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1. Illegals not always deported
2. AZ immigration protests begin
3. Border deaths fill Tuscon morgue
4. AZ prepares lawsuit appeal
5. GOP: ruling hurts Dems

1.
Illegal immigrants committing crimes not always deported
By Mike Beaudet
MyFoxBoston, July 29, 2010

There's wide agreement that illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes should be deported.

In May, a state lawmaker in his car was hit by an illegal immigrant who was charged with drunk driving. The illegal immigrant taunted state police, saying he'd go back to his home country of Mexico and that nothing would happen to him.

FOX Undercover discovered in some cases, little does happen to illegal immigrants who commit crimes here in Massachusetts.

Pascual Bernabel-Soto likes Massachusetts so much he was willing to come here. Even after he was deported.

In fact, Bernabel-Soto then racked up an impressive criminal record of alleged drug dealing, not showing up for court and identity fraud charges - all after his 1998 deportation.

His most recent case was in Weymouth last year when police arrested him for dealing drugs out of a minivan. Despite giving police a false name, a Weymouth detective was able to identify Bernabel-Soto and noted his long criminal record in an application for a criminal complaint.

It includes a previous arrest in Weymouth in 2007 on similar charges and "numerous other narcotics violations"
The detective noted that Bernabel-Soto had "at least ten different aliases," "multiple licenses and identification cards," and faced an attempted murder charge in Puerto Rico.

It’s unclear how he managed stay in this country and continue committing crimes.

Jessica Vaughan is with the Center for Immigration Studies and an expert on immigrants and the criminal justice system who says a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling already allows police all over the country to ask someone about their immigration status.

“There are too many police departments in Massachusetts that are not training their officers on the tools that are available to them and on how they can and should be questioning foreign nationals that they've arrested about their immigration status,” Vaughan said.
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http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/undercover/deporting-criminal-illega...

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2.
Immigration demonstrations kick off in Arizona
By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2010

Reporting from Phoenix —
Opponents of Arizona's hard-line stance on illegal immigration launched a small religious procession from the state Capitol before dawn Thursday, the first of a series of demonstrations for the day the nation's strictest immigration law was due to take effect.

A federal judge Wednesday halted implementation of much of the law, known as SB 1070, ruling it unconstitutional. But activists said they had to keep up the pressure on a state that has come to define the national debate over illegal immigration.

"We live here in a climate of fear," said Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator who joined about 100 people on the two-mile march at 4:30 a.m. "The context of Arizona is foreign to this country. This is basically a nation that's become hostile to its own people."

SB 1070 declared the state's policy is "attrition through enforcement" -- an attempt to drive out illegal immigrants, who make up about 7% of the population here, through a series of criminal penalties. Even without the law, though, the state has used many tools against illegal immigrants.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was expected to demonstrate one of them later Thursday by launching one of his controversial "sweeps," in which his deputies fan out through immigrant neighborhoods, stopping people for sometimes minor infractions and checking their immigration status.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-immigration...

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3.
An Arizona Morgue Grows Crowded
By James C. McKinley Jr.
The New York Times, July 29, 2010

TUCSON — Dr. Bruce Parks unzips a white body bag on a steel gurney and gingerly lifts out a human skull and mandible, turning them over in his hands and examining the few teeth still in their sockets.

Dr. Bruce Parks, the chief medical examiner for Pima County, looked over an unidentified skull.

The body bag, coated with dust, also contains a broken pelvis, a femur and a few smaller bones found in the desert in June, along with a pair of white sneakers.

“These are people who are probably not going to be identified,” said Dr. Parks, the chief medical examiner for Pima County. There are eight other body bags crowded on the gurney.

The Pima County morgue is running out of space as the number of Latin American immigrants found dead in the deserts around Tucson has soared this year during a heat wave.

The rise in deaths comes as Arizona is embroiled in a bitter legal battle over a new law intended to discourage illegal immigrants from settling here by making it a state crime for them to live or seek work.

But the law has not kept the immigrants from trying to cross hundreds of miles of desert on foot in record-breaking heat. The bodies of 57 border crossers have been brought in during July so far, putting it on track to be the worst month for such deaths in the last five years.

Since the first of the year, more than 150 people suspected of being illegal immigrants have been found dead, well above the 107 discovered during the same period in each of the last two years. The sudden spike in deaths has overwhelmed investigators and pathologists at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Two weeks ago, Dr. Parks was forced to bring in a refrigerated truck to store the remains of two dozen people because the building’s two units were full.

“We can store about 200 full-sized individuals, but we have over 300 people here now, and most of those are border crossers,” Dr. Parks said. “We keep hoping we have seen the worst of this, of these migration deaths. Yet we still see a lot of remains.”

The increase in deaths has happened despite many signs that the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally has dropped in recent years. The number of people caught trying to sneak across the frontier without a visa has fallen in each of the last five years and stands at about half of the record 616,000 arrested in 2000.

Not only has the economic downturn in the United States eliminated many of the jobs that used to lure immigrants, human rights groups say, but also the federal government has stepped up efforts to stop the underground railroad of migrants, building mammoth fences in several border towns and flooding the region with hundreds of new Border Patrol agents equipped with high-tech surveillance tools.

These tougher enforcement measures have pushed smugglers and illegal immigrants to take their chances on isolated trails through the deserts and mountains of southern Arizona, where they must sometimes walk for three or four days before reaching a road.

“As we gain more control, the smugglers are taking people out to even more remote areas,” said Omar Candelaria, the special operations supervisor for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. “They have further to walk and they are less prepared for the journey, and they don’t make it.”

Mr. Candelaria said the surge in discoveries of bodies this year might also owe something to increased patrols. He noted that some of the remains found this year belong to people who died in previous years. But Dr. Parks said that could not account for the entire increase this year. Indeed, the majority of bodies brought in during July, Dr. Parks said, were dead less than a week.

Human rights groups say it is the government’s sustained crackdown on human smuggling that has led to more deaths.

“The more that you militarize the border, the more you push the migrant flows into more isolated and desolate areas, and people hurt or injured are just left behind,” said Kat Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson.

At the medical examiner’s office in Tucson, Dr. Park’s team of five investigators, six pathologists and one forensic anthropologist face an enormous backlog of more than 150 unidentified remains, with one case going back as far as 1993.

Every day, they labor to match remains with descriptions provided by people who have called their office to report a missing relative, or with reports collected by human rights groups and by Mexican authorities.

Since 2000, Dr. Park’s office has handled more than 1,700 border-crossing cases, and officials here have managed to confirm the identities of about 1,050 of the remains.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/us/29border.html

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4.
Arizona preparing appeal of immigration ruling
By Bob Christie
The Associated Press, July 29, 2010

PHOENIX -- Arizona is preparing to ask an appeals court to lift a judge's ruling that put most of the state's immigration law on hold in a key first-round victory for the federal government in a fight that may go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gov. Jan Brewer called Wednesday's decision by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton "a bump in the road" and vowed to appeal.

Protesters in Phoenix went ahead with plans Thursday for a march to the state Capitol and a sit-in at the office of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The sheriff said if protestors were disruptive, they'd be arrested, and he vowed to go ahead with a crime sweep targeting illegal immigrants.

Paul Senseman, a spokesman for Brewer, said Arizona would ask the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco later Thursday to lift Bolton's preliminary injunction and to expedite its consideration of the state's appeal.

Bolton indicated the government has a good chance at succeeding in its argument that federal immigration law trumps state law. But the key sponsor of Arizona's law, Republican Rep. Russell Pearce, said the judge was wrong and predicted the state would ultimately win the case.

Opponents of the law said the ruling sends a strong message to other states hoping to replicate the law.

"Surely it's going to make states pause and consider how they're drafting legislation and how it fits in a constitutional framework," Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, told The Associated Press. "The proponents of this went into court saying there was no question that this was constitutional, and now you have a federal judge who's said, 'Hold on, there's major issues with this bill.'"

He added: "So this idea that this is going to be a blueprint for other states is seriously in doubt. The blueprint is constitutionally flawed."

In her temporary injunction, Bolton delayed the most contentious provisions of the law, including a section that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws. She also barred enforcement of parts requiring immigrants to carry their papers and banned illegal immigrants from soliciting employment in public places - a move aimed at day laborers that congregate in large numbers in parking lots across Arizona. The judge also blocked officers from making warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants.

"Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked," said Bolton, a Clinton administration appointee who was assigned the seven lawsuits filed against Arizona over the law.

Other provisions that were less contentious were allowed to take effect Thursday, including a section that bars cities in Arizona from disregarding federal immigration laws.

The 11th-hour ruling came just as police were preparing to begin enforcement of a law that has drawn international attention and revived the national immigration debate in a year when Democrats are struggling to hold on to seats in Congress.

The ruling was anxiously awaited in the U.S. and beyond. About 100 protesters in Mexico City who had gathered at the U.S. Embassy broke into applause when they learned of the ruling via a laptop computer. Mariana Rivera, a 36-year-old from Zacatecas, Mexico, who is living in Phoenix on a work permit, said she heard about the ruling on a Spanish-language news program.

"I was waiting to hear because we're all very worried about everything that's happening," said Rivera, who phoned friends and family with the news. "Even those with papers, we don't go out at night at certain times there's so much fear (of police). You can't just sit back and relax."

More demonstrators opposed to the law planned to gather Thursday, with the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the immigrant-rights group Puente saying they would march from the state Capitol.

Lawmakers or candidates in as many as 18 states say they want to push similar measures when their legislative sessions start up again in 2011. Some lawmakers pushing the legislation said they would not be daunted by the ruling and plan to push ahead in response to what they believe is a scourge that needs to be tackled.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/29/AR201007...

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5.
GOP says Ariz. ruling will hurt Dems
By Scott Wong
Politico, July 29, 2010

Republicans decried a federal judge’s decision Wednesday to block key provisions of Arizona’s new immigration law, saying the ruling highlights the Obama administration’s failure to secure the border and will exacerbate Democratic losses in November.

Most Democrats hailed the decision, saying Arizona’s SB 1070 was “un-American and unconstitutional” because it would have required police to arrest people based on their appearance and detain them until their immigration status was determined.

But Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), who has criticized the administration’s lawsuit, said the ruling marked just the beginning of months of costly courtroom battles in a case that is widely expected to end up at the Supreme Court.

“There are no winners here. No matter what the courts ultimately decide, we will still have wasted millions of dollars, and our borders will still not be secure,” Kirkpatrick said. “The administration needs to stop pursuing this distraction and start working with us to get the border region under control and develop a national immigration strategy.”

Kurt Davis, an Arizona GOP political consultant, sounded what is likely to be a Republican theme. “The big hand of the federal government, in this case a Clinton-appointed judge, has once again interfered with a state trying to secure its porous border,” he said. “This ruling will ensure this issue is discussed the entire election cycle and that the negative impact on Democrats, from the president on down, will be significant.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he assumed that because of further litigation, “this may be unresolved for some time.”

“The more important lesson,” he added, “is the Obama administration needs to make immigration reform and border security a priority because this is what happens when states are basically left to their own devices to try to protect their own people.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton’s ruling a “sort of timeout” in the immigration debate. “It stops the law from spreading because any state will have to slow down and think about this. It doesn’t solve the problem. It gives us time to re-engage with each other.”

“I would like to use this judicial timeout to find some constructive path forward,” said Graham. Obama should “use this time wisely,” work with Congress and hammer out a solution.

In her ruling, Bolton agreed with much of the Justice Department’s request for a preliminary injunction against the law, which is slated to take effect Thursday.

Bolton blocked a provision that would require police to determine the immigration status of people they suspect are in the country illegally. She also blocked a section of the law that would make it a state crime to be in the U.S. without valid documents.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40378.html