The bill to extend payroll tax cuts and extend unemployment benefits is part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, H.R. 3671, a $1 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill that funds several federal government departments, including Defense and Homeland Security.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that “the House voted Tuesday to scuttle a deal brokered in the Senate to extend the payroll-tax holiday and federal unemployment insurance for two months.”

The Journal adds that the “vote leaves Congress at a familiar impasse, just days after a final deal seemed to be in sight. Senate leaders reached an agreement late last week to extend for two months the payroll-tax cut, federal unemployment benefits and a measure to reimburse doctors for treating Medicare patients.”

The 2012 Appropriations Act includes funding that raises the number of immigration detention beds to about 34,000.

The final Fiscal Year 2012 Appropriations 1,200-page bill package includes “a total of $39.6 billion in regular discretionary funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – a decrease of $2 billion below last year’s level and $4 billion below the President’s request.”

According to a detailed summary (.pdf), “the bill provides $5.9 billion for [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement], which is $50 million more than last year’s level. This includes funding for 34,000 detention beds – the largest detention capacity in ICE’s history – and increases in immigration enforcement activities.”

Residents of Pembroke Pines and the town of Southwest Ranches are opposed to the federally funded and privately managed detention center set to be built in South Florida.

The 2012 Appropriations Act also includes $11.7 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “an increase of $362 million over last year’s level.”

Photo: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer (ice.gov)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Homeland Security writes:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubled by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings of discriminatory policing practices within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO). Discrimination undermines law enforcement and erodes the public trust. DHS will not be a party to such practices. Accordingly, and effective immediately, DHS is terminating MCSO’s 287(g) jail model agreement and is restricting the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office access to the Secure Communities program. DHS will utilize federal resources for the purpose of identifying and detaining those individuals who meet U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) immigration enforcement priorities. The Department will continue to enforce federal immigration laws in Maricopa County in smart, effective ways that focus our resources on criminal aliens, recent border crossers, repeat and egregious immigration law violators and employers who knowingly hire illegal labor.

A Department of Justice report released Thursday found that Arpaio, an advocate for controversial immigration enforcement and detention measures, has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations.”

The Department of Justice states that the ongoing civil rights investigation of the Arpaio’s office found “reasonable cause to believe that MCSO, under the leadership of Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”

“We are pleased the Department of Justice report compelled the Department of Homeland Security to take steps today that should have been taken years ago,” said Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in a written statement.

The Network adds:

As the DOJ report implies, DHS was an accomplice in the rights violations caused by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. DHS enabled Sheriff Arpaio to conduct his reign of terror, and expansion of the Maricopa Sheriff’s approach led to SB 1070 and to the potential Arizonification of the country. Today, the Department of Justice again acted to clean up the mess caused by failed DHS policies that enlist local police into the business of enforcing unjust immigration laws. It is time for DHS to stop contributing to the civil rights crisis described in the DOJ report and end the programs that made Arpaio’s crimes possible.”

The National Immigration Forum writes that the “Justice Department findings confirm what the American public had already suspected: Sheriff Arpaio has been more concerned with headlines than the Constitution and the law,” adding that they “also hail Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s prompt termination of the MCSO’s 287g agreement, which delegates authority for immigration enforcement to local officials, and restriction of the MCSO’s access to the Secure Communities program.”

Immigrant advocates across the U.S. have denounced Secure Communities, a highly controversial federal immigration enforcement program critics say contributes to racial profiling, demanding that the Obama administration terminate the program immediately.

Photo: Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer (Photo: ice.gov)

The Department of Homeland Security recently it will begin reviewing about 300,000 deportation proceedingsto implement prosecutorial discretion measures laid out in a June 2011 memo issued by John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE).

The Office of Principal Legal Advisor at ICE in charge of the review has been directed to review “incoming cases and cases pending in immigration court.” The purpose of the review, according to guidance directives also issued Thursday, “is to identify those cases that reflect a high enforcement priority for the Department of Homeland Security.”

According to The New York Times, “the accelerated triage of the court docket — about 300,000 cases — is intended to allow severely overburdened immigration judges to focus on deporting foreigners who committed serious crimes or pose national security risks, Homeland Security officials said.”

The guidance distributed to all immigration attorneys in Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE lists terrorism, felony convictions, murder,  sexual abuse, drug trafficking, illegal entry, reentry and immigration fraud among the crimes that are removal priorities.

Cases not considered enforcement priorities include members of the armed forces, children who have been in the U.S. for more than five years or came to the U.S. before the age of 16, people over 65, domestic violence victims, and people seeking asylum.

The Times adds that “immigration agency lawyers will examine all new cases just arriving in immigration courts nationwide, with an eye to closing cases that are low-priority according to the Morton memorandum, before they advance into the court system,” while “immigrants identified as high priority will see their cases put onto an expedited calendar for judges to order their deportations, Homeland Security officials said.”

Immigrant advocates have had different reactions to the review of deportation proceedings.

The National Day Laborers Organizing Network argues that Thursday’s announcement

highlights how completely out of whack the Administration’s immigration priorities are. President Obama has chosen to deport 400,000 people a year. Moreover, its decision to turn local police into “force multipliers” through [Secure Communities] has caused immeasurable suffering: families have been destroyed, community safety has been undermined, and Latinos’ civil rights have been imperiled as we witness an entire generation of Americans in Waiting criminalized by these policies.

B. Loewe of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network told the Independent in August that the case review

may bring with it an expansion of the definition of “criminal,” because the damaging label is never actually defined. As we’ve seen in Secure Communities, those who they define as criminals are people whose only offense may be driving without a license or may actually only be immigration-related. There’s the potential for many to be condemned under the agency’s new scarlet letter, the title of “criminal.”

The National Immigration Forum, meanwhile, welcomed ”the launch of the Administration’s long-promised review designed to reduce the backlog of deportation cases and prioritize resources. In this time of great concern about our nation’s fiscal health, it makes sense to focus valuable law enforcement resources on the deportation of individuals who are genuine threats to public and national safety.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (aka FAIR) writes that the Department of Homeland Security is beginning “Amnesty Screenings” with the move. FAIR supports immigration enforcement measures like Arizona’s infamous S.B. 1070 and “lower immigration levels.” It has said the prosecutorial discretion measures issued by Morton “constitute nothing less than the granting of administrative amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.”

Currently, employers can check workers’ legal status using E-Verify (which, as of Monday, allows individuals in the District of Columbia, Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Mississippi to check their own employment eligibility status before applying to jobs, as part of a pilot program, according to DHS). But according to the Post, illegal immigrants skirt the system by using fake or stolen Social Security numbers. Thus, the department is contemplating using a credit rating giant, such as Equifax, to make it especially difficult to prove legal identity.

From the Post:

If workers had to use the verification systems in place to apply for a mortgage or a bank account, they would not only have to present a Social Security number to an employer, but also answer questions about their personal history and financial background to establish their identity.

[...]

Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the government planned to use the initiative to evaluate how the third-party verification system worked, with a view to making the tool available to employers.

Private identification systems might reduce Social Security number fraud, but Mayorkas said he has concerns about how the federal government would deal with errors in third-party databases.

The plan is still in the beginning stages and might need congressional approval.

The initiative is a move to ask Americans to help local law enforcement by keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious activity,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and NBA Commissioner David Stern told press at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. The emphasis toward civilian “suspicious activity reporting” has surged in recent years, but advertising campaigns and high-profile partnerships have really begun to take off.

In December, DHS joined forces with Wal-Mart, launching the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign initially in 230 Wal-Mart stores, with a target of 588 sites in 27 states. A short video plays at select checkout stations, telling shoppers to call local police if they see something suspicious. (The term “suspicious,” by the way, is rarely elaborated on or defined by DHS in campaign messages.)

Moving on to sports, DHS partnered with the NFL with its campaign at the Super Bowl in Dallas early this month. And now the NBA.

“We hope that this partnership will emphasize basically that security is a shared responsibility,” said NBA Commissioner David Stern at yesterday’s press event. “We think that sports is a terrific way to send messages, and to get people who go to events to focus on this very important message.”

Or maybe Napolitano is just a big sports fan.

“Our partnership with the NBA to bring the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign to professional basketball events throughout the nation is a vital part of our efforts to ensure the safety of players, employees and fans,” she told the press.

Inquiries have begun over how effective these campaigns are at protecting the country from terrorism. With sports fans and budget-conscious shoppers reporting “suspicious” activities every 10 minutes, does that help the security agencies or overwhelm the system?

David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst for the Cato Institute, said he thinks the national security agencies are overwhelmed with information.

“While there is value in getting a person on the street to be aware and report suspicious activities, you can also create too many false positives,” Rittgers said.

Rittgers said the Federal Bureau of Investigations receives about 700 messages a day, and the National Counterterrorism Center receives about 10,000 pieces of information daily. Clogging the system with even more reports of indiscriminate “suspicious activities” won’t necessarily bring these agencies closer to the information they need to prevent terrorist plots.

“People talk about connecting dots,” he said. “But it’s knowing which dots to connect that has value. …. The commitment to simply collect all the dots might not be as useful as a lot of people would propose.”

For example: “It’s not illegal to purchase a ski mask, it’s not illegal to purchase a gun, it’s not illegal to sit outside a bank. But it’s when you put those all together.”

The measure of success is still to be seen, but meanwhile the money is flowing.

“If You See Something, Say Something” are now being posted all over the country, according the DHS: on 9,000 federal buildings nationwide, at the Mall Of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and the general aviation industry.

DHS allocated $2.9 million for the campaign in 2009, but an official told CNSNews.com that the agency has only spent $500,000 on the campaign to date, saying it is focusing its efforts on partnerships –- outsourcing security, if you will. And while Napolitano told the network the campaign has resulted in the launch of several investigations, she said it’s still difficult to measure whether it will effectively deter would-be terrorists.

The couple was married by proxy while Michael H. Ferschke Jr., a sergeant in the Marines, was overseas. Ferschke died in combat about a month later, and his wife, Hota, now wants to move to the United States to raise their son, whom they found they were expecting shortly before Ferschke deployed. But the Department of Homeland Security does not recognize their marriage to allow her to move to the country: The marriage is considered invalid under current immigration law because it was never consummated.

The law likely only impacts a small number of marriages, but for those it would help, it could ease the migration process considerably. The bill does not take away the consummation requirement to consider a marriage legitimate for immigration rights, but creates an exception “in cases where the failure to consummate the marriage is caused by a physical separation due to active-duty military service aboard by one of the parties,” Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) told Navy Times.

The bill will next move to the Senate, where bill sponsor Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) hopes it will pass before the end of the year.

ICE removals are at a record high this year, but Republicans still accuse the Obama administration of lax enforcement. In their defense, administration officials have insisted their policies reflect a commitment to using resources to prioritize removal of the most dangerous undocumented immigrants. ICE Chief John Morton has said current funding allows for about 400,000 illegal immigrants to be deported each year. Republicans contend the administration never asked for more money.

“ICE has cited a lack of resources as one of the reasons for its prioritization of cases and for its selective enforcement,” Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Oct. 21 . “But to date, we have not seen any efforts by ICE, your Department, or the Administration to request an increase in ICE funding. … As a result, it appears that your Department is doing the very thing that we have raised concerns about in several letters – allowing illegal aliens to evade the law.”

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told TWI he thinks the House could try to give ICE more funding even if the agency does not request it. “When the administration asks for money for detention beds, I could see the House giving them more than they request,” he said.

Of course, any increase in funding in the current economic climate could be difficult, and it’s possible Republicans wouldn’t even go down this path given their statements on reducing spending. But if Republicans were able to find a way to pay for the bill, it is possible the White House would accept the funds, given insistence from ICE that it deports as many illegal immigrants as possible given its funding.

It also means the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review is finally following through on its promise to fill vacancies in the courts, where one in six positions stood vacant as of March. The agency promised to fill the 48 vacancies on immigration courts by the end of the year. They’re not there yet, but Chief Immigration Judge Brian M. O’Leary said the recent addition put the courts on their way to being fully staffed.

“These new immigration judges bring the judge corps of our 59 immigration courts to 262, and we expect to further enhance the corps by additional immigration judges before the end of the calendar year,” he said in a press release.

Vacancies mean longer wait times for hearings and more time in detention centers — plus shorter hearings in a system that already is considered assembly-line justice. Immigration judges had about 70 minutes per case, the shortest time on record from 1998 to the present, according to a March study from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In some cases, this means considering multiple cases at the same time, including mass hearings of up to 80 people.

Immigrant rights advocates argue the backlogs make real justice next to impossible, adding to a number of other complaints about the way immigrants are treated in the civil deportation process.

Some rights groups might have one problem with the new judges hired by the DOJ. A look at their biographies shows that a majority have experience in immigration law specifically, but at least 15 of the 23 worked for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security, its predecessor Immigration and Naturalization Services or the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Justice Department.

Immigration attorneys argue that taking judges from DHS adds to the tension of the process. “They’re your archenemies for fifteen years and now they’re the judge,” Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta immigration attorney, told The Nation.

Three counties have fought to opt out of a fingerprint-sharing program. (San Diego Union-Tribune/ZUMApress.com)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement official David Venturella started off a meeting with San Francisco law enforcement leaders on Tuesday with an apology. ICE, he admitted, had given conflicting information about Secure Communities, a program that shares fingerprints taken for criminal background checks with federal immigration enforcement, and whether counties like San Francisco could opt out.

[Immigration1] The meeting was one of three held in the past week — with officials from Arlington, Va., on Nov. 5, and from Santa Clara, Calif., later on Tuesday — between ICE and communities that had voted to be removed from the program, claiming it could harm public safety and lead to fear of police among immigrants.

In all three, the message was the same: Venturella, the assistant director of Secure Communities, acknowledged there had been reports from ICE that the program was optional and that such meetings were the first step in opting out. But the counties could not withhold information from federal immigration authorities, he informed them.

“They flew all the way here just to basically say, ‘We’re going back on our word,’” said Angela Chan, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus who was briefed after the meeting Tuesday. “The whole entire thing is kind of a puppet show.”

The message on Secure Communities and whether or not counties could be removed from the program has changed multiple times in the last six months, as local officials in Arlington, San Francisco and Santa Clara sought to determine how they could opt out of sending fingerprints to immigration enforcement. Now, even after ICE held meetings with the three counties confirming that opting out is impossible, a coalition of civil rights groups is fighting to get more information on the program and how communities can avoid joining it.

The key, according to activists, will be a Dec. 6 hearing on an injunction filed against the Department of Homeland Security last month by the National Day Laborer Organization Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Cardozo School of Law. A court in New York will decide whether Homeland Security officials have to hand over documents demanded by the groups in February related to opting out.

With those documents, critics of the program hope to be able to prove what Venturella alluded to at the beginning of the San Francisco meeting: The agency has been misleading the public — albeit perhaps unintentionally — about how Secure Communities works and what it requires from local police forces that would rather not share fingerprints with immigration officials.

“What their public definition of ‘opting out’ is has changed based on what they think they can get away with,” Chan said.

Officials in 34 states have signed memorandums of understanding to participate in the program, which so far is voluntary at the state level. (Some governors, such as Democrats Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and Bill Ritter in Colorado, have delayed requests to sign into Secure Communities, while other states are slated to join the program in the next few years.) There was indication from ICE officials this summer that local participation was also optional, even in states where governors had agreed to participate.

“No jurisdiction will be activated if they oppose it,” Dan Cadman, an ICE regional coordinator for the program, wrote in a July 23 email to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. “There is no ambiguity on that point. We get it.”

On Aug. 17, ICE released a report called “Setting the Record Straight” that laid out specific steps for counties that wanted to opt out of Secure Communities. The steps were later reiterated in letters by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and an assistant attorney general.

But a sudden message shift on Secure Communities occurred in the beginning of October. Immigration officials began to say opting out was impossible. “We don’t consider Secure Communities an opt in/opt out program,” Napolitano said on Oct. 6. By Oct. 20, the report called “Setting the Record Straight” went missing from ICE’s website.

The options presented to Arlington, San Francisco and Santa Clara were far from what the counties expected when they voted to opt out. In a memo to Arlington County board members after her Nov. 5 meeting with ICE, County Manager Barbara Donellan clarified ICE’s definition of opting out of Secure Communities.

“All jurisdictions have the option of not receiving the results of ICE’s database inquiries. (This option is what ICE officials were referring to as the ‘opt out,’ for localities, and they acknowledged the confusion these statements have created),” she wrote.

For critics of the program, the new message that Secure Communities is mandatory is a major problem.

“If ICE for some reason decides not to follow through, I think we’re looking at possible massive deception,” Sarahi Uribe, lead organizer of an anti-Secure Communities coalition called the Uncover The Truth Campaign, told TWI in October.

But there is some hope for counties that don’t want to help immigration officials deport undocumented immigrants who are released without being charged with crimes. (In cases of domestic violence, for example, police sometimes arrest both parties until they can determine which person is the victim, a practice that has led to deportation proceedings for some abuse victims under Secure Communities.)

ICE officials said Tuesday that the holds they place on illegal immigrants detected under Secure Community are optional for local police — meaning law enforcement agencies could ignore detainer requests from ICE and release immigrants they do not charge with crimes, said Eileen Hirst, a spokeswoman for San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey who was at the meeting Tuesday.

“That’s the silver lining,” Chan said. “At least he didn’t go back on his word on that.”

But opponents of Secure Communities said they are not done pushing back against the program, which they say lessens overall safety by making immigrants fearful of police.

“We’re not giving up,” Lucero Beebe-Giudice, a spokeswoman for Tenants and Workers United, told TWI. “We continue to believe there’s a way to opt out. They’re trying to take the wind out of our sails, but we think that there’s a way to opt out.”

Tenants and Workers United is part of a larger coalition of immigrant rights groups that are fighting the spread of Secure Communities, which the Obama administration plans to extend nationwide by 2013. ICE officials listed steps for communities to be removed from the program, but later said opting out is impossible because fingerprints are shared directly between the FBI, which receives them for criminal background checks, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Immigrant rights groups are trying to get more information about the program, the technology that would be needed to filter out results sent to DHS and any policy changes that made the program mandatory. The groups submitted a Freedom of Information Act request in February, then filed again in October to receive documents related to the opt-out process.

Beebe-Giudice said Arlington would continue sending fingerprints to the FBI for criminal background checks even though they will be forwarded to ICE, but could change its actions on Secure Communities based on information that comes out of the FOIA request.

“The county is not going to stop doing whatever their regular process is,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to continue to pursue this issue.”