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1. SCOTUS pick a La Raza member
2. Secure Communities to reach all jails
3. GA congressman defends bill
4. Report: Profile of Hispanic children
5. Haitians hoping for TPS

1.
Sonia Sotomayor 'La Raza member'
American Bar Association lists Obama choice as part of group
By Joe Kovacs
The World Net Daily, May 27, 2009

As President Obama's Supreme Court nominee comes under heavy fire for allegedly being a "racist," Judge Sonia Sotomayor is listed as a member of the National Council of La Raza, a group that's promoted driver's licenses for illegal aliens, amnesty programs, and no immigration law enforcement by local and state police.

According the American Bar Association, Sotomayor is a member of the NCLR, which bills itself as the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S.

Meaning "the Race," La Raza also has connections to groups that advocate the separation of several southwestern states from the rest of America.

Over the past two days, Sotomayor has been heavily criticized for her racially charged statement: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

The remark was actually made during a 2001 speech at the University of California's Berkeley School of Law. The lecture was published the following year in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal.

The comment is being zeroed in on by voices from the political right.

"I'm not saying she's a racist, but the statement sure is," columnist Ann Coulter said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman,'" blogged former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. "Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."
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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=99420

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2.
Immigration Checks on Criminals Could Increase Deportations
Local police are enlisted to help ferret out uninvited visitors
By Alex Kingsbury
The US News and World Report, May 27, 2009

The Obama administration is expanding an effort to check the populations of local jails for illegal immigrants, a move that could significantly expand the number facing deportation hearings. Currently, many local police jurisdictions lack either the time or the resources to verify the immigration status of those in custody.

The Secure Communities program, which began last year as a pilot study, will expand into all the country's jails by 2013. It allows law enforcement officials to automatically match fingerprints against federal immigration
databases so that those in the country without authorization will face deportation when they complete their jail terms. Law enforcement officials already verify the immigration status of those in federal and state prisons. Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimates the number of incarcerated criminal aliens in the United States at between 300,000 and 450,000 people.

Currently, everyone arrested and booked into a local jail is fingerprinted, and the prints are run through the FBI's criminal history database. If local police want an immigration check, Department of Homeland Security personnel have to search their records manually. Last year, only 10 percent of the inmates in the country's 3,000 local jails had their immigration status checked.

Since October, the program has operated on a trial basis in dozens of counties around the country and in such cities as Dallas, Boston, Houston, Miami, and Phoenix. Police officers in those jurisdictions fingerprint inmates and automatically query the prints through both DHS and FBI databases. The system does not identify those who have never been fingerprinted by government authorities.
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http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2009/05/27/immigration-chec...

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3.
Deal denies critics’ charge that birthright bill had political timing
Legislation was submitted two months ago, as well as in previous sessions
By Ashley Fielding
The Gainesville Times (GA), May 28, 2009

U.S. Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal said he does not know how a story on a bill he proposed two months ago — and in three previous sessions of Congress — made national headlines just in time to rally Republicans for his gubernatorial campaign.

The bill, House Resolution 1868, proposes to end the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants unless at least one parent is a U.S. citizen, a legal permanent resident or an active member of the U.S. armed forces.

Although Deal introduced the bill into the U.S. House of Representatives on April 2, it made headlines earlier this week.

The timing — less than one month after Deal announced his bid for governor — drew accusations from critics that the bill was nothing but political pandering to Deal’s conservative constituents.

Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, was one such critic. Gonzalez said the bill, entitled the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009, was a political ploy to garner attention. He called the move shameful and despicable.

"(Deal) wants to tinker with the U.S. Constitution to further his xenophobic political ideology, and that is just not what we should expect from our congresspersons," Gonzalez said.

But Deal said he did not have anything to do with the media attention that the bill received this week. He said he did not issue a press release on the piece of legislation. Instead, a reporter from the Associated Press called him "out of the blue" about the bill last week, he said.

"People that make those accusations need to get their facts straight," Deal said.

The only political posturing in the timing of the bill was the congressman’s plan to wait for the number with which to name it — House Resolution 1868, he said.

Deal said he waited for resolution No. 1868, because he wanted to be able to name his bill after the year the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed the right of citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil, was adopted.

"It goes to the meaning behind the 14th Amendment, which was originally intended to settle the status of former slaves," said Deal. "I don’t think anybody could logically argue then that (its writers knew) that we would see a time where 1 out of every 10 births in this country is to an illegal immigrant."
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http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/article/19352/

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4.
Most Hispanic kids children of immigrants
The United Press International, May 28, 2009

Washington, DC (UPI) -- More than half of the 16 million Hispanic children in the United States have at least one immigrant parent, a report released Thursday said.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimated less than 10 percent of Hispanic children are living in the United States illegally. But many of them are the children of parents who are in the country illegally.

Researchers said there has been a major shift since 1980, when a majority of Hispanic children were born in the United States to U.S.-born parents. In the past 30 years, there has been a major wave of immigration from Mexico and Central America.

The children of immigrant parents are more likely to be poor than those whose parents were born in the United States, the report said.
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http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/05/28/Most-Hispanic-kids-children-of-im...

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5.
Haitians in U.S. Illegally Look for Signs of a Deporting Reprieve
By Kirk Semple
The New York Times, May 28, 2009

For Danie, who moved from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to the United States in 2001 to live with her grandparents, there has never been a good time to go home.

Haiti, which has stumbled from grave political unrest to catastrophic natural disasters, remains one of the world’s poorest nations. So although Danie, 22, is an illegal immigrant, she has decided to stay in New York City. She lives in Cambria Heights, Queens, and is about to graduate from college with a degree in education. She hopes to become an elementary school teacher, but fears that her lack of a Social Security number will leave her few options beyond doing menial labor in an underground economy.

The desperation of Haitians was underscored this month when at least nine people drowned after their boat — crowded mostly with people fleeing Haiti — sank off the Florida coast.

“Things are easier here,” Danie said, speaking on condition that she not be identified by her full name because she feared detection. “There’s more security, people find food easier, you have money, somewhere to stay.”

But Haitians in New York — the city with the largest population of Haitian descent outside Port-au-Prince — are hopeful about a proposal under consideration by the Obama administration that would provide relief for her and tens of thousands of other illegal Haitian immigrants.

After four hurricanes and tropical storms in 2008 killed hundreds of people, wiped out most of Haiti’s food crops and caused nearly a billion dollars in damage, the country’s government asked the United States to grant undocumented Haitian immigrants what is known as temporary protected status. The designation would shield them from detention and deportation for a set period of time, and allow them to work legally, while Haiti tries to recover.

Such relief has occasionally been granted to immigrants who are unable to return safely to their home countries because of armed conflict or environmental disasters. It is currently in effect for people from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan.

Supporters of temporary protected status for Haitians say that Haiti is in no condition to absorb tens of thousands of deportees, and that its recovery may depend, at least in part, on a continuing flow of remittances sent home by illegal Haitian immigrants in the United States. Those remittances totaled $1.87 billion last year, according to estimates by the Inter-American Development Bank.

The Bush administration denied Haiti’s request in December. In February, the Obama administration, in a letter from the Department of Homeland Security to immigration advocates in Miami, said it would continue to deport Haitians. And anti-immigration lobbying groups have vowed to oppose any change in the policy.

But immigrant advocates and the Haitian diaspora’s civic leadership have continued to apply pressure on the administration and pore over the tea leaves of rumors and leaks for indications of a policy shift.

They say that in recent weeks, they have drawn hope from a number of developments. In April, on the eve of a trip to Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the administration was reviewing its deportation policy for Haitians. During the trip, she also spoke about the importance of remittances to Haiti.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/nyregion/28haitians.html?ref=americas