By JULIA PRESTON
NT Times

The number of American citizen children who have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant has increased rapidly since 2003, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

About four million American children have at least one parent who lacks legal immigration status, the group found. And 73 percent of all children of illegal immigrants are American citizens. In 2003, 2.7 million American children had parents without legal status. The increase stems from the relatively young age of the immigrants, who have children soon after they settle in the United States, the report said.

Children of illegal immigrants are more than twice as likely to live with two parents than children of United States citizens, according to the report. In all, about 8.8 million people in the United States are in families that include parents who are illegal immigrants and children who are American citizens.

About three-quarters of the nation’s illegal immigrants are Hispanic.

The findings are likely to be another point of contention between advocates for immigrants and groups that favor more aggressive immigration enforcement.

In the last two years of the Bush administration, immigration authorities stepped up raids in factories and immigrant communities, and a record 349,000 immigrants were deported in 2008.

Civil rights and advocacy groups protested that the raids were dividing families and leading to de facto deportations of children with American citizenship who went to live in their parents’ home countries. Groups that advocate stricter enforcement say that illegal immigrants who have been deported have the choice of taking their American children with them or leaving them in the United States.

In the first months of the Obama administration, the raids have slowed to a near halt. After an operation by immigration agents in February at an engine plant in Bellingham, Wash., Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a review to produce a new enforcement strategy, which she said would focus primarily on abusive employers instead of immigrant workers.

The Pew report, by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, analyzed census data from March 2008. It is the first time in five years that Pew has closely examined family situations of illegal immigrants. It used a method for estimating the number of illegal immigrants that is widely accepted, including by government researchers and groups favoring reduced immigration.

In all, 5.5 million children living in the United States have parents who are illegal immigrants, an increase of 1.2 million children since 2003, the report found. Nearly 7 percent of students in public elementary and secondary schools are children of illegal immigrants, the report said.

About one-third of children of illegal immigrants live in poverty, nearly double the 18 percent poverty rate for children of United States citizens, the report found. In 2007, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $36,000, substantially below the $50,000 median for citizens.

The report found signs that the rapid upward mobility long associated with new immigrants had stalled for the current generation of illegal immigrants.

“In contrast to other immigrants,” the report said, “undocumented immigrants do not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States.”

Popularity: 44% [?]

By Tim Hoover
The Denver Post

A bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get in-state tuition might make it out of a Senate committee early today because of one GOP lawmaker’s absence — a situation Republicans called a little too convenient.

Senate Bill 170, sponsored by Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, had appeared destined for failure on a 5-5 vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was to meet Friday morning.

Though Democrats hold a 6-4 majority on the committee, Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge, had said she would not support the bill, meaning it was likely to die on a tie vote.

But Sen. Abel Tapia, D-Pueblo, the chairman of the panel, on Tuesday called a committee meeting for 7:30 this morning.

The extra meeting today means a vote on Romer’s bill could take place without Sen. Ted Harvey, R-Highlands Ranch, who last week said he had family business that would require his absence from the Senate until Thursday. With Harvey gone, the bill could pass on a 5-4 vote.

The bill would allow students who have attended a Colorado high school for at least three years and graduated to get the in-state tuition rate at public colleges and universities. After a contentious debate last month, the Senate referred the legislation to the Appropriations Committee after Republicans raised concerns about its potential costs.

Supporters have said the bill has no impact on state revenue, but Keller’s opposition was seen as the death knell for the measure.

Tapia, a supporter of Romer’s bill, said he scheduled the meeting today because the committee, which did not meet last week, faced a large bottleneck of bills. He said the committee is likely to meet Thursday as well.

“Bills have backed up an awful lot,” Tapia said. “I tried to put as many bills as possible on the (committee’s agenda).”

Republicans, though, said the timing of today’s meeting was fishy in light of Harvey’s absence.

“The bill is coming up before other bills that have been on the appropriations (schedule) for a while,” said Sen. Mike Kopp, R-Littleton, also a member of the panel. “It does strike me as very suspicious.”

Harvey, reached by phone, said he had gone to Florida to help his wife prepare to put her father, who has Alzheimer’s disease, in a facility in Colorado.

“They (Democrats) are taking advantage of my personal family issues to reschedule the committee hearing and push the bill through,” he said.

Kopp said he would offer a motion in today’s meeting to postpone consideration of the bill until Harvey returned to Denver.

Would Tapia agree to that?

“Are they going to want to delay every other bill that they think they can stop?” he asked in response. “I don’t know what I would do. I would have to think about that.”

He said he recognized Republicans might be suspicious of his motives.

“I can imagine that the Republicans may think this is kind of a stealth thing,” Tapia said. “My job isn’t to send bills (to the committee schedule) with the intention of killing them.”

Popularity: 75% [?]

In a little-noticed act of political faintheartedness, the Obama administration has pulled back from nominating Thomas Saenz, a highly regarded civil-rights lawyer and counsel to the mayor of Los Angeles, to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

Mr. Saenz, the former top litigator in Los Angeles for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, was privately offered the job in January. The floating of his name led to fierce outbursts from anti-immigrant groups and blogs, which detest him for being so good at what he does.

He was a leader of the successful fight to block California’s Proposition 187, an unconstitutional effort to deny social services and schooling to illegal immigrants. He has defended Latino day laborers who were targets of misguided local crackdowns, from illegal police stings to unconstitutional anti-solicitation ordinances. An editorial in Investor’s Business Daily slimed Mr. Saenz by calling him “an open-borders extremist” and said Maldef wanted to give California back to Mexico.

None of it was true, but it was apparently too much for the White House. Mr. Saenz was ditched in favor of Maryland’s labor secretary, Thomas Perez, who has a solid record but is not as closely tied to immigrant rights.

Immigrant advocates are stuck with the sinking feeling that Mr. Obama’s supposed enthusiasm for immigration reform will wilt under pressure and heat. Representative Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, found it sadly unsurprising that a lawyer could be rejected for the nation’s top civil-rights job because he had stood up for civil rights. “In what other position do you find that your life experience, your educational knowledge and commitment to an issue actually hurts you?” he asked.

Mr. Obama may have avoided a nasty fight this time. But if he is ever going to win the battle to put 12 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, he will to have to confront and dismantle the core restrictionist argument: that being an illegal immigrant is an unpardonable crime, one that strips away fundamental protections and forgives all manner of indecent treatment.

The Constitution’s bedrock protections do not apply to just the native-born. The suffering that illegal immigrants endure — from raids to workplace exploitation to mistreatment in detention — is a civil-rights crisis. It cannot be left to fester while we wait for the big immigration bill that may or may not arrive under this president.

Mr. Saenz would have been an ideal candidate to reaffirm values that have been lost in the poisoned immigration debate, had Mr. Obama dared to nominate him.

Popularity: 81% [?]

Opinion by Maria Elena Salinas

In New York’s Suffolk County, a group of teenagers seems to have picked up a morbid new hobby. It’s no longer, “Hey, why don’t we go hang out on a street corner?” or even “Let’s go break into cars.” What the seven young boys, 16 and 17 years of age, were doing as a hobby was going out and “beating up Mexicans.”

Unfortunately for Marcelo Lucero, he happened to cross their path on a Saturday night last November on his way to a friend’s house in downtown Patchogue. He was not a Mexican — he was from Ecuador — but the random attack against him was simply because of his ethnic appearance. Lucero was beaten up and stabbed to death. The teenagers have been arrested and will be prosecuted. Their trial is set to begin Feb. 18.

Lucero’s murder was a blow to his family in Ecuador and in New York, as well as to his friends and neighbors, who describe him as a quiet and kind man, always looking for ways to help others. But his death helped to uncover a gruesome pattern of behavior by the youths. It turns out Lucero was just the latest victim of what had turned into a regular and violent pastime: hunting down Hispanics to attack them.

Authorities believe that these teenagers had been targeting their victims for more than a year and that other youths may be involved. Victims were picked at random, walking down the street, riding bicycles, washing clothes in Laundromats. One of the teenagers involved told police, “I don’t go out doing this very often, maybe once a week.”

The publicity surrounding Lucero’s case prompted others to report similar attacks. Prosecutors were able to come up with at least eight other Latino victims who were attacked during a 14-month period.
This case led the Suffolk County Commission to set up a task force to investigate hate crimes. Not only have these young men been out there committing crimes, but the crimes have not been reported because of fear, and the ones that were reported were ignored by police.

The 13-member task force is supposed to look into why these hate crimes have been overlooked and what is causing the racial tensions in the county.

What is happening in Suffolk County is only a reflection of similar situations across the country. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Latinos rose in 2007. There were 1,256 offenses reported, based on the perceived ethnicity or national origin of a person, and of those, 61.6 percent were against Latinos. In the past four years, there has been a 40 percent rise in hate crimes.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says there also has been a major increase in hate groups. These grew from 602 in the year 2000 to 888 by 2007, an increase of 48 percent. White-supremacist groups that normally target Jews or blacks are now going after Latinos. They believe the growth of these hate groups is motivated mostly by the immigration debate.

It shouldn’t be complicated to figure out why hate crimes have risen as much as they have in Suffolk County, or any other county in the United States. There is a clear pattern here. When you have politicians and media commentators constantly accusing immigrants of taking jobs away from Americans, of littering our streets, of spreading disease, of threatening our culture, and categorizing them as criminals, someone is bound to think he or she has the liberty to eliminate them without any consequences.

When you have immigration authorities raiding homes and businesses, and rounding up immigrants, locking them up and deporting them, it’s not unusual for someone out there with a sick mind to think that he or she is actually doing social cleansing by singling out Latinos and treating them like some kind of plague instead of human beings. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore whether they are in the country legally or not — just looking Hispanic is enough to get them insulted, discriminated against, attacked or even killed.

There really is no justification for having teenage boys go out and target people of a specific ethnic group with the intention of hurting them or even just intimidating them. But it would help if those who wield the power and have the attention of the masses would change the tone of the immigration debate. It is not immigrants who are threatening our American values, but rather those who don’t value human life who are the real threat to our country.

Contact María Elena Salinas through her Web site, www.mariaesalinas.com

Popularity: 15% [?]

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Latino immigrants to the United States lost jobs at a faster pace than the broader work force last year, following a sharp contraction in the construction industry where many work, a study released on Thursday showed.

The survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, based on Census figures, showed unemployment among foreign-born Hispanics reached 8 percent in the last quarter of 2008, up from 5.1 percent a year earlier.

The losses among the group outstripped those in the broader labor market, where unemployment rose to 6.6 percent in the period, up from 4.6 percent a year earlier, the study found.

“Job losses are now widespread across the economy, but the construction sector remains the leading source of job loss for both Hispanics and non-Hispanics,” the study said.

Since the United States slipped into recession in late 2007, some 3.6 million jobs have been shed across the economy.

Around 10.8 million foreign-born Hispanics worked in the United States at the close of last year, according to government figures, which do not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

The declining work opportunities stateside contributed to a fall in remittances to Mexico last year, where workers sent home $25.1 billion, a fall of 3.6 percent over 2007.

Popularity: 14% [?]

By IVAN MORENO – AP

GREELEY, Colo. (AP) — Ernesto Garcia counted himself lucky after he was swept up in a 2006 immigration raid on a northern Colorado meatpacking plant: Unlike hundreds of co-workers here illegally, he was allowed to stay in the U.S.

Two years later, he’s jobless and barely getting by while he waits for his immigration case to be resolved.

The 34-year-old Guatemalan is among hundreds of people across the country stuck in limbo while their cases inch their way through immigration courts. A favorable ruling would get them a green card. But in the meantime — and the meantime can be years — they’re barred from working.

Julien Ross, director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, calls it a “sadistic” way to get immigrants to give up and go home.

“This is another example of why the raids don’t work,” Ross said. “It’s almost salt on the wound to have them wait for years for their cases to be resolved. And the government knows they can’t work.”

Immigration cases do not have the same “speedy trial” requirements as criminal cases. Denver’s four immigration judges each have up to 2,000 cases at a time, so delays are inevitable, said Christina Fiflis, an attorney who has represented some of the workers detained in the federal raid on the Swift & Co. plant in Greeley on Dec. 12, 2006.

Some can apply for work permits, but often there’s an “extraordinary delay” in getting them, she said.

Unable to work, many rely on friends, family and charity.

“In many cases, the families will exhaust all options to see if they can remain in the country, especially families who have been here for a long time,” said Rosa Maria Castaneda, a researcher with the Urban Institute, a Washington-based group that tracks the impact of workplace raids.

Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency doesn’t know how many people arrested in raids are still in the United States waiting for immigration court hearings.

“Although this is their right, there are limits on what they can and cannot do in the meantime. There is no provision in law to give work authorization to those who have been found working illegally in the United States,” Rusnok said.

Elaine Komis, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review — the immigration court system — said it’s common for immigration cases to take years when people appeal a decision by the immigration judge.

Castaneda’s group doesn’t have an exact count of pending cases from recent work-site raids.

But she said they include some of the 261 people detained in the Swift raid in Greeley and another 261 in a same-day raid in Grand Island, Neb. They also include 361 workers swept up in a March 2007 raid on the Michael Bianco Inc. textile factory in New Bedford, Mass. As of December, 201 of those workers remained in New Bedford.

“It’s difficult because you can’t get work. But we’re putting our faith in God, that he will help us,” said Brenda Miranda, whose husband, Jose Mendoza, was detained in Greeley, 60 miles north of Denver. “It’s worth it because our children will have better opportunities,” she said in Spanish.

Miranda, 26, said her husband, who like her is from northern Mexico, has been working sporadically — and illegally — in construction. She said he’s left with about $120 a week after making child support payments.

Mendoza, 29, was arrested again late last year when Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck launched an investigation into more than 1,300 people he says filed tax returns with false or stolen identities. Mendoza’s next immigration hearing is in December.

Garcia also has worked illegally since the raid; his last job, in a carrot and onion field, ended in November. It paid him $300 a week, part of which he used to pay an immigration attorney.

The raid in which Garcia was picked up was part of an ICE operation that also targeted Swift plants in Grand Island; Cactus, Texas; Hyrum, Utah; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Worthington, Minn. ICE said a total of 1,297 workers were arrested that day. In the end, Garcia and others — including some whose next court date isn’t until December, or three years after the raid — may be deported.

A church and a community group have stepped in to help the immigrants in Greeley.

“I feel like they’re here, they’re hungry, and we have a moral imperative to help them,” said Ann Ratcliffe, 65, a Family of Christ Presbyterian Church member. She calls the families picked up in the raid “vecinos” — neighbors.

The church and its affiliates have pitched in more than $30,000 over the last two years to help about two dozen families while they wait for their cases to be resolved.

“Here they are and they’re stuck,” said the Rev. Richard Craft, pastor of the Greeley church that helps administer the funds through the community group Al Frente de la Lucha (At the Front of the Battle).

Garcia, who came to Colorado illegally 13 years ago, hopes that the amount of time he has spent here will lead to legal status.

“If it’s horrible for me here, in my country it would be worse,” said Garcia. “Better to fight here and see what happens.”

Ricardo Romero, a leader of Al Frente de la Lucha, said the families still in Greeley include about 13 from Guatemala, six from Mexico and two from El Salvador.

“Once the (church) money runs out, I don’t know what we’ll do,” Romero said. “But if we make it to the court dates, and somebody gets citizenship, then I guess it was all worth it.”

Popularity: 19% [?]

By Chris Strohm, CongressDaily

A battle has begun behind the scenes over whether companies that would benefit from the economic stimulus package before the Senate should be required to use the federal E-Verify system to keep illegal immigrants out of their workforces. The clash could erupt on the Senate floor this week.

The battle pits immigrant advocates against proponents of stiffer enforcement of the immigration laws, who want to require firms receiving contracts under the stimulus bill to use E-Verify, which checks databases maintained by the Social Security Administration and the Homeland Security Department to determine the legal status of employees.

“We didn’t expect immigration at all to be on the stimulus package. We didn’t think we were going to have this whole fight on immigration and E-Verify,” said Angelo Amador, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber opposes adding an E-Verify requirement to the stimulus.

There is no federal mandate requiring businesses to use E-Verify, although some states require companies to do so. Homeland Security has issued a regulation that would require most federal contractors to use the program, but the effort has stalled due to legal challenges and is not slated to go into effect until May. Lawmakers battled last year over setting E-Verify requirements but could only agree to reauthorize the program until March.

Amador said the Chamber and allies among immigrant advocates support a five-year extension of E-Verify and its voluntary use by federal contractors but want GAO to study the program’s error rates and what could be done to fix its flaws. “They’re trying to mandate it without really doing an analysis of what this program does,” Amador said.

Those who want the stimulus bill to require companies to use E-Verify argue that doing so would protect jobs for U.S. workers. “It is critical that the stimulus legislation include provisions to require the use of E-Verify when hiring workers to fill jobs created by the proposal,” Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., wrote in a letter last week to Senate Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell. “The inclusion of such a provision will be a key factor as we evaluate the merits of the stimulus package and gauge our support.”

The House version of the stimulus bill already includes the provision, which was added as an amendment by Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. “We cannot allow for illegal aliens to benefit from this deficit spending. The American taxpayer will one day be forced to pay it back so it should be them that benefit,” Kingston said. Even though his amendment was included, he ultimately did not vote for the House package.

Popularity: 17% [?]

By GEBE MARTINEZ, Politico

She has been likened more to Sarah Palin than to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Which would be just peachy if she were a Republican. But she is a Democrat.

She is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was just beginning her third year in the House representing a conservative, upstate New York district, when she was appointed by New York Gov. David Paterson to fill the Senate seat recently vacated by Clinton.

The decision annoyed some of the nation’s top Hispanic leaders, who are dismayed by what they describe as Gillibrand’s “anti-immigrant” record. (Gillibrand’s promotion to the Senate was praised by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an immigration restrictionist group.)

Either top Democratic leaders like Paterson and New York Sen. Charles Schumer did not know all of Gillibrand’s positions on key Latino issues when she was hurriedly picked or they let them slide, banking instead on her strong ability to dial for dollars and pull in New York’s conservative voters when Paterson and Gillibrand are up for election in 2010.

Bet on the latter. It’s all about winning the next election, not what a person stands for, Democrats remind us. (Gillibrand raised a staggering $4.7 million for her last House race.)

The result is a new senator who is an immigration hard-liner from an ethnically rich state where the Statue of Liberty is an enduring symbol of freedom; where more than one in five residents are foreign-born; and where more than half of the immigrants are citizens and eligible to vote.

Instead of being a rock-solid bet to keep the seat vacated by Clinton, who is a rock star to Latinos, Gillibrand cannot rule out a primary challenge. (She also has been backed by the National Rifle Association, scratching against the grain of New York’s liberal Democratic base.)

What’s more, Schumer’s replacement as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — the arm charged with making sure incumbents like Gillibrand hold on to Democratic seats — is Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the highest-ranking congressional Hispanic and a fierce advocate of immigrants’ rights.

With no way to go but up after being thrown into the deep end of the political pool by her bobbling governor, Gillibrand is setting out to prove she’s unsinkable. She has hired Bronx political veteran Roberto Ramirez to help plug up opposition as she assembles her campaign team for next year’s statewide race.

The “Educating Kirsten” campaign has begun.

Since being sworn into office last week, Gillibrand has met with Menendez and became the 45th member of the Senate Hispanic Task Force.

On Sunday, she sat in a Brooklyn meeting room for two hours with 15 state and local Hispanic leaders who grilled her about her House record, which included opposition to legalizing 12 million undocumented immigrants and backing penalties for cities, such as New York, that protect undocumented immigrants. She was a favorite of “English only” groups.

At the meeting, Gillibrand took copious notes on the Hispanics’ concerns, offered to take a walking tour in immigrant neighborhoods and agreed to receive a 100-day report card, according to a meeting participant. Talks with other leaders in Washington are continuing this week.

Gillibrand has a lot to learn about Hispanics and immigrants, even as a New Yorker.

Recent killings of Latinos in New York have prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to review how local authorities handled the cases. Hate crimes against Hispanics were not on Gillibrand’s radar as a House member, but they will be now, predicted John Trasvina, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and chairman of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of 26 groups.

“We are looking forward; we are not looking backwards,” Trasvina said of Gillibrand’s position on immigration. Gillibrand “is an adult. She’s an elected official. She has to be accountable, and she will be accountable for her [future] votes,” he added.

In limited public statements, Gillibrand has shown a willingness to bend her previous hard-line positions, mindful that she is now representing the whole state, not just the conservative Albany area.

For example, she previously favored an immigrant work force only when farmers could not find U.S. citizens to do the work, but as a new senator she floated the idea of temporary worker visas for five consecutive years and then letting workers apply for legal permanent residency.

The lingering question is whether Gillibrand’s enforcement-only immigration stance can be modified enough to satisfy immigrant and civil rights advocates. Is it even possible for Gillibrand to credibly reposition herself on immigration if it is not in her political DNA?

The situation reminded one activist of Palin, whose own words and limited public record could not be gussied up enough by handlers to increase her credibility during her unsuccessful GOP vice presidential run last fall.

“I am still open to [Gillibrand] being able to conform her ability to run as a U.S. senator to some of the positions she has taken before. I don’t know if it’s possible,” said New York state Assemblyman Peter M. Rivera, the longest-serving Hispanic in the state Legislature. Before the Brooklyn meeting, Rivera observed that Gillibrand’s immigration record “borders on xenophobia.”

But after listening to Gillibrand, Rivera wished her “the best,” while noting that she does not have a lot of time to transform her anti-immigration image.

“We started a relationship on which we can build upon, but really, the rest of it is up to her. There is skepticism that she will be able to change, particularly that she can become a champion for Latinos. Only time will tell,” Rivera said.

Party leaders are trying to put behind them the botched process that led to Gillibrand’s appointment, and Schumer wants time for her to prove her savvy.

“She is doing a great job of reaching out, and we will have to see where that leads,” Schumer said.

Gillibrand’s plight highlights how disconnected most lawmakers are from Hispanics, observed Courtney Cavagnaro, a neighborhood organizer from New Jersey who was in Washington last week with the Campaign for Community Values to lobby for the economic stimulus bill and children’s health care programs.

“We need to ask: ‘How often has [Gillibrand] been in the Latino communities?’” Cavagnaro asked. “‘How often have any of them been in the Latino communities?’” The answer is, not enough, or they would know how Hispanics are disproportionately affected by a bad economy, poor schools and other issues.

Gillibrand will be in those neighborhoods as she works to keep her political career alive.

Popularity: 22% [?]

By NINA BERNSTEIN, NY Times

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation Return to Sender.

And they garnered bigger increases in money and staff from Congress than any other program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

The impact of the internal directives, obtained by a professor and students at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information lawsuit and shared with The New York Times, shows the power of administrative memos to significantly alter immigration enforcement policy without any legislative change.

The memos also help explain the pattern of arrests documented in a report, criticizing the fugitive operations program, to be released on Wednesday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Analyzing more than five years of arrest data supplied to the institute last year by Julie Myers, who was then chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report found that over all, as the program spent a total of $625 million, nearly three-quarters of the 96,000 people it apprehended had no criminal convictions.

Without consulting Congress, the report concluded, the program shifted to picking up “the easiest targets, not the most dangerous fugitives.”

It noted, however, that the most recent figures available indicate an increase in arrests of those with a criminal background last year, though it was unclear whether that resulted from a policy change.

The increased public attention comes as the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has ordered a review of the fugitive teams operation, which was set up in 2002 to find and deport noncitizens with outstanding orders of deportation, then rapidly expanded after 2003 with the mission of focusing on the most dangerous criminals.

Peter L. Markowitz, who teaches immigration law at Cardozo and directs its immigration legal clinic, said the memos obtained in its lawsuit reflected the Bush administration’s effort to appear tough on immigration enforcement during the unsuccessful push to pass comprehensive immigration legislation in 2006, and amid rising anger over illegal immigration.

“It looks like what happened here is that the law enforcement strategy was hijacked by the political agenda of the administration,” he said.

Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, defended the program. “For the first time in history, we continue to reduce the number of immigration fugitive cases,” she said, noting that the number of noncitizens at large with outstanding deportation orders, which peaked at 634,000 in the 2007 fiscal year, is now down to about 554,000. “These results speak for themselves and they are consistent with Congress’s mandate: locate and remove immigration absconders.”

Ms. Nantel said the number of fugitives with criminal backgrounds arrested in the 2008 fiscal year rose to 5,652, or 16 percent of 34,000 arrests, and nonfugitives fell to 8,062, or 23 percent.

Many Americans have welcomed roundups of what the agency calls “ordinary status violators” — noncitizens who have no outstanding order of deportation, but are suspected of being in the country unlawfully, either because they overstayed a visa or entered without one.

But Michael Wishnie, one of the authors of the report, who teaches law at Yale, said that random arrests of low-level violators in residential raids not only raised a new set of legal and humanitarian issues, including allegations of entering private homes without warrants or consent and separating children from their caretakers, but was “dramatically different from how ICE has sold this program to Congress.”

“If we just want to arrest undocumented people,” he said, “we can do it much more cheaply.”

Congressional financing for the fugitive operations program rose to $218 million in the 2008 fiscal year, from $9 million in 2003, as the number of seven-member teams multiplied to 104 from 8.

In Congressional briefings and public statements since 2003, agency officials have repeatedly said that given the vast number of immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, the program will focus its resources on the roughly 20 percent with a criminal background.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo dated Jan. 22, 2004, underscored that commitment: “Effective immediately, no less than 75 percent of all fugitive operations targets will be those classified as criminal aliens” — noncitizens with a criminal record as well as an order of deportation. It added that “collateral apprehensions” — immigration violators encountered by chance during an operation — would not be counted in that percentage.

But on Jan. 31, 2006, a new memo changed the rules. The directive, from John P. Torres, acting director of the agency, raised each team’s “target goal” to 1,000 a year, from 125.

And it removed the requirement that at least 75 percent of those sought out for arrest be criminals. Instead, it told the teams to prioritize cases according to the threat posed by the fugitive, with noncriminals in the lowest of five categories. And it repeated that “collateral apprehensions will not count” toward the 1,000 arrest quota.

But that standard, too, was dropped nine months later. A new memo from Mr. Torres said “nonfugitive arrests may now be included” to reach the required 1,000 arrests. On average, however, it said at least half of those arrested by each team should be fugitives. It also promised to “ensure the maximum availability of detention space for fugitive arrest operations.”

One result was an increase in noncriminals held in immigration detention. Another, the Migration Policy Institute report concluded, was that the percentage of criminal fugitives arrested plummeted, to 9 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30, 2007, from 39 percent in the 2004 fiscal year.

That same year, 15,646, or 51 percent of those arrested, had an outstanding deportation order, but no criminal record, and 12,084, or 40 percent, were termed “ordinary status violators” who did not fit any of the program’s priority categories.

The report said the program relied on a database riddled with errors, and that many deportation orders were issued without the subject in court, sometimes because of faulty addresses.

The looser rules were reflected in sweeps like one conducted in New Haven in June 2007. During the raid, lawyers at Yale’s immigration law center said, agents who found no one home at an address specified in a deportation order simply knocked on other doors until one opened, pushed their way in, and arrested residents who acknowledged that they lacked legal status.

Of the 32 arrested and scattered to jails around New England, only 5 had outstanding deportation orders, and only 1 or 2 had criminal records.

Popularity: 11% [?]

By MICHAEL POWELL, NY Times
Published: February 1, 2009

Kirsten E. Gillibrand, New York’s new senator, suggested to Latino elected officials on Sunday that she would take the lead on some immigration issues — and perhaps quickly drop some positions that they considered objectionable.

In particular, she promised to take a lead in promoting a Congressional bill to roll back a federal provision that discourages states from charging in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants who attend state-supported universities. The bill also would permit illegal immigrants who have grown up in the United States and are attending college to apply for legal status.

And despite her vote in Congress when she was a representative from upstate New York, Ms. Gillibrand said she no longer supported cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities like New York that fail to enforce all immigration laws.

She said she no longer favored the legislation, which would have led to financial penalties for the city. “In a lot of these issues, it’s a case of learning more and expanding my view,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview after the meeting.

Some of the Latino elected officials who met with the senator at the Brooklyn offices of El Diario, the Spanish language newspaper, did not sound persuaded by Ms. Gillibrand’s statements. El Diario ran a front-page headline a week ago declaring Ms. Gillibrand to be anti-immigrant, citing her votes in favor of English-only regulations and a bill deputizing local police officers to act as immigration agents.

“The reality we have before us is her voting record; it’s a record that has caused great dismay,” said Melissa Mark-Viverito, who represents East Harlem and the South Bronx in the City Council. “She talked of ‘reconsidering’ and ‘revising,’ and we’ll see what that means.”

In the House, Ms. Gillibrand, a Democrat, represented a majority Republican and conservative rural district that encircles Albany and snakes toward the Adirondacks. All of the political pressure in that region came from the right, and her votes on immigration issues and on guns hewed to conservative lines favored by her constituents. (On many other issues, from health care to Social Security to Iraq, she voted along more liberal lines.)

She confronts a new reality now. The majority of the Democratic vote statewide is in immigrant-rich downstate cities and towns, and in upstate urban centers such as Buffalo and Rochester. Her visits on Sunday to Brooklyn and then to Chinatown, where she marched in the Chinese New Year parade alongside Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Councilman John C. Liu of Queens, who has criticized her immigration stances, underscored her need to reach out to a much different constituency.

“She understands she no longer represents a small Congressional district upstate,” said Assemblyman Jose R. Peralta of Queens, who is the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. “We are going to help her and pay close attention, and if she doesn’t change, well, then we’ll be speaking to other contenders in 2010.”

Popularity: 21% [?]