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1. Obama postpones meeting
2. Coalition keeping pressure
3. AG Holder reverses policy
4. CA Rep seeks reunification
5. Same-sex couples seek rights

1.
Obama Delays Immigration Meeting; Members Await Invitations
By Jennifer Bendery
Roll Call (Washington, DC), June 3, 2009
http://www.rollcall.com/news/35480-1.html

President Barack Obama is postponing a key meeting with immigration reform stakeholders because of a scheduling conflict.

The meeting with top lawmakers and advocacy groups was originally set for June 8 but is now being rescheduled for June 17. A White House spokesman said the postponement is because of the president’s travel schedule.

Details of the meeting remain unclear, including who will be invited or what stakeholders expect to come from it.

“The president is inviting a small group of bipartisan Senate and House leaders on the immigration issue to the White House for a meeting to have an honest discussion of the issues, identify areas of agreement, and areas where we still have work to do,” said the White House aide.

Even leading proponents of immigration reform, such as Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), have yet to be formally invited to the meeting. A Velázquez aide said the only information the lawmaker has gotten about the meeting has come from the media.

An aide to another CHC member said the word is that Obama “wants this meeting to be small, so it’s unclear if he will only invite key stakeholders, like committee chairs or leadership.” Some lawmakers have concerns as to whether “all members of the CHC will even be invited,” said the aide. “I’m sure everybody wants to go.”

Obama has signaled support for discussions on comprehensive immigration reform this year but not for passing legislation. That sentiment was conveyed in the statement given by his spokesman Wednesday: “The meeting is intended to launch a policy conversation, with the hope of beginning the debate in earnest later this year.”

But that hasn’t stopped immigration reform groups from ramping up pressure on Obama to help pass legislation this year.

A coalition of 10 labor unions, business coalitions, civil rights and religious groups spent Wednesday launching a new campaign “to help President Obama make good on his promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2009.”

The goal of the group, called Reform Immigration for America, is to demonstrate a commitment “to win the legislative battle expected later in the year,” according to coalition press materials. The group describes the White House meeting as the chance to “discuss plans to move legislation forward this year.”

Coalition members include the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the National Council of La Raza and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Both Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) touched on immigration reform during remarks at Wednesday’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Summit. But neither gave a time frame for legislative action.

“I know that comprehensive immigration reform is a priority for all of you. It is also a priority for President Obama. We all agree that we need immigration reform that will keep our country safe, reunite families, protect workers, meet our economic needs, and have a pathway to legalization,” Pelosi said.

Reid pledged to “again pursue comprehensive immigration reform” and said he is “committed to reforming our system in a way that is tough, fair and practical.”

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2.
Groups raise ante on immigration reform
Obama pressed to tackle issue
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times, June 4, 2009

President Obama's nomination of a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court does not give him extra breathing space to put off a contentious fight on immigration, Hispanic groups and immigrant-rights advocates said Wednesday.

"They operate on parallel tracks, separate tracks," said John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, as he joined nearly a dozen other leaders of a coalition that is trying to lay the groundwork so Mr. Obama can tackle immigration this year.

After Mr. Obama nominated federal appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, political pundits said her selection - she would be the first Hispanic justice - would buy the president enough good will among Hispanic voters that he might be able to go slower in pushing for immigration.

But Mr. Podesta said the White House doesn't see her nomination as a stalling tactic on immigration.

"I don't think that's the way the president thinks. I think that he picked the person he thought would best serve on the Supreme Court," Mr. Podesta said.
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http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/04/groups-raise-ante-on-immigra...

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3.
Bush Rule Bolstering Deportations Is Withdrawn
By John Schwartz
The New York Times, June 3, 2009

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday reversed a Bush administration ruling that had weakened the ability of immigrants facing deportation to argue that their lawyers did a bad job.

The original order, issued just days before the inauguration of President Obama, held that immigrants did not have a constitutional right to effective lawyers in their deportation hearings. That 11th-hour decision abruptly closed off one of the most common avenues for appealing deportation decisions.

Because immigration cases are classified as civil litigation, people facing deportation do not have the same right to be represented by a lawyer that criminal defendants have. But before the Bush administration, a long line of legal opinions allowed immigrants whose lawyers had performed poorly to ask that their cases be opened on constitutional grounds. In 2003, the Board of Immigration Appeals, a part of the executive branch that reviews the rulings of immigration courts, reaffirmed that right.

The Bush administration, however, successfully argued in several federal appeals court cases that there was no constitutional right to have a case reopened because of ineffective legal representation.

The Bush administration order, issued by Michael B. Mukasey, then the attorney general, concerned three deportation cases known collectively as Matter of Compean, after the name of one of the people facing removal, Enrique Salas Compean.

In Wednesday’s three-page order withdrawing the former attorney general’s decision, Mr. Holder suggested that the original order did not follow proper government procedure. The process followed by the Bush administration, he wrote, did not thoroughly consider all the issues involved, particularly for a decision that changed a long-standing process that had been reaffirmed by the appeals board.

Wednesday’s order called for a thorough review of the law in such cases, and for a period of public comment that could lead to a new rule.
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But Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, said that restoring the ineffective counsel rule would “give aliens one too many bites at the apple” and could be used by immigration lawyers as a delaying tool.

“If this is going to result in people remaining in the country for years and years on end,” Mr. Feere said, “we really have to question whether or not our immigration system is meeting the public interest of finality.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/04deport.html

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4.
Honda introduces bill that would make sweeping changes in legal immigration
By Ken McLaughlin
The San Jose Mercury News (CA), June 3, 2009

To ensure that issues involving legal immigration don't get lost in the fiery debate about illegal immigration, Silicon Valley Congressman Mike Honda today will introduce a bill that would give green-card holders the same rights as citizens to bring their spouses and children to the U.S.

The wide-ranging legislation, which already has about 50 House co-sponsors and the support of powerful groups such as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, is expected to help build momentum for "comprehensive immigration reform" this year. Two years ago, a reform bill collapsed in Congress amid criticism that it was an "amnesty bill" for undocumented immigrants.

Honda's bill also includes a controversial provision to allow gays and lesbians to sponsor the immigration of same-sex "permanent partners." That issue gained traction recently when immigration authorities tried to deport a lesbian mother from Pacifica to the Philippines.

The law would also increase numerical caps on the number of visas for countries such as Mexico, the Philippines, China and India. People from those countries hoping to immigrate to the U.S. routinely face waits of more than a decade in a system with a backlog of 5.8 million people.

"We're a nation that believes in family values, so to say this is not important to talk about means" that some politicians and activists "are talking out of both sides of their mouths," Honda, D-Campbell, said Wednesday.

But opposing groups argue that the number of immigrants permitted to come to the U.S. each year — roughly a million — is already too high. They are vowing to fight the proposals as strongly as they have fought amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Enough people to fill "a new San Jose are moving to the United States every single year," said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR.

"These kind of numbers have an impact on schools, health care and every institution in the country — an impact lost on people in Congress like Rep. Honda," Mehlman said. "All of these proposals seem to disregard the fact that we now have 9 percent unemployment in this country."

Shrewd move

But Paul Donnelly, a longtime pro-immigration activist and lobbyist in Washington, D.C., said "Honda has done a very shrewd thing here."

"Legal immigration tends to be left out of the immigration debate because the elephant in the room is legalization of undocumented immigrants," he said. "But here's a comprehensive list of things that need to be fixed. It's the right debate to have."

Honda's bill, Donnelly said, will complement another recently introduced bill by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, which is supported by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. That bill did not contain the same-sex provision, which is being debated separately in another bill by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont. The various bills are expected to reach the floors of the two houses by the fall.
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But groups like FAIR and the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies say such a policy would be an open invitation to fraud, in addition to letting the culture wars be played out in immigration policy.
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http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514065

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5.
Same-sex couples fight for immigration rights
By Mallory Simon
The CNN News, June 3, 2009

Jared was forced to choose between a dying father and the love of his life.

Judy Rickard had to quit her job and lose her full pension to be with the one she loved.

Martha McDevitt-Pugh packed up and moved to another country to be with her future spouse.

"Nobody should be in that position. Nobody should have to be an exile," Rickard said.

But all three said their hands were forced by federal immigration laws that don't allow Americans to sponsor their foreign-born same-sex partners for citizenship as a man may do for his wife or a woman for her husband.

"The problem is that I, as a woman, cannot sponsor my female partner for immigration. If I was a man or [my partner] Karin was a man, we wouldn't be having this discussion," said Rickard, 61.

She now travels outside the United States whenever she can to be with her partner, Karin Bogliolo, 68, who had to go back to Britain when her visa expired last year, but it's not the life together they dreamed of.

"I am finally with someone I really want to be with," Bogliolo said. "But we haven't got all the time in the world. We're both getting old." VideoWatch couple's emotional plea to live together »

An estimated 36,000 bi-national couples face the same dilemma each year, according to an advocacy group, Immigration Equality.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the bill for the first time Wednesday, after 10 previous attempts to have hearings on the Uniting American Families Act. The bill has 102 co-sponsors in the House and 17 co-sponsors in the Senate, including Judiciary Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.
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The committee heard from opponents like Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports a restrictive immigration policy and the deportation of illegal immigrants. She testified that immigration numbers in the United States are already staggering and the bill would put further stress on the system.

Vaughan said that because the bill would allow sponsoring of "permanent partnerships," it would be difficult to accept applications because there was no documentation for those, the way there are for marriages.

"Without documents, how do you establish the relationship is bona fide?" she said. "And if we are going to make this change, it should be across all federal levels, not just immigration. What about Social Security and Medicare?"
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/03/same.sex.immigration/#cnnSTCText