Home » Posts tagged "ice"

Source: USA Today
NOGALES, Ariz. – The number of illegal immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector fell by over 40% last year, indicating a significant drop in illegal immigration has declined considerably in Arizona.

Official statistics will be released for several weeks, Butala Bersin, Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told the Border Patrol agents in Nogales this week that the arrests in the Tucson sector fell to 123,000 last year fiscal. Arrests in Nogales Station, the largest in the Tucson sector, fell by 43% to 18,000.
“Ladies and gentlemen, know that you are engaged in a historical enterprise here,” said Bersin agents. The fall of the arrests, he said, shows that illegal immigrants “do not come around here anymore, and when they do, they get arrested.” (more…)

During the last eight years, 126 illegal immigrants have died while under the custody of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in the United States.

The first case that took place during the 2012 fiscal year was Anibal Ramirez Ramirez, 35, from El Salvador, who died on October 2 in Charlottesville, Virginia. (more…)

According to president Barack Obama, he backs an immigration reform and announced last month an initiative to ease deportation policies, but he has ousted 1,000,000 illegal immigrants in two and a half years. If the Administrations keeps up this pace, Obama will deport more people in one term than George W. Bush did in two.

This contradiction between rhetoric and reality is a key element of debate over U.S. immigration policy, and stakes are high for the next presidential election, having in mind that in 2008, 67% of Hispanics voted for Obama over Republican candidates. (more…)

Georgia is putting in place a new law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants, and many across the state are nervous. Businesses fear an economic boycott, the Latino community fears police officers will abuse their new powers, and farmers in South Georgia fear the law will hurt them dramatically.

Georgia is known for its peaches and Vidalia onions, the state vegetable. The specialty crop is produced in just a few counties in the rural southeast part of the state, where the soil is just right.

Aries Haygood with M&T Farms said  that the labor-intensive process that machines just can’t do because they’d bruise the delicate crop — a $140 million-a-year industry.

“Our biggest fear is that because of the way the bill could be structured we won’t be able to find enough workers to do the work that we need done in a short amount of time,” he says

During 2011, Utah and Georgia were the only states to approve immigration laws while others turned down similar proposals.

The film director Luis Argueta in collaboration with several congregations from Iowa and the Guatemalan government are documenting the consequences an immigration raid left on several families three years ago.

In May 12, 2008, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) arrested almost 400 people from Mexico and Guatemala in a meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. The raid is considered the largest single raid of a workplace in US history.

Argueta, born in Guatemala, said he wanted to help his countrymen through “the grief and necessities” they had experienced.

23 persons claiming to be Cuban citizens landed in two Puerto Rican islands between Sunday and Monday.

Customs and Border Protection Agents were notified by Park Rangers of an incursion of a group of 9 alleged alien Cubans that arrived in Mona Island from the Dominican Republic on Sunday.

Hours later, the Ramey Border Patrol Station received a call from the United States Coast Guard reporting another incursion of allegedly Cuban nationals on Monito Island.

Since the 23 Cubans touched soil in Puerto Rico, considered US territory, they will receive a Notice to Appear before an Immigration Judge, for further proceedings under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.

Three construction workers in the city of Tallahassee, Florida were arraigned in federal court May 6 on charges of possessing and using a fraudulent document as evidence of work authorization in the United States according to an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE).

In indictments, Oscar Fuentes, 25, Jaime Antonio DeLarca, 24, and Saúl Rivas Dubón, 32, were separately charged with using a fraudulent document as evidence of work authorization in the United States, based upon their presentation of documents such as counterfeit permanent resident cards or counterfeit social security cards to their employer, Nelson & Associates, Inc.

Fuentes was also charged with transfer of a fraudulent identification document.

The defendants face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

U.S. authorities are facing a huge backlog of records involving people who have stayed in the United States after their visas expired, according to a report released on Tuesday, revealing that a security gap has not been fixed since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT system had a backlog of some 1.6 million records of potential visa overstays as of January 2011, said the report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm.

Five of the 19 men who hijacked the planes in the September 11 attacks had overstayed their visas and the report found that some 36 of the 400 people who have been convicted on terrorism-related charges since 2001 had also stayed after their visas expired.

“It is simply unacceptable that we are still unable to systematically identify people who overstay — some of whom may be terrorists waiting to attack innocent Americans,” Joe Lieberman, an Independent who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement.

Some of the records may include duplicates because of computer system changes, may not have been reviewed yet, or include cases that are not necessarily considered to be a priority, the GAO report said.

As a matter of policy, records involving visa overstays of 90 days or less or those who are not deemed to pose a national security or public safety risk do not trigger an immediate lookout warning, according to the report.

The report was released a day before Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is due to testify on border security before Lieberman’s committee.

 

Federal immigration officials say they admit no wrongdoing on claims a man was illegally held in jail while authorities investigated his immigration status.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said  that it settled the lawsuit with the man, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, to avoid protracted litigation.

The ACLU said the federal government agreed to settle the case for $50,000.

Luis Quezada was arrested in May 2009 after failing to appear in court on traffic charges. ICE asked the Jefferson County jail to hold him for 48 hours but Quezada said he remained in custody for 47 days after the hold expired.

The ACLU has also filed a lawsuit against Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink, which is still pending.

Immigrants detained in the United States lack adequate access to legal representation and medical care, while the system itself is over reliant on detention, a human rights report released on Thursday found.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights study — “Immigration in the United States: Detention and Due Process” — examined the U.S. federal government’s immigration enforcement and detention system.

It drew on research including visits to six immigration detention facilities in Arizona and Texas in July 2009, since when the U.S. federal government has announced its own comprehensive review of the immigration enforcement system.

“The IACHR is troubled by the lack of a genuinely civil detention system, where the general conditions are commensurate with human dignity and humane treatment,” the report said.

The Commission “is also disturbed by the impact that detention has on due process, mainly with respect to the right to an attorney which, in turn, affects one’s right to seek release.” it added.

The IACHR, a body within the Washington-based Organization of American States, said it was “disturbed” that detention management and care was frequently outsourced to private contractors, while “insufficient information is available concerning the mechanisms in place to supervise” them.

The report also singled out concern over what it said were apparently insufficient numbers of medical personnel to attend to immigrants as the federal detention system underwent expansion to its current 30,000-bed capacity from fewer than 7,500 in 1995.

It said detention was a “disproportionate measure” in most instances, and argued noncustodial alternatives would be “a more balanced means of serving the state’s legitimate interest in ensuring compliance with immigration law.”

Reuters contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, but a request for comment was not immediately returned.

The study noted that the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, issued a report in October 2009 that identified some of the same concerns raised by the study.

 

Reuters