wednesday but it will not be officially released until Monday.

In other news, the Boston Globe reported that the Republican platform will not include a call to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That’s another area where Republicans differ with McCain, who opposes drilling in ANWR.

According to the Globe, some platform committee members said they’ll try to bring McCain around to their way of thinking after he’s elected president.

The platform does endorse expanded domestic oil drilling in general.

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While members of the Democratic Party are gathered in the Pepsi Center to support Senator Barack Obama as the party’s nominee in the presidential campaign, Mexicans working just seven miles away, on Federal Boulevard, are living a very different reality.

Luis Carlos Ruiz, owner of the auto shop Transmissions Ruiz, says that even though he is leaning toward Obama because of his position on immigration, Denver’s immigrant community has been greatly affected by local ordinances that attack the undocumented.

“Now, if you’re driving without a license, they’ll take your car and you have no way of getting it back without papers,” says Ruiz.

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DENVER, Co—Before the opening gavel hit the sounding block at the convention’s opening ceremony, Democratic leaders and supporters here did not waste time and took the immigration issues to stage yesterday afternoon.

The Democrats described the current immigration system as dysfunctional, affecting the economy and moral fiber of American society, and reiterated that the Democratic Party strongly recommends a comprehensive immigration reform law to fix the problem.

“Everything with our current immigration enforcement is a failure, starting with ICE,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said in an almost three-hour immigration panel discussion at downton Hilton Inn. “Roughly 30,000 ICE workers lack qualifications.”

Lofgren lashed out at the government for appointing ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers, who had no previous experience relating to immigration. “At 46, after working for the Department of Commerce and at the Office of Independent Counsel under Kenneth Starr, the government asked her to do this job. We need to have qualified individuals to handle immigration issues.”

With a rising number of skilled immigrants, U.S. military service personnel being denied legal status, as well as immigrant families who have been entangled in complicated legal bouts and continue to be separated, Lofgren added that the administrative and legal aspects of immigration are clearly discombobulated.

“What kind of system is this when we want a sailor who served for our country to just remain in Iraq because he has a conditional immigration status and is facing a 3- or 10-year ban?” she said. “Detainees have been denied proper healthcare and we declined due process.”

She illustrated the massive ICE arrest of Latino workers in Postville, Iowa, where they were not only denied legal representation, but also charged with robbery. Lofgren alleged that even the judge there scripted the workers’ pleas. She also claimed that about 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country are highly skilled and could certainly bolster the U.S. economy.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, admitted that immigration is the biggest challenge for Democrats.

“Republicans always say that we have good laws with bad people violating these good laws. And because the government cannot deport millions of people, what they do is to make people’s lives miserable so they will leave on their own,” Sharry said. “The New York Times calls it a ‘strategic misery.’ We call it non-violent cleansing. This is what they (Republicans) do to try to take control of the system.”

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By HOLBROOK MOHR – AP

LAUREL, Miss. (AP) — A day after the largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S. history, Elizabeth Alegria was too scared to send her son to school and worried about when she’d see her husband again.

Nearly 600 immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally were detained, creating panic among dozens of families in this small southern Mississippi town.

Alegria, 26, a Mexican immigrant, was working at the Howard Industries transformer plant Monday when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stormed in. When they found out she has two sons, ages 4 and 9, she was fitted with a bracelet and told to appear in federal court next month. But her husband, Andres, wasn’t so lucky.

“I’m very traumatized because I don’t know if they are going to let my husband go and when I will see him,” Alegria said through a translator Tuesday as she returned to the Howard Industries parking lot to retrieve her sport utility vehicle.

The superintendent of the county school district said about half of approximately 160 Hispanic students were absent Tuesday.

Roberto Velez, pastor at Iglesia Cristiana Peniel, where an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the 200 parishioners were caught up in the raid, said parents were afraid immigration officials would take them.

“They didn’t send their kids to school today,” he said. “How scared is that?”

One worker caught in Monday’s sweep at the plant said fellow workers applauded as immigrants were taken into custody. Federal officials said a tip from a union member prompted them to start investigating several years ago.

Fabiola Pena, 21, cradled her 2-year-old daughter as she described a chaotic scene at the plant as the raid began, followed by clapping.

“I was crying the whole time. I didn’t know what to do,” Pena said. “We didn’t know what was happening because everyone started running. Some people thought it was a bomb but then we figured out it was immigration.”

About 100 of the 595 detained workers were released for humanitarian reasons, many of them mothers who were fitted with electronic monitoring bracelets and allowed to go home to their children, officials said.

About 475 other workers were transferred to an ICE facility in Jena, La. Nine who were under 18 were transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

John Foxworth, an attorney representing some of the immigrants, said eight appeared in federal court in Hattiesburg on Tuesday because they face criminal charges for allegedly using false Social Security and residency identification.

He said the raid was traumatic for families.

“There was no communication, an immediate loss of any kind of news and a lack of understanding of what’s happening to their loved ones,” he said. “A complete and utter feeling of helplessness.”

Those detained were from Brazil, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, and Peru, said Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokeswoman.

“We have kids without dads and pregnant mothers who got their husbands taken away,” said Velez’s son, Robert, youth pastor at the church. “It was like a horror story. They got handled like they were criminals.”

Howard Industries is in Mississippi’s Pine Belt region, known for commercial timber growth and chicken processing plants. The tech company produces dozens of products ranging from electrical transformers to medical supplies, according to its Web site.

Gonzalez said agents had executed search warrants at both the plant and the company headquarters in nearby Ellisville. She said no company executives had been detained, but this was an “ongoing investigation and yesterday’s action was just the first part.”

A woman at the Ellisville headquarters told The Associated Press on Tuesday that no one was available to answer questions.

In a statement to the Laurel Leader-Call newspaper, Howard Industries said the company “runs every check allowed to ascertain the immigration status of all applicants for its jobs.”

Gov. Haley Barbour recently signed a law requiring Mississippi employers to use a U.S. Homeland Security system to check new workers’ immigration status.

The law took effect July 1 for businesses with state contracts and takes effect Jan. 1 for other businesses. Mississippi lawmakers once used laptops made by Howard Industries, but it’s not clear whether the company has current state contracts.

Under the law, a company found guilty of employing illegal immigrants could lose public contracts for three years and the right to do business in Mississippi for a year.

The law also makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to accept a job in Mississippi. A message was left with the district attorney’s office after hours seeking comment on whether he would use the law to bring state charges against Howard Industries or the workers.

The Mississippi raid is one of several nationwide in recent years.

On May 12, federal immigration officials swept into Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, in Iowa. Nearly 400 workers were detained and dozens of fraudulent permanent resident alien cards were seized from the plant’s human resources department, according to court records. In December 2006, 1,297 were arrested at Swift meatpacking plants in Nebraska and five other states.

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Marxavi Angel Martinez was a child of small-town North Carolina. She grew up here, in the rolling Piedmont region, and was a high school honor student and cheerleader before settling into a job at the Graham Public Library. At 23, she lived in a tidy white trailer at the Cedar Creek Mobile Home Park with her husband and 16-month-old son.

Her carefully tended life came crashing down in July when she was accused of using a phony Social Security number and lying on her job application.

Recent arrests of immigrants, Sharpe said, had “gotten out of control.”

The sheriff responded: “If you want to come here illegally and live in this country, do not violate any laws.”

An increased push in recent months to enforce the nation’s immigration laws has snared those, like Martinez, who were raised in the United States — as well as day laborers, repeat immigration offenders and other criminals.

Local law enforcement agencies also have been working with federal immigration agents under a program, known as 287(g), meant to focus on serious crimes, such as drug trafficking, gang activity and terrorism. The deputy who arrested Martinez at the library was assigned to such a task force.

A week after Martinez was jailed, the same deputy arrested her husband on the same charges at his job at a local Biscuitville restaurant. According to friends, Martinez’s parents then turned themselves in to federal authorities. All are being processed for deportation.

Martinez’s arrest followed a June 14 incident in which an Alamance County deputy arrested an undocumented Latino driver on Interstate 85. Local media reports said the deputy had left the woman’s children — ages 14, 10 and 6 — out on the highway at night to fend for themselves for eight hours.

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By GREG BISHOP
Published: August 19, 2008

BEIJING — The American flag landed on the scorer’s table, launched by a family member with exceptional aim. Henry Cejudo grabbed it from his coach and draped it around his body. He stood there for the longest time, fighting back tears, the son of illegal immigrants wrapped in stars and stripes.

After Cejudo had defeated Tomohiro Matsunaga of Japan to win the 121-pound freestyle wrestling final on Tuesday and after his family members had celebrated so loudly for so long that security threatened to kick them out, officials hung a gold medal around his neck. He promised never to remove it.

“I might just sleep with this,” Cejudo said. “It changed my life already.”

Fitting, because his is a story about change — for himself, for his family and maybe now for the USA Wrestling program, which trained the 21-year-old Cejudo to become the youngest gold medalist in United States wrestling history.

The gold medal, and his path to it, changed so many lives along the way.

Like his mother’s life. Nelly Rico, who came to the United States from Mexico as an illegal immigrant,, raised seven children by herself and left Los Angeles with them in the middle of the night to escape the criminal who was the father Cejudo never really knew.

Rico does not like flying, so she watched her son’s Olympics on a laptop back in Colorado Springs. She vomited three times — one for each period her son lost in the three matches leading to the finals.

His right eye bruised and darkened, Cejudo talked of all the hours his mom worked over the years, as a janitor and a construction worker, anything to put food on the table or to heat the house. He talked about all the times they moved, from Los Angeles to New Mexico to Phoenix to Colorado Springs, each time in search of a better life.

“I wish I could just give her the medal right now,” Cejudo said.

More lives changed, like those of all the people back in Phoenix. Frank Saenz, Cejudo’s coach at Maryvale High School, was the one who raised money for him to enter tournaments by knocking on doors and pleading for donations.

Tracy Greiff, another wrestling coach from the Phoenix area, was the one who had told Cejudo in seventh grade that he would win an Olympic gold medal. Greiff said he sold hundreds of tickets to travel here and sit in the rowdiest section this venue had ever seen.

Alonzo Cejudo, one of Henry’s older brothers, was the one who said that next to the birth of his children this ranked as the greatest moment of his life. He was the one who remembers how Rico called Henry her “little golden boy” from the moment of his birth. The one who listened to Angel, Henry’s brother and training partner, talk all week.

Angel told the family he had never seen Henry this strong, this focused, this tough or this prepared.

“Henry knew he was going to take it,” Alonzo said. “He just came to pick up what was already his.”

Angel’s life changed, too, for better and for worse. He was the first Cejudo brother to take to wrestling, the first to become a star. He won four state championships at Maryvale. He put together a 150-0 record.

When he went to Colorado Springs, Henry, as always, tagged along. When Henry won more matches, more tournaments, more medals, Angel became his toughest critic and best friend. When Henry wrapped himself in that flag on Tuesday, Angel watched from the stands with tears in his eyes.

“It’s not, Oh, it should have been me,” said Angel, a world-class wrestler in his own right. “Because if it should have been me, I would have been out there. I’m not going to be jealous of my brother.”

More change looms on the horizon, but this time, with a wider reach. Tucked into the Cejudo cheering section was Jake Deitchler, an 18-year-old who wrestled in the Greco Roman discipline at these Olympics. Deitchler had committed to Minnesota but told The New York Times on Tuesday that he would instead head to Colorado Springs.

“I want to go down the same path,” Deitchler said. “I want to be where he’s at, gold medal hanging around my neck.”

This is what Kevin Jackson, the national freestyle coach and a former gold medalist, has envisioned since Cejudo entered the program at the Olympic Training Center as a high school junior. Instead of going to college, where folk wrestling is the dominant style, Cejudo honed his considerable skills against the best freestyle wrestlers in the world.

The program pays for him to attend college if he wants,” Angel said. “In the interim, the benefit is going up against world-class athletes.”

Jackson ranks Cejudo among the best young United States wrestles ever, guys like John Smith, a world champion at 21, and Lee Kemp, a world champion at 22. Jackson hopes Cejudo’s success at these Olympics will prompt promising young wrestlers like Deitchler to follow down that path.

“He is the present, and he is the future,” Jackson said of Cejudo. “He has two more cycles in him. And he hasn’t come close to how good he can be.”

After the match, Jackson lofted Cejudo in the air, a freestyle wrestling tradition. Jackson watched Cejudo afterward and concluded he was the most emotional champion in recent memory.

Maybe that is because Cejudo’s medal meant so much to so many.

His family waited near the tunnel, and after Cejudo received his prize, he made wrestling’s version of the Lambeau Leap — right into the stands. His family embraced him, tousled his hair, wrapped seven pairs of arms around him.

They all wore or waved American flags, an entire family decked in the stars and stripes. A family that started with illegal immigrants and advanced to right here, this moment, their very own gold medalist resting in their lap.

“Only in America,” Cejudo said.

Via the New York Times

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In a heated debate over immigration, four candidates for the U.S. Senate traded barbs over who had the best ideas for dealing with the controversial matter.

In an event sponsored by the Catholic Charities of Colorado Springs, Republican Bob Schaffer, Democratic Rep. Mark Udall, Green Party candidate Bob Kinsey and American Constitutional Party candidate Douglas “Dayhorse” Campbell tried to answer questions about jobs, border security, free trade and what the nation should do about the millions of illegal immigrants already living in the nation.

At the same time, the candidates interjected stinging barbs about how the others were unfit to be in the U.S. Senate.

“We have a broken system,” Udall said in starting out the debate. “Our national security depends on getting it right, and that solution starts with securing our borders. We also have to hold employers accountable, I believe, and find a way to deal with the 12 to 15 million people who are in an undocumented fashion.”

All those topics were covered during the hour-long forum at Sacred Heart Church in central Colorado Springs. Questions ranged from what to do about border security, whether free trade agreements are part of the problem, and how should the nation deal with a shortage of farm and service industry workers as states begin to clamp down on illegal immigrants.

Though the debate focused more on those subjects, Schaffer took the opportunity to tout his support for the military in a city that owes much of its economic base to the armed forces.

“There’s a huge difference between Congressman Udall and me when it comes to the nation’s defense and the support for it,” Schaffer said. “In fact, I’m the only one here who believes that the nation’s defense is among our highest priorities in the country.”

If that were true, Udall later countered, why didn’t Schaffer fight to get onto the House Armed Services Committee when he served in Congress as Udall has done.

Udall threw a few barbs of his own at Schaffer, accusing him of turning a blind eye to slave labor and siding with U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo’s “extremist” views on immigration.

Those comments sparked Schaffer to interrupt Udall, saying, “Mark, that’s not true,” at least four times throughout the debate.

Udall responded with a few retorts of his own, particularly after Schaffer accused him of supporting an amnesty program for those illegal immigrants already here.

“What he’s suggesting is we should provide amnesty to those who are here in front of us illegally today, and let (others) wait in another country because they’re trying to come in the legal way,” Schaffer said.

“What I proposed isn’t amnesty,” Udall countered. “In fact, (former) congressman Schaffer (who) wasn’t heard from for many, many months on his thinking about immigration reform, basically joined me in suggesting we ought to have an earned path for illegal status.”

“Mark, that’s not true,” Schaffer interjected.

“But congressman, you ought to clarify your record because you’ve tried to have it both ways,” Udall said.

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Under an elliptical moon, the sight of an illegal Mexican immigrant alone with a 15-year-old hometown girl seemed to push the beer-fueled high school football players into deadly violence.

“Isn’t it a little late for you guys to be out?” one teen reportedly asked Luis Eduardo Ramirez, 25, and the girl as they walked near a park after 11 p.m. one Saturday last month. “Get your Mexican boyfriend out of here!”

Ethnic slurs ricocheted in the night, echoing what many have muttered for years in this crumbling mountainside town that was once the thriving jewel of Pennsylvania’s coal country. Then, fists flew, and one teen, an honor student, reportedly delivered a skull-shattering kick to the head, killing Ramirez.

This pocket of blue-collar America, where big-band musicians Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey got their start, is spinning in the ugly vortex of the nation’s racially charged war over illegal Immigration. Federal officials have launched an investigation into last month’s murder to determine if it is part of a rising trend of anti-Latino hate crimes around the country.

“We are reaping what we, as a nation, have [sown],” said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes nationwide.

Feds helping case With Mexicans the focus of anger over illegal Immigration, reported hate crimes against Latinos increased to 576 in 2006, or 25 percent more than three years before, according to the most recent FBI report on such incidents. Latino activists argue the trend has only gotten worse as the debate rages over Immigration reform. In Illinois, anecdotal evidence suggests hate crimes have risen since 2006, when there were six, according to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Though no federal charges have been filed in the Shenandoah case, the Justice Department’s civil rights division is aiding local prosecutors, a department spokeswoman said.

The Schuylkill County district attorney has charged Brandon Piekarsky, 16, and Colin Walsh, 17, as adults with murder and “ethnic intimidation,” which covers hate crimes. Derrick Donchak, 18, has been charged with aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation. Another 17-year-old faces the same charges in juvenile court. All have pleaded not guilty.

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A tax practitioner has teamed up with a software engineer to create a new tax prep program aimed at preparers who service Spanish-speaking taxpayers, especially undocumented immigrants who are ready to begin filing tax returns.

Latino Tax Software’s MultiTax distinguishes itself from more established tax software packages by helping clients obtain Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers from the Internal Revenue Service and allowing them to file multiple years of tax returns they have avoided filing earlier. The software also lets preparers toggle quickly between screens in English and Spanish.

Company president Manuel Alvarez (pictured) started his practice, Latino Taxes, four years ago in California and has since grown it to 1,000 clients. About 85 percent of his clients are Hispanic and Brazilian, while the rest are Latino.

“Within the Hispanic and Latino community, there are some specific challenges,” said Alvarez. “Many people have never filed their taxes in the past, so we help them prepare multiple years of taxes at a time. We work with a lot of undocumented immigrants. Many of them do not have a valid tax ID number, and we work with them so the IRS can choose an ITIN for them.”

Alvarez, a Stanford University MBA, came up with the idea for the software a few years ago and met an engineer at Stanford who helped him develop the program after tax season this year. He previewed the software at the IRS’s National Convention of ITIN Acceptance Agents in Dallas last month and plans to show it later this month at an IRS Tax Forum in New York.

Alvarez sees a lot of upside potential for his software, especially with the presidential candidates in both parties talking about the need for immigration reform.

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A new effort to clear this country of illegal immigrants comes courtesy of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which this week began asking more than 450,000 people who are in violation of deportation orders to come forward, get their personal affairs in order and volunteer to return to their home countries.

Coincidentally, a new report by a think tank that advocates for restricting immigration into the United States shows that hundreds of thousands of people here illegally already have been self-deporting because of increased immigration-enforcement efforts. From August of last year until May, according to calculations by the Center for Immigration Studies, the illegal immigrant population declined by about 11 percent, from 12.5 million to 11.2 million. At that pace, the CIS argues, the current number could be cut in half in five years.

But don’t hold your breath — immigration and demographic experts are not buying into such a scenario. They agree that there has been some increase in the number of undocumented people leaving the country, but they don’t believe you can say with any certainty what those numbers are.

CIS’ figures are based on an extrapolation of U.S. Census data that does not specify legal status. Critics contend this is not enough for a sound scientific measure. Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego, described the CIS metric as so “grossly imprecise” that it renders the rest of the analysis “essentially useless.”

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