Currently, spouses of U.S. citizens must leave the country to apply and are often barred from returning to their families for as long as 10 years. The new rule would allow many of them to get back to their families much quicker.

“This policy will save the lives of American citizens,” said U.S. Rep Jared Polis, D-Colorado. “Jake Martinez would be alive today if this had been in place. It’s past time that we reformed our immigration system so that families aren’t torn apart or sent off to dangerous cities like Juarez, Mexico as they wait to have their cases processed. Congress still must pass comprehensive immigration reform but this proposal is a welcome change over an unfair process that splits apart families and sends husbands, wives and children off to some of the most perilous parts of the world while their cases are heard.”

The case of Tania Nava Palacios of Colorado is a primary example of the danger inherent in the current process, Polis said in a press release. Nava Palacios was forced to depart Colorado and to live in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with her U.S. citizen husband and son while USCIS adjudicated her I-601. Her husband, Jake Martinez, was killed in front of their home. The new process announced today for the adjudication of these waivers will prevent other families from the United States from suffering a similar fate, Polis’s office said.

Allowing these individuals to apply in the U.S. before they must depart the country would create a more predictable and transparent process while improving processing times, Polis said. It would also encourage individuals who may be eligible for permanent residency to apply for a waiver by reducing the amount of time they would need to spend away from their U.S. citizen spouse or parent.

The Supreme Court seal (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Hayfordoleary)

Spanish-language news reporters who spoke Sunday on Al Punto, a Univision program, said the coming Supreme Court decision on Arizona’s immigration enforcement law S.B. 1070 will have an impact on both the 2012 elections and on the lives of millions of immigrants.

Alan Rivera of Hispanic News Network said that the Supreme Court decision that would come in June, in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign, and will greatly influence the Obama campaign against the eventual Republican nominee.

Rivera highlighted the fact that, with Justice Elena Kagan not voting, five of the remaining eight justices were selected by Republican administrations. He also said the immigration issue is a constitutional one, and “the court cannot decide against the Constitution,” adding that “the Constitution says that Congress decides” on legislative issues.

Marcello Raimon of Agencia ANSA — a Latin-American news agency — said “we have to wait with our fingers crossed,” hoping “that the Supreme Court does not decide to allow states to do what they want.”

“It is on the conscience of the justices if they will destroy the lives of millions of people,” Raimon said.

“I find it very interesting that instead of talking about immigration reform for 11 million undocumented immigrants, the anti-immigrant environment in the U.S. is so large we’re talking about these issues,” Al Punto host Jorge Ramos said.

The Supreme Court decision to hear the legal challenge to Arizona’s controversial immigration enforcement law comes at a time when the leading GOP presidential candidates are talking about immigration and trying to strengthen support with Latino voters.

Newt Gingrich has called for a “humane” approach to immigration enforcement, and Republicans share his approach to immigration, but the GOP still has to work hard to get Latino voters in important swing states in the 2012 presidential elections, according to surveys.

ABC News reported that Mitt Romney, during the Fox News debate last week, “laid out more clearly than he has before details of a proposed national ID card system for legal immigrants and the requirement that employers run checks on workers or face ‘very serious sanctions.’”

According to ABC, “Romney said the new protocols would add pressure on illegal immigrants to voluntarily return to their native countries and force them to apply to the U.S. from the ‘back of the line.’”

The Washington Post reported Friday:

Republicans are increasingly worried that their party’s efforts to win a competitive slice of the fast-growing Hispanic vote in important presidential battleground states are being undermined by Mitt Romney’s heated rhetoric on illegal immigration.

Several leading GOP strategists say Romney’s sharp-tongued attacks have gained wide attention in Hispanic media and are eroding the party’s already fragile standing in that community.

The Post adds that  leaders of  conservative groups like the Hispanic Leadership Fund and the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles do not agree with Romney on immigration.

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)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

A federal report released Thursday finds that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., an advocate for controversial immigration enforcement and detention measures, has committed a “wide range of civil rights violations.”

The Associated Press reports:

The federal government issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release, is a result of the U.S. Justice Department’s three-year investigation of Arpaio’s office amid complaints of racial profiling and a culture of bias at the agency’s top level.

The AP adds that federal authorities will continue to investigate, among other complaints, “a large number of sex-crimes cases that were assigned to” Arpaio’s office “but weren’t followed up on or investigated at all.”

In a press release issued Thursday, the Department of Justice states that the ongoing civil rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff’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.”

The department found

a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas, including:

• Discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos;
• Unlawful retaliation against individuals exercising their First Amendment right to criticize MCSO’s policies or practices, including but not limited to practices relating to its discriminatory treatment of Latinos; and
• Discriminatory jail practices against Latino inmates with limited English proficiency by punishing them and denying them critical services.

Arpaio has said he trains his deputies with federal immigration officials, has the largest group of cross-certified law enforcement men and women (160 of them) and proudly talks about his “tent city,” where about 2,000 detainees live “in Korean War tents” and “sleep in bunk beds, 20 to a tent.”

Asked what he would do if the Supreme Court decides to strike down Arizona’s immigration enforcement law S.B. 1070, Arapio said on CNN this week:

It doesn’t change anything. I do like certain parts of that new law, but I’ll tell you one thing, we’ve been doing it under two other state laws. We have two other state laws, one is the employer sanction that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor. So, it’s not going to change anything I’m doing, regardless of what that decision is.

Arapaio endorsed GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry in late November, saying Perry “has done more to combat illegal immigration and secure the border than any other candidate in the Republican presidential field.”

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s recent call for a humane path to immigration enforcement makes him the most recent conservative voice calling for solutions that encompass something more than the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Color Lines, a daily news site “in service to racial justice,” writes today that Gingrich’s”remarks were a reminder of how far the right has moved on immigration, and how twisted the immigration debate has become for both parties. It’s too soon to say, but Gingrich’s remarks could be a sign that Republicans are ready to heed growing calls from within their own party to temper the anti-immigrant rhetoric and stop alienating Latino voters.”

At last week’s CNN GOP presidential debate focused on national security, Gingrich said, “I don’t see how the — the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century. And I’m prepared to take the heat for saying, ‘Let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.’”

The Washington Post reports that “Gingrich attracted huge crowds in Florida this weekend, but he continued to face down accusations from his rivals that he is too soft on immigration to win the Republican presidential nomination.”

The Post adds that Gingrich, “who joined former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at the top of the field less than two weeks ago, showed no sign of slipping at two appearances along the southwest Florida coast — a conservative enclave and critical battleground in the state’s Jan. 31 primary.”

Gingrich has laid out a 10-step program for immigration reform — without citizenship for undocumented immigrants — that would create “a truly efficient and fair system that embraces the rule of law, while acknowledging and celebrating the valuable economic, cultural and social contributions that both existing and future visitors and immigrants have to offer our country.”

The Hispanic Leadership Network, “a sustained effort to engage the Hispanic Community on center-right issues,” co-chaired by former Gov. Jeb Bush and launched this year, is working on several issues, including immigration, to “find common sense solutions to address our broken immigration system.” The Leadership Network will host its national conference in Miami in January 2012.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has said legal and illegal immigration remains a problem that needs to be confronted, and “that Republicans would do better to tone down the overheated rhetoric and focus on a positive immigration reform agenda.”

Rubio has also said that the Republican Party “should be the pro-legal immigration party,” saying it’s time for GOP candidates to start talking about “how we modernize our legal immigration system.”

CARROLL — As he surged to the top of two national polls Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich spent nearly three hours at the Santa Maria Winery in Carroll on Monday, speaking with voters, taking questions, signing books and screening a movie he co-developed celebrating Pope John Paul II.

Gingrich also conducted a 10-minute interview with The Carroll Daily Times Herald and La Prensa, an Iowa Spanish-language newspaper, before going on air nationally with Fox News’ Sean Hannity from a makeshift, temporary studio on the west side of the winery.

It was Gingrich’s second visit to Carroll in the campaign cycle, and momentum had turned decidedly in his favor in the hours before he addressed nearly 200 people at John and Rose Guinan’s local winery.

Public Policy Polling on Monday showed Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, with 28 percent support in national GOP primary surveying. Businessman Herman Cain was in second at 25 percent with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney garnering 18 percent, according to the polling firm.

Another national poll of Republican voters released Monday — this one from CNN — had Romney at 24 percent, Gingrich at 22 percent and Cain at 14 percent in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.

“This is a year when substance and solutions matter,” Gingrich said. “I think like the conversation tonight, I don’t give them slogans. I don’t try to make them feel better with things that are patently untrue. And I think people are really looking for a leader who will work with them to develop real solutions.”

Newt Gingrich met with GOP caucusgoers at Santa Maria Winery in Carroll.

At one point in the local interview Gingrich described himself as follows: “I’m a genuine, intellectual conservative.”

That considered, Gingrich said the series of nationally televised Republican presidential debates has helped his campaign, resurrected it really, because voters can assess him directly.

“Frankly, without the debates my campaign would have been dead because the news media wouldn’t have covered it, and I couldn’t have raised the kind of money that Mitt Romney and Rick Perry could raise,” Gingrich said.

One of the former House speaker’s major strengths is now coming to the fore with voters, he said.

“I’m the only national candidate running,” Gingrich said. “I’ve led a national movement to win control of the House.”

Gingrich noted that he played a key role with welfare reform and federal budget work in the 1990s.

“None of the other candidates have that type of background,” Gingrich said. “I think gradually it began to sink in to people.”

The Public Policy Polling group’s survey clearly shows that Gingrich’s momentum draws heavily on Republicans who have abandoned Cain, a former Godfather’s CEO who faces allegations of sexual harassment and has stumbled on foreign-policy questions in recent days.

In one instance, Cain clearly did not know that China has nuclear capabilities. The Daily Times Herald asked Gingrich if Cain’s lack of knowledge about a world superpower on a life-and-death military issue should be disqualifying for White House service.

“I think voters have to decide that,” Gingrich said. “It’s not my job to decide it. Different people have different strengths. Herman Cain is a very attractive and very articulate businessperson who has a very impressive background in business. He doesn’t have a background in government. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses.”

La Prensa asked Gingrich’s reaction to an often-repeated line from Cain about constructing a border fence with Mexico so that it can electrocute immigrants, and possibly even snare them in an associated moat stocked with alligators.

“It was a bad idea,” Gingrich said.

He added, “I hope he was joking. I’d like to think he was joking.”

Gingrich then turned to his own immigration plans, calling for control of the border in a way that is “human and practical.”

“I’m working on an immigration program which is firm but at the same time has a human aspect to it that I think most Hispanic Americans would appreciate,” Gingrich said.

Earlier, in a question-and-answer session with voters in the winery, Gingrich said he wanted to impose severe penalties for employers who hired undocumented workers. Moreover, he put forward a plan modeled on the Selective Service System used by the military in World War II in which local committees of citizens could help determine the immigration status of a city’s illegal residents based on factors like how long they’ve lived in the area, family roots and contributions socially and in business.

Gingrich said rhetoric about deporting all illegal immigrants isn’t realistic.

“I think it’s very unlikely the American people are going to break up families,” Gingrich said.

In other remarks to the audience, Gingrich said he is “deeply opposed to raising taxes” in a recession. He said opening up offshore drilling in the United States is a way to boost revenue through royalties. Gingrich also had strong comments on education, saying schools too often seek to provide students with unearned self-esteem and academic diplomas or degrees.

“None of the Founding Fathers would think that made any sense because it’s fundamentally a lie,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich, a former history professor at West Georgia College, reminded the audience that President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for Americans to pray on the radio during the hours after D-Day and at other points in World War II.

A president today would be challenged if he took such measures, Gingrich said.

“We’d probably have an ACLU lawsuit against the president,” Gingrich said.

In the interview with The Daily Times Herald Gingrich said he wants to take federal money away from Planned Parenthood and funnel it into an adoption-promotion program.

“I come out of a background where my father was adopted and I was adopted,” Gingrich said. “We have a very deep sense that this culture has made it all too easy to end a life than to find a way to encourage a life.”

Much of the crowd at the winery stayed after Gingrich’s remarks to watch the movie “Nine Days That Changed the World” about Pope John Paul II’s historic nine-day pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979 created a revolution of conscience that transformed Poland and fundamentally reshaped the spiritual and political landscape of the 20th Century.

Gingrich and his wife, Callista, a former congressional staffer and graduate of Luther College in Decorah, along with a Polish, American, and Italian cast, explore what transpired during these nine days that moved the Polish people to renew their hearts, reclaim their courage, and free themselves from the shackles of Communism. The film was produced in partnership with Citizens United Productions.

In Alabama, comparisons to the civil rights battles of the 1960s are hard to avoid. From local press to the New York Times and beyond, reporters and those they interview are connecting the dots, not generally in a way flattering to the state.

The New York Times was blistering in an editorial published Monday, all but calling Alabama and its lawmakers racist.

Alabama is far from alone in passing a law whose express aim is misery and panic. States are expanding their power to hasten racial exclusion and family disintegration, to make a particular ethnic group of poor people disappear. The new laws come cloaked in talk of law and order; the bigotry beneath them is never acknowledged.

But if there is any place where bigotry does not go unrecognized, it is Alabama.

“It is a fear of folks who are not like us,” said Judge U. W. Clemon, a former state senator and Alabama’s first black federal judge, now retired. “Although the Hispanic population of the state is less than 5 percent, the leaders of the state were hell-bent on removing as much of that 4 percent as possible. And I think they’ve been fairly successful in scaring them out of the state of Alabama.”

If it was just the big-city national media piling on, that would be one thing, bu the local press has more than held its own in this regard.

From al.com:

The nation’s harshest immigration law… is creating nothing short of a “humanitarian crisis” that mirrors the fear and racism felt during the Jim Crow era, opponents of the law said Thursday.

During an afternoon news conference about Alabama’s immigration law, lawyers, educators and children’s advocates said the effects of the law mirror the fear and racism felt during the Jim Crow era and have led to thousands of children being kept home from school, pregnant women being afraid to give birth in a hospital and families having their water supply cut off.

When Alabama’s law was enacted, the Southern Poverty Law Center established a hotline to hear people’s concerns and offer guidance. The SPLC, which has taken a leading role in fighting the law, received more than 2000 calls in the first week the line was open.

The Center for American Progress Monday released a number of lists attempting to quantify the effects of the law.

Among the Center’s findings are that if only 10,000 of Alabama’s 120,000 undocumented immigrants quit or were forced out of their jobs, it would cost the state $40 million in lost productivity. If the federal government was to deport all 120,000, the Center says it would cost taxpayers $2.8 billion.

The Center’s study concluded that undocumented immigrants paid $130 million in taxes last year.

It’s well documented that farmers and Alabama’s agriculture sector in general have struggled mightily since the law went into effect. As both undocumented and documented Alabamans of Hispanic descent or appearance have fled the state, leaving farmers with no one to harvest crops.

One tomato farmer told PBS he had lost $300,000 so far. He’s hired new people to do the work, but few of them have lasted, saying either that the work is too hard, or the pay is too low.

Where do all the immigrants fleeing places like Alabama and Arizona go? any head to the small towns of the Midwest. There is nothing new about this migration to the Midwest, apparently. As small towns in Kansas and Nebraska lose residents to more prosperous places, people of Hispanic descent move in, opening businesses and stabilizing local economies. Mostly, they are welcomed, reports The New York Times. In many cases, when Hispanic children grow up in these small towns, they end up staying to raise their own families instead of moving on in the grand American tradition.

From Monday’s New York Times:

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

That demographic shift, seen in the findings of the 2010 census, has not been uniformly welcomed in places where steadiness and tradition are seen as central charms of rural life. Some longtime residents of Ulysses, where the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic, grumble over the cultural differences and say they feel like strangers in their hometown. But the alternative, community leaders warn, is unacceptable.

…

There has long been a strong Hispanic presence throughout the region, which is rich with difficult work in meatpacking plants and on farms, feedlots and oil fields. But over the last decade, as their population in the rural Great Plains spiked by 54 percent — a figure comparable to gains in metro areas in the region — Hispanic residents have pushed from hubs like nearby Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal into ever smaller communities, buying property on the cheap, enticed, many say, by the opportunity to live quiet lives in communities more similar to those in which they were raised.

In the sparsely populated western half of Kansas, every county but one experienced a decline in the non-Hispanic white population, two-thirds of them by more than 10 percent.

At the same time, a vast majority experienced double-digit growth in Hispanic population, more than offsetting the declines in seven counties and many smaller cities and towns. Those places with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents tend to have the lowest average ages, the highest birth rates and the most stable school populations.

“Our research clearly shows that Arizona voters want their politicians to work together to focus on practical solutions for improving the state’s economy,” said Jill Hanauer, President of Project New West, which conducted the poll. “Russell Pearce’s decision to focus on extremist immigration policies played a role in his defeat, and could do so for more Arizona Republicans if they continue to ignore the priorities of voters.”

Among voters who did not support Pearce, 38 percent cited either his divisiveness, fanaticism, rigid ideology, or issue platforms. Another 21 percent specifically named Pearce’s position on immigration, his piloting of SB1070, his destruction of Latino relations or his outright dislike of Hispanics.

White voters basically split evenly between Pearce and winner Jerry Lewis, but Lewis won the Hispanic vote by a large margin. Pearce won the Mormon vote, but Mormons were seen as a key constituency of Lewis, who is also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. While Lewis lost that key demographic, that he did as well as he did was a huge factor in the election.

“LDS voters in SD-18 sent a clear message that character matters to them,” said Hanauer. “These results are consistent with past surveys we’ve conducted that show values are extremely important to the the LDS community, and Mormons are willing to vote against an established member of their community if they view them as morally flawed.”

DeeDee Garcia-Blase, who was recently president of Somos Republicans, was one of the lead organizers of the recall. She recently announced that he had left the Republican Party to become an independent and to found the National Tequila Party, a non-partisan group dedicated to increasing Latino voting in the United States, among other things.

From a column she recently published on Huffington Post:

I am an immigration advocate.

I left the Republican Party because I felt betrayed with their continued inaction on legal immigration reform and was tired of the attacks from the far right in which Conservative websites falsely accused me of being for open borders. I have also been called a “RINO” or “Republican in Name Only” due to my strong pro immigrant views. For the record: I do think it is important to document and know who is coming in and out of our country. I’m a veteran and know and understand the importance of our national security.

“Republicans won’t touch immigration,” she told the Colorado Independent. “My hands were tied in the Republican Party. I was being attacked right and left in the Republican Party.”

As a non-partisan organization, she said the Tequila Party, of which she is co-chair, is open to people of all political persuasions. She said the group has about 3000 members so far, with more Democrats than Republicans.

Looking at the presidential race, she said she didn’t think Mitt Romney would be able to garner significant Hispanic support, but that Perry might be able to, if he can reignite his faltering campaign.

Gov. Susana Martinez has released evidence in an effort to disprove her earlier claim that her grandparents came to the United States as undocumented immigrants.The Associated Press reports:

Martinez, a Republican and the nation’s only female Hispanic governor, made headlines this year by acknowledging that her grandparents came to the U.S. without immigration documents. But she said her comments were based on what she has since learned were mischaracterizations of census information by the news media.

The governor directed her political organization to undertake the genealogical research after publicity about her immigrant roots and her push to repeal a law allowing undocumented immigrants to get a driver’s license.

“We don’t know everything, I’m sure,” the governor said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But it gave us more information than we had and it helped us understand … the family tree and how people came back and forth from Mexico into the United States.”

What Martinez released wasn’t new evidence per se, but rather a new perspective on whether her grandparents legally qualified as undocumented immigrants by today’s standards.

Initially, the fact that the 1930 Census listed her parents as “aliens,” meaning they were not U.S. citizens or seeking citizenship at the time, led to the media reporting that they were undocumented, and Martinez publicly stated that the claim was true.

However, the 1930 Census does not mention immigration status or whether her grandparents were authorized by the government, typically what is needed by today’s standards in order to say someone is undocumented or “illegal.”

U.S.-Mexico border states during the early twentieth century had many Mexican nationals who weren’t officially “immigrants”, many of which would cross back-and-forth across the border as migrant workers. As Michael A. Olivas, director of the Institute of Higher Education Law & Governance at the University of Houston, told AP: “There was no such thing as an undocumented immigrant during that time.”

Martinez’s grandparents were issued permits by the U.S. government to cross the border multiple times from 1908 to 1931, according to documents given to AP. ”So [my grandfather] understood the process and seemed to have followed the process,” Martinez said.

But the documents don’t say anything about immigration status, merely that the border crossings were authorized by the U.S. government. Mexican nationals are no longer authorized to freely cross the border and inhabit and work within the United States without a visa specifically permitting them to do so.

The concept of “illegal” Latin American immigrants only arose during the Great Depression, as high unemployment caused many Americans to focus on migrant workers as an unwelcome cause of economic competition. That distrust resulted in the policy of “Mexican Repatriation,” when immigration authorities pressured or forced hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals, and many U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, to leave the United States.

Immigrant rights activists used Martinez’s initial admission to argue against her proposal to repeal a state law allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Despite her background, Martinez has gained approval from conservatives for her tough stance on undocumented immigrants, and she is part of a small group of Hispanic GOP leaders to have gained national attention.

In September, HLN kicked off its efforts in the Southwest by holding a conference in Albuquerque having as keynote speaker Gov. Susana Martinez, one of a group of high-profile Hispanic Republican leaders elected in November 2010 that also includes Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (Fla.), urged those in attendance to “have a conversation” with Latinos in their communities.

National HLN co-chairs, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Bush administration Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, were unable to attend but sent videos. Both praised Martinez’s leadership and argued that Democrats had failed Latinos.

Stringent immigration policies enacted by Republican-controlled state governments, as well as rhetoric on the issue that many perceive to be anti-Hispanic, have alienated many Hispanic voters from the GOP.

Lauro Garza, the head of Somos Republicans, a Hispanic GOP group in Texas, recently announced he was leaving the party after presidential candidate Herman Cain said he wanted an electric fence on the border that would kill potential unauthorized migrants, which Garza pointed to as evidence that the party had been “infiltrated by nativist ideas.”

The founders of HLN are hoping that it can reverse the trend of Southwestern Hispanic voters rejecting the GOP. But according to Jose Armas of the Hispanic Link News Service, the HLN conference received a mixed to negative reaction from Latinos in attendance. One particular grievance was that the Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company which lobbied in favor of Arizona’s restrictive immigration law S.B. 1070, was a sponsor of the conference.

Here’s video of Gutierrez and Bush addressing the conference: