Curiously, the meeting was not listed on the vice president’s schedule. But Arpaio told the Phoenix Business Journal that he’d said to Biden in their meeting that he needs more deputies and resources for his law enforcement unit.

Arpaio’s law enforcement actions, however, have not always gone over well with the Obama administration. The Arizona sheriff is under official investigation for civil rights violations, and just recently, the Department of Homeland Security revoked some of his powers to enforce federal immigration laws under the 287(g) program.

Arpaio has insisted that he has all the powers he needs to arrest illegal immigrants anyway, and vowed not to let up on his much-publicized efforts to crack down on them.

The operation was supposed to be part of an ICE program to deport dangerous illegal immigrants who had previously been ordered deported and had prior criminal records, reports The Arizona Republic. But of the 80 people arrested, only six had prior criminal histories, and only two of those were fugitives. According to the ACLU, “at least 23 of the 80 arrests were for people that ICE calls ‘incidentals’ — people who happened to be present at a residence or workplace when authorities showed up looking for someone else.”

This afternoon, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, who’s known for encouraging local law enforcement to search out illegal immigrants and is under federal investigation for racial profiling as a result, tweeted that “the ACLU doesn’t want ICE arresting illegals either,” with a link to the Arizona Republic story.

But on Wednesday, Mudd will speak for the first time since his Homeland Security confirmation debacle, on a subject well within his area of expertise. He’s scheduled to give a lunchtime speech, “Al Qaeda: The Domestic Threat,” at a panel assembled by the New America Foundation. Presumably Mudd will talk about the prospect of domestic infiltration or radicalization of American Muslims like Najibullah Zazi. Almost as if his intelligence experience could have come in handy at the Department of Homeland Security…

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.”

The latest data from the Syracuse University-based Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, seems to confirm that. Prosecutions referred by the Immigration and Customs Agency, or ICE, were up dramatically in June — a 47 percent increase from the previous month, and a 109.6 percent increase from five years ago, under the Bush administration.

According to TRAC, which bases its studies on data released from the Justice Department, 89 percent of the June 2009 cases were classified as “immigration” prosecutions, while less than 7 percent were for drug trafficking.

In May, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pledged to focus her agency’s efforts on lawbreaking by employers of illegal immigrants, rather than on prosecuting the immigrants themselves.

A detailed breakdown of the latest Justice Department data can be found here.

It’s part of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s tough-on-illegal immigrants strategy, and it wins President Obama points from conservatives who fear he’ll go soft on “illegals”. But the abuse of immigrants by local sheriffs like Joe Arpaio in Arizona have outraged immigrant advocacy groups, while even major law enforcement organizations oppose saddling local cops with federal law enforcement responsibilities that often undermine police forces’ ability to do their jobs.

Stepping up the pressure, on Tuesday, 521 different civil rights and advocacy organizations sent a letter to President Obama urging him to immediately terminate the program, known as 287(g) after the section of the immigration law that authorizes it.

Capitalizing on the President’s recent remarks acknowledging a history of racial profiling in the United States in connection with the arrest of his friend, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the letter reads in part:

We applaud your recent remarks acknowledging, that “there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” However, DHS’s continued use of the 287(g) program exacerbates exactly this type of racial profiling. In light of well-documented evidence that local law enforcement agencies are using 287(g) powers to justify and intensify racial profiling, Secretary Napolitano’s July 10, 2009 announcement that DHS has expanded the 287(g) program to include 11 new jurisdictions is deeply alarming.

The letter comes on the heels of a recent admission by President Obama that he’s not likely to get an immigration reform bill passed this year, though he’d promised Latino groups he’d make that a priority when he was running for office.

Immigration experts say the continued crackdown on enforcement without providing an opportunity for legalization of otherwise law-abiding immigrants could dampen Latino voters’ initial enthusiasm for Obama, as well as for other Democrats in the next round of elections.

“It needs to be much more than a kinetic effort, an intelligence, law enforcement effort. It has to be much more comprehensive,” said Brennan, who will address the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday. “This is not a ‘war on terror.’ . . . We cannot let the terror prism guide how we’re going to interact and be involved in different parts of the world.”

As The Post reports, the Bush team said a lot of this stuff as well. Back in 2005, for instance:

“It is more than just a military war on terror,” Steven Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview.”It’s broader than that. It’s a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative.”

So it’s on Brennan to explain how this approach is more than saying, No, no, we mean it this time … Is there an ideological component? Or does that implicitly overestimate the intellectual force that al-Qaeda possesses and counterproductively links al-Qaeda to a mainstream of Islamic thought? How does Brennan link Afghanistan, where the mission appears to be moving to something beyond counterterrorism, to this effort? Are these changes in policy or changes in branding?

And: how do the Republicans react? If the Obama administration is doing anything, it’s slowly killing the idea of a war on terrorism, which became almost a culture-war issue during the Bush era. “You cannot win a war when you don’t believe you’re fighting one,” President George W. Bush hectored in the days before the 2004 election. Do the Republicans let that one go? Do they say that President Obama’s just being Bush-lite? Do they attack Obama for being weak? Or do they do all these attacks at once and see what sticks?

Oh and by the way: eight years ago today, Bush received at his Crawford ranch a briefing from the CIA titled ‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In U.S.’ I’ve been told by the White House that it’s just a coincidence, but quite an resonant parallel even if so. (Thanks to @emptywheel for the reminding tweet.)

In a blogger conference call, Heyman unveiled Homeland Security Dialogue as a place for Americans to discuss and comment “the vision and the goals for homeland security” that six department task forces contributing to the QHSR are studying. The idea is that you’d go over to the Website, read through the proposed statements on a variety of department functions — immigration, disaster preparedness, counterterrorism, etc. — and both comment and rate each others’ comments. That way the task forces will get your input on the front end of the review. Heyman said he hoped the tool would allow the “pulse of the community” to be “fed back into the study group.”

The QHSR won’t be due to Congress until December, but the first phase of commenting closes out on Aug. 9. There’ll be additional comment phases in late August/early September and then late September/early October to discuss different aspects of the review. For now, thanks to some early solicitation from the department of key “stakeholder” opinion, there are already some comments up. RPMueck from the University of Maryland’s Department of Public Safety thinks the counterterrorism mission statement is “well intentioned but wordy.” Jlyall of the Catholic Charities of Los Angeles wants the department to “reconsider the effect its enforcement policies are having on families and communities, particularly low-income communities of color.” Netwings from CERT Queens District 1 wants to “Close borders to immigrants.”

Internet: only you can determine what’s in the mainstream or in the margins for DHS’s consideration.

As University of California-Davis law professor Kevin Johnson writes in a post on Concurring Opinions, despite President Obama’s longstanding support for reform before he became president, the issue has been eclipsed in this administration by the troubled economy and health care reform, which now dominate the legislative agenda. Putting immigration reform off until next next year, though, could destroy its chances, though, because as Johnson notes, “next year is an election year in Congress” and “Enacting legislation on a contentious issue that touches on volatile issues of race and class, seems unlikely in an election year” — particularly during an economic recession.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration hasn’t waited to step up immigration enforcement, expanding controversial programs like the 287(g) program that allows local police to enforce federal immigration laws and may lead to racial profiling, and expansion of the “Secure Communities” program, which sends the fingerprints of suspects booked at local jails to the federal immigration authorities to check immigration status. The results of this stepped-up enforcement has been, as one recent study found, a dramatic increase in immigration prosecutions.

As a recent Justice Department proposed budget makes clear, Secure Communities is expected to lead to the deportation of “tens of thousands more” immigrants next year.

The political calculus appears to be, writes Johnson, that “the administration will gain the public trust on enforcement and then be in a better position to seek immigration reform that benefits immigrants.” But he warns that the same strategy backfired on President Bush when he failed to pass immigration reform despite aggressive workplace raids and record deportations.

The Obama administration now runs the same risk.

“As it fashions and implements more and more immigration enforcement measures, it may never be able to push balanced immigration reform through Congress.  And delay is dangerous because there is always some reason to put off a national debate on a controversial issue.”