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1. Crackdown targets employers
2. Police chiefs seek role
3. Ceremony naturalizes 500
4. American Apparel probed
5. Argentine seeks reprieve

1.
Immigration crackdown goes after employers
By Susan Carroll
The Houston Chronicle, July 1, 2009

Federal officials on Wednesday announced plans to audit the immigration and employment paperwork of 652 businesses across the country, including 26 in Houston, marking a major increase in work site enforcement.

The initiative is part of a growing push to target employers who hire illegal immigrants, a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement strategy.

The number of audit notices delivered to employers Wednesday eclipsed the 503 issued all of last fiscal year, and signaled the beginning of a “bold, new” ICE initiative, officials said Wednesday. The notices alert business owners that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be inspecting their hiring records, including employment eligibility verification forms known as I-9s.

John Morton, the assistant secretary for ICE, said in a statement that the nationwide effort is a “first step in ICE’s long-term strategy to address and deter illegal employment.”

ICE officials said they could not provide names of companies that will be audited because they were selected based on tips and information from investigations. A total of 111 of the targeted businesses are in Texas, said Gregory Palmore, an ICE spokesman in Houston.

Palmore said about 60 percent of the Houston-area businesses targeted involved companies with fewer than 100 employees, while the remainder involved larger companies. The companies fall into a wide range of categories, including manufacturing, restaurants, construction and trucking, Palmore said.

Gordon Quan, a Houston immigration attorney and co-chairman of the firm Foster Quan, said the crackdown was expected inside immigration circles.

“They’re trying to establish that this administration isn’t going to be rolling over and kowtowing to immigrants,” he said. “The focus is going to be on employers and stopping the magnet to bring people across the border.”

A shift from the past

In April, the Obama administration announced new guidelines that increase the focus on employers who break the law. The guidelines represent a significant shift from the past administration’s work site enforcement strategy, which resulted in a series of high-profile raids across the country in recent years, including in Houston, but relatively few employer arrests.

Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank that supports stricter immigration controls, called the audits a “step in the right direction.”

“If they’re not going to do raids, they can at least do this,” he said. “It’s incomplete, but at least it’s part of the answer.

“If they keep it up, if it’s not just a one-time publicity stunt, business across the country will sit up and take notice that they could be next and they better clean up their acts,” Krikorian said. “Not just with existing workers, but going forward with new hires.”

Krikorian questioned whether the audits may amount to a “spoonful of enforcement to make the amnesty go down.”

The audits and investigations into suspected unscrupulous employers could help appease some critics in Congress who have said they would oppose a legalization program for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. without first increasing border and interior enforcement.
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/immigration/6506722.html

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2.
Big-City Police Chiefs Urge Overhaul of Immigration Policy
By Damien Cave
The New York Times, July 2, 2009

Miami, FL -- Seeking to inject their views into the revived debate over immigration overhaul, several big-city police chiefs urged Congress on Wednesday to draft a new policy that improves public safety by bringing illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

The chiefs — updating recommendations made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments — called for an overhaul that would integrate immigrants into the legal system, possibly with driver’s licenses, and separate the local police from immigration enforcement.

“We’re in the business of delivering a police service whether the person has had a car accident, been a victim of a crime, or been a witness to a crime,” said Chief John Timoney of the Miami Police Department.

He added that immigrants needed to come forward without fearing “that they are going to wind up being reported to federal authorities and deported.”

Chief Timoney, Chief Art Acevedo of the Austin Police Department in Texas and former Chief Art Venegas of the Sacramento Police Department said local law enforcement had been undermined by the blurred line between crimes and violations of immigration law, which are civil.

Those who call illegal immigrants “criminals,” they said at a news conference here, are misreading the law and hurting their own communities by scaring neighbors who could identify criminals.

“When you remove the emotion from the debate,” Chief Acevedo said, "no one can argue that it is in the best interest of public safety to keep these people living in the shadows.”

The police chiefs here, having spent most of their careers in cities with large immigrant communities, said it would be impossible to send the nation’s 10 million to 15 million illegal residents home. They criticized last year’s roundups of illegal immigrants at workplaces, and the federal 287(g) program that has given at least 63 police departments a role in deporting illegal immigrants.

They said they favored tough border enforcement and efforts to prosecute employers who rely on illegal foreign-born workers. But they insisted that local law enforcement be kept apart from immigration enforcement because such agencies lacked the training and time, especially with recent budget cuts.

“It’s a matter of resources and priority,” said Chief Acevedo, who was born in Cuba and oversees a department of 2,100 officers. “My priority is dealing with criminals and terrorism issues, not dealing with civil matters.”

Jessica M. Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration enforcement, said the chiefs were misguided.

The costs for local police are often minimal, Ms. Vaughan said, because the federal government pays jailing costs, and verifying immigration status can be done in conjunction with standard checks of criminal databases.

Immigrants are less likely to report crimes, she added, because of language barriers, a lack of understanding about American law, and a general distrust of authority stemming from corruption in their home countries.

“None of this is related to fear of deportation,” she said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02florida.html?ref=global-home

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3.
Immigrants sworn in as citizens in Phila.
By Zoe Tillman
The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 2, 2009

As Moinma Kromah sat in the lobby of the Convention Center completing a voter-registration form - one of her first acts as a new U.S. citizen - she reflected on her decades-long journey from war-torn Liberia to Philadelphia.

Kromah, 36, was one of more than 500 men, women, and children sworn in as citizens yesterday. The Chester resident lost about 20 relatives - uncles, aunts, and cousins, she said - to Liberia's civil war in the late 1980s and 1990s.

She was sent by family to Sierra Leone to escape the war in 1990, only to face violent interrogation at school when another Liberian came in with a gun, she said.

"It was very difficult for young people," she said. The United States offered "a better quality of life."

She arrived in the United States in 2001. She works for a care-giving agency. After eight years of giving fingerprints, completing forms, being interviewed, and studying for a civics exam, she was granted citizenship.

Liberia was one of more than 60 countries represented at the ballroom ceremony. Mayor Nutter and keynote speaker Jane Golden, executive director of the Mural Arts Program, joined immigration officials to welcome the new citizens.

Nutter called on them to volunteer in their neighborhoods and thanked them for their dedication to their new home.

Native-born citizens "may take our freedoms for granted," he said. "I love this country, and I know you do as well."

The oath of allegiance was administered by Karen Fitzgerald, Philadelphia Immigration Services director. Friends and family hurried into the aisles to take pictures.

Five members of the armed forces were sworn in, representing the Air Force, Marines, and Army National Guard.
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http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/20090702_Immigrants_sworn...

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4.
American Apparel says some employees may not be working legally
By Andrea Chang
The Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2009

Most companies might shy away from trumpeting their troubles with the law, but not American Apparel Inc.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles manufacturer and retailer known for its racy advertising, colorful clothes and outspoken support for immigration put out a news release to announce that the government had found that about 1,600 of its workers did not appear to be authorized to work in the U.S. About 200 more had been found to have discrepancies in their employment records, the company said.

The findings were the result of an inspection last year by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Among the infractions found were some employees' use of fake Social Security numbers.

"Clearly, if there is widespread use of Social Security numbers that either are not real or belong to someone other than the person named, we have concerns about possibly a scheme to avoid immigration law," said Pat Reilly, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency. "They are going to be fined no matter what. What's in question now is the amount of the fine."

Reilly said it wasn't typical for a company to put out a news release about unfavorable audit results.

In an interview, American Apparel founder and Chief Executive Dov Charney declined to discuss the specifics of the inspection but said, "We've always been committed to following the law." And he added: "We rigorously support immigration reform."

The company has conducted an advocacy campaign called Legalize L.A., calling for the legalization of undocumented workers.

In its release, the company said it would give the employees cited by the government -- most of whom work at its downtown L.A. factory -- a "reasonable" amount of time to verify their immigration status.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-american-apparel2-2009jul02,0,6550...

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5.
As his deportation hearing nears, young undocumented dreamer shares his story
An undocumented Florida resident who faces deportation told his story at a press conference in Washington, D.C.
By Brittany Levine
The Miami Herald (FL), July 2, 2009

Walter Lara considers himself the all-American guy next door, raised on the mantra that if you work hard and do well in school, you can ''make something of yourself.'' But the 23-year-old, undocumented Florida resident -- who supporters say is ''as American as apple pie'' -- faces deportation on Monday because his parents never adjusted his immigration status after they moved to Miami from Argentina when he was 3.

He has garnered support from lawmakers and immigration activists, but time is not on his side.

Lara held a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, hoping to sway lawmakers to write a bill that could keep him in the United States. The only ways to stall Lara's deportation are if immigration officials postpone it, or if Congress passes a private bill granting him temporary residency. But with Congress out of session and the July Fourth holiday approaching, things don't look good, Lara advocates said.

Florida Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson has asked a top Homeland Security official to postpone Lara's deportation, and Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, has penned a private bill seeking the same thing.

Lara, who did not know he was undocumented until he tried to apply to University of Central Florida, said he knows little about Argentina.

MDC Grad

He graduated from Miami Dade Honors College with an associate's degree in computer animation. He dreams of working for Pixar.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Lara in February while he was installing satellite dishes for DirecTV.

Lara's story parallels that of Alex and Juan Gomez, two local youths who were to be deported in 2007, but weren't.

Like Lara, they had a Facebook group of more than 1,300 members calling to halt their deportation. They, too, had a private bill and lawmakers on their side.

The difference for the Gomez brothers was timing and popularity, said Miriam Calderon, a policy director at First Choice, a children's advocacy group handling Lara's public relations. The Gomez's became poster children for the DREAM Act, a bill that would grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants who attend college or serve in the military.
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DREAM Act critics such as Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank, said, 'It's not America's responsibility to clean up the parents' mess.

''This idea of picking and choosing particular cases and passing bills for particular individuals is no way to run a railroad,'' he said.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/1123810.html