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1. DHS chief pledges enforcement
2. Admin orders catch and release
3. Congress to consider bill
4. NY enforcement hawks protest
5. Americans pick ag-sector jobs

1.
Homeland Security chief: We will enforce immigration laws
By Perry Stein
The Miami Herald (FL), June 23, 2009

Addressing hundreds of the nation's sheriffs in Fort Lauderdale, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday that her department would work to secure the nation's border and enforce the existing immigration laws.

``We will enforce the nation's immigration laws. We are going to do it in a smart and effective way,`` Napolitano said.

As the keynote speaker at the National Sheriffs' Association annual conference on Tuesday, Napolitano discussed immigration and other issues facing law enforcement.

Napolitano said she would take legal action against employers who make money fromthe labor of illegal immigrants.

A major theme in Napolitano's short address was communication between the department and local and state law enforcement.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/broward/story/1111000.html

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2.
Illegal immigrants netted by local police could be released
The Obama administration directive comes as the president begins to assert control of the immigration issue.
By Patrik Jonsson
The Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 2009

Atlanta -- Some undocumented immigrants swept up on minor charges such as fishing without a license won’t face federal detention. Instead, they’ll be released on their own recognizance under an Obama administration directive to a Nashville, Tenn., sheriff who charged 6,000 people with immigration crimes over the past 2-1/2 years.

The “release on recognizance” order by Immigration and Customs Enforcement – a branch of the US Department of Homeland Security – could affect at least some of the 66 US law enforcement jurisdictions that are part of a controversial program which, in essence, deputizes local police to act as de facto immigration agents.

The directive, made earlier this month, is the result of overcrowding in federal prisons, but also ties into a broader, ongoing review of the program, known as 287(g), and its impact on immigrant communities.

“There hasn’t been a [policy] change: ICE always puts a priority on criminal aliens who pose a national security threat,” says Matt Chandler, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman in Washington. But he acknowledges: “We are taking a deep, hard look at the program.”

The sheriff who received the ICE email earlier this month, Davidson County’s Daron Hall, says that it’s been standard practice over the past three years to detain most undocumented workers apprehended under the 287(g) program until their immigration court hearing.

Releasing nondangerous detainees could take a bite out of the 287(g) program, experts say. Pre-2006 studies showed that about 85 percent of illegal immigrants released on bond did not show up for their court date.

Releasing those who pose little criminal threat is a sign of shifting priorities on immigration policy in Washington, some say.

“There’s definitely a change in focus,” says Michelle Waslin, senior policy analyst at the Immigration Policy Center in Washington. “[The Obama administration] is reasserting federal control over immigration reform.”

President Obama is scheduled to meet Thursday with congressional leaders about immigration reform.

The 287(g) program has become politically popular in places like Arizona’s Maricopa County, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio uses it to conduct drug and gang raids.
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http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/06/23/illegal-immigrants-net...

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3.
Will Congress Do Away With the Immigration 'Widow Penalty'?
By Tim Padgett
Time Magazine, June 24, 2009

It was bad enough that Natalia Goukassian, then 21, had to spend her honeymoon in June of 2006 in West Palm Beach, Fla., helping her husband Tigran find alternative treatments for connective tissue sarcoma, an aggressive cancer, or that six months later the Air Force enlisted man, 21, succumbed to the disease. But as it turned out, her painful ordeal had only just begun. While the Veteran Affairs Department deemed the Russian immigrant (but not yet legal resident) eligible for surviving spouse benefits, immigration officials at Homeland Security took a very different view: At Natalia's interview for legal residence the next year, she was told that because she hadn't been married long enough before Tigran died, she would be deported. "To hit you with that when you've lost someone you loved and you're feeling desperate, to not consider me a spouse because my husband had died," says Natalia, now 24 and an accounting student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, "it seemed the coldest bureaucratic thing ever."

Current Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has acknowledged complaints like Goukassian's. Earlier this month Napolitano, facing a growing number of lawsuits stemming from the so-called "widow penalty" in U.S. immigration regulations, suspended the rule's enforcement. "Smart immigration policy balances strong enforcement practices with common-sense, practical solutions to complicated issues," she said. Critics have been harsher, suggesting that imposing the provision made authorities look petty if not heartless.

But some on Capitol Hill don't think a temporary measure goes far enough. On Tuesday, Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern introduced legislation, the Fairness to Surviving Spouses Act, that would nix the widow penalty for good. To leverage their message, they were joined by both Goukassian and another military widow, Diana Engstrom, whose husband was killed in Iraq in 2004 in a rocket-propelled grenade attack. Engstrom, a Kosovo native, found out afterward that she too would be deported because she'd been married for less than the two years required for an immigrant spouse's legal residence eligibility.

The legislation may seem a sure bet, but anti-immigration sentiment still runs hot enough in Congress to make passage of the Nelson-McGovern bill a real challenge; and it's likely a big reason the Obama Administration, which is cautiously trying to revive immigration reform, hasn't completely done away with the widow penalty on its own yet. Conservative immigration think tanks like the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, for example, argue the rule is still a sensible safeguard against rampant marriage fraud, sham matrimonies between a U.S. citizen and a foreigner solely to get the latter a green card, or legal residence.

"I feel bad for the widows, I've lost a spouse myself, but any measure that doesn't uphold the [two-year marriage] condition would further compromise the integrity of our immigration laws," says Michael Cutler, a Center fellow and former federal immigration fraud investigator. "We forget here that the green card for the alien spouse was meant as an accommodation for the U.S. citizen spouse, and that most alien spouses are being supported by the citizen spouse. When the citizen dies, should the U.S. assume the burden of supporting the alien?"

Brent Renison, an Oregon immigration attorney who has headed up numerous suits challenging the widow penalty, calls the marriage fraud argument bogus. "We've never asked for automatic approval of these widows' legal residence status," he says. "We simply ask that they be allowed to show that their marriages were valid, and if so, recognize that the humane thing to do is let them stay where they've made a new life." That's especially true, Renison insists, when the surviving spouse has a U.S.-born child from the marriage. In one of the more controversial cases, a Brazilian woman whose U.S. husband died in his sleep of heart complications was handed a deportation order despite having a 5-month-old, U.S. citizen son.
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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1906659,00.html

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4.
Immigration activists rally after deaths
By Terence Corcoran
The Lower Hudson Journal News (Westchester, NY), June 24, 2009

Brewster -- Members of an immigration-reform group formed in the wake of 9/11 came to Brewster yesterday to decry the recent deaths of a mother and daughter who police say were killed by an illegal immigrant driving drunk.

Members of 9/11 Families for a Secure America called for tougher enforcement of immigration laws in the wake of the June 8 deaths of Lori Donohue, 37, and her daughter, Kayla, 8. The two were struck, police said, by a truck driven by Zacaria Conses-Garcia as they were leaving the girl's dance class.

The deaths have united many in the community in their opposition to drunken driving and illegal immigration.

Authorities said that Conses-Garcia, 35, was in the country illegally from Guatemala and that he was driving without a license and with a blood-alcohol content nearly twice the legal limit when he ran over the Donohues.

He is being held without bail at the Putnam County jail, charged with two counts of aggravated homicide.

Ed Kowalski, a director of 9/11 Families, and Peter Gadiel, its president and co-founder, blamed the Donohues' deaths on lax enforcement of the law.

"The recent deaths of Lori Donohue and her 8-year-old daughter Kayla would not have occurred if Zacaria Conses-Garcia had not entered the country illegally, been employed illegally and allowed to drive," said Kowalski, who got involved in 9/11 Families after his niece, Elizabeth Butler, 17, of North Salem, was raped and murdered in June 2005 by an illegal immigrant she met while working at a Croton Falls market.
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http://www.lohud.com/article/2009906240333

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5.
Farming jobs being picked clean by U.S. residents
By Anastasiya Bolton
The KUSA News (Denver), June 23, 2009

Lafayette, CO -- It is hot, there is no shade from the unforgiving Colorado sun, other than the hats that protect their faces.

Three people are helping Jason Condon and the Isabelle Farm grow organic radishes, lettuce, tomatoes and potatoes for sale mainly here, in Colorado.

Anne-Marie Cory got this part-time job at the Lafayette farm last year. This is her job away from her other part-time office gig.

"I have to have my hands in the dirt," Cory said.

Cory loves this job, a job that's becoming increasingly competitive.

Farmers can use what's called the H-2A program to recruit foreign workers to do temporary or seasonal work here in the U.S.

From July to September of 2008, there were 171 H2-A jobs posted. Thirty-nine Americans applied for those positions.

The very next quarter, in the final three months of 2008, 887 Americans applied for the 981 H-2A available. And as unemployment jumped at the beginning of 2009, so did applications from Americans; 1,799 applied for 726 jobs. That means instead of the jobs being filled by foreign or migrant workers, they are mostly going to U.S. residents.

"A lot of the American workers are now applying for farm jobs that maybe they may not have applied for in the past," said Olga Ruiz, state monitor advocate with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. "People who started out in agriculture or even field labor who got out of that field maybe went into construction or other types of work, who maybe got laid off for whatever reason, decided they wanted to go back to farm work, because it's a paycheck and they need it."
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http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=118219&provider=top&catid...