Immigration

A four-day sweep conducted last November in Arizona by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looking for immigrant fugitives and criminals resulted primarily in the arrests of immigrants who were neither criminals nor fugitives, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona has found.
The operation was supposed to be part of an ICE program to deport dangerous [...]

The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $1.26 million dollars to five men who claim they were illegally detained and mistreated after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as part of a settlement agreement reached between the Justice Department and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) threatened to hold a midnight vote yesterday to proceed to long-delayed legislation extending unemployment insurance for up to 20 weeks. That vote didn’t happen, but it might not have to. Reid’s office said this morning that party leaders “should be able” to reach agreement to skip that step and [...]

The immigration restrictionist group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) said it’s flooding Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and planning another round of Tea Parties, to motivate what they hope will be a huge backlash against any attempt to legalize any undocumented immigrants in the United States. The group is gearing up to fight comprehensive immigration [...]

This afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) squared off on the chamber floor over how to proceed on legislation to extend unemployment benefits at least 14 weeks. Needless to say, they failed to reach an agreement, with McConnell rejecting Reid’s motion to scrap tomorrow’s cloture vote and move [...]

Dallas police wrongly ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English over the last three years, reports the Dallas Morning News.
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. [...]

Republican senators are pushing controversial immigration and banking amendments to the unemployment insurance measure.

One small and largely overlooked part of the $44.1 billion Homeland Security budget that passed the Senate on Tuesday involves a provision to expand the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program, which relies on the Social Security database to verify a job applicant’s immigration status. Although the GOP lost out on its efforts to make [...]

Even though CNN refused to run the “Drop Dobbs” ad created by America’s Voice and Media Matters, another coalition of Latino advocacy organizations, undeterred, has started its own anti-Lou Dobbs campaign.
“Basta Dobbs” [translation: "Enough Dobbs"] is sending around this video about CNN anchor Lou Dobbs and his connection to anti-Latino hate crime. Dobbs, of course, [...]