1. MA pushed for Sec. Comm.
2. New twist to SB1070 suit
3. Border activity increases
4. CIS staffer at SB1070 debate
5. Businessman raises funds

US pushes state to join security plan
By Maria Sacchetti
The Boston Globe, October 6, 2010

Federal officials say they are compelling Massachusetts law enforcement agencies, including the State Police, to join a national program that checks the immigration status of everyone arrested and fingerprinted by 2013, officials said yesterday.

The planned rollout of the federal Secure Communities program has state officials, nonprofits, and local police chiefs scrambling to determine the program’s impact in Massachusetts and whether it conflicts with a policy barring the State Police from enforcing immigration law.

Meanwhile, organizations that work with immigrants launched a series of community meetings last night to alert them to the the new initiative.

The immigration checks would mark a dramatic shift for Massachusetts, where Boston is the only community to participate in the program. Police in other communities have largely avoided helping to enforce federal immigration laws over fears that it would discourage immigrants from coming forward to report crime. In 2007, Governor Deval Patrick reversed a plan by Governor Mitt Romney to have the State Police enforce immigration law, preferring to have the prisons do it instead.

Federal immigration officials have been trying to expand in the state for at least a year and hoped to be in half the state’s counties by now, officials said. In 2009, the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent a letter urging state officials to sign a memorandum to “establish a solid foundation’’ for “bringing counties and police departments online.’’

The document was never signed, a fact that has drawn criticism from Patrick’s rivals in the governor’s race. Republican Charles D. Baker and independent Timothy P. Cahill have accused the administration of delaying expansion of the Secure Communities program.

John Grossman, an undersecretary at the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety, denied that the Patrick administration had delayed the program’s expansion. He said he had viewed ICE’s request to sign an agreement as an unnecessary formality.

“It was our understanding that they didn’t need us to do anything in order to go forward and deploy this program,’’ he said. “They didn’t have us sign anything before they deployed in Boston,’’ which served as a pilot for the program in 2006, two years before it officially became Secure Communities.

Grossman said the state is still waiting for clearer signals from the federal government about the program’s schedule for expansion here.

Brian P. Hale, spokesman for ICE, would not comment on the reasons for the delay in Massachusetts but said they were working with the Patrick administration to take Secure Communities statewide.

“It’s all about . . . making sure the deployment is done in the right way,’’ Hale said. “A lot of that requires some negotiations. We want to make sure the deployment in Massachusetts meets the common goal that we have, which is to take criminals off the streets and protect our communities.’’

Grossman said the administration still has not said whether it supports the Secure Communities program in principle.

“We have not taken a position yet because we are defining with ICE what that means,’’ said Grossman. “We do have a position that serious criminals who are in this country illegally ought to be deported. But we also need to understand the parameters of this program.’’

The goal of Secure Communities is to ensure that dangerous criminals are detained and deported, but it is raising concern nationwide that it is also netting minor offenders.

Under the Secure Communities program, in which FBI and immigration databases are linked, the process of booking people who are arrested would automatically determine if they have criminal histories and alert federal immigration officials if they are in the country illegally, Hale said.

Federal officials say that Secure Communities does not require local and state police to enforce immigration law. Only federal immigration officials will decide whether to hold a person for deportation.

But the new program still made some officials uncomfortable. Many police agencies in Massachusetts work with ICE to arrest criminals, but they avoid targeting immigrants without legal papers, typically a civil violation, because they fear it could deter them from reporting crime.

In Chelsea, Police Chief Brian Kyes worried that Secure Communities could erode trust in his city, where nearly 38 percent of the city’s residents are immigrants.

“It would be a huge change from what we’re doing now,’’ said Kyes. “This is something the Chelsea police would not want to be a part of. It’s my belief that it would be counterproductive to the relationships we’ve formed and the trust and confidence between the police and the community in the past few years.’’

But in neighboring Everett, Chief Steven Mazzie praised the program. He said ICE would probably only have the staff to target major criminals.

“We have a large immigrant population over here, but at that point if someone’s under arrest for a criminal matter, I see it only as a tool that we can use to get criminals off the street,’’ Mazzie said. “I see it doing nothing but helping us keep our communities safer by removing people that don’t belong here, people that are committing criminal activity.’’
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/10/06/us_as...

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2.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer slams 'foreign interference' in immigration lawsuit
By Scott Wong
Politico (Washington, D.C.), October 6, 2010

In a new twist in the fight over Arizona’s immigration law, Gov. Jan Brewer (R) on Tuesday asked a federal court to disallow foreign governments from joining the U.S. Justice Department’s suit to overturn the law.

The move comes in response to a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling issued Monday allowing nearly a dozen Latin American countries — Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Chile – to submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Justice’s challenge to SB 1070, which Brewer signed into law in April and is considered one of the nation’s toughest immigration-enforcement measures.

“As do many citizens, I find it incredibly offensive that these foreign governments are using our court system to meddle in a domestic legal dispute and to oppose the rule of law,” the Republican governor said in a statement shortly after the state’s motion was filed Tuesday evening.

“What’s even more offensive is that this effort has been supported by the U.S. Department of Justice. American sovereignty begins in the U.S. Constitution and at the border,” she added. “I am confident the Ninth Circuit will do the right thing and recognize foreign interference in U.S. legal proceedings and allow the State of Arizona to respond to their brief.”

Brewer and her supporters have said the state law is necessary because the federal government has failed to protect the border and enforce immigration laws. But the Justice Department – with strong backing from President Barack Obama – sued to block the Arizona law on constitutional grounds.

Responding to the suit, a federal judge in July put some of the most contested parts of the law on hold, including a provision that requires police officers to check the immigration status of individuals they stop for other offenses if there is “reasonable suspicion” they are in the country illegally.

Brewer, who has vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court, which will begin hearing arguments in San Francisco on Nov. 1, one day before the midterm elections.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/43199.html#ixzz11avEVgGs

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3.
Cartel Threat Grows, Illegal Numbers Drop
By Anthonly L. Kimery
Homeland Security Today, October 6, 2010

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Also, since about 2008, federal immigration enforcement has risen to unprecedented levels, largely because of the deployment to the border of thousands of new Border Patrol agents and ICE investigators whose operations were enhanced by millions of dollars in electronic surveillance and other narco- and human-smuggling detection technologies and assets.

Nearly 15,000 criminal immigration cases were referred for prosecution by CBP during March and April, the most since a similar period in 2008. From February to April, Border Patrol prosecution referrals jumped 45 percent, 98 percent of which came from Border Patrol’s southwest districts.

Meanwhile, ICE reported more criminal prosecutions during the same period of Time than since its creation in 2005. Deportations have escalated to record levels and stayed there. They went from 186,000 in 2007 to 388,000 in 2008. The sheer numbers of enforcement cases have clogged federal and US district courts across the southwest, but have taken many of the cartels’ experienced operatives off US streets.

“The numbers are clearly moving in the right direction,” stated CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin and ICE Director John Morton in a joint July 29 op-ed, “What We're Doing to Secure the Border,” published by the Wall Street Journal. The two accurately noted that “last year, illegal crossings along the Southwest border were down 23 percent, to a fraction of their all-Time high,” and that “seizures of contraband rose significantly across the board in 2009—illegal bulk cash, illegal weapons and illegal drugs.”

But Judicial Watch’s Fitton told Homeland Security Today “that no matter what the numbers are, or whether they’re going up or they’re going down in any given year, within the larger context of the situation there’s still a crisis on the border.”

“The bottom-line,” Fitton stressed, “is there are still too many [illegals] getting into the country.”

Federal authorities Homeland Security Today recently interviewed on the border during its recent month-long investigation agreed, but they also emphasized that the numbers can be interpreted in different ways given the “bigger picture of what’s happening down here,” as one of the officials explained.

Officials noted that because the crackdown on TCOs’ drug trafficking operations have cut into their illicit profits, they are aggressively attempting to smuggle more and more people across the border, including Latin American nationals wanting to come to the US to work who the TCOs are forcing to carry drugs.

Agreeing with Fitton that too many illegals are still streaming across the border, the Washington, DC-based Center for Immigration Studies made the astonishing claim in June that, “at minimum, [the] inescapable conclusion” of “hidden camera footage” it “acquired from a variety of [unidentified] sources … of both illegal-alien entry as well as gun- and drug-smuggling … is that [the] hidden cameras reveal a reality that illegal-alien activity is escalating …”

The group relied on independently unverified and undocumented edited footage from the hidden cameras in a ten minute mini-documentary in which it claimed that what the hidden cameras captured “indicates that there is an unfortunate lack of federal law enforcement presence on Arizona’s federal land on the border in Nogales, in the Coronado National Forest (15 miles inside the border), and the Casa Grande Sector (80 miles inside the border).”

The variety of CBP officials interviewed during Homeland Security Today’s investigation on the border this past summer vehemently disputed the group’s claims.

Supported by Tucson Sector Air Branch agents under his command, Air Branch Chief Johnson and a CBP official from Houston told me during a meeting in Johnson’s office that the sort of long lines of [apparent] illegals that are seen in the videos just don’t “get by us” anymore without being caught by any number of eyes and technological monitors.

Johnson explained that “the numbers [of people] like you see in some of the videos” would be detected by the surveillance assets that Border Patrol has in place. “Today, it would be almost impossible not to notice large groups like these videos show, especially on the well worn trails” the alleged illegals in the videos are walking on.

“We know where these kinds of trails are, and they’re monitored around the clock,” Johnson said.

Johnson further assured that Border Patrol agents are “definitely” on the ground near the kinds of well worn trails like those seen in the videos but wouldn’t necessarily have been picked up by the so-called “hidden cameras.” He and the CBP official from Houston said Border Patrol agents were in the areas of each of the trails depicted in the videos, explaining that Border Patrol typically waits to round up groups of illegals travelling on these sorts of trails by positioning themselves at choke points where trails empty into clearings or other areas where it’s easier for agents to apprehend them.

CBP’s Cribby agreed. He said there’s no way for CBP to verify the authenticity or circumstances under which the videos were taken, but stressed that well traveled trails and large groups of illegals – especially throughout the rugged border terrain of the Tucson Sector – are flagged by an array of sensors and aerial patrols by the Air Branch “that would detect this many people.”

None of the many varied CBP officials interviewed believed Border Patrol missed detecting the large numbers of alleged illegals that the Center for Immigration Studies claimed the hidden cameras caught sneaking into the country.
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http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/14964/150/

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4.
In hostile territory
By Hillary Davis
Arizona Daily Sun, October 5, 2010

Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law is to one side unconstitutional and a temptation for racial profiling, to the other side a remedy to an economic issue and supportive of federal law.

Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, debated the merits of the law that is still referred to by its legislative shorthand, SB1070, to a packed room Monday night at the High Country Conference Center in Flagstaff.

The debate was the first in a university-sponsored series discussing the controversial law. Although the talking points were familiar, the debate was notable for recruiting a proponent of the law to defend it in a city where public discussion has largely been officially disapproving of the illegal immigration crackdown.

Saenz, whose organization has filed suit against the law, said SB1070 is "obviously unconstitutional" because immigration is a federal issue -- and that if states had their own immigration laws, the nation would be fractured.

He was also skeptical that racial profiling would be avoided, despite language in the law that prohibits police from solely considering race when deciding to question somebody's residency.

Saenz said being an illegal immigrant is a status crime, not an act crime. So if an immigrant's covert entry into the United States or the moment they overstayed their visa is unwitnessed, then what can be observed -- appearance -- is what leads authorities to suspect somebody's immigration status.

"When it comes to a status crime, you have no choice but to turn to racial profiling," he said.

SOME MUFFLED BOOS

The event was mostly collegial, although Vaughan endured the occasional verbal interruption. Protesters also held up signs as she spoke and muffled boos leaked from the 150 people or so in attendance.

Vaughan acknowledged that the law could have been worded better, and that it might overreach. But she said it couldn't be unconstitutional because it supports and mirrors existing federal law.

She said the U.S. can't deport every illegal immigrant, but it also cannot accept that illegal immigration is a force of nature that cannot be controlled.

"The key here is to change the incentives that are at play," she said.

Saenz said that if SB1070 mirrors federal law, there's no need to be redundant. But more so, federal means federal.

"That means states -- stay out," he said.

Vaughan said that undocumented immigrants take jobs that Americans could do. Saenz disputed the desire among Americans to do physical, low-paying agricultural work, for example, but Vaughan countered that a steady stream of undocumented workers willing to do the work in less-than-ideal conditions means that employers have no incentive to make the jobs more attractive.

She also said that low-wage jobs mean the workers can turn to taxpayer-funded welfare systems, at least through their American-born children.

NATIONAL BORDERS UNNECESSARY

Before the debate, members of the NAU debate team demonstrated a brief examination of the laws. Also, about 15 protesters lined a lobby stairwell to protest Vaughan's presence and support for SB1070 with signs and chants like "No human is illegal" and "Repeal 1070."

Kathleen Peters, a graduate student studying race and gender history, wore a shirt that said "Repeal" in bold letters. As a member of the Repeal Coalition, she supports the abolition of "anti-immigrant" laws.

In a globalized society, nationalism isn't needed, she said. Jobs and products flow across borders, and so should people, she said.

"We find that the laws are misguided, often racist and don't get to the core of the issue," she said.
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http://www.azdailysun.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_71c3dd27-...

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5.
State agency says Bruce Ratner used federal program to finance Atlantic Yards project, Nets arena
By Michael O'Keffe
New York Daily News, October 6, 2010
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/2010/10/06/2010-10-06_ratne...

A state official says funds Nets minority owner Bruce Ratner raises for the Atlantic Yards through a federal program that grants green cards to foreign investors will not create any new jobs beyond those already forecast for the $4.9 billion project, which includes a $900 million arena for the Nets.

Elizabeth Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the Empire State Development Corporation, said Ratner turned to the EB-5 program because it will save money on Atlantic Yards financing.

"If this financing was not available - or if Forest City Ratner is not as successful as we hope in raising funds under this program - then Forest City Ratner will need to raise funds from other sources to facilitate build-out of the entire project," Mitchell said in an email.

The EB-5 program was created in 1990 to encourage economic development in this country by granting green cards to foreign investors, and their families, who invest $500,000 or more to projects that create new jobs or retain jobs that would be lost without their money. The investors get back their money, and permanent residency in the United States, after two years.

Raising money through the EB-5 program, said David North, a former Labor Department official who is now a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, is much less expensive than financing projects through traditional means.

City officials urged Forest City Ratner to explore the program after the Brooklyn Navy Yard successfully sought $125 million earlier this year through the program, FCR spokesman Joe DePlasco said. The federal government still needs to approve the Atlantic Yards financing.
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http://www.azdailysun.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_71c3dd27-...