1. Spin campaign on amnesty
2. Obama's uncle a fugitive
3. Legal group supports GA law
4. Group criticizes AL law
5. Ex-CBP agent took bribes

1.
Information campaign on new deportations policy announced
EFE, August 31, 2011

With a call to "be patient and be careful," U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez and pro-immigrant groups announced Tuesday a national information campaign about the significance of the Department of Homeland Security's new deportations policy.

The first forum will be held Sept. 10 at Chicago's Benito Juarez High School, where the Illinois Democrat will be able to provide the first-hand information he expects to obtain next week at a meeting with John Morton, director de Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Gutierrez discussed the information campaign in a press conference at the Chicago headquarters of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

While the DHS decision to review the cases of 300,000 people in the process of deportation is "not everything we asked for," it does represent progress "after so much bad news," the lawmaker said.

According to the new guidelines conveyed to the offices of ICE, people with no serious criminal records, with members of their immediate families who are American citizens or who have lived in the country from a very young age, will be considered low-priority cases and will be taken off the deportation list.

Gutierrez warned, however, that this is not an amnesty nor is it a legalization program that undocumented immigrants can sign up for.

He said that ICE is continuing its usual work and in particular is sticking to its controversial programs of Secure Communities and 287(g), under which local police share detainees' fingerprints with the federal government.
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http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/08/31/information-campaign-on...

Related Topic: Administrative Amnesty

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2.
Obama's uncle is called a fugitive
By Maria Sacchetti and Dan Adams
The Boston Globe, August 31, 2011

The uncle of President Obama arrested here last week on drunken driving and other charges has been a fugitive from deportation since 1992, according to two federal law enforcement officials with knowledge of the case.

Onyango Obama, who is from Kenya and is known as the president's Uncle Omar on his father's side, had lived a quiet life in Massachusetts until last Wednesday, when police said the car he was driving darted in front of a police cruiser, nearly causing the officer to hit his car.

The federal officials, who spoke about Obama's immigration status on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the case, said Obama had been told to leave in 1992, but he did not go.

Obama is the second relative of the president to have defied a deportation order, reigniting debate over illegal immigration and raising questions about how a man who had lived in the United States illegally for years had managed to secure a job, a Massachusetts driver's license, and apparently, a federal Social Security number, without being detected by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been ordered deported and just ran off and nobody's looking for them," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict controls on immigration.

Onyango Obama's sister, Zeituni Onyango, also faced deportation before a Boston immigration judge granted her asylum last year. She, too, had avoided the spotlight, living in public housing in South Boston despite a deportation order. Her immigration status was leaked to the media days before her nephew's historic election in 2008.

In contrast, Obama kept to himself in a modest house in Framingham. He worked in a small liquor store on Route 126 where locals stop in for a six-pack of beer, a bottle of wine, or scratch tickets.

"He was a great worker," said Parimal Patel, the owner of Conti Liquors, where Obama worked for the past five years. "We're in total shock. I wish I had known, I would have asked him to call the president and have him come down for some publicity."

Obama last week pleaded not guilty in Framingham District Court to multiple charges, including driving under the influence, failing to yield, and negligent operation, said court documents and the Associated Press. He is being held on an immigration detainer in the Plymouth County House of Correction.

Yesterday, a portrait of his life emerged on the residential street where he lived, surrounded by other immigrants and young families.

Onyango Obama is the younger half-brother of the president's father, Barack Obama Sr., a scholar from Kenya who was rarely in the president’s life. The president's father came to the United States to study, but he was also a heavy drinker with a chaotic personal life. He died when he rammed his truck into a tree stump in Kenya in 1982, according to a new book, "The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father," by Globe reporter Sally H. Jacobs.

According to the book, Onyango Obama came to the United States in 1963 as part of Tom Mboya's airlift helping Kenyan students study in the United States. It was Barack Obama Sr.'s brotherly duty to help him, and with help from a friend, his younger brother was accepted at a boys' school then known as Browne & Nichols, in Cambridge, Jacobs's book reported.

Back then, the younger Obama was known as Omar Okech Obama, and he was described in the book as tall and good-natured. According to the book, he stood out as apparently the only African student at the preparatory school, where boys wore blazers to class.

Speaking in a British accent, he captivated his classmates with stories of wild animals and exploring the bush in Africa. He got involved in the campus newspaper and the debate team but was a star on the soccer field, where he had to wedge his calloused feet into cleats after years of playing barefoot back home.

For reasons that are unclear, Obama left the school after two years and enrolled in the Newton public schools in the fall of 1965. By then, his older brother had returned to Kenya, and without him, Obama appeared to falter.

He dropped out of school and changed his name to O. Onyango Obama, according to the book, which matches the name of the man arrested yesterday and the name on his driver's license.

For a while, he lived in an apartment on Perry Street in Cambridge that became a wellknown meeting place for Kenyan students.

It is unclear what happened to him next - a relative described him to the future US president during his trip to Kenya as being "lost," according to the president's memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

But Obama resurfaced in 1994, when he was apparently the clerk on duty at a Dorchester convenience store as two masked men burst in, beat him with a sawed off shotgun, and robbed him, according to Jacobs's book.

He managed to keep a low profile for almost 20 years, until he steered his white Mitsubishi SUV outside the Chicken Bone Saloon last week.

Police said he had a blood alcohol level of 0.14 percent, which is above the legal limit of 0.08 in Massachusetts. A spokesman for the Registry of Motor Vehicles said his driving record was clean.
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/08/31/obama...

Related Topic: Onyango Obama

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3.
Judicial Watch Supports Georgia Immigration Law
By Greg McDonald
NewsMax.com, August 31, 2011

Judicial Watch has joined efforts to uphold key provisions of Georgia’s new illegal immigration law that a federal judge has temporarily ruled cannot be enforced by the state.

The conservative watchdog group argues in its “friend of the court brief” filed last week in U.S. District Court that Georgia is not attempting to take over the federal role of “regulating immigration,” but “has merely invoked its well-established police power and codified the inherent, well-established investigatory powers of state and local police officers.”

Civil liberties groups have challenged the Georgia law, known as HB 87, because of sections that would allow police to check immigration status when questioning people, and punish people found to be transporting or harboring illegal immigrants.

The sections could be applied even during traffic stops or other routine investigative activities.
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http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/JudicialWatch-Georgia-immigration-law/201...

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4.
Catholic League criticizes illegal-immigration law
By Brian Lyman
Montgomery Advertiser, August 31, 2011

A Catholic activist group criticized Alabama's immigration law Tuesday, saying it would punish clergy for carrying out their ministerial duties.

Similar arguments made by attorneys for Alabama religious leaders last week received a skeptical response from a federal judge presiding over a suit seeking to block implementation of the statute.

The Catholic League, a New York-based nonprofit that targets what it sees as anti-Catholicism in the nation, quoted briefs filed on behalf of Alabama's Roman Catholic bishops -- plaintiffs in a lawsuit aimed at overturning the law -- in expressing its opposition.

In particular, the League appeared to quote from an affidavit filed by state Sen. Roger Bedford, D-Russellville, last week. In the affidavit, Bedford noted that language that had been inserted into a Senate version of the immigration legislation that specifically allowed religious organizations to transport individuals to and from religious services, disappeared from the final version of the law, signed by Gov. Robert Bentley on June 9.

Clergy have expressed fear that provisions in the law that ban harboring undocumented aliens could be applied to religious activities and services, including sacraments, that involve the undocumented.

"The idea of punishing the clergy for doing what they are called to do -- servicing those in need, independent of any condition -- is morally reprehensible and constitutionally offensive," Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote in a news release.

Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, who co-sponsored the legislation, said this afternoon the law bans activities that shield undocumented aliens from the authorities but does not ban religious activities with them.

"You can do sacraments, feed people in a soup line, help after a tornado -- you can do all these things as long as it's not for the purpose of keeping them from being detected by the authorities," he said.
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http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20110831/NEWS02/108310327/Catholic-League-criticizes-illegal-immigration-law-?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|Frontpage|s

Related Topic: Alabama

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5.
Former CBP agent took bribes to alter immigration data
Chicago Sun Times, August 30, 2011

A former federal agent at Midway International Airport was sentenced to nearly four years in prison Tuesday for taking thousands of dollars in bribes to allow foreign workers to stay in the United States illegally.

U.S. District Judge Blanche M. Manning imposed the sentence and granted a preliminary order requiring William Mann, 51, of Munster, Ind., to forfeit $28,500 in bribe proceeds.

Mann was the U.S. Customs and Border Protection supervisor at Midway when he received about $1,500 from at least 19 restaurant employees and their spouses to alter their immigration records, arelease from the U.S. Attorney’s office said.

Mann pleaded guilty in February to one count of conspiracy, three counts of bribery and three counts of immigration fraud.
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http://www.suntimes.com/news/crime/7370661-418/former-cbp-agent-took-bri...