1. DHS to begin review
2. DHS Sec. backs efforts
3. AL lawmakers weigh changes
4. Uncle makes court appearance
5. Smuggler got immunity

1.
U.S. to Review Cases Seeking Deportations
By Julia Preston
The New York Times, November 17, 2011

The Department of Homeland Security will begin a review on Thursday of all deportation cases before the immigration courts and start a nationwide training program for enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers, with the goal of speeding deportations of convicted criminals and halting those of many illegal immigrants with no criminal record.

The accelerated triage of the court docket — about 300,000 cases — is intended to allow severely overburdened immigration judges to focus on deporting foreigners who committed serious crimes or pose national security risks, Homeland Security officials said. Taken together, the review and the training, which will instruct immigration agents on closing deportations that fall outside the department’s priorities, are designed to bring sweeping changes to the immigration courts and to enforcement strategies of field agents nationwide.

According to a document obtained by The New York Times, Homeland Security officials will issue guidelines on Thursday to begin the training program and the first stages of the court caseload review. Both are efforts to put into practice a policy senior officials had announced in June, to encourage immigration agents to use prosecutorial discretion when deciding whether to pursue a deportation.

The policy, described in a June 17 memorandum by John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, suggested that the Obama administration would scale back deportations of illegal immigrants who were young students, military service members, elderly people or close family of American citizens, among others. While the announcement raised excited expectations in Latino and other immigrant communities, until now the policy has been applied spottily, deepening disillusionment with President Obama in those communities.

The Obama administration has removed high numbers of illegal immigrants, nearly 400,000 in each of the last three years. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Mr. Morton said those numbers would not decrease, but they wanted agents and courts to focus on deporting the worst offenders, including national security risks, criminal convicts and those who repeatedly violate immigration laws. Many immigration offenses, including being present in the United States without legal status, are civil violations; they are not crimes.

Administration officials have flexibility to transform immigration court procedures because those courts are part of the Justice Department in the executive branch, not part of the federal judiciary. Central to the plan is giving more power to immigration agency lawyers — the equivalent of prosecutors in the federal court system — to decide which deportation cases to press.

“We are empowering the attorneys nationally to make them more like federal prosecutors, who decide what cases to bring,” said a senior Homeland Security official, who asked not to be named because the policy has not been formally announced.

In the first stage of the court docket review, which will begin on Thursday, immigration agency lawyers will examine all new cases just arriving in immigration courts nationwide, with an eye to closing cases that are low-priority according to the Morton memorandum, before they advance into the court system.

At the same time, immigrants identified as high priority will see their cases put onto an expedited calendar for judges to order their deportations, Homeland Security officials said.

The goal is to “reduce inefficiencies that delay the removal of criminal aliens and other priority cases by preventing new low priority cases from clogging the immigration court dockets,” the Homeland Security document said. Officials said the first stage was an “initial test run” that would be completed by Jan. 13.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group that analyzes immigration court data, reported in September that the backlog before the nation’s 59 immigration courts was at “a new all-time high.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/deportation-cases-of-illegal-immigr...

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2.
Napolitano: Border plans must be sustained
United Press International, November 17, 2011

Border security requires a sustained effort, not a push that fades away when the situation turns around, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

"One of the things that has happened in the past in the border is you would get a surge of effort for a few months or what have you, and then once the numbers started to turn around, the manpower would be withdrawn or the technology would be shifted around," Napolitano told the El Paso Times in an interview published Thursday.

Napolitano, a former Arizona governor, noted local border law enforcement officials at a roundtable discussion in Washington Wednesday said border security "requires continued, sustained involvement and true partnership between federal agents and local police officers and sheriff's deputies."

The roundtable stressed the Obama administration's efforts to boost border security and facilitate legitimate trade with Mexico and its commitment to working with federal, state and local officials to do so, Napolitano told the Times in the telephone interview.
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http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/11/17/Napolitano-Border-plans-must-b...

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3.
In Alabama, Calls for Revamping Immigration Law
By Campbell Robertson
The New York Times, November 16, 2011

An increasing number of state lawmakers say they are willing to consider critical changes to Alabama’s sweeping anti-immigration law, part of which appears to make proof of citizenship or legal residency a requirement even for mundane activities like garbage pickup, dog licenses and flu shots at county health departments.

As they learn more about the breadth of the law, which was already described as the most far-reaching of the state-level immigration laws when it went into effect on Sept. 29, some political leaders have gone beyond acknowledging a general need for “tweaks” to openly discussing specific changes, which in some cases are as substantial as getting rid of certain provisions in their entirety.

“The longer the bill has been out, the more unintended consequences we have found,” said Slade Blackwell, a Republican state senator. “All of us realize we need to change it.”

Changing this law is not as easy as it may appear. For one thing, it is still very popular. Those open to changes are quick to emphasize that they do not want to dilute the law’s purpose: to deter illegal immigrants from working in the state and to prevent them from benefiting from taxpayer-financed services.

“Eighty percent of the population of the state thinks it’s a good bill, so politically you’re kind of careful to say anything negative about it,” said Judge James V. Perdue, president of the Alabama Probate Judges Association. “Those that passed it don’t want to admit that there’s anything wrong with it.”

But as lawmakers hear complaints from business leaders and constituents, several have become more willing to discuss changing, clarifying or in some cases scrapping sections of the law governing schools, government transactions and several of the law’s stiff penalty provisions.

Outside of farmers and poultry plant operators, who have complained of severe labor shortages, the most pointed criticisms concern a legally vague provision that requires proof of immigration status for “any transaction between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state.”

The law lists three examples of such transactions: renewing driver’s licenses, business licenses and car tags. In a court filing in August, the state argued that the United States Justice Department, which is challenging the law, was exaggerating the law’s reach.

“Its fear that Section 30 would prohibit such aliens from having running water or sewer services, for example, has little basis,” the filing said.

But lawyers across the state are concluding that this section could be interpreted, in the words of Birmingham’s city attorney, Thomas Bentley, to apply to “almost everything that we do.”

Utilities that are run directly by municipalities, like Huntsville Utilities, which provides electricity, water and gas to 164,000 customers, are indeed barred by the law from providing any services to illegal immigrants. Other utilities, those that are public corporations like Alabama Power, are not. Some exist in a legally complicated territory in between.

“One afternoon, we sat down and we had the county directory and we went through and made a list of every county department that interfaces directly with citizens,” said Julian Butler, the attorney for Madison County, which includes the City of Huntsville.

Some already required some form of identification, Mr. Butler said, but many did not. He and his colleagues are still discussing whether people can rent a pavilion at a county park, enroll children in a Little League team or sign up for a membership at the county swimming pool without first proving that they are citizens or legal residents. Paying property taxes might require a trip to the courthouse with documentation. Architects, nurses, hair stylists, plumbers, real estate agents and a host of other professions will have to demonstrate their legal status every time their licenses are renewed.

“There are a lot of frustrated citizens that are being inconvenienced by the implementation of the law and who didn’t think it was going to impact them,” said State Senator Paul Sanford, the only Republican senator to vote against the law and the author of two bills that would amend it.

To enable online transactions and thus shorten the long lines that have formed at some courthouses, the state created a database of everyone with a current Alabama driver’s license, a document the state has deemed acceptable proof of immigration status.

But there are some transactions that require more than that. And people with out-of-state licenses or military ID’s will in many cases have to produce some other documentation in person at government offices.

“I had a military guy who came back from Afghanistan and went to get him a tag for a new truck and he couldn’t, he needed to show his birth certificate,” said State Senator Gerald Dial, who voted for the law but said he would not have if he had known of some of its “unintended consequences.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/in-alabama-calls-for-revamping-immi...

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4.
Obama's uncle makes court appearance in Mass.
The Associated Press, November 17, 2011

President Barack Obama's uncle plans to argue that Massachusetts police did not have the right to stop his car before his drunken-driving arrest.

A lawyer for Onyango (ohn-YAHN'-goh) Obama told a judge Thursday he plans to file a motion to suppress the traffic stop that led to his client's arrest in August because Obama was not committing any motor vehicle violations.

Obama has pleaded not guilty. He did not speak during the brief appearance in Framingham District Court.

A hearing on his lawyer's suppression request is scheduled for Jan. 12.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hVFamYKytj8yB0Xbe2S8WP...

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5.
Smuggling suspect got immunity in case of convicted border agent
By Jerry Seper
The Washington Times, November 16, 2011

A suspected drug smuggler, whose 2008 arrest resulted in a two-year prison sentence for a U.S. Border Patrol agent accused of violating his civil rights, was interviewed by officials at the Mexican Consulate in Texas and later made available to testify against the agent under a grant of immunity, records show.

The suspected smuggler, then 15, told Mexican officials he had been beaten and threatened by agent Jesus E. Diaz Jr. following his Oct. 16, 2008, arrest near Eagle Pass, Texas. Consulate officials interviewed the teenager just hours after he had been detained.

In a letter that same day to the Border Patrol, the consulate officials demanded the agent be prosecuted and complained they had not been notified of the arrest, learning about it through another source, who was not identified. They said that after their interview, the teenager was repatriated to Mexico, where he would be made available to testify in the case.

The consulate officials also accused Diaz of using excessive and unnecessary force, striking the youth several times in the ribs, threatening to hit him again if he didn’t reveal where the drugs had been stashed, and lifting his handcuffed arms behind his back.

In a handwritten note attached to the consulate letter, the teenager said he entered the United States illegally with six other persons, crossing the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. He said the group had stopped to rest when they were joined by others who carried backpacks with drugs. He said Border Patrol agents spotted them, and he was placed under arrest.

In Spanish, the teenager wrote that Diaz used excessive force, lifted both his arms behind his back while he was handcuffed, forced him to the ground by putting his knee in the teenager’s back, and kicked him in the ribs. In the statement, he said the abuse lasted seven minutes.

The teenager also said he did not know anything about the drugs reportedly being carried into the United States, although the U.S. attorney’s office on the day of the Diaz sentencing said that during the trial, the teenager had “admitted that he was smuggling marijuana at the time he was apprehended.”

Defense attorneys argued there were no injuries or bruises on the teenager’s lower arms, back or ribs, and the only marks on his body came from the straps of the pack he reportedly carried containing the suspected drugs.

Diaz, a seven-year Border Patrol veteran whose wife and brother also are Border Patrol agents, was cleared by both the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The Internal Affairs Division at U.S. Customs and Border Protection ruled differently nearly a year later, and the agent was indicted in November 2009.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/16/smuggling-suspect-got-im...