In the same case, however, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, the court also sent back the plaintiffs’ claims that they were held in abusive conditions of confinement following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. They’ll have another chance to make those claims, but, significantly, will have to meet the Supreme Court’s new heightened pleading standards set out in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal.

In FY 2009, the federal government prosecuted almost five times more immigration cases than in 2002.

Interestingly, although the government has said it is concentrating its immigration enforcement efforts on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, TRAC found that of the 91,899 immigration prosecutions in the last fiscal year, only thirteen employers in eight cases were prosecuted for the felony offense of illegally hiring undocumented workers.

Meanwhile, the prosecution of other major crime categories, such as crimes involving drugs, weapons and white-collar crime, increased only slightly or in some cases actually declined.

For example, according to TRAC, in FY 2009, the Justice Department recorded 178 securities fraud prosecutions. Although that’s a 22-percent increase in securities fraud prosecutions from the year before, notes TRAC, it’s still only about a third of the number of such prosecutions in 2002. As for corporate fraud, the 82 prosecutions from last year are about a quarter of the number in 2003.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Arizona voters finds Arpaio, famed for his crackdowns on illegal immigrants, leading Goddard, the state’s current attorney general, by 12 points – 51% to 39%. Seven percent (7%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.

According to the survey, Goddard leads Republican Gov. Jan Brewer by a comfortable nine-point margin, and Goddard is virtually tied with State Treasurer Dean Martin. Brewer is the only one of the possible candidates who is officially in the race.

With numbers like this, could Arpaio be enticed to run for governor? And could he win?

Rumors have been swirling in Arizona for the past few months that Arpaio is mulling a gubernatorial bid, fueled by his antipathy for Goddard. The 77-year-old Arpaio was first elected in 1992, and he won re-election in 2008 by a commanding 13-point margin, with 55 percent of the vote. During that race, Arpaio raised more than $600,000 — an eye-popping sum for a countywide election. Effectively a modern-day political boss, “Sheriff Joe” is well-known for his heavy-handed tactics to combat illegal immigration and bragging about the harsh conditions in county detention facilities. He has launched investigations of numerous political opponents, including Goddard, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, the Phoenix New Times and the Maricopa County Superior Court.

While Arpaio remains extremely popular in Maricopa County — the home of Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe accounts for approximately 61 percent of Arizona’s population — Goddard has already proven himself in statewide races, having been elected attorney general in 2002, and re-elected in 2006 with 60 percent of the vote (pdf). A poll released last month by the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and KAET found Arpaio had a 61 percent approval rating among Maricopa County voters, while the same survey found 55 percent of Arizona voters approve of Goddard’s performance. Arizona has been trending Democratic in recent years, but a Gallup poll from January found party identification in the state was essentially a dead heat, and one would be hard-pressed to find anybody in Arizona without a strong opinion about Arpaio.

All of this seems to confirm Rasmussen’s findings: If Arpaio got into the race against Goddard, he would stand a pretty good chance of winning. It’s also a safe bet that Arpaio would raise a lot of money from out-of-state illegal immigration opponents.

The Obama administration has already clashed with Arpaio on a couple of occasions. In March, the Justice Department announced it was opening an investigation into allegations of racial profiling and unlawful searches and seizures, and last month Arpaio was stripped of his authority to enforce federal immigration laws under the controversial 287(g) program.

But if the Justice Department thought Arpaio was a handful as sheriff of Maricopa County, just imagine what he could do with control of the state’s Department of Public Safety, and Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislature.

(Via Eric Kleefeld)

This post has been updated.

Last night, Dobbs told his audience that he would be leaving the network, saying that “some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in positive problem-solving, as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day,” he said.

In fact, as the The New York Times and others reported last night, Dobbs had been told by CNN president Jonathan Klein to tone down his anti-immigration rhetoric and report a straightforward newscast. Although at first he agreed to go along, yesterday he announced that he’s no longer playing the game.

There’s been much speculation since Dobbs met with Fox News president Roger Ailes that Dobbs will join the Fox News Channel, but yesterday both Dobbs and Fox denied having any such arrangement.

Roberto Lovato, co-founder of Presente.org, an advocacy organization coordinating the BastaDobbs.com campaign, said he’s “thrilled that Dobbs no longer has this legitimate platform from which to incite fear and hate.”

Dobbs, however, is not likely to fade from the media spotlight anytime soon. As he put it yesterday, he feels he has an important role to play. Citing health care, jobs, immigration, climate change and the ongoing wars as the major issues of the day, he said:

“Unfortunately, these issues are now defined in the public arena by partisanship and ideology rather than rigorous empirical thought and forthright analysis and discussion. I will be working diligently to change that as best I can. And as for the important work of restoring inspiration to our great free society and our market economy, I will strive as well to be a leader in that national conversation.”

It seems Dallas police were confused when, after pulling drivers over for other suspected violations, the police checked their in-car computers and a pull-down menu listed the “non-English speaking driver” charge as an option. The violation actually referred to a federal law governing commercial drivers that the Dallas police now say they don’t even enforce. However, at least 39 non-commercial drivers were fined $204 for their limited language skills.

Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle said on Friday that they would be reimbursed.

Although Dallas police don’t seem to have been attempting to enforce any immigration laws in these incidents, there’s a parallel to the ongoing controversy over a federal program that allows local police around the country who stop Latinos for minor traffic violations to check their legal status, then turn them over to federal immigration authorities for deportation if they can’t prove they’re in the United States legally.

The federal program, known as 287(g), deputizes some local police to enforce federal immigration law. But abuse of that power, often due to similar misunderstandings by local police officers, has at times led to the deportation of legal U.S. residents and even citizens, and prompted angry complaints from immigrants’ advocates.

Ultimately, much of the problem — in Dallas and beyond — seems to come from a lack of training of local police. The revelation that non-English speakers were getting fined in Dallas therefore could end up casting more attention on the 287(g) program, to the extent that local officials are wrongly arresting immigrants due to a lack of training on immigrants’ rights, local law enforcement authority, and what actually constitutes a crime.

Under the controversial 287(g) program, Arpaio had been allowed to check a suspect’s immigration status on the street as well as in jail after an arrest, and turn illegal immigrants over to federal authorities for deportation. But given that he’s faced a slew of lawsuits for abuse of that power, plus a civil rights investigation by the federal government, DHS recently revoked part of Arpaio’s authority.

Last week at a news conference, he distributed a document that cited a law that doesn’t exist and included a legal interpretation of federal law that came from a restrictionist group that’s been called a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Center for Immigration Studies had posted on its web site in 1999 a legal interpretation that said “state and local law-enforcement officials have the general power to investigate and arrest violators of federal immigration statutes without prior INS knowledge or approval, as long as they are authorized to do so by state law,” and that “evasive, nervous, or erratic behavior; dress or speech indicating foreign citizenship; and presence in an area known to contain a concentration of illegal aliens” is enough to constitute reasonable suspicion to authorize law police action. Arpaio used that language to justify continuing to arrest people he suspected of being illegal immigrants but who were not violating state criminal laws.

Arpaio had originally said he got the legal interpretation from a Cornell University Website, but a Cornell law professor told The Arizona Republic that the school’s Website contains no such thing, and that there actually is no law that says what Arpaio claimed in the document he distributed.

Too bad CNN just rejected the ad.

The immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice last week harshly criticized CNN for not mentioning that Dobbs is “one of the biggest menaces facing Latinos in America” because of his relentless focus on illegal immigration, largely from Latin America, as the source of many of America’s ills.

In response, it created this TV ad, with Media Matters, under the headline “CNN: Drop the Hate, Drop Dobbs,” that ends with a plea to viewers to sign the “Drop Dobbs” petition that’s been circulating online and on Twitter and Facebook.

Yesterday, the groups submitted the ad to CNN, asking the network to run it during the “Latinos in America” shows.

Not surprisingly, CNN today rejected the ad. The groups still hope to run the ad during the “Latinos” show on another network, if it can find a willing host.

Here’s how Research Director Steven Camarota puts it in his latest “Backgrounder“:

A new survey by Zogby International finds that people in Mexico think that granting legal status to illegal immigrants in the United States would encourage more illegal immigration to the United States. As the top immigrant-sending country for both legal and illegal immigrants, views on immigration in Mexico can provide insight into the likely impact of an amnesty, as well as other questions related to immigration.

But to gain some useful insight, it’s important to look at the actual question that Zogby asked the 1,004 Mexicans polled, which was: “If the U.S. gave permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants (migrantes indocumentados), do you think it would make your friends and family members more likely or less likely to go to the U.S. as indocumentados, or would it make no difference?” 56 percent of Mexicans polled said they thought it would make people they knew more likely to go.

In fact, “permanent legal status” for new illegal immigrants is not what anyone in Congress is contemplating, but that’s what this latest CIS “Backgrounder” implies. Advocates for comprehensive immigration reform have been pressing for a law that would grant legal status only to certain immigrants who have been living and working in the United States for at least several years. New immigrants would not qualify for legal status, but would have to apply through the channels provided for in any new law, which would likely be based in large part on the needs of the labor market.

“The general thing that the restrictionists do and will continue to do is try to make the case that as soon as you do this, the floodgates are going to open and life as you know it won’t ever be the same,” said Wendy Sefsaf, communications manager for the Immigration Policy Center. “That’s the argument they make every single time.” But even President Reagan’s “amnesty” program back in the 1980s required immigrants to have been in the United States for several years before they’d qualify, she noted. And the State Department would make that clear in Mexico and elsewhere when any new immigration law is passed in the United States.

It’s worth noting, too, the second question asked by the Zogby poll, and Mexicans’ answers. “If at this moment, you had the means and opportunity to go to live in the U.S., would you go?”  59.6 percent of Mexicans said “no.” Only about a third of those polled said “yes.” So it turns out that even if they were given the opportunity — which they won’t be — all those people in Mexico wouldn’t stampede across the U.S. border after all.

The report finds that although many immigrants have not committed crimes, they’re held in secure facilities designed for criminals and often in far more restrictive conditions than necessary. They also often don’t have sufficient access to medical and legal assistance while in custody.

The reforms announced today by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton involve primarily centralizing control of the detention facilities under ICE headquarters’ supervision; classifying immigrant detainees according to their risk level and housing them accordingly; improving detainees’ access to medical and legal services; and increasing supervision of the facilities by federal employees rather than by private contractors.

Longtime critics of the agency’s detention practices are not completely satisfied, however, noting that DHS’s proposals fail to include a way to ensure that the agency complies with improved standards, that immigrants aren’t unnecessarily locked up, and that innocent people aren’t harassed by local authorities empowered to enforce federal immigration law.

As Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, put it in a statement released yesterday, “Meaningful reform of the system must focus not only on the conditions under which immigrants are being detained, but on why they are being detained in the first place — often for prolonged periods of time — when other forms of supervised release would be sufficient to address the government’s concerns, as well as the need for basic due process.”

Linton Joaquin, general counsel for the National Immigration Law Center, called the proposal “a step in the right direction” but said that “as long as these standards are not enforceable, the rights violations faced by the men and women in these systems will persist.”

Even if the sheriff and his deputies can’t arrest anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant on the street, they can still check the immigration status of everyone in Maricopa County’s jails and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation. The Department of Justice is separately investigating Arpaio for allegedly abusing his authority by conducting unconstitutional searches and engaging in racial profiling.

DHS has promised to review all 287(g) agreements with individual counties, even as it has expanded the number of those agreements in effect.