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1. Rep. Pelosi defends Obama
2. DC chief shaky on Sec. Comm.
3. TX homes stranded by fence
4. Mexico arrests drug boss
5. Illegals convicted, set free

1.
Pelosi: Obama hasn't broken promise to try to enact immigration reform
By Michael O'Brien
The Hill (DC), February 27, 2011

President Obama hasn't broken his promise to seek immigration reform, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said Sunday in defense of the president.

Pelosi said that Republicans were to blame for the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and, barring that, the DREAM Act.

"Well, I don't think he broke his promise, what he found is that it is almost impossible with the resistance in the Senate of the Republicans to pass it," Pelosi said Sunday in an interview on Univision. "But that doesn't mean we don't keep on trying and keep coming up with new ways to do it."

Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress had talked consistently over the past two years about their intention to push forward with immigration reform, as they'd promised to do on the campaign trail in 2008. But the protracted healthcare battle and stagnant economy deprived Congress of the time and political capital to tackle comprehensive reform.

Instead, in the lame-duck Congress, the House passed the DREAM Act, a more limited bill providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. But even this measure failed in the Senate, when most Republicans and some Democrats joined together to sustain a filibuster of the legislation.

That failure was seen as a disappointment to Hispanic voters, who tend Democratic and had favored immigration reform. Elected Democrats are hoping the inaction won't hurt Obama and the party at the polls in the 2012 election.

Democrats have vowed to return again to the DREAM Act and immigration reform, but it's tough to see how such legislation would advance through the now-Republican House.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/146303-pelosi-obama-has...

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2.
Federal immigration program is applied inconsistently in region
By Shankar Vedantam
The Washington Post, February 27, 2011

When D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier heard about a new federal immigration enforcement program last year, she said it could have prevented eight killings in the city in the previous two years.

But her enthusiasm was tempered by a concern that the program, designed to detect suspects in police custody who are undocumented immigrants, would also ensnare people who had committed minor offenses, prompting immigrants not to report crimes and domestic abuse to police.

Lanier worked behind the scenes last year with federal officials to redesign the program in potentially far-reaching ways, according to recently released internal documents by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

But Lanier's attempt to get the program to focus on serious offenses was stymied when the D.C. Council and community groups expressed reservations about participating in any fashion. Eventually, the city withdrew from the program.

Lanier's efforts offer a glimpse into the myriad ways in which communities in the Washington region and across the nation have grappled with the controversial immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities. The District's experience also reveals how inconsistent federal guidelines have created widespread confusion. Arlington County, for example, was forced to participate in the program against its will. Other jurisdictions, such as the District and Montgomery County, have been given significantly more latitude.

The Secure Communities program grew out of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission and has become a centerpiece of the Obama administration's effort to focus immigration enforcement on criminals.

Under the program, fingerprints routinely collected by local authorities are forwarded to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a status check. If a fingerprint is matched with someone known to be in the country illegally, ICE can order the immigrant's detention as a first step toward deportation.

Initially, federal immigration officials promised many local governments that their participation would be voluntary. But in late 2009 and 2010, the officials modified their assurances. They began telling communities that the only voluntary part of the program was that a jurisdiction could choose not to receive information about why ICE wanted police to detain someone - a relatively minor aspect of the program.

"Because Secure Communities is fundamentally an information-sharing partnership between federal agencies, state and local jurisdictions cannot opt out from the program, though state and local jurisdictions can opt not to receive the results of immigration queries," ICE spokesman Brian Hale said.

Hale said he expected that every jurisdiction in the country would be actively participating in the program by 2013. He credited the program with apprehending more than 59,000 undocumented immigrants who committed crimes, including about 21,000 who had committed serious offenses such as murder, rape and child sexual abuse.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/26/AR201102...

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3.
Texas landowners stuck on wrong side of border fence
By Richard Marosi
Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2011

The Rio Grande once ran wide and deep behind the four-room house that Pamela Taylor and her husband hammered together more than half a century ago. Migrant workers had to take a ferry upriver to get across from Mexico, and a flood once inundated the family's citrus groves.

Over time, the waters receded, the river narrowed and Mexico got closer. Thieves led by a one-legged man stole Taylor's horses from the barn and beans off the stove. Drug smugglers hid marijuana in her bushes. Migrant workers would camp in her front yard and bring her fresh tortillas in the morning.

The once-swift river now could be crossed with little more than a leaky inner tube. Still, there was some comfort in knowing that, on the map anyway, the Rio Grande marked the international boundary. Nowadays, Taylor isn't so sure.

The Homeland Security Department last year put up a tall steel barrier across the fields from Taylor's home. The government calls it the border fence, but it was erected about a quarter-mile north of the Rio Grande, leaving Taylor's home between the fence and the river. Her two acres now lie on a strip of land that isn't Mexico but doesn't really seem like the United States either.

The government doesn't keep count, but Taylor and other residents think there are about eight houses stranded on the other side of the fence.

"It's a no man's land," Taylor said. "They said they were going to build a fence to protect all the people. We were just lost in the draw."

When the Homeland Security Department began its Southwest border buildup four years ago, erecting barriers seemed a straightforward enough proposition. The international boundary is ruler-straight for hundreds of miles from California to New Mexico, and planners laid the fencing down right on the border, traversing deserts, mountains and valleys.

But here, where the border's eastern edge meets the Gulf of Mexico, the urgency of national security met headlong with geographical reality. The Rio Grande twists through Brownsville and surrounding areas, and planners had to avoid building on the flood plain. So the barriers in some places went up more than a mile from the river.

While the border fence almost everywhere else divides Mexico and the U.S., here it divides parts of the city.

Authorities defend the barrier, saying it helps control illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The fencing doesn't stop immigrants, but they say it slows people down and funnels them to areas where U.S. Border Patrol agents can respond quickly.

In and around Brownsville, the fence slices through two-lane roads, backyards, agricultural fields, citrus groves and pastures for more than 21 miles, trapping tens of thousands of acres, according to some property owners' estimates. (The Homeland Security Department did not keep track of the total.) Narrow gaps allow back-and-forth access for cars and tractors, pedestrians and Border Patrol agents, but they are spaced as much as a mile apart.

"My son-in-law tells people we live in a gated community," joked Taylor, 82, who shares her modest home with her daughter's family.

Originally from England, she married her Mexican American husband during World War II, and picked tomatoes and cotton to scrape enough money together in 1948 to build a modest home and raise four adopted children.

She never learned to speak much Spanish and struggled with Mexican food. "My father-in-law told me I was the only person he knew that made square tortillas," Taylor recalled. Hers has been a life defined by adapting, but she said nothing prepared her for America's new border barrier.

"We feel abandoned here," she said. "That's why we refer to it as the Mexican side of the fence."

Planning challenges and fierce opposition held off construction crews for several years, making Brownsville the last border city to get barriers under the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Tensions escalated in this mostly Latino, working-class city of 172,000 when people realized that large segments of the fence would not sit anywhere near the international boundary.

Some residents got the word by studying maps of the project at public hearings. Others answered knocks on their front doors to find Border Patrol agents bearing clipboards: Would they sign a waiver allowing the government to begin surveying their land?

Landowners were offered compensation, but many were outraged. They protested at public hearings, lobbied politicians in Washington and fought court battles. The government had to start condemnation proceedings against more than 100 residents, some of them poor farmers or senior citizens with centuries-old ties to the community.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-texas-fence-2011022...

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4.
Local Mexico drug boss tied to U.S. agent death caught
Reuters, February 27, 2011

The Mexican Navy said on Sunday it arrested the alleged regional head of the feared "Zetas" drug gang in connection with this month's murder of a U.S. customs agent by a drug gang.

The Navy said in a statement that Marines arrested Sergio "El Toto" Mora, the alleged head of the Zetas in San Luis Potosi, in a Sunday morning raid in the northern city of Saltillo.

Mora was to be transported to Mexico City and handed over to the federal prosecutors' office for interrogation.

The statement did not provide further details of Mora's suspected role in the killing.

A news conference where Mora was to be presented to journalists in Mexico City was canceled shortly before it was supposed to begin Sunday evening.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jaime Zapata died and his partner was wounded when they were ambushed in broad daylight on a major highway outside of the city of San Luis Potosi earlier this month by alleged drug gang members.

It was one of the worst attacks on U.S. law enforcement personnel in Mexico in more than a decade.

Mexico's federal prosecutors' office believes the attack was due to a mistaken identity, but it has come under heavy diplomatic pressure from Washington to capture Zapata's killers.

Security forces have already arrested six men, four women and a minor in connection with the attack, all of whom are allegedly linked to the Zetas.

Nine of those arrested were ordered held in prison for 40 days on Sunday by a Mexican judge to allow prosecutors more time to collect evidence against the suspects before they were charged.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/28/us-mexico-usa-agent-idUSTRE71R...

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5.
Illegal Immigrant and convicted killer, but set free
MyFoXBoston, February 28, 2011

After 16-year-old Ashton Cline-McMurray was brutally murdered, his mother took some comfort in hearing that at least some of her son's killers would never walk American streets again.

It's the reason why Sandra Hutchinson agreed with letting the purported gang members, several of them illegal immigrants, plead guilty to lesser charges. She says the prosecutor reassured her that, after their criminal sentences were finished, those in the country illegally would be deported.

"They said that they would never set foot, basically on American soil again. In other words, they'd be like in jail until they got sent back," Hutchinson said.

It's no wonder Hutchinson wanted her son's killers gone. Her son was disabled with cerebral palsy when he was attacked while walking home from a football game in Revere.

"They stabbed him. They beat him. They beat him with rungs out of stairs. They beat him with a golf club," Hutchinson said. "They stabbed him through his heart a couple of times. And through his lung. They stabbed him in his abdomen. He didn't have a chance, really."

The four purported gang members who killed her son pleaded guilty to lesser charges, from manslaughter to second degree murder, meaning they didn't serve the mandatory life sentence without parole that comes with a murder conviction.

That allowed one of the defendants, Loeun Heng, to be released by the Massachusetts Parole Board last March. The illegal immigrant was immediately taken into custody by the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But instead of being deported to his native Cambodia, Heng is back on American streets.

"It's crazy," Hutchinson said. "They're just letting them back out there to do it to somebody else."

Heng is free in America thanks to a little-known Supreme Court decision from 2001, Zadvydas v. Davis, which forbids federal immigration authorities from detaining illegal immigrants who have been ordered deported for more than six months.

The Supreme Court carved out a few exceptions for terrorism and other cases, but in the vast majority of cases, illegal immigrants must be released after 180 days if they aren't deported, often because their home countries aren't cooperating.

"The government is releasing him because it has no choice," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which generally supports tougher enforcement on immigration matters. "We can't deport people unless their home country will take them back," Vaughan said.

"Do you think this puts the public at risk?" asked FOX Undercover reporter Mike Beaudet.

"Oh absolutely it puts the public at risk because ICE is forced to release people that it would like to remove but it can't and it's no longer allowed to hold them in detention," Vaughan replied.

Vaughan estimates that thousands of illegal immigrants have been released nationwide, and probably dozens have been let go in New England.
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http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/undercover/convicted-and-illegal-but...