Daily news updates from CIS

September 28, 2009

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[For CISNEWS subscribers --

1. Democratic faction demands coverage for illegals (2 stories)
2. FBI: corrupt border officials major security threat
3. NY bomb plot embodies immigration dilemma
4. Jordanian bomb plot exposes security challenges (story, link)
5. Health officials target illegals for inoculations
6. Census providing Spanish language forms
7. 'Virtual fence' program under fire
8. Feds to maintain southern presence, bolster Canadian border
9. Columbian president visits Boston ex-pats
10. Pew finds Mexicans still ready to immigrate
11. Hawkish VA county garners public approval
12. WI city mulls business license verification requirement
13. CO city to host ICE branch office
14. GA hospital gets go-ahead to close dialysis clinic (story, link)
15. New NC comm. college rules delayed until 2010
16. MALDEF expecting piecemeal amnesty, if not full
17. Activists fret expense of naturalization
18. Catholic bishop links illegals and abortion
19. Faith leaders press amnesty policy (story, 2 links)
20. Program gets farm laborers' kids into class
21. Teens debate immigration issues
22. CA students study immigration
23. MT students hope for DREAM Act
24. IA students take hands-on look at issue
25. Ethnic press a vital service to immigrants
26. Project documents WWII refugees in NY
27. CA fair highlights 19th century Chinese immigration
28. Haitian artist tackles immigration
29. Hospitality workers file wage complaints
30. Unions target foreign carwash labor in CA
31. Pittsburgh lawyers expand Spanish language services
32. Asylum seekers look to doctors for medical certification of abuse
33. Nepalese refugees find home in Columbus
34. TX ceremony naturalizes 500
35. Thai family gains citizenship after divorce mix-up
36. Salvadoran youth granted asylum
37. Illegal alien drug dealer found guilty in San Fran.
38. CA gang sweeps nab illegal aliens

Subscribe to CIS e-mail services here: http://cis.org/immigrationnews.html

-- Mark Krikorian]

1.
Liberals seek health-care access for illegals
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times, September 28, 2009
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/28/liberals-seek-health-care-access-for-illegals/

Fearful that they're losing ground on immigration and health care, a group of House Democrats is pushing back and arguing that any health care bill should extend to all legal immigrants and allow illegal immigrants some access.

The Democrats, trying to stiffen their party's spines on the contentious issue, say it's unfair to bar illegal immigrants from paying their own way in a government-sponsored exchange. Legal immigrants, they say, regardless of how long they've been in the United States, should be able to get government-subsidized health care if they meet the other eligibility requirements.

'Legal permanent residents should be able to purchase their plans, and they should also be eligible for subsidies if they need it. Undocumented, if they can afford it, should be able to buy their own private plans. It keeps them out of the emergency room,' said Rep. Michael M. Honda, California Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Mr. Honda was joined by more than 20 of his colleagues in two letters laying out the demands.

Coverage for immigrants is one of the thorniest issues in the health care debate, and one many Democratic leaders would like to avoid. But immigrant rights groups and the Democrats who sent the letters say they have to take a stand now.

President Obama has said he does not want health care proposals to cover illegal immigrants. The bill drawn up by Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, excludes illegal immigrants from his proposed health care exchange.

Mr. Honda and his allies, though, say illegal immigrants should be allowed to pay for insurance if they can afford it, even if it comes through a government-established exchange. As a generally young, healthy part of the population, illegal immigrants could help reduce overall costs for those who buy into health exchange plans, the lawmakers said.

The Democrats' letters, however, do not issue ultimatums or threaten to withhold support for the bills if their requests aren't met.

The National Council of La Raza launched its own 'flood their voice mail' campaign last week to put pressure on Mr. Baucus to expand coverage in his proposal to include all legal immigrants and to drop verification language in the legislation that would prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining coverage.

Mr. Honda told The Washington Times that he's not pushing for illegal immigrants to gain access to taxpayer-subsidized benefits. 'That's an argument that's been done already,' he said.

Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, said proposals that include government coverage for illegal immigrants leave him incredulous.

'If anybody can, with a straight face, advocate that we should provide health insurance for people who broke into our country, broke our law and for the most part are criminals, I don't know where they ever would draw the line,' he said.

Mr. King, who opposes Democrats' health care plans in general, said illegal immigrant access in legislation 'would be a poison pill that would cause health care to go down' to defeat.

Twenty-nine Democrats signed on to the letter on legal immigrants, while 21 signed the letter on covering illegal immigrants. Although the leadership of the Congressional Black Caucus signed the legal-immigrant letter in their capacity as CBC officials, they signed the other letter as individual members of Congress.

Under the 1996 welfare law overhaul, Congress restricted most federal benefits to longtime holders of green cards - those who have been in the country at least five years.

But Democrats chipped away at that rule when they reauthorized the State Children's Health Insurance Program earlier this year and allowed states to cover all immigrant children and pregnant women, regardless of how long they've been in the country.

In their letter, the Democrats said health care costs are much lower for legal immigrants than for native citizens.

'Immigrants are part of our families, our communities, our economy, and contribute to the fabric of America,' they wrote. 'It is simply wrong that their taxes would pay for public health insurance programs to which they are not allowed access.'

EDITOR’S NOTE: CIS Director of Research Steven Camarota has recently offered his perspective on health care reform, available online at: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_645010.html

CIS estimates of the potential cost of covering illegal aliens are available online at: http://www.cis.org/IllegalsAndHealthCareHR3200

The collection of CIS materials on the cost of illegal aliens is available online at: http://cis.org/Announcements/HealthCare-Immigration-Publications

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Everyone will suffer if illegal immigrants aren't covered in reform, some caregivers say
Florida, home to a million undocumented immigrants, pays big to take care of those who can't get insurance, including those here illegally. If health care reform leaves out the undocumented, we'll still be paying, caregivers warn.
By William E. Gibson
The South Florida Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale), September 25, 2009
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/sfl-health-reform-immigrants-092509,0,4969482.story

Washington, DC -- Excluding undocumented immigrants from health care reform could jeopardize everyone's health and perpetuate a costly gap in insurance coverage, medical experts warned this week.

Much of the point of health care legislation in Congress is to cover all Americans to protect the public health and ease the high cost of treating uninsured patients in emergency rooms. Some health leaders worry that leaving the undocumented out of a newly created health care system would impair attempts to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis or swine flu, and continue the growing burden on public hospitals.

The gap in coverage is especially big in Florida, home to a million undocumented residents.

The warnings come while the Senate Finance Committee is drafting a bill designed to prevent illegal immigrants from tapping into new health care marketplaces, known as exchanges, where individuals and small businesses could shop for insurance.

The committee, which will resume its work next week, is expected to produce a bill that would require consumers to show proof of citizenship or legal status when joining these exchanges. The bill also would prevent the undocumented from getting tax breaks designed to make insurance affordable. And it would force newly arrived legal immigrants to wait five years before joining exchanges or getting tax breaks.

Some health leaders in Florida fear these exclusions and restrictions would undermine the advantages of reform.

'If I'm standing next to someone who has tuberculosis and who is uninsured, it doesn't protect me if they aren't treated,' said Fernando Trevino, dean of the School of Public Health at Florida International University. 'To the degree that someone is not getting care, they are more likely to spread infectious diseases to the rest of the population.'

He and other public-health experts also say any bill that leaves a big gap in coverage would miss an opportunity to lower costs by providing preventive care to everyone.

'People forget that we already provide inefficient and expensive care to undocumented residents,' said Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, chief of general internal medicine at the University of Miami medical school. 'They come into emergency rooms with advanced stages of an illness. Often they have medical conditions that are very expensive to treat but could have been prevented with primary care.'

Restrictions on the undocumented, if approved by Congress, would apply to new benefits provided by the reform legislation. The exclusion would not block immigrants from buying insurance on the private market outside these exchanges.

These measures stem from a determination to prevent explosive immigration issues from derailing an overhaul of the health care system. President Barack Obama tried to assure Congress in a nationally televised speech this month that 'the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.'

The remark sparked an outcry from conservatives - most immediately from Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., who shouted, 'You lie!' during the address to Congress. Wilson and many other Republicans say the reforms being considered would allow illegal residents to sneak into the health care system at taxpayer expense.

The undocumented have access to health care. By law, hospitals and other providers are required to treat all patients who need emergency care.

Public clinics in South Florida and elsewhere do not ask patients about their immigration status. They also give vaccinations for such things as swine flu without demanding documents.

But some public-health leaders are concerned that the heated rhetoric and exclusions coming out of Washington will further discourage immigrants and some U.S. citizens. They say some residents who don't speak English or meet the profile of a typical American - even those here legally - are reluctant to show up at public facilities for fear of harassment or deportation.

'By not covering them, we are choosing the worst for them and the worst for the rest of us in terms of financial cost,' Carrasquillo said. 'We end up paying for it.'

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2.
Exclusive: FBI Says Corrupt Border Officials Accepting Bribes Expose U.S. to Terrorist Risk
FBI Worries Corrupt Border Officials Could Let in Terrorists Without Detection
By Pierre Thomas
The ABC News, September 24, 2009
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/corrupt-border-officials-accepting-bribes-illegal-immigrants-exposes/story?id=8654516

The Federal Bureau of Investigation worries that corrupt U.S. officials at the nation's border crossings are exposing Americans to serious risk, and are stepping up efforts to root those officials out.

With evidence of corrupt U.S. border officials allowing illegal immigrants to enter the country in exchange for bribes, the FBI is concerned terrorists or materials that could be used in a terrorist attack might also slip through.

'If you're a corrupt border official, and you're allowing illegal immigrants to come into the country, you're not going to know who you're letting in,' Kevin L. Perkins, assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division for the FBI, told ABC News.

In one instance at the U.S.-Mexico border, FBI video surveillance obtained by ABC News caught a truck full of illegal immigrants pulling up to Customs and Border Protection officer Michael Gilliland, and being waved through his border inspection lane for $100,000, officials said.

And in Texas, an undercover FBI operation allegedly caught a deputy sheriff in the act.

'You can either pay me here or follow me all the way to Petula and you can pay the judge,' the deputy sheriff told an undercover FBI agent posing as a Mexican national, despite the agent having broken traffic laws.

'So the fine is $150 here,' the deputy sheriff was recorded as saying.

'You don't have to worry about court or anything,' he said, after the undercover agent handed over $150 in cash.

'I don't worry about nothing?' the agent asked.

'No,' the deputy sheriff replied.

The FBI says corrupt border officials willing to betray their badge for a price represent a potentially grave national security threat.

'Whether it's a truckload of illegal narcotics or whether it's components of a weapon of mass destruction. We have to know what those are. We have to have assurance that our borders are safe, that our borders are secure and that we can find these things before they enter our country,' said Perkins.

Custom and Border Protection is one of the key agencies under increasing federal scrutiny. They are the frontline sentries in the fight against illegal immigration. Right now, the bureau says they are investigating more than 100 such cases of corruption.

'They are the first line of defense coming into the country. They are the people that check people, goods and other things coming across the border,' said Perkins.

Since 2004, 94 federal customs officials have been charged with mission-related corruption. The agency said it's taking the problem seriously and has been agressively expanding efforts to root out crooked employees.

The case of customs officer Margarita Crispin underscores the seriousness of the problem.

Crispin was recruited by a powerful Mexican cartel. She was sent to the agency as a mole, to help smuggle tons of drugs through border checkpoints in El Paso, Texas. For her trouble, the cartel paid Crispin $5 million. She was arrested in July 2007, and in April 2008, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 240 months in prison.

Lloyd Easterling, acting public affairs director for the CBP, said the federal government has ramped up its efforts to root out corrupt border officials.

'[The Department of Homeland Security] Office of the Inspector General, [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] Office of Professional Responsibility and CBP's Office of Internal Affairs work together to address possible cases of corruption. This layered approach and collaboration among federal agencies is critical to the mission of professional integrity. Although the percentage of prosecutions for mission related corruption is very small, no incident of corruption is tolerated,' Easterling said.

Corrupt Border Officials Could Inadvertently Allow Terrorists Into Country

The FBI fears the worst case scenario: Illegal immigrants allowed in by corrupt border officials could be terrorists.

Statistics show there may be good reason for concern. The illegal immigrants caught at the Mexican border are not just from Central and South America, but literally from around the world.

In the last two years, the government says 2,285 illegal immigrants have been caught coming from China, nearly 1,000 from Europe, and hundreds from nations where terrorism is a major concern -- 80 from Pakistan, 10 from Afghanistan, 36 from Somalia, 19 from Yemen, 25 from Iraq, and 26 from Iran.

The FBI worries the border could be the gateway for terrorists who could enter the U.S. without leaving a clue.

'The risk that it poses to the nation is very grave,' said Perkins, 'in that they do not know what they are allowing into the country or even who they are allowing into the country.'

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3.
From Smiling Coffee Vendor to Terror Suspect
By Michael Wilson
The New York Times, September 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/nyregion/26profile.html?hpw

For years, he was a fixture in Lower Manhattan, as regular as the sunrise. Every morning, Najibullah Zazi would be there on Stone Street with his pastries and his coffee, his vending cart anchored to the sidewalk.

For many on Wall Street -- young, old, all in a hurry, the charging bulls of Bowling Green -- his was the first hello of the day. Affable and rooted, he lived for 10 years in the same apartment with his family in Flushing, Queens. His father drove a cab for more than 15 years.

He was, in other words, no brooding outcast, no sheltered, suggestible loner raised in a closed community.

He was the smiling man who remembered a customer liked his coffee large, light and sweet. He had a ''God Bless America'' sign on his cart. He was the doughnut man.

But prosecutors say Mr. Zazi, 24, who worked blocks from ground zero, was just as furtive an operative as the Sept. 11 hijackers when he traveled to Pakistan last year for terrorism training and returned to the United States with a plan to build bombs using beauty supplies and backpacks.

In fact, law enforcement officials, who fret about how to seal the borders of a free society from terrorists, say they find in Mr. Zazi a particularly harrowing challenge: a homegrown operative who travels freely, who is skilled with people, who passed an airport employee background check, who understands the patterns and nuance of American life so well that he gave multiple interviews to journalists for whom access and openness rarely seem like a disguise.

''This is one of the best countries in the world,'' he told a reporter by telephone on Sept. 14 after the F.B.I. had identified him as a terrorism suspect. ''It gives you every single right.''

Mr. Zazi, to date, has merely been charged, not proven guilty. And vast passages of his life remain unexplored, facts and experiences that could help explain his embrace of violence or undercut the government's disturbing portrait of him.

Even if he is proven to be the aspiring terrorist the government asserts, how and why he became one may not be understood for months, if ever. The suspects who have been charged with terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks were fueled by a variety of motivations and influences, and often a mix of them: politics, family, economic deprivation, social alienation, the work of a terrorist recruiter. Religion sometimes provides a general framework and sense of identity, but other factors and events frequently drive the transformation.

For nearly two weeks, though, the story of Mr. Zazi, now one of national interest, has lacked almost any details. A tour of where Mr. Zazi worked and lived, in New York and in Colorado, and interviews with investigators, the Zazi family and friends, provides something of a fuller picture, one filled with the routines of life in Queens but also flecked with hints of his emerging anger, contradictions and puzzles.

Mr. Zazi is both an Afghan immigrant steeped in the traditions of Islam and a kid from the streets of Queens, where his family moved in the early 1990s.

As a teenager, he often carried two things, his basketball and his prayer mat, his friends say. He grew a dark, wiry beard and began wearing tunics several years ago, just as he was applying for his first of two Macy's credit cards.

He was a janitor and a worshiper at a mosque that split several years ago over the question of its members' loyalty to the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks. He was a devoted fan of gadgets who married, by arrangement, his 19-year-old cousin, who lives with their two children in Pakistan.

Last summer, the authorities say, he shopped in Denver for hair supplies to build bombs with. If he did so, he was also engaged in something much more mundane: credit counseling to survive a bankruptcy he had declared in New York.

It is impossible at this moment to know what it all adds up to. But the details that are being learned create the sense of a far more complicated man than the coffee cart vendor many people saw. Certainly the government's charges have painted the outlines of a man Mr. Zazi's family is having a very difficult time reconciling with the Najib they knew.

Habib Rasooli, a businessman in Queens and a relative of Mr. Zazi's, said they had no clue to the terrorist leanings, if they were real.

''If the guy was involved in all this stuff, I say, 'O.K., bring him to justice,' '' Mr. Rasooli said. ''I'd bring him myself.''

Early Life

Mr. Zazi was born on Aug. 10, 1985, in a village in the Paktia region of eastern Afghanistan. He is a middle child with two sisters and two brothers, and his family name is shared by a tribe, one of some 500 in the region.

The family moved to the Peshawar area of Pakistan in 1991 or 1992, when Mr. Zazi was about 7, he has said. The broader area has since been identified as ''ground zero in the U.S. jihadist war,'' according to a federal complaint against Mr. Zazi, and home to many Qaeda operatives.

Mr. Zazi's father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, came to the United States around 1991, relatives said, and began driving a yellow taxi, working 12-hour shifts so he could afford to bring his family over several years later. The family rented a two-bedroom apartment on Parsons Boulevard, near the home of the younger Mr. Zazi's aunt and uncle.

In many ways, Flushing must have seemed like another planet to a teenager raised in tribal villages. But several of the family's neighbors came from the same region, and many prayed together at the Masjid Hazrat Abu Bakr, a large Afghan mosque, which was near their house.

Najib entered Flushing High School, and played billiards with friends and basketball with other Afghan boys in the yard at Public School 214. He loved video games and all things technological, and that grew into a fascination with cellphones and computers, said a friend, Ahmad Zaraei. He played the lottery.

Najib was not a strong student, and he dropped out before graduating, friends said. Mr. Rasooli, the elder Mr. Zazi's step-uncle, said it bluntly: ''He was a dumb kid, believe me,'' but one who was dedicated to making money and helping his father.

Mr. Zaraei said, ''He was basically a left shoulder for his father.''

The younger Mr. Zazi also spent a lot of time at the mosque, even volunteering his time as a janitor there. He turned 16 a month and a day before Sept. 11, 2001. One acquaintance who gave only his first name, Rahul, recalled discussing the attacks three years later and Mr. Zazi saying: ''I don't know how people could do things like this. I'd never do anything like that.''

Life at the mosque was disrupted after the attacks. Worshipers there, a large white structure with a turquoise minaret on 33rd Avenue, became deeply divided. When the imam, Mohammed Sherzad, spoke out against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, pro-Taliban members of the mosque revolted, praying in the basement or the parking lot, and eventually ousted the imam, who opened a smaller mosque nearby.

It is unclear where, in this heated time, the Zazis fell, though the imam said in an interview that he saw several members of the Zazi family, including Najib, praying in the parking lot with those who opposed him.

Friends said that Najib later came to love videos on YouTube that featured Zakir Naik, a physician in India and a prominent speaker on Islam. Dr. Naik has been a controversial figure among Muslims and has been criticized for endorsing polygamy and Islamic criminal law, wherein the hands of a thief are chopped off, calling it ''the most practical.''

To Mr. Zazi, ''he was his inspiration,'' his friend Mr. Zaraei said. ''He just loved him.''

Dr. Naik does not preach violence, and neither did Mr. Zazi, ever, said Farooq Jaji, whose brother married the elder Mr. Zazi's sister. He said that he spoke many times with Mr. Zazi about world affairs and that the young man consistently said he found terrorism to be at odds with the teachings of Islam.

But prayer was important to him, said Sunwoo Sik, who owned a Flushing food market where Mr. Zazi worked for a year or so.

He had just walked in one day after seeing a ''cashier wanted'' sign in the window of Mr. Sik's store, the Norion Super Market.

''He said he didn't want to go to college,'' Mr. Sik said. ''He wanted to make money.'' He often came to work with a basketball, and ate halal meat and spicy rice every day for lunch, pausing each evening for his faith.

''Every day at 5, he'd go down to the basement and pray,'' Mr. Sik said. ''He'd lay out cardboard and pray.''

In 2005, he quit. His father now ran a coffee cart, which his sister and brother-in-law had been operating in Lower Manhattan. Now it was Mr. Zazi's turn. He took a 15-hour course in food handling to get a city license.

Mr. Sik said Mr. Zazi told him he was leaving ''because the coffee cart paid more money.''

The Cart Crew

The vendors gather before dawn in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, stocking their coffee carts with pastries and rolls that they generally buy from the owner of the Guernsey Street garage, from whom they also rent space.

Many of them are Afghan immigrants. Some own their carts. Others lease them. Mr. Zazi was there every morning for years, preparing his father's cart and towing it to the financial district, where he set up shop before the sun rose.

''He was well spoken,'' said John Walters, a customer who works nearby. ''He always said good morning to everyone. He used to memorize what everyone needed in the morning.''

During this period, around 2006, Mr. Zazi flew to Pakistan and took a wife, whom he hoped to later move to New York. He returned in 2007 for another visit, said his lawyer, Arthur Folsom.

Each time, he went back to work with his coffee cart. Over time, Mr. Zazi's appearance shifted, customers noted, to that of a devout Muslim. He grew his beard long, started carrying prayer beads and occasionally wore tunics instead of his Western-style outfits, friends and customers said.

''At first he wasn't that much into religion,'' said his friend Mr. Zaraei. ''That changed.''

At some point, several neighbors and customers said, they felt something change. Mr. Zazi was not as friendly.

A Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker, John Rodes, 53, who bought his coffee from Mr. Zazi, said a co-worker recounted to him that Mr. Zazi had tried to sell her a Koran. ''He did it more than once,'' Mr. Rodes said.

Erika Moran, 26, who works in investor relations, was a regular at his cart until last summer, she said.

''I got in an argument with him one day,'' Ms. Moran said. ''You knew he was very religious, to say the least. He asked if I was happy. I said yes. He told me I could not be happy. He was speaking in general. He said, 'You people cannot be happy, with your money.' ''

The stirrings of a move toward violence, or something much more inconsequential? Either way, money certainly was not making Mr. Zazi happy. He was spending more than he earned, opening new credit cards and not paying his bills.

In April 2008, according to bankruptcy records, he began using a Discover card. May 2008: a Shell card. June 2008: five new credit cards. July 2008: three more, including ones from Sony and Radio Shack. August 2008: two more.

He would later report that his monthly expenses were $1,108, including $450 in rent and $390 for food. His stated income was only $800.

Off to Pakistan

He said he was going to see his wife, as he did every year. On Aug. 28, 2008, Mr. Zazi and some others boarded a plane in Newark and flew through Switzerland and Qatar to Peshawar, according to court records.

The day he left, he had signed his cart over to another vendor to operate. It was a lease, and the Zazi family would receive payments of some kind.

Little is known about his time in Pakistan, except what the authorities say he has admitted: that he was trained in weapons and explosives. Insight into such training camps was gained in July when Bryant Neal Vinas of Long Island described his training in Peshawar to F.B.I. interrogators.

The first course was an introduction to the AK-47 and other guns, followed by a 15-day course in how to make suicide belts. Then rocket-propelled grenades. Then, graduation.

It is not clear precisely when federal authorities first encountered Mr. Zazi or how long they have been tracking his movements. On Jan. 15, after five months away, Mr. Zazi flew back to New York, arriving at Kennedy International Airport.

His financial woes were waiting for him. Five days after his return, he took part in a telephone counseling session with a representative of GreenPath Debt Solutions. He would file for bankruptcy two months later.

Then he abruptly moved to Colorado, where his aunt and uncle lived, in Aurora, a suburb on Denver's prairie-fringed flank, where newcomers find homes new and cheaper than in the city.

''Life is a little bit easier there,'' said Mr. Jaji, his relative. ''The living is cheaper.'' Mr. Jaji said he had spoken to the elder Mr. Zazi about two months ago and was told: ''We are happy. The children are happy.''

Mr. Zazi hit town hungry for work, again drifting toward a job generally filled by immigrants: driving a shuttle van at Denver International Airport. His shuttle carried 15 passengers.

He applied for a limousine license, underwent an airport background check and began driving a van for a company called Big Sky, then for a company called ABC Transportation.

Mr. Zazi quickly drew three tickets for moving violations, but his coffee-cart training paid off: drivers competing with him for passengers said he was friendly and hard-working as he jockeyed to fill his van. ''He talked to everyone,'' said Rachid Zouhair, who worked with him.

In March, Mr. Zazi filed for bankruptcy. He said on the application that he was unmarried and listed $51,000 in debts.

Several months later, his uncle said he kicked him out of their house, amid tiny stick trees on East Ontario Drive, for not paying rent. Mr. Zazi moved to an apartment complex two miles away, where his parents would join him at the end of July.

Federal agents, who have tracked Mr. Zazi for weeks, perhaps longer, provided their version of how he spent some of that time in their court filings. The work with bomb materials would not take place at Mr. Zazi's home, according to federal investigators, but in a hotel suite he rented in Aurora. They say chemical residue they found in the kitchen there indicates he tried to heat up the beauty supplies to help convert them into a bomb.

He had bought some bomb ingredients in beauty supply stores, the authorities said, after viewing instructions on his laptop on how to build such a bomb. When an employee of the Beauty Supply Warehouse asked about the volume of materials he was buying, he remembered Mr. Zazi answering, ''I have a lot of girlfriends.''

As he was completing his purchases, he was also completing his credit counseling, a requirement to have his bankruptcy discharged. A counselor signed the certificate for GreenPath on Aug. 13. Four days later, the bankruptcy case was closed.

He would return to the Aurora hotel on Sept. 6, apparently frantic for advice on how to complete the bomb-building, investigators contend. Then he rented a car from Hertz on Sept. 8. The next day, he packed his laptop into the car and started the ignition.

F.B.I. agents were watching. New York was 1,800 miles away. He drove through the night, arriving on Sept 10. Investigators say he may have hoped to set off bombs here. But he flew home on Sept. 12, perhaps alarmed to learn that the authorities were tracking his movements.

Mr. Zazi explained his trip to New York differently, telling reporters he had come back to clear up issues regarding his coffee cart.

He was certainly there, at the cart, on the morning of Sept. 11, eight blocks from the hole that had once been the World Trade Center. Old customers saw him. ''He was standing behind his friend,'' said Imran Khan, a transportation authority worker.

Mr. Zazi was joking and laughing, they said, the doughnut man once more.

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4.
Alleged skyscraper plot highlights problems of keeping tabs on immigrants
By Todd J. Gillman
The Dallas Morning News, September 27, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/DN-terrorsecure_27nat.ART.State.Edition2.4c67535.html

Washington, DC -- The tension between security and civil liberties, between surveillance and privacy, has simmered for eight years. The plot exposed last week in Dallas by the FBI – a Jordanian teenager allegedly hoping to level a skyscraper – provides the latest fuel.

Initially, the disturbing image of Hosam Maher Husein Smadi allegedly trying to leave a scar in Dallas' skyline vindicates the post-Sept. 11 push for a more robust national security apparatus, particularly with FBI officials exposing plots to attack targets in New York and Illinois on the same day they arrested Smadi.

'It's going to give the Cheney crowd some bragging rights,' said one liberal-leaning national security expert, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, referring to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

For all the early rhetoric about reversing Bush-era policies, the Obama administration has embraced many post-Sept. 11 techniques. The latest rash of allegations of jihad-inspired schemes can only reinforce that trend, national security and legal scholars say.

Obama ended abusive interrogations. But he angered his liberal base by refusing to walk away from other policies, including the placing of wiretaps on foreign suspects without warrants.

'Obama came into office at a point where people thought the Bush administration had gone too far on the curtailment of civil liberties and had basically created a national security state,' Clemons said, but support for a more robust approach persists.

'There's no doubt that during a high-fear time, American citizens become more gripped up and become more in favor of these really intrusive measures.'

The White House is struggling with one issue in particular: the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During the campaign and into the early days of his presidency, Obama vowed to close it. But last week, aides conceded that a January deadline can't be met. And Obama now wants to keep 50 or 60 detainees indefinitely. Such a policy can't be what Obama voters expected.

Patriot Act

And the administration has largely brushed off pressure from civil libertarians to overhaul the Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 law that created broad new investigative powers. Obama wants Congress to renew certain provisions that were set to expire later this year.

Among those: authority to conduct 'roving' wiretaps that follow a suspect and not just a specific phone or computer and to dig through business, medical and library records without a court-issued subpoena, by issuing a so-called National Security Letter. The Justice Department's inspector general has documented numerous instances in which use of the tactic hasn't been properly disclosed. Critics say that shows the tool is ripe for abuse.

The debate in coming months will be contentious.

Matt Mayer, a top aide in the Bush Homeland Security Department now with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he's concerned that it takes a rash of foiled attacks against Dallas and other cities to keep America vigilant.

'We risk putting our guard down to a pre-9/11 mentality,' he said. 'The pendulum always swings in this civil liberties-and-security debate. After an attack, the pendulum naturally swings toward security. The question always is how far back it goes.'

Immigration questions

Many questions remain about Smadi, especially regarding his immigration status. The FBI says Smadi was in the country illegally, though details remain fuzzy.

That revelation has prompted anger over immigration policies. Members of Congress expressed dismay, and if Washington manages to turn from health care to immigration any time soon, the case will shape that conversation.

'Hopefully his arrest will reignite the debate for real illegal-immigration reform, especially cracking down on those who overstay their welcome,' said U.S. Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Plano.

Smadi's father, an engineer in Aljoun, Jordan, told reporters his son and a younger brother, Hussein, 18, went to the U.S. on legitimate student visas in 2007 after their mother died of cancer.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials won't disclose any details from the files. ICE agents detained Smadi's brother Thursday in California, and placed him in a federal detention center in San Jose.

Smadi had a U.S. alien registration number, which supports his father's assertion that he arrived legally. Schools are required to report the comings and goings of foreign students to an immigration-agency database called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.

Did he ever enroll in school? Was there ever a red flag in his file and if so, did ICE follow up? The FBI says it identified Smadi as a suspect by monitoring extremist Web sites, not through an immigration-related inquiry.

Lawmakers are likely to demand answers.

'This is one that seems to have fallen through the cracks,' said Susan Ginsburg, director of the mobility and security program at the Migration Policy Institute, who was senior counsel to the federal commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks and an adviser to the Homeland Security Department.

Roughly 40 percent of those classified as illegal immigrants arrived on a tourist or student visa, or with other permission. The Government Accountability Office has highlighted the Department of Homeland Security's struggle to confirm whether visitors leave on time.

'The system, under normal circumstances, is not set up to identify overstays,' said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who leads the House Homeland Security Committee. 'Given this obvious vulnerability, you will see it getting some additional attention from Congress.'

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, said the Smadi case shows the urgent need for a comprehensive overhaul of immigration policy that includes improved monitoring of foreigners who could pose a threat.

'We are not always fortunate enough to have controlled investigations like this one,' he said. 'As long as we have nine or 12 million people creating a shadow world within our country, it makes it that much more difficult for our law enforcement people to focus on the bad guys.'

The FBI portrays Smadi as a lone wolf – an al-Qaeda wannabe with no apparent training or connection to any terrorist network, eager to produce mass casualties but lacking the skills.

For investigators, that's a mixed bag. The smaller the conspiracy, the less chance for slips. Authorities sift through credit card transactions, money transfers, e-mails and phone records, hoping to detect and disrupt a plot.

Plots targeting military bases and train stations from Georgia to the Bronx have been disrupted in recent years, as the FBI shifted from a post-incident response (gather intelligence, track down bad guys after an attack) to a proactive response (identify potential bad guys, infiltrate and disrupt).

'As much as people want to think they're out there snooping on everybody, they're not,' said Janice Kephart, another 9/11 commission counsel and now director of national security policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tougher enforcement. 'They've found the balance they didn't have before. ... We wouldn't have seen these types of arrests prior to 9/11.'

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Texas bomb plot suspect appears in court
By Anabelle Garay
The Associated Press, September 25, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D9AUFCHO2.html

Dallas (AP) -- A 19-year-old Jordanian national accused of plotting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper has made his first court appearance.

Hosam Maher Husein Smadi mostly looked down as he was led into the courtroom in handcuffs Friday. Smadi was arrested Thursday after officials said he placed what he believed to be a car bomb in a parking garage beneath a 60-story tower.

Asked whether he understood his rights, Smadi softly answered, 'Yes.' Smadi waived his right to an immigration hearing and will remain in jail. He is charged with trying to detonate a weapon of mass destruction and face up to life in prison if convicted.

He was appointed a public attorney and an Arabic translator, and a probable cause hearing was set for Oct. 5.

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5.
Officials push swine-flu shots for migrants
By Erin Kelly
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix), September 26, 2009
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2009/09/26/20090926flu-immig0926.html

Washington, DC -- With swine-flu vaccinations set to begin next month, public-health officials are mobilizing to ensure that the nation's estimated 11 million-plus illegal immigrants are vaccinated.

And unlike the divisive debate over whether illegal immigrants should get federal health care, there is little dispute that they should receive the H1N1 shots.

'We believe it's important that all people be vaccinated regardless of immigration status if there's a pressing public-health concern,' said Jon Feere, legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants and wants to reduce immigration.

Leaving up to 12 million immigrants unvaccinated - an estimated 500,000 in Arizona - would increase the health risk to everyone and make it much harder to control the epidemic, said Dr. Kevin Fiscella, associate professor of family medicine and community and preventive medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York.

'We're all in this together,' he said.

About 800,000 to 1 million doses of the vaccine should arrive in Arizona next month, but not everyone will be able to get a shot right away. Priority will go to infants and young children, kids with chronic health infections and pregnant women, followed by school-age kids and adults who care for newborns or have chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes.

Most of the general public will likely have to wait until at least December for their immunizations.

Experts say state and local governments will have to overcome major barriers to persuade illegal immigrants to trust pub- lic health departments enough to come forward then and get themselves and their children vaccinated.

'For an undocumented immigrant who lives in daily fear of being deported, contact with any quasi-governmental agen- cy, even a public-health department, induces anxiety,' Fiscella said. 'People worry, 'Are they going to ask me for my Social Security number?' '

Federal health officials are trying to quiet those fears with assurances that no one will be asked to prove their immigration status to get a vaccine at any public-health clinic or mass-vaccination site.

'Whether you're legal or illegal, the flu virus doesn't discriminate, and neither do we,' said Arleen Porcell, spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To get that message out, Porcell said, the CDC is holding briefings with Hispanic media, buying ads in Spanish-language magazines and newspapers, and working with non-profit community and religious groups that provide aid to immigrants on a regular basis.

In Maricopa County, public-health officials have been working with local Univision and Telemundo TV stations and the Radio Campesina Network to reach Spanish-speaking residents.

The county has created special public-service announcements and done frequent interviews to educate people about the H1N1 virus, said Jhoana Molina, coordinator of the hard-to-reach populations program at the Maricopa County Department of Public Health.

Working with Univision, the department has even set up phone banks that Spanish-speaking residents can call to talk to nurses and other health personnel to get information about virus prevention, Molina said. She said similar efforts will be made to get the word out about vaccination-clinic locations once the vaccine arrives in Arizona in October.

'We don't focus on who is and isn't undocumented,' Molina said. 'We try to get the word out to everyone.'

Although some children of illegal immigrants may get vaccinated at school, many will not, heath officials said. Vaccination plans vary from state to state and school to school.

In Arizona, state health officials are working with school nurses to prepare for mass-vaccination clinics at some public schools, according to a report posted on the Web site of the Arizona Department of Health Services.

Still, in many cases, children and their parents will have to go elsewhere. Most of those families will not be able to afford the $20 to $30 fee that drugstores typically charge at their mass-vaccination clinics, said Dr. Daniel Blumenthal, associate dean for community health at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the federal government is urging clinics not to charge patients, whether undocumented or not.

The vaccine itself is provided free by the federal government, but some clinics or retail stores are charging a fee to cover administrative costs.

'We've asked the providers to strongly consider not charging fees so there will be no financial barriers to vaccination,' Sebelius said in a conference call with regional reporters. 'We can't make that mandatory, but a lot of voluntary agreements have been made.'

While public-health officials are working to reach as many people as possible inside the United States, customs officials and Border Patrol agents are on the lookout for people entering the country who appear to be sick.

People with symptoms such as coughing, sneezing and red eyes are taken aside to be checked by health officials to see if they need medical treatment or can be sent on their way, said Kelly Ivahnenko, spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

'We're obviously not going to deny entry to citizens or lawful travelers, but we're being vigilant for signs that they need medical help,' she said.

But spotting someone with swine flu is not always easy, Ivahnenko said.

'The challenge with H1N1 is that you can be infected and not show symptoms for a couple of days,' she said. 'And, by then, they're already moving around the country.'

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6.
Latinos bank on bilingual census form to aid count
By Amy Taxin
The Associated Press, September 28, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j1KGzyYDk5jw-QPOruzHyQ6dQ0tQD9B078D03

Long Beach, CA (AP) -- When Teresa Ocampo opens her census questionnaire, she won't have to worry about navigating another document in English.

The 40-year old housewife who only speaks basic English will be able to fill hers out in Spanish which is exactly what U.S. officials were banking on when they decided to mail out millions of bilingual questionnaires next year.

For the first time, the decennial census will be distributed in the two languages to 13.5 million households in predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. Latino advocates hope the forms will lead to a more accurate count by winning over the trust of immigrants who are often wary of government and may be even more fearful after the recent surge in immigration raids and deportations.

'If the government is reaching out to you in a language you understand, it helps build trust,' said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. 'I think the community has become really sensitive to political developments, and the census is the next step in this movement that we're seeing of civic engagement in the Latino community.'

Traditionally, experts say, the Census Bureau has undercounted minority and immigrant communities, who are harder to reach because of language barriers and distrust of government.

Latino advocates hope the bilingual forms will help show their strength in numbers to underscore their growing political influence and garner more in federal funds that are determined by population.

Census officials say they designed the bilingual forms after extensive research, using the Canadian census questionnaire as an example. Over a six-year testing period, officials said the forms drew a better response in Spanish-speaking areas.

The bilingual forms will be mailed out to neighborhoods where at least a fifth of households report speaking primarily Spanish and little English, said Adrienne Oneto, assistant division chief for content and outreach at the Census Bureau in Washington. The cost of preparing and mailing the bilingual questionnaires is about $26 million, which is more than it would have cost to send only English forms.

More than a quarter of the forms will be distributed in California from Fresno to the Mexican border, with Los Angeles County topping the list. The Miami and Houston areas will also receive sizable numbers of the questionnaires.

Automatic mailing of the bilingual forms debuts in 2010. In addition to Spanish, census forms will be made available in Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Russian upon request. That's similar to the 2000 census, when participants could request questionnaires in several languages.

But none of those other languages compares to the proliferation of Spanish. Roughly 34 million people reported speaking Spanish at home in the United States in 2007, more than all the other languages combined except English. Eighty percent of the U.S. population reported speaking only English at home.

The question is whether the bilingual forms will help overcome immigrant fears of federal authorities after seeing friends and family swept up in immigration raids over the last few years.

'It is a difficult time for immigrants and I could see where there might be concern where being counted might lead to future negative consequences,' said Clara E. Rodriguez, professor of sociology at Fordham University in New York.

There are also concerns that the recession has dried up funding used to encourage people to fill out their census forms.

California, for example, pumped $24.7 million in 2000 into efforts to boost the state's count but has only $2 million budgeted for the upcoming year, said Ditas Katague, the state's 2010 census director.

The Census Bureau has worked with Spanish-language TV giant Telemundo to help get the word out. The network's telenovela 'Mas Sabe el Diablo' (The Devil Knows Best) will feature a character who applies to be a census worker.

Adding to the challenge of getting more people to participate is a boycott of the census called by Latino Christian leaders. They want illegal immigrants to abstain from filling out the forms to pressure communities that depend on their numbers to support immigration reform.

Census officials say they don't expect a backlash from English speakers because those likely to receive bilingual forms are used to hearing the two languages side by side.

Rob Toonkel, a spokesman for the pro-English advocacy group U.S. English, said he supports census outreach in a myriad of languages but worries that sending bilingual questionnaires only in Spanish might rub some immigrants the wrong way.

'When you start saying, well, this is our preferred immigrant group whatever group that may be it sends a very dangerous message,' Toonkel said. 'It would be the same thing if they started sending (it) to New Hampshire in French or Detroit in Arabic.'

Joe Kasper, a spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said the forms should be sent only in English to encourage people to learn the language.

'Taxpayers should not have to carry the additional expense of providing bilingual questionnaires,' Kasper said.

But many say the bilingual forms make practical sense especially since youngsters may speak English even if their parents prefer Spanish.

In Ocampo's neighborhood in central Long Beach, Mexican immigrants live in a dense stretch of bungalows and two-story apartment buildings alongside African-Americans, Asians and whites. Children playing in the street call out to each other in English, then respond to their parents in flawless Spanish.

That's how Ocampo, who is originally from Mexico, said she would have filled out the English census questionnaire if she had to.

'For me, it's much better in Spanish because I don't know English, not enough to fill out a long form,' said Ocampo, whose teenage children are bilingual. 'If they send it in English or Spanish, either way I'll do it, because my kids speak English.'

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7.
Boeing's 'virtual fence' on Mexican border is full of holes, critics say
After 3 years and $500 million, Boeing getting a chance to fix glitchy border system
By Oscar Avila
The Chicago Tribune, September 27, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-sun-boeing-border-tech-0927sep27,0,2613588.story

Along the boundary between Arizona and Mexico recently, Border Patrol agent Michael Scioli weaved his SUV through unforgiving rock formations and hills of desert brush. Illegal immigrants covertly were crossing the border nearby, but Scioli's agency doesn't always have the manpower to know exactly where.

Scioli then passed a 98-foot-tall tower fitted with cameras, a high-tech extra set of eyes that he and other agents presumably would welcome. 'Don't have much to say about that,' the agent said tersely.

The tower is part of a network of cameras and sensors rolled out with great fanfare by Chicago-based Boeing Co. three years ago but now is largely disowned by Border Patrol agents and lambasted by lawmakers and government watchdogs.

The so-called virtual fence, which has received $500 million from the Department of Homeland Security, should have been fully in place already in southern Arizona. Instead, the department scrapped the first attempt, which cost Boeing at least $40 million in overruns.

Now, Boeing is trying to revive the troubled project after the U.S. government gave the company a second chance this month.

Homeland Security officials say technology is a necessary tool to track not only illegal immigrants but also violent Mexican drug smugglers and even potential terrorist threats.

Boeing has declined interview requests about its work on the project. But at a hearing this month, the company tried to reassure skeptical lawmakers of progress in fixing glitches.

'I am amazed that we have spent [this much] and don't have a system that works,' Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, told Boeing and government representatives at the hearing. 'America is screaming for the right kind of security.'

The U.S. government has spent $3.7 billion on border improvements, including fencing and additional personnel, since fiscal 2005.

The government has more than doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, to about 20,000, and built about 600 miles of fencing along the southern border since 2006. But Homeland Security officials say technology is vital -- one leg of a three-legged stool, they call it -- because of the harsh terrain.

Boeing won a contract in 2006 for the Secure Border Initiative and so far has received more than $500 million to implement a network of cameras, sensors and radar that has been plagued by glitches, according to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Flash rainstorms would trip the radar accidentally. Satellite communications -- initially thought to be more efficient in terrain where cell towers are sparse -- took too long to transmit instructions from cameras to control centers to agents in the field. By the time the agents reached locations minutes later where the cameras had registered a hit, the illegal immigrants had moved on.

A prototype with a name out of science fiction, Project 28, went over budget and Boeing had to kick in at least $40 million beyond what the government paid the company.

With Boeing's three-year technology contract set to expire in September amid few results, the Department of Homeland Security went back to the drawing board. To the surprise of some lawmakers, the government this month exercised a one-year contract option with Boeing.

Mark Borkowski, the Homeland Security official who directs the Secure Border Initiative, said that 'the milk is spilled' and that it would have been too difficult and costly to start over with a new firm. He said the government would not have renewed the contract if it thought Boeing was 'hopeless.'

'Saying it isn't hopeless isn't exactly high praise. It is more than that,' Borkowski said in a telephone interview. 'Boeing hasn't necessarily distinguished itself, but they are improving. They are on an upward trend.'

The network of cameras and sensors was scheduled to be fully operational by this year. Now, the government's new projection for full operation has been pushed back to 2016.

Timothy Peters, Boeing's vice president for global security systems, told lawmakers this month that the company is working to resolve issues in the lab so the network will be 'robust and reliable.'

Lawmakers remained skeptical. 'We want to believe you, but in the context of the past, it's going to be tough,' Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Pa., told project representatives.

Borkowski said the government deserves part of the blame for approving an overly ambitious project without sufficient testing. The government mistakenly thought it could use technology available 'off the shelf' instead of developing new systems, he said.

He said the government has simplified the project, removing in-vehicle monitors that didn't work well. The project also has switched from satellite to microwave communication signals. The goal is to give agents a system that merges data from ground sensors, video cameras and radar.

The government already has installed 17 towers to watch over a 23-mile stretch south of Tucson, Ariz. The project managers are finishing a new round of testing and plan to turn the network over to the Border Patrol in January.

Borkowski said the future of the project depends on that field testing. Some lawmakers complain that the government has lowered expectations too much: The new system has to detect only seven of 10 incursions to be considered acceptable.

Even though the Bush administration initiated the virtual fence, the new version of the project has political ramifications for the current administration. President Barack Obama wants to offer a path to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants in the country, but supporters say there will be little political will if the U.S. has not succeeded in securing its borders.

T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents about 17,000 agents, said he worries that this political pressure has jammed through a system that is ineffective at an astronomical cost.

'The electorate is saying they want the border secured, so [the government] is moving forward regardless of the warning flags,' Bonner said. 'That generally translates into a recipe for fraud, waste and abuse. It's a question of value for the taxpayer's dollar. It's not an endless trough.'

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8.
Feds: No plans for fewer SW border agents
By Brady McCombs
The Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), September 26, 2009
http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/310657

There'll be no decrease in the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents on the Southwest border when the new fiscal year starts next week, but the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that it is trying to add agents along the border with Canada.

Homeland Security hopes to increase the number of agents on the nearly 4,000 miles of U.S.-Canada border in the coming years but will not sacrifice security along the Southwest border with Mexico to get there, said Matt Chandler, acting deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security.

'Our duty is to execute the mission at both borders,' Chandler said. 'It's important to national security at both borders.'

The number of agents on the Southwest border - 17,415 currently - will not decrease even as the agency continues to add agents to the northern border, Chandler said.

Several media outlets reported that 384 agents would be moved to the border with Canada at the beginning of fiscal year 2010, which starts Thursday. But Chandler said those reports are inaccurate and don't reflect the most current information.

Chandler said the report comes from a budgetary document that didn't take into account recent deployments to the Southwest border.

There are currently 1,881 Border Patrol agents on the northern border. Homeland Security has set a goal of having 2,212 by theof fiscal year 2010, Chandler said.

The Border Patrol's ranks have increased exponentially in recent years, from about 12,000 agents in 2006 to about 19,000 in 2009, a Government Accountability Office report shows.

The U.S.-Canadian border is the longest undefended border in the world, according to a 2008 GAO report. Recommendations from the 9/ 11 Act of 2007 required that the secretary of homeland security submit a report to Congress to address the vulnerabilities along the northern border.

That report, delivered to Congress in February 2008, did not fully meet legislative requirements, the GAO report shows. While the report identified vulnerabilities and initiatives to address them, it did not include the resources needed.

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9.
Colombian leader holds town hall meeting in East Boston
By Maria Sacchetti
The Boston Globe, September 27, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/27/colombian_president_uribe_holds_town_hall_meeting_at_east_boston_high/

They arrived before dawn for a glimpse of him, traveling from Maynard, Boston, and even Connecticut. A white-haired man held a sign in Spanish saying ``four more years.'' Another man, wrapped in a flag, grew teary-eyed at the mention of his name.

Hundreds of Colombians poured into East Boston High School's auditorium early yesterday morning to greet President ¡lvaro Uribe, who has achieved folk hero status in this immigrant enclave for reducing violent crime in the South American nation, and for taking a hard line against drug trafficking and terrorism.

Dressed in a blue-striped shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, the graying leader hardly cut a dramatic figure as he stopped in Boston last week on an official visit to the United States. But the sight of him inspired Colombians to climb onto the wooden seats to snap photographs and chant his name.

``I don't have the words to describe the feeling,'' said Rubiel PatiÒo, a 50-year-old painter who lives in Maynard and traveled to Boston to see Uribe, wrapped in the Colombian flag. ``The emotion is huge.''

But Uribe's conservative administration has also faced harsh criticism for alleged human rights abuses. In June, the group Human Rights Watch said Uribe was largely failing to address allegations of abuses and killings of civilians and trade unionists. Uribe is also facing criticism for possibly seeking a third term, which would require a change to the constitution.

Uribe, through a spokeswoman, declined two requests for an interview during his trip to Massachusetts last week. He spoke at Harvard on Friday and then yesterday, to 500 Colombians and others at East Boston High.

Yesterday marked the South American nation's first town hall meeting in Massachusetts, which is home to at least 14,000 Colombians, according to the census.

Uribe spoke for more than an hour to a diverse group of immigrants - business owners, retirees, cooks, and housekeepers - holding forth on a wide range of topics, sometimes waving a pen in his hand or consulting a laptop on a nearby table.

He listed some of his administration's achievements: Kidnappings and murders have plunged, health care is more widespread, and so is education. But he acknowledged that unemployment is high, the country has been at war for 45 years, and people still leave to work in the United States to send money home.

``What I've come to tell you isn't new,'' he said from the stage, adorned with flowers and US and Colombian flags. ``The basic idea is for Colombia to be a country you can trust, trust at home and abroad.''

Despite the improvements, Colombia's murder rates are still much higher than in the United States.

Last year Colombia logged 15,251 homicides, almost half the number in 2002, but more than six times higher than the US rate.

Human rights groups continue to complain that Uribe is too dismissive of alleged abuses. Human Rights Watch said Colombia has the highest murder rate of trade unionists in the world, and the group also complained about the killings of civilians allegedly by the armed forces.

Outside the auditorium, two dozen protesters held signs such as ``No more lies,'' and ``No more death squads.''

``He has militarized the country,'' said Estela PÈrez, holding a sign outside the school. ``We don't want him to be reelected.''

Inside the auditorium, immigrants said they visit home regularly and feel safe enough to travel by land, something that was unthinkable a decade ago when kidnappings were widespread.

``He's the best president Colombia has ever had,'' said a beaming Gloria CastrillÛn, 54 and the mother of a Boston police officer who is originally from Antioquia Province, the home of most Colombian immigrants in Boston.

``He's restored democracy,'' said Alvaro Ramirez, a 52-year-old cook. ``He's given us our country back.''

One man in the auditorium criticized the army. The crowd shouted him down, but Uribe let him finish.

Still, Uribe defended the army. He said Colombia had a choice: Be protected by the army and the police, or be at the mercy of leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.

As Uribe left, a man shouted, ``God bless you!''

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10.
For Mexicans seeking to cross the US border, it's not just about jobs anymore
By Sara Miller Llana
The Christian Science Monitor, September 25, 2009
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0925/p06s13-woam.html

Mexico City -- New data about Mexican immigration to the United States find that the evaporation of jobs during the US recession has done little to dissuade millions of Mexicans from wanting to move across the border amid growing signs that many Mexicans are motivated to leave home not by the lure of higher wages but by fears for their safety.

To be sure, economic opportunity is still the main driver behind Mexican immigration. That's meant the overall number of Mexican's in the US has shrunk slightly in the past year as construction came to a standstill and suburbanites put their gardens at the bottom of their priority lists.

But an expected wave of reverse migration, in which unemployed Mexicans would stream back home to their cities and villages, has been more like a trickle. New US census data shows only a slight decline in the US foreign-born population in 2008. And a new study by the Pew Research Center shows that one in three Mexicans - about 35 million people - would head to 'el norte' if they could.

On top of the traditional economic reasons, a growing number of Mexicans feel unsafe in their own country, particularly wealthier citizens who are targets of kidnap gangs and other forms of crime.

Surveys have shown over the past decade that the main motivation for immigration by Latino populations is overwhelmingly economic, followed by family reunification. But the violence raging across the country, where more than 13,000 have been killed in drug-related violence since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and dispatched the military to fight drug gangs, is also pushing people across the border.

'There is no question that it is happening ... and it is extensive compared to what happened in the past,' says Josiah Heyman, a border expert at the University of Texas at El Paso. At least along the border, many of those moving out of security concerns are from the upper and middle classes, Mr. Heyman says. 'It is not that insecurity doesn't affect poor Mexicans in the countryside. But people who can pick up and leave the country in response to crime are people who have money.'

Drug crimes

Mexico's Attorney General's office says that 90 percent of victims in drug-related homicides are criminals themselves. But President Calderon's tough stance has pushed gangs desperate for income into other criminal areas, such as kidnapping and extortion - the kinds of activities that have an impact on the average citizen.

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's most violent city and just across the border from El Paso, Texas, residents told the Monitor in December that they, or their friends and colleagues, were increasingly getting threats via phone or were forced to 'pay' for their safety. They said many small business owners had simply left for the US.

More Mexicans say country is in bad shape

'Our survey clearly shows that Mexicans are pretty unhappy with direction of their country,' says Richard Wike, the associate director of the Global Attitudes Project that carried out the Pew study.

Their number one concern? Crime. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed say it is a 'very big' problem, followed by economic issues (75 percent) and illegal drugs (73 percent). Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed, in face-to-face interviews that took place in late May and early June, say the country is on the wrong track - up ten percentage points from the year before - and 69 percent say the economy is in bad shape.

The Pew survey did not ask Mexicans to rank the reasons for their desire to emigrate, but it was conducted as the economic situation in the US has put a strain on immigrants, leading to a drop in remittances. US census data, released Monday, reports a dip in the overall foreign-born population, from 12.6 percent of the population in 2007 at just over 38 million to 12.5 percent last year, when it stood at just under 38 million. Four of ten Pew respondents also said they know someone who left for the US but returned because they couldn't find a job.

Brazilian immigrants were the second-fastest growing illegal population in the US - until the recession hit, and many turned around. Read about how that has affected one US community here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Pew survey can be found online at: http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/266.pdf

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11.
Residents' Ratings of Prince William Rise
Survey Finds Improved Views of County Services Despite Cuts and Controversies
By Jennifer Buske
The Washington Post, September 27, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092600006.html?wprss=rss_metro/va

The Prince William Board of County Supervisors got a bit of good news last week: Residents like what the county is doing.

Despite the national recession and the county's controversial immigration policy, budget cuts and recent embezzlement scandal in the information technology office, almost 91 percent of Prince William residents are satisfied, overall, with county services, according to a study conducted by the University of Virginia's Center for Survey Research.

'This county has faced some very serious challenges in the last several years,' said Thomas M. Guterbock, the center's director. And 'it's tough to maintain a high level of satisfaction with services in a time of serious budget shortfalls. Prince William has managed to pull it off.'

On Tuesday, Guterbock briefed the board on the results of the 17th annual citizen satisfaction survey. The nearly $100,000 study was conducted in May and June and reached 1,746 randomly selected county residents 18 and older. Although there is room for improvement, survey results show higher satisfaction with the direction of the county.

'Thanks for the great news,' board Chairman Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large) said at Tuesday's meeting. 'This is one of those occasions where you can't say you are going to shoot the messenger because you actually delivered us a good message.'

Satisfaction with the quality of life in Prince William is the highest it has been in four years, with residents rating it at 7.3 on a 10-point scale. General satisfaction with the job the county is doing in giving residents value for their tax dollars is also up, from 74.8 percent in 2008 to 80.8 percent in 2009.

Police also scored better in this year's survey. After the board adopted an illegal immigration policy in 2007 and modified it last year, the police department's scores dropped among the county's Hispanic residents.

Last year, 72.8 percent of Hispanics were satisfied with the police department overall. That number increased to 85.5 percent this year. Among all residents, satisfaction with the department rose from 89 percent last year to 92.5 percent this year.

When looking at enforcement of the immigration policy, 85.5 percent of Prince William residents were satisfied with police efforts, up from 80.5 percent last year.

'I'm very pleased with the results,' Police Chief Charlie T. Deane said. 'I suspect some of the improved perception of what we are doing has had to do with people seeing the reality versus the rhetoric. We try to be fair, lawful and responsible. . . . I'm proud our officers are being received in a better light than when this was initially started.'

Guterbock said the police department's community outreach on the immigration policy might have helped drive the numbers back up. Another possibility, he said, is that people who were highly dissatisfied have left the county.

The illegal immigration policy could have also affected residents' trust in government, which dipped to 58.4 percent last year but rebounded to about 63 percent this year.

Although showing improvement, the three issues politicians most often promise to address -- transportation, growth and economic development -- remain among the bottom five in resident satisfaction.

About 55 percent of survey participants, up almost 10 percentage point from 2007, are satisfied with the county's transportation network, with residents speaking more favorably about transportation on the western end of the county.

'The transportation issue is typical for Northern Virginia but not for the state as a whole,' Guterbock said. 'Northern Virginia stands out with congestion problems.'

Residents were only 40.8 percent satisfied with travel options in Northern Virginia outside Prince William. Stewart said Prince William scores a little better than its neighbors because it is the only county to build its own roads. Although some projects are stalled because of the economy, residents on the western end have watched numerous projects come to fruition, including the widening of Linton Hall Road and Route 28.

Survey results show that 70.5 percent of residents are satisfied with growth, up more than 26 percentage points from 2007. Satisfaction with the county's efforts to attract jobs, however, is at 73 percent, the lowest it has been since 2004.

'You get this contradiction in every county: People want more jobs, but they don't want an increase in population,' Guterbock said, adding that residents were dissatisfied with growth before because it was too rapid. 'The county is no different than other' jurisdictions.

County officials say they have made changes over the past few years to become more business friendly. For instance, officials revamped the permitting and inspection process, making it easier for people to open a business. The county is also seeking to bring office space and high-paying jobs to the community, officials said.

Although last year Stewart questioned the need to do the survey annually because of the cost, among other reasons, he said Wednesday that it has great value to the board and county staff members, which use it to gauge performance standards.

Guterbock said the county is unusual in that it puts resources and time into such a survey.

'Obviously we are very proud of this and the results,' Stewart said. 'The board and county government staff should be particularly proud that we have been able to achieve such a high level of satisfaction when times are so tough.'

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12.
U.S. citizenship may be required to do business in city
By Georgia Pabst
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI), September 25, 2009
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/61599782.html

Those who want to do business in Milwaukee may first have to prove that they are U.S. citizens, under a proposal that will have a hearing next week.

According to the proposed ordinance, all applicants for a new or renewed professional or commercial license or permit to do business in the city of Milwaukee would be required to show proof of U.S. citizenship or documentation of their legal status and ability to work in this country.

The Common Council's licensing committee has scheduled a hearing on the measure for 8 a.m. Tuesday in Room 301B of City Hall.

The ordinance has been introduced to ensure compliance with the United States Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which prohibits state and local governments from giving public benefits, including professional and commercial licenses and permits, to those who are not citizens or do not have legal status to work here, City Clerk Ron Leonhardt.

The new measure also would be in line with U.S. Department of Homeland Security requirements, he said.

If the ordinance passes, the city's license division will reject any new or renewal applications if the required documentation is not provided, he said.

An appeal process also is outlined in the measure if an applicant is rejected.

'The ordinance is an attempt to comply with federal laws, and it's not the intention to target any ethnic group,' Leonhardt said. A variety of community-based organizations and others, such as the Wisconsin Restaurant Association and the taxi cab companies, were advised of the proposed ordinance, he said.

'With such a bad economy, this is not a time to try to put any more obstacles in the way of people, particularly the undocumented,' said Tony Baez, president and CEO of the Council for the Spanish Speaking. 'It's punitive. And it's also not the time when the country as a whole is trying to engage in comprehensive immigration reform,' he added.

The proposed ordinance was drafted, Leonhardt said, after City Attorney Grant Langley advised that the federal law applies to the issuance of licenses and permits. Langley also received a communication from Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who suggested such a measure.

In October 2007, Van Hollen advised state Department of Regulation and Licensing Secretary Celia Jackson that the federal measures for citizenship verification applied to that department because it's prohibited from issuing professional licenses or credentials to illegal immigrants.

In a lengthy letter, Van Hollen wrote that ' . . . although state law does not require DRL to verify the qualifications of an applicant for a professional license or credential, it does not prohibit DRL from verifying these qualifications.'

'However, I recommend that DRL verify the immigration status of all applicants for state professional licenses and credentials to be certain that it is not issuing them in violation of federal law,' he wrote.

As of Aug. 1, 2008, the Department of Regulation and Licensing requires those applying for a new or renewed license or permit to sign a 'certification of legal status,' which meets the 'spirit of the requirement,' said David Carlson, a spokesman for the department. He noted there are more than 350,000 license holders in the state.

In 2007, the City of Green Bay passed a controversial ordinance barring businesses that get city licenses, contracts or grants from hiring illegal immigrants.

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13.
Oft-delayed ICE office now slated for mid-January
By Chris Casey
The Greeley Tribune (CO), September 27, 2009
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20090927/NEWS/909279975/1005/NONE&parentprofile=1001

The long-delayed opening of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office in west Greeley is now slated for mid-January.

The office, which will house several ICE agents and serve as an investigations field site, was originally scheduled to open in fall 2008. Various construction and funding issues disrupted work on the 11,000-square-foot, one-story office at 4645 18th St.

After federal funding hit a snag early in the year, the U.S. General Services Administration, which supervises the construction of the office, put a hold on work in late spring. At that time, GSA officials estimated the office would come on line by early fall.

Sally Mayberry, spokeswoman of the GSA's regional office in Denver, said Friday that two more items had to be worked into the current schedule.

'There were some steel issues that were recognized during demolition and the fact that we're coming up on the holiday season,' Mayberry said.

The office will handle an assortment of investigations: work force enforcement, gang activity, predatory crimes, sexual assaults against children, child pornography, money laundering, smuggling and intellectual property rights infringement.

The office was proposed by Weld District Attorney Ken Buck in late 2005 and worked its way through congressional channels — getting strong support from former U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard — before being green-lighted in summer 2008.

The focus of the office is to investigate people coming into the community and engaging in crime, federal officials said.

The office has drawn the ire of some Latino activists who say it is unnecessary and will intensify friction that lingers in the city following the December 2006 ICE raid at the then-Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.

Weld commissioner Sean Conway has been monitoring the oft-slow progress of the construction of Greeley's ICE office.

'We're finally moving toward the finish line,' he said.

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14.
Judge clears way for Grady dialysis to close
By Craig Schneider and Shelia M. Poole
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 26, 2009
http://www.ajc.com/news/grady-dialysis-center-to-146721.html

A Fulton County judge on Friday cleared the way for Grady Memorial Hospital to close its outpatient dialysis clinic within days.

Grady spokesman Matt Gove said the outpatient dialysis clinic would close in about a week, once plans are in place to find other care for its patients.

But even as Grady prepares to close the clinic, the legal and political challenges carry on.

Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville had issued a temporary restraining order last week to keep the clinic open pending a hearing. Patient advocates had filed a lawsuit asserting that patients desperately needed the Grady service and would suffer without it.

Glanville said he will continue to hear arguments on the case, said Grady attorney Bernard Taylor.

So the hospital is expected to face off in about a month against the patient advocates who filed the legal challenge.

In addition, the Fulton DeKalb Hospital Authority is expected to discuss the closure at its meeting Monday. The authority contracts with the Grady corporate board to run the hospital. Some authority members question whether the closure violates the contract between the two, which demands that Grady continue its mission to provide for the needy.

'We want to make sure the decision was made not only about dollars and cents,' but for what's best for people, said authority board member Thomas Dortch.

The closing of the Grady clinic would essentially leave metro Atlanta without a major hospital that provides nearly free outpatient dialysis care for the poor, uninsured and illegal immigrants.

Lindsay Jones, an attorney for the patients, said they he planned to file legal actions on Monday to keep the clinic open.

Some patients are frightened that they will not find alternative care and the ruling will become a death sentence.

Abebech Tadesse is worried for her father.

'We have no options,' Tadesse said, her voice breaking. 'The only option is to count the days until he dies.'

Her father, Tadesse A. Amdago, 69, is a green-card holder from Ethiopia. They are not giving up hope. 'I will pray and see what's going to happen.'

The closing of Grady's outpatient dialysis clinic reflects many of the issues that are hurting safety net hospitals across the country. Their communities often expect them to provide all the care that other hospitals don't, but many of these medical facilities are sinking financially under the weight of providing uncompensated care to uninsured people.

Grady officials say the outpatient dialysis clinic has outdated equipment and loses between $2 million to $4 million a year.

Grady officials say they will help find care elsewhere for patients. Some 51 patients, all illegal immigrants, remain without plans for treatment. Grady has offered to finance their moves back to their home countries or to another state that pays for such care for illegal immigrants. Grady spokesman Gove said Grady would pay for their care at private clinics for three months, as other options are explored.

Grady will also set up a hotline to provide guidance to patients for the next 120 days.

Ignacio Godinez Lopez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico and a laid-off home remodeler, is worried that he may end up in the emergency room.

He knows he doesn't want to go back to Mexico.

'I know a man who moved to Mexico about a week ago and he cannot get his dialysis,' he said.

Judge Glanville had initially granted the temporary restraining order Sept. 16, pending a hearing on the issue.

In his decision Friday, Glanville said that at this time the patients and advocates had not presented enough evidence to prove that the patients needed the court's intervention.

The judge made it clear that 'the court is unpersuaded at this time that plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of their claims.'

He added that the court is unconvinced that the patients have a constitutional right to the court's relief.

Patients, their relatives and patient advocates were stunned by the action.

State Sen. Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta), a member of the Grady Coalition, feared closing the clinic is just the first step in more service cuts.

Dorothy Leone-Glasser, co-founder of the Grady Advocates for Responsible Care, which worked with the coalition, called the order 'very cruel.'

'Patients will then flood the emergency rooms [to get treatment], and I don't see how that is a healthy medical solution to that problem,' she said.

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Judge Rules That Hospital Can Close Dialysis Unit
By Kevin Sack
The New York Times, September 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/health/policy/26grady.html?hp

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15.
College still eludes illegal immigrants
OK to enroll in N.C community colleges won't take effect until at least next fall.
By Kristin Collins
The Charlotte Observer (NC), September 27, 2009
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/local/story/971481.html

Some Latino advocates celebrated news this month that N.C. community colleges would open their doors to illegal immigrants. Last week, they lamented that the opening was no more than a crack.

The decision from the State Board of Community Colleges allows undocumented students to enroll in degree programs at all of the state's 58 campuses, but it won't take effect until at least next fall because of a slow-moving administrative rules review process. And if enough people object, the rule could face a vote by the legislature, which has the power to kill it.

If the rule is approved, undocumented students will get last priority for classes at a time when surging enrollments have filled classrooms to capacity. And out-of-state tuition of $7,700 per year will be out of reach for many of the children of low-wage workers.

'We cannot call this a victory,' said Andrea Bazan, a long-time activist who has pushed for in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.

Last week, the rule began its journey through an administrative process that requires a 60-day public comment period. Once that is complete, citizens can make formal objections to the rule. If at least 10 do so, the rule must be voted on by the General Assembly when it convenes in May.

House and Senate Republican leaders said they will organize an effort to oppose the rule. They said they weren't sure they would succeed, in light of past bills on the issue that have been killed by Democratic leaders.

But this time, Democrats such as Gov. Bev Perdue and Lt. Gov Walter Dalton have publicly opposed the rule. And at the board meeting where it was approved, a crowd of protesters gathered, saying illegal immigrants should not get public resources in a recession.

'Next year's an election year, and the new rule is not a thing that the people of the state appear to want,' said Sen. Phil Berger, an Eden Republican.

While the rule waits in limbo, some say the colleges should begin admitting undocumented students now. In May 2008, the decision to bar illegal immigrants took effect immediately. And the board has established that no state or federal law bars their admission.

'If overnight they can say, 'You can't come in,' why does it take so long to say you can?' said Tony Asion, head of the statewide Hispanic advocacy group El Pueblo. 'We can't understand that.'

Board members say they want to make sure that the decision is legal and enforceable before they put it into practice. In the past few years, the colleges have changed their policies on admitting illegal immigrants several times.

'We have been so embarrassed by the multiple changes of course that we don't want to take any risk,' said Dr. Stuart Fountain, a board member from Asheboro who led the effort to craft the new policy.

Board members said they did the best they could with a contentious issue. They said they could not ignore concerns that illegal students would take spots from legal residents.

Board member Allen Wellons, a Smithfield lawyer, said he would have liked to do more for undocumented students, many of whom came here as young children. He said he hoped for a policy at least in line with the state's university system, which does not give illegal immigrants lower priority, and would eventually like to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students under 21.

But Wellons said the issue is too complex, and too emotional, for the board to make much headway.

'This is a federal issue,' he said. 'Our country should stand up and do what is right. We have used the labor that Hispanics have provided without repaying them. It's not something that can be addressed by a community college board.'

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16.
AP Interview: Leader has back-up immigration plan
By Suzanne Gamboa
The Associated Press, September 26, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g_xEohzLeLovYe63wr1NdmuuWWIwD9AUJ0803

Washington, DC (AP) -- The head of the nation's leading Latino legal advocacy group said if comprehensive immigration legislation seems unlikely in 2010, Congress should make down payments by passing smaller-scale reforms.

In an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he fully expects work on rewriting immigration law to begin in Congress next year.

But if Democratic leaders delay, because of elections and a hostile political climate for immigrants, Congress should take up the issue gradually and in smaller ways, Saenz said. Lawmakers could address the need for foreign agricultural workers, provide legal status to high school graduates brought to the country illegally as children, and create equity for same sex partners who want to come to the U.S. or get green cards.

'As of right now, I have not been convinced that comprehensive immigration reform cannot move in 2010, so it needs to move. It needs to include all of these elements and many more,' Saenz said. 'If that is not possible, then I'm interested in discussing this idea of down payments with a commitment to fulfill the obligation through comprehensive immigration reform that is not postponed indefinitely.'

Previously, immigration advocates have been reluctant to address immigration reform piecemeal to keep the various interest groups united on difficult issues, such as legalizing millions of people who are in the country illegally.

Saenz acknowledged that immigration reform is meeting fierce opposition. He also agreed that President Barack Obama may face a tougher road trying to tackle it than former President George W. Bush, whose conservative credentials made his stance on the issue more palatable to some. Obama is under pressure from Latinos to succeed, he said.

'Part of President Obama's mandate coming in, particularly in the high levels of support that he received from Latino voters in critical states, I think a significant part of his mandate was about comprehensive immigration reform,' Saenz said.

While the politics is playing out, Saenz said the Obama administration can take immediate action on immigration by fixing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Homeland Security Department, and suspending agreements that allow local and state law enforcement to enforce immigration laws. The agreements have led to civil rights abuses, such as racial profiling, he said.

Saenz, who was general counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for five years, said that like the LA police force of about 15 years ago, ICE's 'reputation in the community is deservedly abysmal' because it permits and condones civil rights violations regularly.

'It needs to be fixed,' just as LAPD was, Saenz said. That could be done with leadership, transparency, repercussions for civil rights violations and oversight from an outside group, among other things, he said.

Saenz said other priorities for MALDEF are:

* Countering calls by some in the Latino community for Census boycotts as a way to secure immigration reform. Saenz said the idea is a 'self-inflicted wound of tremendous damage.'

* Protecting Latino's voting rights when legislatures take up redistricting after the Census, probably on an expanded geographic scale than in previous years because of growth of the Latino population.

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17.
Fees deter many from citizenship
Advocates say cuts in services also play role
By Maria Sacchetti
The Boston Globe, September 28, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/28/fees_deterring_many_immigrants_from_applying_for_us_citizenship/

Nearly 300,000 legal immigrants in Massachusetts are eligible to become US citizens, but only a small percentage each year are reaching that goal, raising concerns that huge swaths of people are being priced out of the American dream.

Fees to apply for citizenship have soared in the past two decades from $60 a person to $675, making them among the highest in the Western world, researchers say. At the same time, assistance for navigating the often confusing system is dwindling because of state budget cuts.

Citizenship is considered the ultimate pathway to integration in society, requiring that immigrants learn English and US history and defend the Constitution. It grants them the right to vote, apply for federal jobs, and bring their families to the United States.

In Massachusetts, nearly 29,000 immigrants became US citizens last year, about 10 percent of those eligible. This federal budget year, which ends Wednesday, only 16,099 immigrants have applied for citizenship so far in the state.

In a third-floor walkup in Dorchester, members of the Arias family said they waited 13 years in the Dominican Republic to come here legally, and then five more years to be eligible to apply for citizenship. But, with low-wage jobs cleaning offices and serving coffee, they cannot afford the fees, which amount to $3,375 for the parents and four daughters, one of whom is a minor and is exempt from the fee.

``With these high prices, we'll have to keep waiting,'' said Leonidas Arias, a 58-year-old who cleans office buildings.

To apply for citizenship, immigrants must be permanent legal residents of the United States for five years, or three years if they are married to a citizen. They must fill out a form, pay fees, get fingerprinted, and undergo an interview, where they must pass an English test in history and civics.

The cost is not the only reason immigrants do not apply for citizenship, advocates and immigrants say. Some cannot speak English well enough to pass the test - more than 15,000 people are on waiting lists statewide for English classes. Still others do not wish to become citizens because they feel loyal to their homelands and plan to return.

Whatever the reason, researchers and advocates say, everyone pays the price that comes with having residents who are not full-fledged citizens. It is visible in low voter turnout among immigrants and the lack of engagement with police, schools, and community groups. Perhaps less visible but more detrimental, researchers say, is the sense among noncitizens that they do not have a stake in this country.

Without citizenship and participation, immigrants become outcasts, said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

``We've lost our soul,'' said Sum, who has studied low voter turnout among immigrants. ``You have a lot of people who are here who can't register or don't vote. What kind of democracy is that?''

The effects ripple across cities such as Boston, Lawrence, Cambridge, and Lynn, which have high immigrant populations and low citizenship rates. Less than half of immigrants in each city are naturalized citizens, according to 2008 census figures, compared with 49 percent statewide and 43 percent nationwide.

In Lawrence last week, less than a third of voters turned out for a historic election that could lead to the first Latino mayor in a city that is nearly 70 percent Hispanic.

In recent years, the citizenship picture across the country had appeared bright. Applications surged before the most recent fee increase in 2007, and more than 1 million people became US citizens last year - a record high, according to officials at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that processes the applications.

Still, an estimated 8 million legal immigrants are eligible to apply for citizenship, according to the agency. Nationally, the price of citizenship has soared while funding for citizenship assistance remains relatively low.

``Other than the United Kingdom, the United States is a very expensive country [for citizenship] - and notably more expensive,'' said professor Randall Hansen, a political science professor at the University of Toronto who has studied immigration fees. In Canada and Australia, for instance, it costs about $200 to naturalize, he said.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services raised fees two years ago to hire more staff and modernize its systems to speed processing times. Now processing times are among their lowest in at least three decades. It takes less than four months in Massachusetts to become a citizen, on average, faster than the national rate. In addition, the federal agency is facing a budget shortfall, because of reduced applications for immigration services, that could lead to higher fees.

``We're in kind of a challenge right now,'' said agency spokesman Bill Wright.

In Massachusetts, the state slashed funding for citizenship classes to teach civics, history, and geography to prepare immigrants to pass the test, from more than $600,000 to $250,000 this year, as part of budget cuts. The cut contrasted sharply with the expectations that Governor Deval Patrick set in July 2008, when he pledged to find better ways to integrate immigrants into Massachusetts.

``We're very disappointed that the program has been cut, and especially at this juncture,'' said Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. ``If you want everybody to participate and be more active in their communities, you should encourage citizenship.''

Richard ChacÛn, executive director of the Massachusetts Office for Refugees and Immigrants, the state agency that administers the funding, said the governor and the state Legislature had to cut the funding because of widespread budget cuts. The governor had hoped the budget would be higher, he said.

``The administration has done so far what it can to preserve a program like this,'' ChacÛn said. ``It's a reflection more of the tough budget climate than of any attitudes about the value of this program.''

Advocates for immigrants say they need help filling out the application or even figuring out whether they are eligible to apply for citizenship.

One recent day, more than 100 immigrants from Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere poured into the SEIU Local 615 union hall in Downtown Crossing for help applying for citizenship.

Santos Valera, a 37-year-old Spanish teacher from Colombia who lives in Hudson, furrowed his brow when he read a question on the federal citizenship application asking whether he had any title of nobility. Told it meant royalty, he and a volunteer burst into laughter.

``He is royalty in his house,'' said volunteer Jose Patrone.

At home in Dorchester, the Arias family has no idea when they might be able to afford the application fees.

Every Saturday, 24-year-old Anni Arias attends citizenship classes at the union hall, where teacher Ana Zambrano tutors her on everything from the location of the Statue of Liberty to the significance of the stars on the US flag. Arias is eager to vote, but earns less than $15,000 a year.

Last Tuesday, she was mid-sentence when the telephone rang. It was the Plumbers' Union urging her to get out and vote in that day's preliminary election in Boston.

``What can I tell you?'' Arias told the caller, rubbing her head in frustration and wearing a yellow T-shirt that said ``Barack and Roll.'' ``We can't vote yet.''

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18.
Bishop links illegal immigrant care, abortion
The Baltimore Sun (MD), September 28, 2009
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/faith/2009/09/illegal_immigrant_health_care.html

Several Catholic bishops in the United States have come out in favor of extending some form of health insurance to illegal immigrants. At least one now is linking the issue to abortion.

'If [health care reform] leaves out immigrants, it is doing what some people want it to do in terms of the unborn,' Bishop William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., told the Catholic News Service.

'How can we say that we're a country of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all who come to our shores if we say, 'except the unborn.' Or, if we say, 'except the handicapped.' Or, if we say, 'except the new person,' asked Murphy, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development. 'Then we have not lived up to the high ideal of our country. And we have introduced a sense of injustice into a plan that should be just for all.'

As the CNS story notes, most U.S. bishops who have spoken publicly about health care reform 'have expressed the opinion that one of the richest countries in the world should find a way to guarantee that everyone within its borders has access to medical care, from conception to natural death.'

CNS quotes Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, Calif., on concerns among bishops that even legal immigrants might be left out of the system. Soto told CNS that reform 'has to include at a minimum some kind of safety net for the undocumented,' particularly if the goal of a nationwide health care reform plan is to improve the overall health of society.

'We realize it's a very contentious issue,' Bishop Soto said. 'But there has to be some kind of a safety net.'

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19.
Faith Leaders Call for Immigration Reform
By Bridget Huber
Mission Local (San Francisco), September 27, 2009
http://missionlocal.org/2009/09/faith-leaders-activists-call-for-immigration-reform/

A multi-faith group of about 500 people gathered at St. Mary’s Cathedral Saturday to pray and call for immigration reform.

Clergy from 11 Bay area congregations led the service, including four from the Mission District: St. Peters and St. Anthony’s Churches, the Mission Dolores Basilica, and Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. The event was organized by the San Francisco Organizing Project and other faith-based pro-immigrant groups.

Though the health care debate has dominated national politics lately, Bishop William Justice of the San Francisco Archdiocese said it was important not to lose sight of immigration reform. 'There are real people being deported. Families are being separated … we want to say, ‘Hey wait, this issue hasn’t gone away.’'

The service began with a lay-led reading in English and Spanish of Isaiah 58:5-12, with verses such as, 'If you spend yourself in behalf of the hungry/ and satisfy the needs of the oppressed/ then your light will rise in the darkness/ and your night will become like the noonday.'

Next came testimony from a woman whose husband was deported in January. The woman declined to give her name because of her own immigration status, but told the crowd that her family had lost its home after her husband was sent back to his native country.

Standing with a baby in her arms and two of her older children at her side, she said her kids constantly ask for their father. 'I want you to know that there are thousands and thousands of mothers like me, suffering from the immigration raids,' she said.

Bishop Justice said, 'Dear Lord, help us to remember when we speak of immigrants and refugees, we speak of Christ.'

Angela Chan, a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, spoke about the 160 undocumented youth who have been held in immigration detention or deported since July 2008 when Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered state and city employees to alert immigration authorities as soon as an undocumented juvenile was charged with a felony.

'This was not supposed to happen in San Francisco,' she said. The city marks its 20th anniversary of becoming a Sanctuary City in October.

Chan urged the crowd to support passage of Supervisor David Campos’ legislation that would restore due process to undocumented immigrant youth. The Board of Supervisors will vote on the legislation on Oct. 20.
The crowd blessed elected officials including three city Supervisors

The crowd prayed for elected officials.

Several elected officials, including Supervisors Bevan Dufty, Eric Mar and John Avalos, and Vice President of the Board of Education Jane Kim, attended and were called to the pulpit to be blessed.

The officials gathered in front of the church and bowed their heads. The clergy extended their hands toward them. The worshipers did the same. Led by the Rev. Israel Alvarán, the group prayed for God to give the officials the strength to fight for immigrant rights. 'Give them a double portion of courage, so they will stand for us and speak for us,' said Alvarán.

After the service, Maria de Lourdes Rodríguez, a St. Peter’s parishioner, said undocumented immigrants need a path to citizenship. The U.S. should remember its own roots, she continued. 'Diversity is what makes this country so strong and important. Immigrants are the foundation of this country.'
Clergy prayed for elected officials, including three city Supervisors.

Clergy prayed over a group including three city Supervisors.

Sonia Miranda, a Mission District resident who came to the U.S. from Nicaragua in 1985, knows firsthand the difficulty of living without legal status. 'If you don’t have documents, you don’t have rights,' she said.

Miranda, who came to this country illegally along with her husband and toddler son, spent her first years in the country working 12-hour shifts as a dishwasher for $20 a day.

'They exploit you when you’re undocumented,' she said. 'And instead of complaining, we say, ‘At least I have a job.'’

Things got harder when Miranda left her abusive husband. She worked 16-hour days and often had to leave her son, who was in elementary school by then, home alone. 'Those times were so hard and frightening,' she said.

But she became a citizen in 1989 and now helps other immigrants with their paperwork. She learned English and got an associates degree in science from City College and went on to be trained as both a nurse and a pre-school teacher.

Her son graduated on Saturday from an apprenticeship with a local union.

She wants others to have the same opportunities. 'What I most want is immigration reform that will give people a life of hope and of family,' she said.

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Interfaith call to reform laws on immigration
By Marisa Lagos
The San Francisco Chronicle, September 27, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/26/BAD419TBCO.DTL

Faith-based movement in immigration reform debate
By Jane Pratt
The Abilene Reporter-News (TX), September 24, 2009
http://www.reporternews.com/news/2009/sep/24/minister/

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20.
Out of fields, into class for migrant kids
By Christine Armario
The Associated Press, September 28, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hyfqYg696_NuQ8kjnQFUotJEkkiQD9B039OO2

Ocala, FL (AP) -- Elizabeth Pineda climbs out from bed, her 4-year-old son Adrian asleep nearby. She lays out a tiny pair of shorts and a white T-shirt for his first day of school, gathers her purse and tiptoes outside. Her cousin will get the boy up and off to class in a few hours.

It is 4 a.m. and only a few solitary street lamps light the darkened roads in this rural central Florida community. She climbs into an old white Ford work van and starts the engine.

Pineda, the 20-year-old daughter of migrant farmworkers, is heading to the peanut fields.

It's a story repeated in migrant families across the United States: A chain of labor that stretches from one generation to the next. As a little girl, Pineda helped pick oranges from the lowest branches as her father worked from a ladder overhead. As a single mother, she has sometimes had to bring Adrian along as well — letting him play with toy cars in the van while she picked peanuts nearby.

Private childcare is too expensive for most of these families, and the alternatives are limited.

The government offers a Head Start program for the children of migrant and seasonal laborers. But it serves only a fraction of those eligible, according to estimates by providers and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Waiting lists stretch hundreds of children long in parts of the country.

Those who can't get in go to friends' care, or to state-run pre-kindergartens or to the fields, where they are exposed to the heat, insects, chemicals and heavy machinery and where, each year, some children are hurt or even killed.

In this farming town, two Head Start centers have opened in the last year. And with a $26 million boost for Early Head Start in federal stimulus funds and separate $10 million expansion, nonprofit organizations around the country are hoping to expand enrollment of migrant infants and toddlers by thousands more.

The goal: Besides providing a safe haven, the programs offer access to basic social services, help teach English and aim to set these children on a path toward parity with their peers in kindergarten.

Pineda has enrolled Adrian. Her dream: That he never has to do what she does.

How many young children follow their parents into America's fields isn't known.

Care providers estimate that just under one-fifth of children eligible for Migrant and Seasonal Head Start are enrolled (about 35,000 in 2007, according to the most current national figures).

Yvette Sanchez-Fuentes, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association in Washington, said she accepted the estimate 'just because of the amount of wait lists that they have across the country.'

In South Texas, there are 400 children on the waiting list of the largest provider of migrant Head Start services. During the peak season in Michigan, the waiting list sometimes exceeds 200 children, many of them vulnerable infants and toddlers, officials said.

Parents have become better educated about the dangers of the fields, Sanchez-Fuentes said, but still there are tragedies.

In Newport, Tenn., Arnulfo Hernandez and his wife, Esmeralda, took their 11-month-old son, Jesse, with them to the tomato fields in 2007. Other migrant families had encouraged them to enroll him in a Head Start program, but the young parents, then just 22 and 20, were reluctant to do so.

'They were very nervous about being apart from their baby, and we do hear about raids,' said J Davis, the nonprofit Telamon Corp.'s Tennessee state director. ''What's going to happen if I'm away from my child and immigration shows up and I disappear?''

The couple put Jesse in the back of their van, rolled down the windows and left the back door up, according to a report filed by the Cocke County Sheriff's Office. They tied a thin string used to keep tomato plants upright from a seat in the car to a belt loop on Jesse's pants to keep him from wandering away, Chief Detective Robert Caldwell said.

Esmeralda Hernandez told detectives she checked on her son every five minutes. But at one point, the couple found Jesse unresponsive. He'd gotten his neck tangled in the string and strangled, Caldwell said.

'They were devastated,' Davis said. 'We were all devastated.'

In Polk City, Fla., 2-year-old Ruben Velasquez crawled out of a truck as his family picked oranges in 2006. He was between the vehicle and a flatbed trailer when his 10-year-old brother moved the truck forward, crushing him.

'Every so often, you do hear horror stories,' said Lourdes Villanueva, director of farmworker advocacy with the Redlands Christian Migrant Association. 'But the potential for that happening is all the time.'

The path Pineda drives to the fields is long and, at times, jolting. She stops first outside a beige trailer and honks. A wrinkled, groggy-eyed man in flip-flops emerges and languidly pulls himself into the van.

She picks up nearly a dozen more workers, the youngest just 13. They are tired and silent. Several are barefoot.

The van whips through overgrown grass in the darkness, no visible destination in sight. It's usually her father's job to drive the laborers, but he is sick. So the duty falls on her.

Pineda has long black hair and wears a pair of light-blue jeans with sequined crosses on the back pockets. Growing up, she went to eight different schools, depending on where her parents were traveling to work. They mostly stayed in Florida, but also went to South Carolina, where her father worked in the tobacco fields.

She managed to earn As and Bs in school. Then, at 16, she got pregnant.

After graduating from high school, she went to work in the fields. She has held other jobs — gas station attendant, restaurant hostess — but says she couldn't get enough hours.

Now, with the recession, she says there is no other work to be found around Ocala, about 95 miles north of Tampa. And so she harvests peanuts, an especially labor-intensive crop, with low-growing plants that offer no shelter from the sun. The first few days of the season, Pineda says her muscles ache so much she can hardly sit and stand when she gets home.

The fields are no place for a child, she believes, and yet when she couldn't find someone to care for her son she often took him with her. A Migrant and Seasonal Head Start program opened up nearby when he was 3, but Pineda says there wasn't space for him. This year, a second center opened up in Ocala, and Adrian got in.

'Hopefully he never has to go to the fields and pick,' Pineda says.

Research on early learning has shown the importance of building basic cognitive and social skills from an early age.

Children from low-income families know about 3,000 words by age 6, while those from high-income backgrounds know 20,000, a 1995 study estimated. Children from privileged families hear millions more words by age 3 than those from less affluent backgrounds, according to a 2003 study.

Migrant children in particular are a vulnerable population, as they often attend more than one school each year, and sometimes in different states, meaning academic requirement vary.

'These children do not have a typical home,' Villanueva said. 'Many times, there's two or three families living together in one trailer, so there's no room for a bookshelf, for example.'

They may also feel pressure to help contribute to the family income and work in the fields. In some states, farmers can employ children as young as 10 or 12 outside school hours.

When the Head Start centers open they are sometimes the children's first link to social services. Villanueva, who is based in central Florida, recalls seeing children who had suffered so many untreated ear infections that scar tissue had left them with hearing loss. Other young children had teeth that needed to be extracted.

The immigration debate inevitably trickles into any attempt to provide services.

In Bybee, Tenn., about 70 miles southeast of Nashville, a 72-year-old farmer decided to lease land for a migrant Head Start day care program in 1999 in order to give his workers' children a place to go.

His neighbors responded with an angry march, threatening letters and harassing phone calls. Then his hay barn was set on fire, in what investigators said was an act of arson and possible hate crime. No arrests have been made in the case.

'I never bothered nobody — I just wanted to help them kids,' James Ellison said at the time.

Today there are over 450 centers in 40 states, and funding has been increasing in recent years. About $288 million was allocated for the program in the 2007 fiscal year. This year, stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act could increase enrollment by as many as 8,000 infants and toddlers, Sanchez-Fuentes said.

Many of the students are U.S. citizens, she added — 'kids that are going to go into our public schools and then hopefully into our universities.'

Growers mainly support migrant Head Start initiatives.

'As a general rule, farm employers would prefer not to have young children around the field,' said Ron Gaskill, senior director of congressional relations for labor and environment for the American Farm Bureau.

Davis of Telamon recalled a recent plea to make room for more children, so they wouldn't go to the fields. It came from a farmer who 'doesn't want the liability of the danger and the exposure to pesticides.'

Pineda's van comes to a stop in the middle of a dark field. The headlights of a few cars shine onto patches of green peanut plants. In the distance, small circles of light bob up and down like fireflies. They are the headlamps of workers already digging for peanuts.

Pineda's group steps out into the sand. The scent of peanuts fills the air. The sky is freckled with stars.

A car blares music from Conjunto Primavera — a norteno act whose name translates 'Spring Band' — and the workers laugh and squeal with the music, more festive than the surroundings would suggest.

Seventeen-year-old Omar Bautista, shoeless but with socks to protect his feet from ants, has duct tape strapped around each of his fingers and the palm of his hand. The leaves and the peanuts aren't sharp themselves, but pulling them like a rope can burn your skin.

'I was born with a peanut plant in my hand,' he says with a laugh.

Bautista's 13-year-old brother lies asleep still in the truck. They are both due to start school in a week.

In the darkness, Pineda is thinking about classes.

Today is her son's first day. She herself has started night school once a week and is taking two online courses, aiming to finish college and become a massage therapist or maybe a teacher.

Today she will earn $2.50 for each bucket of peanuts she can fill. She hopes to fill at least 10.

Pineda leans against the front of her van as workers start divvying up the buckets. She waits for the sun to rise.

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21.
Constitution center sponsors teen video debate on immigration
By Michael Matza
The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 26, 2009
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20090926_Constitution_center_sponsors_teen_video_debate_on_immigration.html

Alternating between giddiness and focused attention, a cross-section of American youth debated immigration reform yesterday in an innovative videoconference centered in Philadelphia and sponsored by the National Constitution Center.

Challenged by the prompt, 'Should the United States reduce immigration?' the selected students from several high schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, New York, and California were linked via closed-circuit TV and watched one another on large, subdivided video monitors.

'We should reduce immigration. Our environment can only support a certain number of people,' said Matt Hope, 17, of Wilson High School, near Reading. 'As a pragmatic issue, we can't let everyone in.'

While expressing empathy for immigrants who want to come to America to seek better lives, a student identified only as Ellen from Mohawk High School in Sycamore, Ohio, said, 'We can't be the safe haven for everyone in the world.'

Seconding that thought was Tom Emberger, 15, of Northeast Philadelphia, a sophomore at MaST Charter Community High School.

'We can't be sentimental,' Emberger said. 'If an immigrant can't get into the country we can feel sorry for him . . . but our government is supposed to take care of the people who are already here.'

Piping in from Menifee County High School in rural Frenchburg, Ky., a student identified only as Keenan provided counterpoint.

'We say, 'No, don't reduce immigration,' ' he said, speaking from the heart of tobacco country, where many of the farmhands are undocumented immigrants.

'People say illegal immigrants take away jobs,' Keenan said. But 'cheap immigrant labor is one of the things that can make or break these small farms. . . . Besides, this country was founded by immigrants.'

From St. Agnes Upper School in Memphis, Tenn., a girl identified only as Corey said immigrants, regardless of their legal status, 'should have the opportunities to have the opportunities we have.'

Though students' opinions varied widely about what types of reforms were needed to turn the tide of illegal immigration or to deal with the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants already here, 'there seems no debate that our system is clearly broken,' said the program's moderator, Su Chin Pak.

J. Michael Hogan, codirector of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Pennsylvania State University, is a scholarly adviser to the videoconferences, which are part of 'Exchange,' a series on thorny social problems.

'A debate suggests there are just two sides to an issue,' Hogan told the students yesterday. 'But there are a lot of different perspectives on immigration. We have a lot of hope that you young people will teach us how to deliberate better.'

Before the program got under way, Ukrainian-born Mykhalo Gopka, 17, a senior at MaST, said approximately 80 percent of his class favored reducing immigration when the students began studying the issue in his government class. As alternative ideas were aired, he said, the class breakdown became closer to 50-50.

He still takes a hard line. 'People come to America for a better life, to escape poverty or oppression,' he said. 'But if too many people come in, the U.S. will eventually become what everyone was trying to escape.'

As in any discussion of American immigration, the famous motto on the base of the Statue of Liberty eventually was invoked: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'

Michael Brown, 16, a MaST sophomore, said he would first ask illegal immigrants, 'Why are you coming here to better your lives but start out by breaking one of our laws?'

He favored stricter border controls and a tough quota system for deciding who gets in: 'What happens when we run out of room for immigrants? We need to start teaching them now that 'no' means 'no.' '

Though the students were open and civil with one another, Emily, from Jamestown High School in Jamestown, N.Y., couldn't resist a parting shot.

After apologizing that she couldn't quote the Statue of Liberty's motto precisely, she said, 'I'm pretty sure it doesn't say, 'No means no.' '

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22.
Immigration debate takes spotlight at Surf City high school
Edison High juniors took on the role of immigrants filtering through early 1900s Ellis Island as part of a social studies lesson.
By Cindy Carcamo
The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, CA), September 26, 2009
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/immigration-deported-immigrant-2582141-new-old

Huntington Beach, CA -- The immigration debate hit home Friday at Edison High School as juniors experienced firsthand the trials and tribulations of those looking to be admitted into the country.

During a two-day period, about 500 students at the Surf City high school went through an Ellis Island simulation of what it would have been like to be an immigrant in the early 1900s, filtering through what is often referred to as the Gateway to America.

Each student took on the identity of a real immigrant who came through the New York port of entry. They answered questions. They endured long lines and inspections and, at times, interrogations. All with the aim of finding out whether he or she would get to stay or end up deported.

The event was more than a re-enactment, however. It threw these teens into the heated issue of immigration through a lesson examining the past.

It gave students the chance to compare and contrast immigration issues a hundred years ago to today's immigration firestorm, with the main focus on those who are in the country illegally, specifically the Mexico-U.S. border.

'In 1908, we were processing thousands of immigrants legally a day, and today, obviously the dynamic has shifted,' said Mike Walters, a social studies teacher. 'That's the question we've posed to the kids. What's changed? Why not have the floodgates open in Ellis Island anymore? We let them debate it out.'

First in line at the 11 a.m. simulation was Plato Aristophones, a single 29-year-old Greek man who was the son of a rich rug-maker. He wore an oversized green blazer and a black and white hat. Jesse Richards, a 16-year-old water polo player with sun-kissed hair, admitted to having nothing in common with his new identity but made his best attempt at impersonating the immigrant.

'You speak English?' asked a volunteer parent posing as an immigration official.

'Yes.'

When asked whether he had a job, trade skills or college degree, Aristophones quipped back.

'I never worked. My father is very rich,' said the aspiring rug-making entrepreneur who claimed to be a 'strict monarchist' as part of his political affiliation.

Oh, yes, and one more thing.

Aristophones also carried $15,000 to start his new venture.

By this time, the self-assured Greek immigrant thought he'd quickly win clearance and be sworn in as a U.S. citizen.

Instead he was ordered deported. He didn't have enough points, according to his paperwork.

'Sorry, you don't have enough skills for a job so you go to the deportation section,' said an adult posing as yet another immigration official.

Bewildered, the Greek man sat apart from the others, soon to be joined by a 39-year-old Italian immigrant by the name of Loretta Piranini, who was played by Alex Dicus, 16.

'I'm being deported, too,' she said, holding on to a baby doll that was supposed to be her 8-month-old baby. 'Wait, for sure we got deported? I'm making an appeal.'

Piranini only had $23 in her pocket after paying her life savings for a monthlong boat trip that took her from her native land to what looked like deportation in a new land. She could only take the youngest of her 14 children on the trip, leaving her blacksmith husband behind to help fight soldiers in the war.

Leaving behind her role, Dicus spoke about her own immigration experience. The great-granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, she said the simulation and her character's deportation order made her more sympathetic toward people who come to the country illegally.

Soon after their deportation orders, it turned out the characters played by Dicus and Richards were not deported after all. It was a paperwork mix-up, the immigration officials said.

'Well, sometimes that happens,' Walters said, adding that only 5 percent of people were turned away from Ellis Island. 'When you process thousands of people a day, of course, you're going to have a mistake.'

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23.
Undocumented UM student's hopes hinge on DREAM bill
By John S. Adams
The Great Falls Tribune (MT), September 27, 2009 Sunday
http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20090927/NEWS01/909270303

Missoula, MT -- Carlos Rivera wants what just about every other university student in the United States wants: to earn his degree and set off into the world in pursuit of the American Dream.

But before Rivera can realize that dream, he's going to have to get through a nightmare most college students can't even fathom.

That's because Rivera is on the verge of being deported to Mexico, and unless Congress moves past the health care debate and on to immigration reform ø specifically a bill known as the DREAM Act ø Rivera's chances of staying in the country beyond winter are slim.

'I try not to think about it,' Rivera said of the possibility of returning to his native city of Guadalajara, a sprawling Mexican metropolis of 1.6 million that he doesn't even remember.

'It's one of those things that I think, 'what's the point about worrying about it 'til it happens?' I want to keep a smile on my face,' he said.

Rivera, a 27-year-old international business student at the University of Montana in Missoula, spent the past 21 years living his life as though he were just another American citizen. That was until he came to the attention of federal immigration officials last year.

Rivera said he was unaware of his status until he was in high school. Until recently, he never understood the consequences of being an undocumented alien living in the United States.

However, when he opened his mailbox in June and found a letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordering him to appear at its office on July 14 to be deported, the severity of his situation sunk in fast.

The DREAM Act

It's impossible to say how many people around the country are facing the same dilemma as Rivera.

Immigration officials declined to comment on the specifics of Rivera's case, but Dallas-based ICE spokesman Karl Rusnok said it's not uncommon for immigrant children to learn later in life that they're not citizens and then find themselves facing serious consequences.

'It is not unusual for somebody to be in this country for a lengthy period of time, since they were 2 years old for example, and not realize that they are undocumented aliens until they come to the attention of the police or something like that,' Rusnok said.

However, he added that living in the country illegally for most of their life does not give people any more right to stay in the country than someone who just walked across the border.

'You could be here 10 minutes or 10 years. You still need to have some means of being able to legalize,' Rusnok said.

Children who immigrate to the United States with their undocumented parents currently have no method of achieving citizenship.

Some members of Congress have set out to change that with their support of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, known as the DREAM Act.

The idea behind the act is simple: immigrant students who arrive in the country as children, graduate from a United States high school, stay out of trouble with the law and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill's enactment, can have the opportunity to earn conditional permanent residency.

The Senate debated a version of the bill in 2007, but it fell eight votes short of the number needed to overcome a filibuster by senators opposed to the measure.

The act has been introduced again, but it's unclear if or when Congress will resume debate on the measure. Supporters of the bill estimate that they still are eight votes shy in the Senate.

Rivera's immigration attorney, Shahid Haque-Hausrath of Helena, said the DREAM Act could hold the key to Rivera's future in the United States. Rivera is scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in January, at which point he could face deportation.

'Carlos has a serious girlfriend, and they are considering marriage, but right now the only thing that would help Carlos is the DREAM Act,' Haque-Hausrath said. 'If there is no serious discussion of the DREAM Act by the time of Carlos' hearing, he may very well be removed. If things are moving, the judge may agree to give us a few months to see what happens in Congress before removing Carlos.'

If the judge orders Rivera removed from the country, he would be barred from returning for 10 years, Haque-Hausrath said.

Critics of the DREAM Act say the primary intent of the bill is to create broad amnesty for illegal aliens, rather than paving the road to citizenship for people such as Rivera.

Roy Beck is executive director and founder of Washington, D.C.-based NumbersUSA, an organization that lobbied against the 2007 version of the DREAM Act and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Beck said he's sympathetic to Rivera's situation, but added that the DREAM Act is not an appropriate path to citizenship for immigrant children who were brought to this country by undocumented parents.

'You can take a lot of these individuals and you can make a compelling case for their story,' Beck said. 'If it was just this guy, I've got no problem with this guy being given amnesty. But there are apparently about 500,000 of these people in this country.'

Beck said the DREAM Act, as written, contains loopholes that would allow people who receive amnesty under the law to apply to have their family members put on a path toward citizenship.

He said that would lead to massive fraud and open the door to thousands of new immigrants who could pour into the country in order to take advantage of the amnesty provisions in the law.

'When you allow people to break the law, and then allow them to harvest what they broke the law to get, you encourage more illegal activity,' Beck said.

Rivera's mother brought him to the United States on March 15, 1988 ø three weeks before his seventh birthday.

'We were on our way to Canada,' Rivera said. 'But, at the time, my mother was a devout Mormon, so we stopped in Salt Lake City. My mom fell in love with it, so we ended up staying.'

Rivera's mother enrolled him in school soon after they arrived in Utah. After first grade, they moved to Oakley, a small town about 45 miles east of Salt Lake City.

There Carlos continued his schooling while his mother worked at a nearby ranch. Carlos said he doesn't believe his mother ever intended for the two to live in the United States permanently.

'We left Mexico because I don't think my mom had a lot of family support, and there were a lot of economic hardships,' Rivera said. 'Mostly she wanted us to have a better education than what was offered in Guadalajara. She heard Canada had better opportunities. At the time we were traveling to Canada as tourists, but we never made it to Canada.'

Rivera completed most of his schooling in Utah, but just before his senior year, his mother moved to Montana for a new job. That same year Rivera, who developed an interest in business at a young age, earned a scholarship to study business at a company in Florida that trains financial brokers. He and his mother moved to the Sunshine State, where he finished high school while working as a certified diversified cash-flow specialist.

'I got a lot of recognition from industry at a young age,' Rivera said.

After graduating from high school, Rivera worked from Florida for Utah-based August Hill Capital, a real estate consulting firm founded by a former classmate of his.

Kurt Walker, a managing partner and co-founder of August Hill Capital, said Rivera worked for the company for more than two years and played a pivotal role in securing one of its most valuable clients.

'Carlos actually successfully landed one of the most important relationships we have today,' Walker said.

He declined to name the client because of sensitive business dealings, but said Rivera's professionalism, combined with his enthusiasm to learn the complexities of the financial brokerage world, paid dividends for the company.

'Carlos was able to do a fine job of not only weeding through relationships, but he was very much becoming more and more somebody that we depended on,' Walker said.

After working for August Hill Capital for more than two years, Rivera returned to Montana to pursue a college degree.

If he's allowed to remain in the country, he expects to graduate by the end of next year.

But that's a big if at this point.

'Worst-case scenario, I'm not able to finalize any form of relief or rescue from deportation, and I'll have to go back to a country that I'm not familiar with ø I don't know anyone, and I haven't seen any relatives since I was 6 years old,' Rivera said.

Beck sees Rivera as a victim who is forced to pay a hefty price because his mother, who is still in the country, illegally overstayed her visa by more than 20 years, and the federal government failed to do anything about it.

'In this case, this guy's mother put him in this position ø she's the criminal. By giving the DREAM Act amnesty under current conditions, you just encourage more of this behavior,' Beck said. 'If you give an amnesty to this guy, in five years he can become a U.S. citizen, and then as soon as he becomes a U.S. citizen, he could immediately petition for his mother to get a green card. That is absolutely untenable. There's no way this woman should be rewarded for doing everything she's done, including put him in this bad situation.'

For Carlos, who is facing the prospect of being thrust out of the only world he knows and into what amounts to a foreign country, his situation is hard to grasp, but he's not giving up hope.

'There's a little bit of disbelief that this is happening. I've established my home here. My whole life is in this country,' he said.

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24.
History class dumps books, gets personal
By Melissa Walker
The Des Moines Register, September 28, 2009
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090928/NEWS02/909280315/1004

Students in three Des Moines high schools have shelved their history books and now are learning about the past through firsthand accounts and primary documents.

The students are learning about 20th-century issues such as immigration and war through visits from people who immigrated to the United States, draft cards and newspaper articles.

District officials hope the 20th-century-history course will reverse an increase in the number of students who failed history courses, which are required for graduation.

The district received a 'Teaching American History' federal grant - $1.5 million spread over five years. About $300,000 a year will be spent on materials for the humanities classes and to train teachers on new ways to instruct students and to learn more about the subjects they teach, said David Johns, Des Moines' humanities curriculum coordinator. About $25,000 annually had been spent.

High school students in Des Moines must pass two years of history to graduate. For the past three years, about 18 percent of students - about 2,000 juniors - who were enrolled in U.S. history failed the course. About 18 percent, or 2,000 students, failed world history in 2007-08; that grew to 21 percent last year.

Johns said an F in U.S. history sets students up for failure because they have to either go to summer school or retake the class in 12th grade. Students also are required to take a semester of economics and a semester of government, both typically taken in 12th grade.

Johns said the numbers caused district officials to reconsider how they taught history. The subject is better taught with the use of sources, either people who have experienced an event or the documents written from the time period, he said.

'It doesn't discredit the textbook but puts it in its appropriate place as a supplement to the course,' he said.

Students at Hoover High School, for example, went directly to the source this month to learn about immigration.

Haris Kovacevic, 17, a Hoover senior from Bosnia, and Ale Guzman, 17, a Hoover senior from Mexico, shared with freshmen why they immigrated to the United States with their families.

Another speaker, Dr. Marianka Pille, a pediatrician at Blank Children's Hospital, told about her family's immigration from Holland and her work with immigrant families.

Students asked speakers about the challenges they and their families faced in the United States, why the families immigrated, and from where they thought future immigrants were likely to arrive.

Freshman Marquise Gwenigale, 14, said the speakers helped her understand the experiences of immigrants, specifically students at Hoover, where 27 languages are spoken.

'It helps us learn a lot about what other people have had to go through,' she said.

Stefanie Rosenberg-CortÈs, a Roosevelt history teacher, said the new course, which combines world and American history in the 20th century, gives teachers an opportunity to expose students to new ways to learn about history.

'It's a total shift from the old approach where you get out the textbook and let the textbook lead you instead of doing what has really been good for students,' she said. This is 'where you really get into the documents and you get into people's lives, and you're not reading about it from an abstract paragraph in a textbook.'

The training component of the grant also is key for history teachers because it is the first time that they have been trained specifically in their subject area rather than in areas such as literacy or collaboration methods that aren't related to history, Rosenberg-CortÈs said.

About 35 high school teachers will participate in the program this year. Lincoln South, Roosevelt and Hoover high schools are the first to make changes in their history courses. The program will eventually be expanded to include about 100 teachers.

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25.
Niche newspapers serve as survival guides for immigrants;
By Laura Figueroa
The Miami Herald, September 26, 2009
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/broward/story/1252461.html

Come publication day, Jorge Moreira Nunes is use to having a knock or two at his Deerfield Beach office door.

For 10 years, Nunes has published AcheiUSA -- a Portuguese language newspaper catering to South Florida's Brazilian community.

``They come here asking for help with immigration questions, or sometimes they are unsure if they should report something to the police,'' Nunes said.

And though his background is in journalism, Nunes doesn't turn anyone away. It's why he founded AcheiUSA -- the name means ``I Found'' -- he wanted his fellow Brazilians to find the resources they needed in their new homeland.

``We wanted this to be the paper where Brazilians could come to find out about their community. Anyone can grab news from Brazil over the Internet, but we wanted to specialize in what was happening among the Brazilian community here in South Florida.''

AcheiUSA is one of more than two dozen niche publications catering to South Florida's diverse immigrant groups from Latin America to the Caribbean.

From the Lauderhill-based The Caribbean-American Commentary to the Miami Beach-based Brazilian paper El Paracaidista , the publications not only offer a touchstone as to what's going on back home, but many serve as guides for newly arrived immigrants who use the paper's contents to find out about social service programs and immigration updates.

``Its like the link between two worlds,'' said Monica Cubides, of Doral, an avid reader of the weekly Spanish paper Venezuela al DÌa . ``You find out about what's going home, but you also find out about the great things the Venezuelans here in South Florida are doing.''

Vital Information

Venezuela al DÌa was started 14 years ago by Manuel Corao, a retired Venezuelan journalist who moved to the Doral area.

``We saw that the Venezuelans coming to this area were no longer just coming here for vacation or business, but to stay,'' Corao said. ``Yes, they want to know what's going on back home, but we also thought it was important to fill them in on their rights as an immigrant, the different professional work opportunities, and which networking events they could meet fellow Venezuelan professionals.''

The Doral-based paper has grown from printing 5,000 copies weekly to distributing 20,000 copies across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. It has also started producing editions in Orlando and Venezuela.

``The concerns that a Venezuelan has may not be the same as those of a Central American,'' said Corao, who serves as editor-in-chief. ``Smaller papers are able to speak specifically to a group. It's like reading a letter from a friend trying to fill you in on all the news and guide you in a new country.''

Providing a ``survival guide'' to new Latin American immigrants is the reason Ira Guevara and Cynthia Zak, a former journalist from Argentina, founded El Paracaidista, The Parachuter.

Printed in Spanish, the Miami Beach-based paper not only offers immigration news, but also updates on certification classes and other educational opportunities.

``There's no reason that someone who was a chemical engineer back in their country should be washing dishes,'' Guevara said. ``If you were a pharmacist in your country, why are you selling hamburgers here? We wanted to provide a source of information where people knew what resources were available to them so that they can reenter the professional world.''

Positive Image

Aside from offering insight into work and education, many turn to the papers to read about the accomplishments of their countrymen.

``It seems the only time the mainstream media covers our community is if someone dies or is arrested,'' said Rovan G. Locke, publisher of the Caribbean-American Commentary, a monthly paper distributed throughout Broward County.

``That's why the community turns to papers like ours,'' Locke said. ``We highlight the accomplishments of local Caribbeans. We elevate the discussion on current affairs by offering analysis of the news.''

A recent publication asked readers to weigh in on whether Jamaicans abroad should have the right to vote in the country's general elections alongside news of the Miss Black USA pageant.

While the newspaper industry as a whole has weathered tough financial times in the past couple years, a March 2009 study by the National Newspaper Association and the Suburban Newspaper Association found smaller community newspapers have fared better.

``People are always going to live their lives in the outside world, not just the Internet,'' Guevara said. ``They are always going to stop at the cafeteria for lunch, at the supermarket to pick up food, at the local church, and there they will find us. The Internet is a great tool and has helped us reach people outside of Florida, but at the end of the day most of our readers prefer picking us up and reading us while they are outdoors.''

Back at the Deerfield Beach offices of AcheiUSA, Nunes sits in his office lined with posters of famous Brazilian landmarks. His deadline is looming and there are decisions to be made -- where should he run the story about the Broward sheriff's deputy accused of molesting undocumented immigrants? Yet despite the stresses of deadline, Nunes remains calm. ``I feel like our paper is helping people.''

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26.
WWII refugees are part of city's immigration mosaic
By Michelle Kearns
The Buffalo News (NY), September 27, 2009
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/808787.html

When English escapes her, Jozefa Kawalek Solecki switches to Polish, searching for the words to describe what happened to her after the German and Russian invasions of Poland 70 years ago.

To explain it all takes hours.

On a February morning in 1940, the 15-year-old Solecki began a trip a Siberian work camp with others from the nearby towns and villages. They were loaded into cattle cars and had no idea where they were going.

People broke out in song.

Sitting on the couch in her Cheektowaga living room one recent afternoon, Solecki began to sing the lilting, hopeful hymn.

'Nie przyjdzie na mnie zadna straszna trwoga ...'

It means, 'No terrible fear shall come to me.'

She remembers voices joining others from one car to the next, until the song about trusting the Lord could be heard coming from all the cars that lined the tracks.

In Siberia, her baby nephew died of malnutrition. Her father disappeared. Solecki spent a decade traveling to Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, India, Tanzania, South Africa, Scotland, and England, finally arriving in Buffalo at age 27.

'I don't wish anybody to go through that hell,' she said in Polish-accented English.

Her story is painful to tell, as are the stories of the thousands of other Polish refugees who came to Buffalo to start their lives over after the war. Now there is an effort under way to collect stories from people like Solecki and commemorate their experiences in a local museum. So far, Solecki and about 10 others have offered to contribute stories.

A group made up of children of war survivors founded the Polish Legacy Project with the goal of interviewing people from Buffalo's aging Polish community, once one of the most populous in the country. Their jumping-off point was a collection of mementos and photos that was started two decades ago in an East Side community center. Now the Legacy Project has a 12-person board of directors; an application for nonprofit status in the works; plans for a 'virtual' Web site museum at www.PolishLegacyBuffalo.com, and perhaps, a building, a book and a documentary.

The group's new effort begins next weekend, with a conference called 'Poland to Buffalo Through WWII: Untold Stories Come Alive.' The event will take place Saturday at the WNED Studios, 140 Lower Terrace, and next Sunday in Corpus Christi Church, 199 Clark St., and Dom Polski, 1081 Broadway.

Legacy Project founder Andrew Golebiowski said he believes the war is part of what makes this community unique.

'This refugee immigration story should be in this mosaic, which has had a few empty tiles in it until now,' said Golebiowski, who worked on a Polish community documentary for local public television and now works at Channel 2 as a photographer and editor. 'The challenge is getting people to think this is important. Now they're getting older and dying. I feel this sense of urgency to get the firsthand accounts.'

Golebiowski hopes 400 will attend the conference, but he expects 200.

'Because we're Polish and we're pessimistic,' he said with a smile.

Golebiowski believes that cultural tendencies to keep quiet, be modest and avoid complaining help explain why few people know about the non-Jewish Poles' stories about World War II.

The other reasons are varied and complex. The story of the Holocaust and the deaths of millions of Jews took precedence. Refugees focused on starting their lives over. There was a language barrier. The stories hurt and seem farfetched. Some refuse to talk.

One woman told Golebiowski a neighbor didn't believe she had been in Siberia.

'So after that, I gave up telling my story,' she said.

Jozefa Solecki and the Polish Legacy Project

'A wonderful education'

Buffalo's Polish population first began to grow during the boom of the Industrial Revolution in the 1870s and continued through the turn of the century when jobs were plentiful, said Golebiowski. At first Poles lived on the East Side, now full of abandoned houses. The area still is known for grand Polish churches and the Broadway Market's butchers and bakeries.

In the 1960s, the community thrived. Erie County had one of the highest percentages of populations of people of Polish descent of any county in the country, said Golebiowski, who has examined census records.

Estimates place the number of non-Jewish Poles who died in the war between 2 million and 3 million, many in concentration camps or summary executions.

After the war, thousands of survivors emigrated to the United States.

While there are no formal counts, Golebiowski estimates a few thousand refugees settled in Buffalo. Often they came because of family connections. Sponsorships from churches and community organizations helped, too.

Golebiowski doesn't know who sponsored his late father, who found work as a welder at the Ford plant. As a corporal in the Polish Army, Golebiowski's father was captured by the Germans. As the war was ending, He managed to escape, get to England and rejoin the Polish army in exile.

Golebiowski's mother, Helena, 77, survived the war in a village, once deciding to leave the family's underground shelter just before a bomb dropped.

'I kind of lived it my whole life. That's all my parents talked about was the war,' Golebiowski said. 'I think I got a wonderful education from my parents about the world, about the history about the language.'

When Golebiowski started working at Channel 2 five years ago, he helped produce his first story about a local survivor. It was the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a rebellion to take back the city after five years of German occupation, and Golebiowski interviewed a man he knew had been involved in the revolt.

'After 63 days, we capitulated,' said Zdzislaw 'Jesse' Goralski, 84, a former West Seneca junior high German teacher.

Food and water were gone.

'We were living like rats,' he said.

About 3,000 people died a day. Bodies lay in shallow graves created by the rubble.

'The smell was so bad, you had to close your nose to walk by,' Goralski said.

A CNN documentary about the uprising included an old image showing the 19-year-old Goralski taking a pistol from his belt after the surrender. To see his young self after so many years was strange.

'You're happy, but at the same time, you have tears in your eyes, like I have now,' he said. 'It's hard to even talk about this.'

Yet, fighting as he did and going to prison was 'a blessing,' compared to what others endured. He and the other guerrillas were treated with humane Geneva-convention guidelines that left him in better shape than some of the thin American GIs.

Because he had learned English as a young man, Goralski got a post-war job with the American Army. An officer who befriended him insisted he leave Germany for a new life in the United States. He chose to come to Buffalo because a friend had moved here.

History all around

When he arrived, the city's tree-lined streets were as lovely as people had told him.

Goralski now lives in Texas with his wife, and he was pleased to discover that a family visit will coincide with next weekend's conference.

'I'll go there and tell my story if somebody wants to hear it,' Goralski said.

Like Goralski, Julie Senko, another conference panelist, was among the Polish refugees looking for a new home. Her family was assigned to a city in the South. But when train headed for Buffalo was about to leave and had room, they boarded that one, instead.

'My father says, 'No problem. It doesn't matter where we go,' Senko said. 'We are very grateful.'

Senko was living in eastern Poland when Hitler's army invaded. Her family and others were hiding in a field when the German soldiers found them.

'They were ready to execute us, but with the children crying and the mothers crying, somehow it softened the furor,' she said.

Instead, the family was sent a concentration camp and then forced to work a German farm.

Senko met her late husband, Stanley, in Buffalo in about 1950. Stanley had spent the war in concentration camps, where a doctor experimented on him to see if he could revive someone so close to death.

But his Buffalo life was ordinary. He started a home remodeling business and built the family's brick house in Cheektowaga.

To their daughter, Regina Senko Hanchak, a professor of nursing at Erie Community College, it is stunning how people went on to lead such unassuming lives.

'People just don't realize that there's so much history around them,' she said. 'You may not know that person that's delivering your furniture or fixing your car may have had all these things happen to them.'

Connecting with the past

When Dick Solecki was a boy listening to his mother, he didn't know what parts of her story to believe.

The former member of the Cheektowaga Town Board considers himself a curious romantic, so after after he had found success in his career in real estate and ran Gov. George E. Pataki's local office, he traveled to see the places of her stories for himself.

On a visit to her family farm, which is in what is now Ukraine, he found a well his mother told him about that the people now living there didn't know existed.

Next, he went to the train depot from which his mother departed all those years ago. He sat by the tracks for an hour, trying to picture people in cattle cars, and then decided he would take a trip to Siberia, too.

He knew his first-class seat on a Russian train wasn't the same as the car without a toilet in which his mother rode, but he decided the desolate rural towns with horse and buggies and houses with thatched roofs must have been like what she saw.

It was a thrill to later go on another trip and see Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the same mountain his mother admired from a refugee camp as a teenager.

Solecki's journeys taught him something about himself and his mother. She is the stronger of the two.

'I couldn't probably survive a day,' said Solecki, who gets claustrophobic on airplanes. 'They made it for years.'

As he talked, his mother sat next to him on the couch, listening and wiping at tears. She was proud of him. She wept to think that he could go all these places and there were no soldiers or wars to hurt him.

'I am happy for him that he can travel,' she said, 'and no one will stop him.'

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27.
Chinese fair shares 'untold stories'
By Dixie Reid
The Sacramento Bee (CA), September 25, 2009
http://www.sacbee.com/livinghere/story/2205013.html

Sacramento was Yee Fow, or Second City, to the throngs of Chinese immigrants who came during and for years after the 1849 Gold Rush.

They opened laundries, herb shops, mercantile businesses and noodle houses. They did the backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and the Sacramento River Delta levees.

And they endured abuse and discrimination for decades. Exclusion laws first enacted in 1882 attempted to keep the Chinese out of this country.

'In the past, the Chinese have been so quiet, but it's come to the point where the younger generation is saying there are a lot of remarkable, untold stories that should be told,' says Steve Yee, who's heading up Sunday's Chinatown Mall Culture Fair. 'We have been part of the fabric of this community, and we have something to say.'

The free fair, in its third year, continues to explore those stories. The theme is 'Bridging the Past to the Future.'

Eddie Fung, believed to be the only Chinese American soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II, will be on hand to talk about his experiences as a POW and a cowboy in Texas. He'll participate in a lecture panel that includes five local World War II veterans: Ping Leong, Henry Kim, Su Bun Chan, Milo Chun and Joe Wayne Fong.

In addition, Sacramento-born Shawna Yang Ryan will discuss her 2007 novel originally called 'Locke, 1928,' the saga of a small Chinese community 22 miles south of Sacramento. It's been re-released by Penguin Press as 'Water Ghosts.'

The Culture Fair also will play host to the traveling exhibit 'Gateway to Gold Mountain,' on loan from the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

The U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, is sometimes referred to as the Ellis Island of the West, although its stories are far different than those of its East Coast counterpart.

Between 1910 and 1940, about 175,000 Chinese, mostly men, were detained on Angel Island for weeks and sometimes years before either being allowed residency in this country or being deported.

'The scale and richness of the exhibit is great,' says Eddie Wong, the foundation's executive director. 'It's staggering when you see large-scale, almost life-size, photographs of immigrants in the barracks at Angel Island. You get the idea of what it was like to live in a place that was so crowded. And it's moving to see the poetry and read the translations.'

Detainees whiled away long hours by carving verses onto the walls of the men's barracks. More than 200 poems were preserved as part of the immigration station's ongoing restoration in what is now Angel Island State Park.

In addition to the historic elements of the Chinatown Mall Culture Fair, organizers have planned numerous activities for children and adults.

There will be lion dances, a Chinese fashion show, and demonstrations and workshops in martial arts, calligraphy, tai chi, and Chinese chess, cooking and zhezhi paper-folding. Vendors will sell cosmetics, toys, arts and crafts, and Chinese videos, books, herbs and food.

The festival serves as a celebration of the traditional Autumn Moon observance and its iconic delicacy, the mooncake. A variety of flaky filled pastries will be available for tasting.

'It'll be fun, fun, fun,' Yee says of the festival. 'We want to share our story and culture with the general public. It's almost like taking a trip to China, and it doesn't cost you anything.'

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28.
Haitian artist paints boat migrants as Voodoo gods
By Jennifer Kay
The Associated Press, September 28, 2009
http://www.nj.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-9/125414653891810.xml&storylist=entertainment

Miami (AP) -- The officers on deck confront the Voodoo love goddess with broad shoulders and stoic faces, eyes darkened by sunglasses. She pauses on the gangplank, barefoot but resplendent in a gold crown and ruffled pink dress.

The goddess in Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie's 1996 painting, 'Ezili Intercepted,' is bewildered, bemused maybe, but not desperate. She seems to smooth her hair with bejeweled fingers. Ezili is notorious for charming the men in her path.

Duval-Carrie's migrant deity is so different from the Haitian migrants photographed with U.S. or Caribbean authorities when their overcrowded vessels founder. Lying prone on boat decks or stretchers, they have no names, no power.

Thousands of Haitians attempt to flee their Caribbean homeland of more than 9 million by boat each year. Detained at sea or on U.S. and Caribbean beaches, they appear as blurry masses of refugees.

In painting after painting and a flotilla of sculptures, Duval-Carrie has depicted these migrants as vibrant Voodoo gods.

He has had many opportunities to reflect on their journeys the U.S. Coast Guard has interdicted an annual average of 1,524 Haitian migrants for each of the past 15 fiscal years. The lucky ones who reach 'the other side of the water' without notice find protection in an underground economy. The ocean swallows countless dead.

'The news is so dramatic that I'm pulled right back. When will there be a respite?' Duval-Carrie said recently in his studio in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood. 'I wish it would go away and I could concentrate on something else.'

But the migrants keep coming, and there are always victims to grieve. The bodies of three women who perished when their overloaded sailboat capsized off South Florida in May were buried recently in a Miami-area cemetery beneath plaques reading 'Unknown.' None of the 16 survivors professed to knowing them, and no relatives came forward to identify them.

'It's one way I can give them importance and respect,' Duval-Carrie said. 'There's a total disrespect here for them.'

He strands the same cast of colorful gods in wooden boats or on rocky shores: the lord of the cemetery in his signature black top hat; the gatekeeper to the spiritual world; the god of healing; the love goddess who resembles Carmen Miranda; the coiled serpent god; temperamental twins; and the skeletal spirit of the dead.

Their faces sometimes serene, sometimes leering comprise a dual warning. Authorities outside Haiti should respect the migrants' courage, Duval-Carrie said. Meanwhile, Haiti is losing its identity through constant migration.

In two panels of a recently completed, silver-toned installation titled 'Memory Without History,' finely dressed skeletons join the gods' voyage.

'They're all dead already,' Duval-Carrie said.

He paints migrants as an expatriate himself. He was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1954. His family fled the Duvalier regime for Puerto Rico when he was boy and did not return to Haiti until he was a teenager. The homecoming lasted a year before Duval-Carrie moved to New York to finish high school. He studied art in Montreal and Paris, then settled about 15 years ago in Miami, where he was delighted to find a part of the city called Little Haiti.

'He's both within and without this profound Voodoo culture,' said Donald Cosentino, professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA. The university's Fowler Museum of Cultural History is one of three museums in the past decade to showcase Duval-Carrie's ongoing exploration of migration and Haitian Voodoo, a blend of Christian tenets and African religions.

'He knows profoundly the plight of his own people, but he also knows how that fits into American society,' Cosentino said.

Duval-Carrie first took up migration as a theme in 1989 for a Paris exhibition. 'Altar of the Nine Slaves' shows nine green-headed men chained in Africa, crowded into a boat and then at work in sugar cane fields in Haiti.

The slaves' Middle Passage never ends, as they mingle with the gods throughout Duval-Carrie's subsequent work. The boats mostly drift, sometimes aided by the serpent god bridging the distance between the palm-lined shores of Haiti and menacing Coast Guard vessels guarding the glittering lights of Miami. Mystical 'power points' bind land, sea and sky in webs of sparkling dots.

The boat gods' few landfalls appear traumatic. They shipwreck on tiny reefs jutting out of the water, and when they do reach Miami, the city seems to blind them. Searchlights block the entrance of a lone migrant in 'Vigilante City,' while the gods stand stunned under a Miami Beach causeway in 'The Landing.'

Duval-Carrie calls his work reflective, not political, though Haitian migrants represent the effects of political and economic policies throughout the region.

'These are people, they're real people. There should be a basic minimum of respect and understanding,' he said. 'You cannot just treat them because they're black or they're poor any differently than your poor people here. And it's a reflection on the United States, how they behave.'

The dark sense of humor evident in his work bubbles up as Duval-Carrie considers what he could paint if the boats ceased coming. 'Something lofty or something banal. I would like to paint flowers,' he said, chuckling.

He probably won't have that opportunity soon. About 40 Haitian migrants were detained in early September after their boat came ashore in a storm in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos; 15 people died and dozens were missing after a sailboat packed with Haitians struck a reef near the same island in July. Eleven Haitians were detained as they landed at a South Florida beach in July. Earlier this month, the Coast Guard repatriated 164 Haitians found in a freighter in the Bahamas.

'The problem hasn't come to an end yet,' said Peter Boswell, senior curator at the Miami Art Museum. 'He feels the need to continue to address it and not let it be a period in his art. The situation in Haiti hasn't really changed enough for him to take on a new subject.'

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29.
Hotel staffing company faced wage complaints
By Katie Johnston Chase
The Boston Globe, September 26, 2009
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/09/26/hotel_staffing_company_faced_wage_complaints/

The toilets are still being scrubbed and the sheets changed at the three Hyatt hotels in the Boston area, but the workers performing these tasks are making half as much money to maintain up to twice as many rooms as the staff housekeepers the hotel fired.

The dismissal of 98 Boston area housekeepers on Aug. 31 ignited public outcry and prompted boycotts against Hyatt, which said yesterday that it would offer the fired housekeepers jobs through a staffing agency or worker retraining options. It also thrust into the spotlight the Atlanta firm that the Hyatt hired to replace the housekeepers, Hospitality Staffing Solutions, a company that has faced several complaints of wage violations in recent years.

Hospitality Staffing Solutions has faced lawsuits in Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, including a 2009 class-action suit on behalf of more than 100 janitors and housekeepers at two Pittsburgh Hyatts. And Audrey Richardson, a lawyer with Greater Boston Legal Services, said there are six wage-related complaints against the company pending with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, which doesn’t comment on open cases.

President Rick Holliday addressed the complaints against the company, which has about 4,800 employees in 450 hotels around the country, saying that 'administrative mistakes’’ might have been made, but the firm treats workers with dignity and respect.

'You don’t run a business for 18 years and have the amount of employees that we have in the cities we have and not make a mistake,’’ said Holliday, who would only say he had 'quite a few’’ employees in the Boston area.

Sonia Lopez, a 32-year-old former Hospitality Staffing Solutions worker, started cleaning 16 rooms a day for $8 an hour at the Cambridge Hyatt in March. A week after the Hyatt housekeepers were fired, she said, she was told to clean 25 rooms a day, adding at least an hour and a half to her workday without additional pay.

Before long, Lopez’s back was bothering her. On Sept. 13, after Lopez told her supervisor she couldn’t clean her last four rooms, she said, she was fired on the spot.

'They think that we’re slaves,’’ said Lopez, who spoke in Spanish through a translator. She is one of the six former Hospitality Staffing Solutions workers who have filed complaints with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.

Other cleaning firms, such as J&R Cleaning Services of Cambridge and Clean Tech Professional Cleaning Services of Hanover, have faced wage-related complaints, and Richardson said there are nine such complaints pending against Illinois-based Capital Cleaning, and others that were resolved. There are so many accusations of wage violations that the attorney general’s office is investigating the entire cleaning industry.

'The workers that have come forward are just the tip of the iceberg,’’ said Richardson, who added that cleaning firms are often repeat violators.

According to a new study, two-thirds of more than 4,000 low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

And 39 percent of the workers in the study, which was financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes, and Russell Sage foundations, were illegal immigrants.

Holliday said all Hospitality Staffing Solutions workers are legally authorized to work. But three Boston-area workers told the Globe on Monday that they were undocumented to work in the United States.

Six current and former workers interviewed also said they were never offered benefits, although Holliday said the company provides Aetna health insurance.

The Hyatt housekeepers made about $15 an hour and had benefits, including a 401(k) plan. The staff workers also had to clean 16 to 18 rooms daily, while Hospitality Staffing Solutions employees interviewed said they sometimes are required to clean nearly double that.

Hyatt declined to comment for this story.

Holliday said room quotas have gone up as hotels adopt green programs, which may stipulate that the sheets are not automatically changed if a guest stays more than one night.

He said it should take housekeepers only 10 or 15 minutes to clean these 'stay-over’’ rooms, while workers are typically allowed 30 minutes to clean other rooms.

'A lot of what we’re proud of is that we’ve given a lot of people a start,’’ said Holliday, adding that the firm promotes entry-level workers. 'It’s the American dream.’’

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30.
Unions target owners of five L.A. carwashes
Organizers focus on a chain of businesses owned by Iranian immigrants who are facing 220 charges of worker abuse.
By Patrick J. McDonnell
The Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-carwash28-2009sep28,0,6469641.story

An aggressive push to organize thousands of immigrant carwash workers in Southern California has sparked a fierce battle pitting big labor against two brothers who are major players in the Los Angeles carwash industry.

The labor movement has emptied its arsenal against Benny and Nisan Pirian, entrepreneurs whose family operates five carwashes in Los Angeles County. The Pirians settled a federal labor complaint last month but still face criminal charges, a class-action suit, a union boycott and recurrent demonstrations.

The carwash dispute is being closely watched nationwide as one of the latest fronts in organized labor's push to bolster its immigrant ranks. The sponsorship of the AFL-CIO and the United Steelworkers underscores how such campaigns have gained mainstream footing after successful efforts to organize janitors, drywall workers and others.

'It shows that the plight of low-wage immigrant workers is now very much on the radar of organized labor,' said Ruth Milkman, a labor expert at UCLA.

This month, union backers took the unusual step of holding a candlelight vigil outside Benny Pirian's Beverly Hills home, inviting a rabbi to join the speakers in excoriating the brothers' alleged mistreatment of workers.

'We are just looking for respect, to be treated as human beings,' said Pedro Guzman, a worker at the Vermont Hand Wash, the family flagship, who was among the participants.

The Pirians declined to comment through their attorney, Mark J. Werksman, who described the siblings as Iranian immigrants who are model employers facing a union smear campaign. He said there was no advantage to workers having a union in a small, family-run business.

'The union is using my clients as a punching bag to try and flex their muscles and intimidate the carwash industry in Los Angeles to accept unionization,' he said.

The unions are pushing carwash owners to sign so-called clean accords, in which employers agree to uphold minimum wage, safety and environmental laws, while also pledging to respect workers' right to organize. No employer has signed a clean agreement to date.

'We're trying to raise the standards of the industry and at least get everyone to earn minimum wage before we move to the next phase, collective bargaining,' said Chloe Osmer, strategic coordinator for the carwash campaign, which went public 18 months ago.

Pro-union workers say they have faced dismissals, slashed hours and other reprisals.

Last month, organizers and Pirian-owned Vermont Hand Wash settled a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board. Among other things, the company agreed to pay back wages of more than $50,000 to four employees who say they were terminated or had their hours cut because of union sympathies.

'Some of my colleagues got fed up and left,' said Guzman, a native of Honduras who was awarded $1,650 in back pay. 'But I'm sticking it out.'

Despite such friction, activists say the union offensive has already prompted some carwash owners, including the Pirians, to pay more attention to minimum wage laws and belatedly provide safety equipment, such as gloves and masks.

The carwash industry, which employs about 18,000 workers in Southern California, according to union estimates, has long been accused of violating wage guidelines and worker protection laws. Carwash workers say they face hazards from airborne fumes and possible skin damage from solvents, soap and acid.

A state law passed in 2004 created employee safeguards and mandated that carwash owners register their operations. But authorities cite continued offenses, including failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, lack of safety equipment and threats directed at workers.

'Carwashes are sweatshops out in public,' said Julia Figueira-McDonough, a deputy Los Angeles city attorney prosecuting criminal charges against the Pirian brothers.

The Pirians were in court last week, fighting off 220 misdemeanor counts in the city case, which cites alleged abuses against workers. Charges include wage theft, intimidating witnesses and conspiracy.

The Pirian brothers, who are free on bail, could each face more than 120 years' imprisonment and fines of $186,000 if convicted. The brothers could also be forced to pay more than $1.2 million in restitution to workers.

The charges, said Werksman, the Pirians' attorney, are 'bogus and trivial,' part of a 'witch hunt' designed to pressure the industry to bow to unionization.

'I think the union was very intimately involved in the filing of these charges,' he said.

Although acknowledging that the union helped facilitate the testimony of dozens of witnesses, city officials denied that the case stemmed from union pressure.

'We make our own independent decisions based on the claims alleged,' said Andrew K. Wong, deputy Los Angeles city attorney. 'We don't ask the union its opinion.'

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31.
Lawyers note need for more Spanish speakers
Demographic shift calls for improved services in courts, jail
By Gabrielle Banks
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 28, 2009
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09271/1001345-455.stm

Attorney Lourdes Sanchez Ridge said she first noticed the trend when she got a call from a Spanish-speaking inmate at Allegheny County Jail who said he'd been locked up for 10 months and hadn't seen his lawyer.

When Ms. Sanchez Ridge contacted the absentee lawyer, he said, 'Why should I go see him if I can't communicate with him?' She agreed to serve as a translator for the initial interview, though she knew this private lawyer could have long ago hired a professional translator himself.

'The guy was in for felony drug charges. Nobody went to see him [or explained the charges]. And he's scared out of his wits,' recalled Ms. Sanchez Ridge, an international and white collar defense lawyer who heads Pittsburgh's Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and co-founded the county bar association's Hispanic Attorneys Committee. 'As a result, I understood there were a lot of Spanish-speaking people at the jail. A lot more than I thought.'

Richard Delgado, an emeritus law professor at University of Pittsburgh who teaches at Seattle University, said Latin American immigration to the U.S. has actually decreased slightly in the past few years. He attributes any spike in the numbers in the jail to 'hypervigilance and this country's paranoia about undocumented immigrants.' He said he believes law enforcement officers are on 'a rampage' and Latino immigrants 'are in the crosshairs.'

'I'm a Latino and when I go out I'm on high alert. And I'm a 70-year-old law professor,' he said.

Inmate data provided by Warden Ramon Rustin showed that on average, 43 undocumented immigrants from Latin America were lodged in the jail per month from September 2008 to August 2009.

Defense attorneys say most of these individuals are in for relatively minor infractions, like driving under the influence or disturbing the peace.

Many stay for a short time before they are transferred to a federal detention facility in York if they face immigration proceedings and possible deportation.

Mr. Delgado said, 'Immigrants, especially Latinos, are a low-crime group, in part because of immigrant ethic but also because they don't want to come to the attention of the authorities.'

After Ms. Sanchez Ridge's eye-opening experience, she organized an impromptu meeting to draw criminal justice officials' attention to the demographic shift in the community. The warden, two criminal court judges, the court administrator and the public defender attended.

Then the wheels of the local justice system slowly creaked forward toward better access.

The judges and court administrator pulled together thousands of pages of standard court forms, like jury trial waivers, protection from abuse orders, subpoenas and warrants. Ms. Sanchez Ridge and three fellow attorneys from the Hispanic Attorneys Committee volunteered to translate the mountain of documents into Spanish.

The warden arranged for one of the lawyers, Marilin Martinez-Walker, to dub the orientation video at the jail.

The public defender, Michael J. Machen, kept pretty quiet at that meeting, Ms. Sanchez Ridge remembered, but nevertheless he, too, snapped into gear to improve services for non-English-speaking defendants.

Under his directive, the public defender's office considers any inmate without a lawyer a potential client. Paralegals interview about 250 to 300 new clients at the jail each week, another chance to review the Latino population.

Now, when a Spanish-speaking inmate shows up at the jail, Mr. Rustin has asked his staff to contact the public defender's office, where a Spanish-speaking staff attorney, Anthony Borrero, or one of the Spanish-speaking paralegals, is on call to do these interviews. The office created an intake form in Spanish that paralegals can use in a pinch if they're caught without backup.

Mr. Machen also hired a Spanish teacher to give a weekly language class for interested employees. Mr. Corr, who grew up in Northern Ireland and is a student in the class, said the teacher covers really practical material, like asking clients whether they have an attorney.

Five paralegals, five investigators, two intake clerks and a secretary have completed a semester's worth of coursework and Mr. Corr said that all 13 students have signed up to continue this fall.

Ms. Sanchez Ridge nominated Mr. Machen, and he was chosen to receive the Hispanic Attorneys Committee's El Sol Award for 'his extraordinary efforts ... to ensure Hispanic defendants with limited knowledge of the English language are receiving competent and effective legal counsel,' according to the official announcement. He will be honored Wednesday at the group's Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, which is co-sponsored by the Allegheny County Bar Association and Thorp Reed & Armstrong LLP, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Rivers Club, Downtown.

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32.
Giving Voice to Asylum-Seekers' Scars
By Steve Hendrix
The Washington Post, September 27, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092602544.html

After a long day of treating diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol, physician Randi Abramson shifted gears one evening last week to face a different litany of complaints: beatings with whips, burns with cigarettes, repeated rapes, mock drownings, sexual slavery.

'Man,' Abramson said as she stepped from an exam room at Bread for the City's second-floor medical clinic on Seventh Street NW. 'That was a really sad one.'

Abramson drops onto a stool, composing her thoughts before entering on a laptop the horrifying story of her most recent patient at the District nonprofit organization's new monthly clinic for political asylum-seekers: a 24-year-old Kenyan woman who recently fled Mexico and is petitioning to stay in the United States. Raised by abusive grandparents who beat her and, at 10, subjected her to genital mutilation. Cast out by her family for choosing school over marriage, she was tricked into a prostitution ring couched as a scholarship opportunity. She ended up in a Mexican brothel, where she was held captive, beaten and knifed by a customer.

Such shocking tales of cruelty can take a toll, said Abramson, one of three doctors who have volunteered to lend expert medical credence to clients' allegations of torture and abuse. It has been difficult to find doctors willing to take on these cases. But those who have stepped forward say they find powerful satisfaction in the opportunity to boost wrecked lives onto a path toward salvation.

'The scars, everything I found in the physical exam completely support the history she related,' Abramson said. 'It's just very rewarding to know that I will document what I heard and saw this evening and that will have a huge impact on her life.'

Doctors say they rarely see people trying to pass off other injuries as evidence of torture. Such cases are usually weeded out before they reach medical exams. Although doctors often cannot trace wounds to a particular incident, they can compare patients' accounts of their traumas to scars that tell their own stories.

Having a doctor certify that an asylum-seeker was tortured back in the home country enormously improves the chance that an immigration court will approve a claim, according to immigration lawyers. Typically, clients are refugees on the run, fleeing home without medical records, police reports or any other proof of their stories. A little expert testimony can turn a tale of woe into a legal victory.

'I've seen the impact an affidavit or testimony from a U.S.-educated physician has on the court, and it can be incredibly persuasive,' said Laura Tuell Parcher, a lawyer at Jones Day in Washington who has handled pro bono asylum cases for 15 years. 'I've seen a judge say after a doctor's testimony: 'That's it. We're done. I'm granting [asylum].' '

Like other immigration lawyers, Parcher has struggled for years to find doctors to examine her clients on a case-by-case basis. Bread for the City's new clinic, an outgrowth of a program pieced together by several physicians at George Washington University, seeks to make the service available more consistently.

Citing federal records, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute says about 30,000 people apply for asylum each year. Last year, 22,930 applications were granted, and about half of those required a hearing before an immigration judge.

The atmosphere at the clinic is surprisingly upbeat. As in any doctor's office, attendants sort charts and usher patients around. But when someone calls out 'Child care!' from the waiting area, two young female staffers immediately drop what they are doing and go play with puzzles with two children of a woman who wants her story of torture vetted.

Kenyan-born Frida Ngwa had her allegation of torture assessed four years ago by Katalin Roth, a physician at George Washington who was seeing asylum-seekers at last week's clinic. Ngwa said she remembers Roth asking her to disrobe and reveal the scars from serial beatings by police who objected to her work with political prisoners. 'They hit me with the butts of their guns and kicked me with their heavy boots,' Ngwa said. 'Dr. Roth examined me from the bottom of my feet to the top of my hair. I trusted her.'

At her successful asylum hearing, Ngwa recalled, 'the judge read Dr. Roth's report and said, 'I don't know why human beings can be treating people like this.' I cry when I think of that day.' Ngwa now works as an elder-care attendant in the District.

Hope Ferdowsian, a GWU internist who has been evaluating asylum-seekers for six years, helped run a one-day training seminar this summer in hopes of recruiting more volunteers. More than 40 doctors came, but the clinic has added only three more names to the roster. Aside from the time required to write legal reports and testify in courts, many physicians are wary of the disturbing nature of torture cases, Ferdowsian said.

At last week's clinic, she examined a human rights worker from West Africa who had been raped twice at a police station and was once left outdoors naked and unconscious. During the exam, Ferdowsian carefully measured the scars on the woman's back left by multiple whippings.

Her caseload has included a man dunked to the point of unconsciousness in a barrel of fetid water and another who was held for days in a pond where dead bodies were floating. Her first torture allegation was also the easiest to confirm: A livid burn scar in the perfect shape of a clothes iron on the political activist's abdomen was all she needed to see.

'The stories can stay with you, no doubt about it,' said Ferdowsian, who said she was drawn to working with torture victims because of her family's history of persecution in Iran. 'I will never stop doing this work. I'm constantly amazed by how resilient these survivors are. I'm always struck by the level of forgiveness they offer.'

Part of Ferdowsian's coping strategy is to accept the powerful emotions at play in the exam room. She cries. She often turns to Abramson and Roth for a little professional sympathy. Especially in cases of sexual abuse, she said, doctors must ditch the detached bedside manner and tap their deepest empathies to let the unspeakable be aired.

'There's really no good training for a clinician to know how to do this,' said Siddarth Shah, a Virginia-based physician and consultant to health-care providers who treat torture and trauma victims. He teaches relaxation techniques and other ways doctors can keep the tales they hear on the job from overwhelming their lives. 'Everybody is to some extent negatively affected by this kind of work, but typically it's more than compensated for by the good works they do. It's hard to predict who will take on stories in a detrimental way and who will stay healthy.'

Abramson said getting home to her young children and husband is the best antidote to the shocks of clinic work.

And Roth, who has been evaluating torture victims for a decade, said she often keeps the shadows at bay with a little Diana Krall, or Maria Callas, or a visit to the Phillips Collection art museum.

'One thing I do is get lost in something beautiful,' Roth said. 'Music, art, nature. It might just be dinner with friends. I just try to enjoy the fact that we have such a privileged and peaceful life here.'

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33.
Refugees resettled from Asia to gather
By Mark Ferenchik
The Columbus Dispatch, September 26, 2009
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/09/26/refugees.html?sid=101

If the weather holds out and you find yourself winding through Sharon Woods Metro Park today, you might come upon a small ceremony celebrated by one of Columbus' newest immigrant communities.

The city's Bhutanese Nepalis, who number about 120, are holding their first Durga Puja festival, a Hindu celebration of the goddess Durga's victory over evil.

They've already overcome much hardship.

For nearly two decades, more than 100,000 lived in refugee camps in Nepal.

Ethnic Nepalis had lived in the nearby kingdom of Bhutan for more than a century, but they were driven out by the Bhutanese government, which decided that their large number posed a threat.

The Bhutanese Nepalis said they were discriminated against after the Bhutanese government introduced a 'one nation, one people' policy to ensure its homogenous Buddhist culture and branded them illegal immigrants in 1988, according to Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department.

The Nepalis were 'transported like animals' from Bhutan to Nepal between 1991 and 1993, said Damaru Adhikari, a 38-year-old who taught English at home and was one of the first to arrive in Columbus, in June 2008.

Nepal's government would not grant the refugees citizenship, and they lived along riverbanks for years, Adhikari said.

Since November 2007, more than 17,000 have immigrated to the United States, according to the United Nations. The U.S. government has offered to resettle 60,000.

US Together, a local resettlement agency, has been helping the refugees in Columbus.

Twenty-seven families have moved to Columbus, concentrated in two apartment complexes south of the old Northland Mall site, said Adhikari, who now works as a case manager for US Together.

Most of the refugees were teachers or farmers. Some have found warehouse work for companies such as FedEx, Adhikari said.

But some have been frustrated trying to learn the language and culture and adapting to their new homeland, said Jocelyn Greene, US Together office manager.

It's another hardship, but one they are enduring with grace, Greene said.

'We're talking about refugees who have spent 10 to 20 years in refugee camps,' she said. 'They don't mind facing another' hardship. 'They're used to that.'

Metro Parks Executive Director John O'Meara said Columbus' recent immigrants, including Latinos and Somalis, often use parks for get-togethers and celebrations.

'It's just a good place.'

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34.
Immigrants journey started at age 14
'By Elaine Ayala
The San Antonio Express-News (TX), September 25, 2009
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/61304057.html

Jaime Rios stood with more than 500 other people from more than 50 countries in Laurie Auditorium on Thursday to take an oath of allegiance.

Holding their right hands in the air, they repeated after U.S. Magistrate Judge John W. Primomo the oath swearing to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The ceremony was filled with patriotic music, voter registration pitches, miniature American flags and a speech from Spurs owner Peter Holt.

For Rios, 44, getting naturalized wasn't just emotional, it was akin to 'taking the first step on the moon,' he said in Spanish, repeating a few of the words in English, 'like going to the moon.'

The day was 30 years in the making and began when he crossed the Rio Grande and entered the country illegally. He was just 14, a boy who started working in Mexico when he was about 8 and got little in the way of formal education. Rios said he brought nothing with him besides the willingness to work hard and the ability to drive a tractor.

That turned out to be a fortuitous skill that impressed San Antonian Jack Curry, a construction supervisor who initially didn't give Rios a job but ended up becoming a father figure, boss and friend.

Rios said he gets goose bumps remembering the man.

'He felt sorry for me,' Rios said, recalling the Dr Pepper and sandwich Curry gave him the day they met.

Curry died two years ago but got to see Rios start J&P Paving, a San Antonio asphalt paving company that constructs streets, parking lots and driveways.

Rios has 22 employees and thousands of dollars in equipment. The company has taken on small jobs such as church parking lots (Rios has done some for free) and, as a subcontractor, has been involved in bigger projects on state highways, city streets and shopping malls.

At the moment, J&P Paving is doing work for H.L. Zumwalt Construction on a two-year San Antonio Water System project.

Rios is married to Pastora Rios (the 'P' in J&P Paving) and has five daughters, one of them a student at St. Mary's University who wants to become a doctor.

Rios credits Curry with putting him on a path to success.

When people ask him, 'How you did it?' Rios tells them he was surrounded by good people and made sure to get to work at 5 a.m. when starting time was 6 a.m.

His immigration attorney Joe De Mott said his client was hired to do a paving job at a Border Patrol station in Eagle Pass, noting that a man once fearful of immigration authorities grew to conduct business with them.

'We sometimes get jaded with the immigration debate,' De Mott said. 'But when you really stop and look at it, they're looking for better lives for themselves and their families.'

'They come here with those dreams, and it makes a better country for all of us.'

Lennie Turpin, general manager of Zumwalt Construction, couldn't help getting emotional when he heard of Rios' big day.

'As far as the work,' Turpin said of Rios' company, 'it's some of the best in town. I will say that his word is gold.'

Just minutes after taking his oath, Rios was standing next to Peter Holt and smiling for a camera. Hundreds of other freshly minted citizens were waiting for their turn.

Before stepping away, Rios couldn't help telling the great-grandson of Caterpillar inventor Benjamin Holt that he has a company of his own, too, and owns a couple of the Holt family's tractors.

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35.
Thai family wins citizenship after divorce mix-up
By Amy Taxin
The Associated Press, September 25, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hTA6ZBlqishbfxT1tRtXjA-ULy0wD9AUIGQO4

Los Angeles (AP) -- Andy Promsiri needed to clutch his naturalization certificate in his hand to believe he had finally become a U.S. citizen after trying for 26 years.

It also helped him accept that he and his brother weren't being sent back to Thailand with their 72-year old mother after a mix-up over a 1975 divorce document led to deportation threats by the federal government.

Promsiri, a 48-year-old college financial aid adviser, beamed throughout a Friday ceremony at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, where he took his oath and pledged allegiance to the American flag with 2,300 other new citizens.

When he finally received his long-awaited certificate, he kissed it.

'This is it. This is real,' Promsiri said, fighting back tears.

The family's odyssey through the American immigration system dates back to 1971 and revolves around a single piece of paper that U.S. government officials initially accepted as a valid document but challenged more than three decades later.

Promsiri's mother Pai Ciesiolka left Thailand in 1971 with her two young sons to join her husband, who was in the U.S. on a student visa. Four years later, the couple went to the Thai consulate in Los Angeles to get a divorce.

She remarried later that year in Las Vegas this time to a Colorado man named Paul Ciesiolka and returned to Thailand to apply for a green card at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

Once the card was approved, she flew back to the U.S. and obtained residency for her sons.

When her second marriage fizzled, Ciesiolka and her children continued to renew their green cards faithfully every decade as required by U.S. law. Everything was as it should be until they tried to become American citizens.

Andy Promsiri applied in 1983. He sailed through his citizenship exam but never heard back from officials. He reapplied a decade later and received a call the day before the ceremony telling him not to come.

In 1998, Promsiri, his brother Kevin and mother all applied for citizenship. More than a decade later, they got letters saying were being deported. U.S. immigration authorities said they didn't recognize Ciesiolka's 1975 divorce certificate and alleged she was actually married to two men when she got her green card that year.

'This was a Kafka-esque ordeal,' said Carl Shusterman, the family's immigration attorney. 'You wake up in the morning and you get the mail and you've been a green card holder since before you were 10 and all of a sudden the government wants to deport you.'

The family was petrified. They had lived nearly four decades in the U.S. Ciesiolka had retired; her sons had grown up in American schools and were professionals with lives of their own.

Amid pressure from attorneys and after a story by The Associated Press last May, the government held off on deporting the family. They conducted interviews, took their fingerprints and eventually approved them for citizenship.

Mariana Gitomer, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, declined to comment on the government's reversal or the details of the case. She said officials were pleased the family had become U.S. citizens.

For the family, taking the oath brought excitement and relief.

Now, the Promsiri brothers are planning a trip to France. They can't wait to vote. Andy Promsiri said he's even eager for the jury duty dreaded by colleagues and friends anything to be part of the country where they've spent nearly their entire lives.

'It's just one of the happiest days in my life,' Andy Promsiri said. 'Now I can relax and enjoy being an American. It is wonderful.'

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36.
A child's life, a lawyer's humanity
Asylum helps boy escape wrath of Salvadoran gang
By Scott Calvert
The Baltimore Sun (MD), September 27, 2009
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bal-te.md.asylum27sep27,0,3819855.story

The 12-year-old boy's harrowing story tumbled out: Tormented by a gang in his native El Salvador. Sent by his terrified mother to sneak into the United States in search of safety. Nabbed by Border Patrol agents in Texas. Told he'd have to go back home, whatever the consequences.

Santos Maldonado-Canales badly wanted to stay, and now, sitting in a plush Baltimore law firm in August 2008, his hopes rested with an earnest young lawyer. At 27, Azim Chowdhury was two years out of law school and knew nothing about immigration law. A partner at the Duane Morris firm had given him the case as part of its mission to offer free representation.

On that day, Chowdhury began an odyssey of his own, immersing himself in tricky legal issues and a Salvadoran family saga. Winning asylum would not be easy, he soon learned. Immigration judges often deny asylum in gang cases. Over the next year, he would employ clever thinking, deep research and a bit of luck to press his client's case, and by the end he would find himself sought out by veteran lawyers.

But in that first meeting with Santos, all Chowdhury knew was that he wanted to win. 'We don't want this kid to go back to El Salvador,' he thought. 'We're pretty sure he's going to get killed.'

The fear was real. In 2007, Santos' 16-year-old brother, Jose Ever, was shot dead by gang members. These were the same thugs who afterward continued to beat and threaten Santos and his family.

Jose Ever's murder, by his family's account, was brutal payback for his stubborn refusal to join the gang known as Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. 'He was a really good student,' said his mother, Maria, through an interpreter, 'and he wanted to continue with his studies.'

MS-13 is a notorious Latino gang known for its violence and criminal rackets. It originated in Los Angeles among Salvadorans, and the FBI says it has spread to 42 states. The Washington area is a hotbed.

El Salvador has a big MS-13 presence partly because so many members have been deported back to the small Central American nation, where law enforcement is weak and poverty widespread.

The dead-end economy is what prompted family patriarch Pablo Maldonado-Canales to leave El Salvador well before MS-13 began preying on his three sons. Since 1998 he has lived in Maryland, working in construction and sending money home. Though here legally, he lacked the right to bring his family.

The family's gang troubles began five years ago, when Jose Ever was 13, Santos was 8 and a third brother, Pablo Michael, was 12. Gang members targeted the eldest for recruitment, and soon they were roughing him up for daring to reject them.

For Santos, a green-eyed boy with a wide face, the attacks began in 2006, when he was 10. He was walking home from school when he encountered four MS-13 members lurking by an overpass. After encircling him, the boys threw him to the ground.

'Then one of them kicked me in the stomach and stepped on my back,' he said in an affidavit. 'He said me and my brothers were going to be killed unless we joined their gang.'

The attacks continued and escalated. Before long the gang started harassing Pablo Michael. 'It was really ugly,' Santos said in an interview, 'because they always hit me.' All along, family members say, the gang for some reason had one key goal: to pull Jose Ever into its fold.

One day in May 2007, Jose Ever came home with a bloody lip and black eye. A gang member with a devil tattoo issued a warning: Either he join, or the gang would assail not only him but his brothers and mother.

Two months later Jose Ever was shot in the head. A friend who was present said he recognized the shooter as an MS-13 regular who had bullied Jose Ever. Santos remembers his mother's wails and tears.

The family's nightmare was hardly over. Gang members kept taunting the brothers and pushed their mother to the ground outside her home. It wasn't that the gang wanted them to join; the harassment was retribution for Jose Ever's defiance.

Ominous phone calls came at all hours. 'They would threaten me,' Maria said in an interview, 'tell me they were going to kill us, like they killed my son.' She felt powerless. The police did nothing after her son's murder. She had nowhere to go.

So a couple months later, she sent Santos to America, entrusting him to a cousin driving north to the border. (Pablo Michael, then 15, stayed behind because of medical issues related to a childhood head injury.)

As planned, Santos waded across the Rio Grande River and linked up with a woman waiting in Texas. She would spirit him to his aunt in Texas, and the aunt would get him to his father in Maryland. It was Nov. 1, 2007, his first day in America.

But within an hour Border Patrol agents pulled the car over and took Santos into custody. Immigration officers fed him pizza, but Santos says every bed was full at the detention facility, 'so they locked me in a bathroom for the night.' He was 11, stuck halfway between his mom and dad.

The next night, Santos was put in foster care. A month later he was allowed to move to Maryland with his father, though the U.S. government still intended to deport him.

His father, who hadn't seen him since he was 2, called a Washington nonprofit group for help but was told it lacked resources. Before running out of money, he paid a law firm a hefty $700 to shift his son's case to Baltimore. The nonprofit National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children contacted the Duane Morris firm, where Santos' case landed on Chowdhury's desk.

Ten months after he had crossed the Rio Grande, he and his father met with Chowdhury in the firm's hushed offices high above the Inner Harbor.

Looking back, Chowdhury admits he was not thrilled at first. A 2006 graduate of the University of Maryland Law School, he liked the idea of working pro bono. But he is used to representing pharmaceutical companies on Food and Drug Administration matters. He'd never handled an immigration case and didn't speak Spanish.

'I had no idea what I was doing,' he said. The stakes were high: 'This is somebody's life we're talking about, not just another corporate transaction.'

He was not entirely on his own. Sara McDowell, a senior attorney at the center for refugee and immigrant children, advised him, as did Andres Benach, a Duane Morris immigration lawyer.

Still, the challenge was steep given two rulings by the Board of Immigration Appeals in July 2008 that Benach said 'pretty much closed off' the arguments typically made in gang asylum cases.

In general, asylum can be granted when someone has a well-founded fear of persecution for one of five reasons: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. The last category has been tried in gang cases, but the appeals board said those resisting gang pressure do not make up a social group.

Chowdhury knew he had to thread the needle. Santos faced peril in El Salvador, the lawyer reasoned, not because he'd resisted the gang, but for a very basic reason: 'Because he was his brother's brother.' And a nuclear family has long been an accepted social group for asylum cases.

But as the asylum hearing approached, Chowdhury worried any gang claim might fail because of the apparent judicial skepticism. And there was a hiccup: If Santos fled because of threats to his family, why were his mother and brother still in El Salvador?

Then in February, his mother and brother made it to Texas. She'd had enough when five MS-13 members beat Pablo Michael on a soccer field. Not only were his mother and brother now in the U.S., it meant they could testify at Santos' asylum hearing.

That was not necessary. On June 11, shortly after Santos spoke, Immigration Judge Philip T. Williams granted the boy asylum. The judge embraced Chowdhury's argument, noting that the family was 'mistreated in the worst way' by MS-13.

So pervasive and deadly was the gang's influence, Williams said, according to a transcript, 'that this young man was scared out of his wits, left El Salvador, came to the United States and clearly has nowhere else to go in El Salvador where he would be free from the wrath of MS-13.'

The ruling, which the government did not appeal, has attracted notice. Chowdhury has received inquiries from some 30 immigration lawyers curious about the case and his legal approach.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell University, said Santos was fortunate: 'He had good facts, he had a good lawyer and he had a fair judge. That combination is what allowed him to win when so many others have failed.'

Despite putting in hundreds of hours, Chowdhury is not done. He also represents Maria and Pablo Michael, and their asylum cases have yet to be heard. Chowdhury says he plans to stick with the legal argument that worked for Santos.

For now, the family of four is living outside Washington and adjusting to life in America - and life together for the first time in a decade. When it's all over, Maria promises to cook a big meal for Chowdhury.

Santos, now 13, is in eighth grade; his brother, 17, is in ninth grade. Santos likes playing soccer. And while Chowdhury has suggested a career in law, Santos thinks he might become a police officer to protect 'the defenseless.'

As he put it, 'I wouldn't want anyone to go through what we went through.'

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37.
'Sell crack or die' defendant found guilty
Immigrant blamed his actions on threats by human traffickers
By Jaxon Van Derbeken
The San Francisco Chronicle, September 26, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/26/BANS19SOJ8.DTL

A San Francisco jury convicted a Honduran immigrant Friday of felony charges of dealing crack in the Tenderloin, rejecting his defense that human traffickers had threatened to kill him if he didn't sell drugs.

Rigoberto Valle, 23, has been in custody since his arrest June 4 at Golden Gate Avenue and Larkin Street for selling two rocks of crack cocaine to undercover officers.

Valle will be sentenced Oct. 19. He is expected to receive credit for time served and be placed on three years' probation. He would then be subject to deportation, however, because he is under a federal hold on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

Valle testified that traffickers known as coyotes who brought him to San Francisco had demanded $500 for his passage from Phoenix and ordered him - at the point of a gun and then a knife - to earn it by dealing crack. The sum was on top of the $1,500 his family had paid the smugglers to get across the border, Valle said.

The jury in San Francisco Superior Court deliberated nearly eight hours starting Thursday before convicting Valle.

Outside court, jurors said they sympathized with Valle, who testified that he had traveled a month by foot, bus and boxcar to reach the United States. But they also said they weren't sure they believed that human traffickers had forced him to deal drugs.

'I wanted to find him not guilty,' said one juror, who did not want to be named. 'We all had enormous sympathy for his situation, but that was not what we were there to decide on.

'To me, it came down to that he knew what he was doing was illegal,' the juror said. 'I don't think he honestly cared.'

Jury foreman Daniel Ludwinski said he also sympathized with Valle and believed he had been a victim of human trafficking. But, he said, 'It all came down to whether we could trust the defendant.'

He said he thought Valle could have avoided dealing crack by leaving or seeking help.

Valle's attorney, Hadi Razzaq, brought in an expert from Oregon who testified that the alleged threats against Valle turned his situation from one of simple illegal immigration to human trafficking.

Razzaq asked that the jury 'protect Mr. Valle - he's a victim.'

'I'm extremely disappointed,' Razzaq said after the verdict. 'It's unfortunate that somebody who's been a victim of what I think pretty clearly is human trafficking is being prosecuted and now convicted.'

Assistant District Attorney Richard Hechler told the jury that the case was about a sale of two rocks of crack, nothing more. He said Valle had contributed to his plight by agreeing to come to San Francisco.

'He could have run, he should have run and he didn't run,' Hechler said in his closing argument. 'He may or may not have been trafficked. That's not the issue. The issue is, did he commit a crime?'

Hechler declined to comment after the verdict, but spokesman Brian Buckelew of the district attorney's office said, 'From day one we said this wasn't a human trafficking case. It was another crack sale in the Tenderloin. The jury agreed.'

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38.
9 are arrested in gang sweep
Alleged hit man for a Mexican drug cartel is among those held in Bell Gardens probe.
By Ching-Ching Ni
The Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gang26-2009sep26,0,4457441.story

Nine members and associates of a Bell Gardens street gang, including a suspected hit man for a Mexican drug cartel, have been arrested on drug trafficking and weapons charges, federal officials said Friday.

The suspects -- six U.S. citizens and three illegal Mexican immigrants -- were arrested Thursday as agents served search warrants in Bell Gardens and Los Angeles, officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. Their arrests culminated a nine-month investigation by the agency of the Barrio Evil 13 street gang.

Several assault weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle, a Tec-9 submachine gun, a MAC-11 submachine gun and a sawed-off shotgun, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition also were recovered.

'This is a relatively small and newer gang that has been operating with impunity for the last several years,' said Kevin Kozak, deputy special agent in charge of ICE's Los Angeles office of investigations. 'They have access to significant weapons . . . and claims they can have access to military-grade weapons through a 'friend' in the military.'

One of the suspects, Henry 'Silent' Valenzuela, 27, of Bell Gardens, told an ICE undercover investigator that he is a hit man for a Tijuana-based drug cartel, Kozak said.

Valenzuela allegedly tried to recruit the officer to carry out 'hits' for him in the Los Angeles area for a $10,000 fee, Kozak said.

Bell Police Chief Randy G. Adams, whose department worked on the investigation, said he hopes the arrests will help solve other crimes in the community. 'Gangs know no geographic boundary,' he said. 'Removing these weapons from the streets helps all of us in southeast Los Angeles feel safer.'

Others arrested include Sergio Calderon, 23, and Everado Venegas-Lumbreras, 38, both of Bell Gardens; Javier Avila-Lopez, 40, and Eduardo Ortega-Plascencia, 39, both of Los Angeles; Margarito Enciso, 27, of Long Beach; and Silverio Palma-Carlin, 31, Francisco Arellano, 32, Alfredo Rutillo-Medina, 27, all of Mexico.

Other agencies that assisted in the arrests include the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Bell, Huntington Park, Long Beach and Vernon police departments.

'This is an ongoing investigation,' Kozak said. 'We are concerned about the source origin of these weapons and the distribution network. The size of their stockpile implies that they were supplying other gangs.'

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