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1. Feds execute major sweep
2. Arpaio facing sanctions
3. Election forum tackles issue
4. Activists assail detentions
5. Tea Party targets amnesty

1.
Houston Bus Companies Were Links in Illegal Immigrant Network
By James C. McKinley Jr.
The New York Times, February 5, 2010

Houston -- Raids on 14 illegal bus companies here have shed light on a seedy underground system that transported illegal immigrants all over the country and that sometimes held them captive until their relatives paid exorbitant fares, federal law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Using minivans, the companies were carrying hundreds of illegal immigrants from Mexico to cities across the United States, taking back roads and traveling primarily at night to avoid the authorities, according to criminal complaints filed in Federal District Court. Twenty-two people were arrested earlier this week on charges of using their businesses to transport illegal immigrants.

The bus companies worked exclusively with smuggling operations, officials said. The owners paid commissions of up to $300 for each passenger to smugglers who had brought the immigrants across the Mexican border. Then they held the immigrants in safe houses for days, often under guard, until they loaded them onto vans, according to court documents.

Agents said that at one of the bus companies raided this week, Super Express Van Tours, they found the operators had used pit bulls and armed guards to keep the immigrants from leaving a safe house next door to the office.

“These were not legitimate transportation companies like Greyhound,” said John Connolly, the deputy special agent in charge in Houston for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The companies also charged far more than legitimate carriers would for the trips, asking them to pay as much as $650 for a ride to cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami. The fee was usually paid at the end of the journey by relatives of the immigrants, officials said. In some cases the drivers refused to release the passenger if the family could not pay, the complaints said.

“These companies did not treat their passengers as persons, but rather as commodities to be bought and sold,” said John T. Morton, an assistant secretary of homeland security, at a news conference Wednesday.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/us/05bus.html

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2.
Arpaio's office could face sanctions over records
By JJ Hensley
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix), February 4, 2010

An attorney for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office told a federal judge that the agency destroyed documents it should have retained as part of a racial-profiling lawsuit, opening the door for sanctions against Sheriff Joe Arpaio's agency.

Tim Casey, an attorney representing Arpaio, admitted to U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow that deputies destroyed "stat sheets" generated in Arpaio's controversial "crime suppression operations" and had also failed to retain thousands of emails, all of which the agency could have turned over to plaintiffs' attorneys in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs' attorneys, who represent five people claiming sheriff's deputies detained them because of their skin color, filed a motion asking Snow for sanctions in November.

The hour-long hearing Thursday was the first chance for both parties to make their case in front of Snow, who essentially separated the destroyed "stat sheets" from the deleted emails.

Casey said that confusion among deputies over which stat sheets to retain and a lack of communication about keeping emails led to the lost and destroyed documents. Attorneys for the plaintiffs claim the material would show the Sheriff's Office engaged in selective enforcement during the crime-suppression operations.

"Doesn't that make information that might have been contained on those stat sheets relevant?" Snow asked, which Casey did not dispute.

Snow then asked if the legal requirement for sanctions was met when it came to the destroyed stat sheets.

"Yes," Casey replied.

Snow held off on the sanctions ruling and told both parties to return for a conference in mid-March. By then, the sheriff's attorneys should have turned over thousands of emails related to the activities of the Human Smuggling Unit.
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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/02/04/20100204arpaio-sanctio...

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3.
221st candidates forum centers on religion, immigration
By Howard Roden
The Courier (Montgomery County, TX), February 5, 2010

Religion, illegal immigration and abortion were among the topics the four candidates for the 221st state District Court addressed Thursday night during a forum hosted by Montgomery County Eagle Forum.

About 50 people showed up at Conroe Community Church to hear Lisa Michalk, Scott Golemon, Dave O’Neil and John Devine detail their qualifications, and then respond to questions from the crowd.

While all of the candidates professed to have the most experience for the job – as well as possessing the ability to streamline the court’s day-to-day operation – most of the questions from the audience dealt with the hot-button issues that are important to Montgomery County Eagle Forum, the local branch of conservative advocacy group the Texas Eagle Forum.

When asked how much God would play in his decisions as judge, Devine, of Magnolia, proudly declared his faith plays a major role.

“I’ll do what my conscience dictates,” said Devine, noting he’s been sued by “gay atheists” and the American Civil Liberties Union for his religious stance.

Golemon, who lives in Cut and Shoot, told the audience that America’s founding fathers had God, the Holy Bible and the Ten Commandments in mind when they created the U.S. Constitution. But Golemon said he sees a certain amount of hypocrisy with advocacy judges, whether they wear a conservative or liberal label.

“If you don’t like the law, the Constitution says that you don’t look at the judicial (system) to change the law,” he said.

Michalk, of The Woodlands, noted that as great a document as is the U.S. Constitution, it’s a document that has been amended 27 times.

“I bring that up, because it’s important to understand that legislators are people. They make mistakes,” she said. “We need to apply it to what’s happening and say, ‘I’m going to follow the law’”

O’Neil, of Lake Conroe, said he “strongly disagrees” with Devine’s position.

“In my opinion, it is the role of the legislature to decide what the law is and the personal convictions of an individual judge are all but irrelevant to the application of the law.”

The law is frequently flawed, O’Neil said. “But the public should not have to be keeping an eye out on two branches of the government in order to decide what the policies of the country are,” he said.

When asked about illegal immigration, Michalk is concerned about the automatic probation awarded to illegal immigrants on certain state law convictions.

“I want them to report to INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and get their status corrected,” she said.

Golemon and O’Neil both said they would notify the proper authorities when they become aware of they have a illegal immigrant before their bench. Devine attacked what he called “the status quo” of illegal immigration in Montgomery County.

“Our jails, prisons and schools are full with (illegal immigrants). To allow the status quo to continue will break us all,” he said.
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http://www.hcnonline.com/articles/2010/02/05/conroe_courier/news/forum02...

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4.
Immigrant facilities subpar
Chronicle review shows ICE not enforcing its own standards of care
By Susan Carroll
The Houston Chronicle, February 5, 2010

Luis Dubegel-Paez, a 60-year-old Cuban immigrant, lay on the floor of Rolling Plains Detention Center with no pulse, his face flushed, his pupils dilated.

For months before he collapsed at the detention center near Abilene, he had been complaining to nurses about chest pain and heart problems, asking to see a doctor.

“Can't stand the pain,” Dubegel-Paez wrote on a sick call slip on Jan. 1, 2008.

In response, he was treated by a nurse at the center's medical clinic and given cold medicine. As the weeks passed, he filed more urgent requests to see a doctor — only to be given more cough medicine and Tylenol by nurses, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement records.

While Dubegel-Paez waited to see a doctor, inspectors working for ICE toured the facility Feb. 26, 2008, to check that it complied with ICE's own detention standards. The inspectors rated the center “acceptable,” noting no deficiencies in its medical care.

It was only after Dubegel-Paez collapsed and died in March 2008 that ICE's inspectors noted in a report that medical care for about 500 detainees at the facility was being provided only by eight vocational nurses with minimal nursing or physician supervision.

The case highlights what critics have called pervasive problems with ICE's enforcement of detention standards.

A review of more than 800 pages of inspection reports obtained by the Houston Chronicle through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that inspectors have, in some instances, given positive reviews to facilities with serious problems — ranging from inadequate medical care to poor grievance procedures. In many cases, ICE has required facilities with deficiencies to make improvements, though inspectors often failed to note in subsequent reports whether changes were made.

After Dubegel-Paez's death, inspectors noted that the Rolling Plains facility failed to meet a number of ICE's detention standards, including care for chronic illness and responding to sick call requests.

But ICE officials still did not downgrade the center's rating because of staffing problems in the medical unit, records show, and continue to place a growing number of detainees there.

ICE officials said they are in the process of overhauling the nation's immigration detention system, including its monitoring procedures, and plan to improve oversight of medical care.

“The problems that occurred in 2007 and 2008 are terrible problems, and as an institution and an agency we have to address them and take them extraordinarily seriously,” said Brian Hale, ICE's public affairs director in Washington, D.C. “But I also do have to point out that was something that occurred in the past, and this new administration ... is committed to ensuring that doesn't happen again. We take it very seriously.”
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/immigration/6852074.html

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5.
Tea Party Dabbles in Immigration Politics
By Marcelo Ballvé
New America Media, February 5, 2010

The Tea Party movement has energized activism against President Obama’s vision for immigration reform.

The link between Tea Partiers and immigration politics developed last summer, when the impact of illegal immigration on the health care system became a prominent side issue in town hall debates.

Since then, illegal immigration has steadily gained ground on the Tea Party agenda.

Immigration “is one of our main issues in the state of North Carolina,” said David DeGerolamo, co-founder of Tea Party group NC Freedom, in a phone interview. “And what it comes down to is that the United States is a republic based on the rule of law. What part of illegal is right?”

DeGerolamo is scheduled to give a talk today on “How to Unite State Tea Party Groups” at the National Tea Party Convention, which began yesterday in Nashville.

The Nashville event has devoted a good share of its spotlight to activists devoted to promoting get-tough policies against illegal immigrants and blocking White House plans to offer a path to legal status for the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants.

These activists label such legislation as amnesty, and they helped derail a similar effort in 2007 that had the backing of then-President George W. Bush.

Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman whose signature issue was illegal immigration, was yesterday’s kick-off speaker at the Nashville convention, which is headlined by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Tancredo served 10 years in the House beginning in 1999, but gained widespread notoriety in 2002 when he called for the deportation of an undocumented honors student after a newspaper wrote about his inability to gain in-state tuition for college.

Also leading a session at the convention is NumbersUSA, a Washington, D.C. organization that advocates for lower immigration levels.

In the Tea Parties, groups like NumbersUSA discovered a new opportunity to spread and amplify their message, said Devin Burghart, who tracks the Tea Party movement from Seattle for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.

“It has become far more common for Tea Party groups to discuss the topic of undocumented immigrants at events and on their websites,” he said. “In terms of their long-term planning it is clearly becoming a part of their agenda.”

Of course, the links between hardline immigration activists and Tea Partiers don’t necessarily add up to a united front on immigration.

With a movement as fractured, fast changing and diffuse as the Tea Parties, it’s difficult to establish a clear idea of activists’ views on a single issue.

“Immigration is not a part of the movement's ‘platform,’” Keli Carender, a prominent Tea Party blogger and speaker at the Nashville convention, wrote in e-mail to New America Media. “I'm sure every person involved in the movement has their own personal views on immigration, and though they may be espoused from time to time, they … may not be representative of anyone else in the movement.”

Individual candidates linked to the Tea Party movement, however, have embraced the illegal immigration issue.
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http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b4cc03...