The California legislature has passed a bill designed to shield illegal aliens from law enforcement and it currently sits on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk. The "Trust Act" (AB 1081) would prohibit local law enforcement from complying with federal detention requests except when an illegal alien has been convicted of, or charged with, a "serious" or "violent" felony. The crimes that would be a prerequisite for sending aliens to ICE custody include murder, rape, assault with intent to commit a rape or robbery, kidnapping, carjacking, and a number of other crimes. Read more...

Amnesties for illegal aliens always end up also being amnesties for unscrupulous business owners who employ illegal aliens. President Obama's controversial use of deferred action for up to two million illegal aliens will result not only in the aliens getting a reprieve from deportation and a pass for past illegal acts, it will also have the effect of rewarding businesses that engaged in illegal hiring practices by legalizing their illegal workforce. Read more...

The American Bar Association (ABA) recently held its annual meeting in Chicago and took the opportunity to embrace a more open-borders position than ever before. The ABA angered its membership in 2010 by filing an amicus brief against Arizona's S.B. 1070. Read more...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has sent a lengthy letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton questioning many aspects of the Obama administration's plan to grant work permits to millions of illegal aliens via the president's controversial DREAM decree. Read more...

Immigrant (noun): "a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence"
— Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A pollster for the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute explains that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Arizona's S.B. 1070 will make immigration a central issue during the presidential election this November. The pollster points to some recent surveys not widely reported by the media: Read more...

The federal government estimates that Arizona has one of the fastest growing illegal immigrant populations in the country, increasing from 330,000 in 2000 to 560,000 by 2008. In an effort to alleviate some of the problems associated with illegal immigration, Arizona passed S.B. 1070, the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” which is designed to “discourage and deter” illegal immigration. The Obama administration filed suit against Arizona, arguing that the state did not have the authority to enforce the act. Four provisions of S.B. Read more...

Read about the possible implications of the S.B. 1070 Supreme Court decision.

• The U.S. Supreme Court has rendered a decision on the four provisions of Arizona's S.B. 1070 questioned in Arizona v. United States.

• The Ninth Circuit has been reversed in part affirmed in part.

• Section 2 upheld, which allows local police to question status.
  

The Obama administration's latest attempt at amnesty is a lawless act and an end run around American citizens and their representatives in Congress. It is also a hostile act toward the millions of legal residents looking for jobs. Legalizing illegal aliens is unpopular and this plan may well drive voters away from the Obama campaign. Read more...

Today the Supreme Court heard Arizona v. United States, the case involving Arizona’s S.B. 1070, also known as the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act." I was able to watch part of the argument and take the photos and video below. Though the decision will not come out until summer, the Court's questioning has many concluding that the Court is more likely than not to side with Arizona on at least some, if not all of the issues. Here's a sampling of the latest headlines: Read more...

Ten states have joined California in filing an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court objecting to what they allege are unconstitutional provisions of Arizona's S.B. 1070, the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act". The 10 other states are New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Read more...

Mass legalization and mass deportation are two unworkable, unrealistic means of addressing the nation's illegal immigration problem. Mass legalization — aka amnesty — was tried in 1986 and it resulted in more illegal immigration, significant fraud, and facilitated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, just to name a few problems. Read more...

Univision's Jorge Ramos, a man who regularly pushes for legalizing illegal aliens in the United States, recently interviewed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and asked what he thought about fellow candidate Mitt Romney's support for the "attrition through enforcement" approach to illegal immigration – the policy already embraced by a number of states. Read more...

In too many police stations, public safety takes a back seat to illegal alien advocacy. Americans are paying for it with their lives. Read more...

Temple University law professor (and CIS Fellow) Jan Ting analyzes the Supreme Court's decision to hear Arizona v. United States and predicts that S.B. 1070 will be upheld as constitutional in a new op-ed:

Arizona law will be upheld

A new report by First Street, a CQ Press organization, analyzes two pieces of legislation – the DREAM Act and the Legal Workforce Act – and finds that open-border-oriented groups spend much, much more money lobbying than groups seeking a more rational immigration policy. Read more...

Earlier this year, Sen. John McCain stated a fact – namely, that open borders lead to illegal aliens starting forest fires – and the usual suspects responded with the usual indignation. A new GAO report confirms that McCain was indeed correct. Read more...

The Obama administration's justification for filing lawsuits against Arizona, Alabama, and South Carolina is that state-level immigration-related initiatives are creating a "patchwork of laws" that are too burdensome for aliens to follow. As Attorney General Eric Holder recently put it, "a patchwork of state laws is not the solution and will only create problems." So much for the laboratories of democracy. Read more...

About two months before the 9/11 attacks, the Supreme Court took a more active role in immigration regulation than it ever had before in Zadvydas v. Davis, a case that effectively forced the release of thousands of criminal aliens into the United States. The case illustrated the disastrous consequences of the judicial branch abandoning the plenary power doctrine, which holds that the political branches — the legislative and the executive — have sole power to regulate all aspects of immigration as a basic attribute of sovereignty. Read more...

On July 29, 2000, drunk-driving illegal alien Sergio Montelongo-Sanchez killed three young Americans and seriously injured a fourth: Christopher Shackleford, Julieanne Pascoe, Kelli Bourgeois, and Matthew Hunt. Now, the families are mounting a campaign to prevent Montelongo-Sanchez from being paroled decades before his 45-year sentence is up, concerned that he will be deported to his native Mexico only to return to the United States, possibly threatening the lives of more innocent people. Read more...

Immigration attorney Margaret Stock recently responded to my latest Backgrounder in an attempt to marginalize the issues surrounding citizenship as it relates to children born to foreign diplomats. My full report, "Birthright Citizenship for Children of Foreign Diplomats?", is available online. The point of the report is that, although the numbers involved are small, the lack of any mechanism to prevent the U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats – the one group that everyone agrees is ineligible for citizenship – from acquiring all the attributes of citizenship is indicative of our lack of seriousness about the whole subject of who is, and is not, a U.S. citizen. Read more...

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an injunction Friday, temporarily blocking parts of Alabama's "Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act." The order is available online. It was not a decision on the merits of the law. A full hearing to determine the constitutionality of the enjoined provisions is expected to be held sometime in the next few months. Read more...

20 Municipalities Forced to Drop E-Verify Laws Read more...

After enjoying a few glasses of wine while visiting my family in Sonoma County last week, I came across an article in a local paper that supports mechanization as an alternative to mass immigration. Read more...

During the last two GOP presidential debates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has defended his support for in-state tuition breaks for illegal aliens by calling it a state issue. Certainly, many issues are best handled by states. But when a state embraces illegal immigration, the impact is not limited to the state itself. By opposing a border fence, opposing E-Verify, embracing sanctuary cities and tuition breaks, Perry and the Texas legislature have arguably turned the Lone Star State into America's illegal alien welcoming mat. Read more...

In a decision that seems to unnecessarily risk the lives of many people, ICE has released Onyango Obama, President Obama's "Uncle Omar" about two weeks after he was detained following a drunk driving accident. He reportedly had been ordered deported to his native Kenya back in 1989, and lost an appeal in 1992. Read more...

Apparently, it is incorrect to assume that the open-border crowd supports the deportation of even so-called "high priority" illegal aliens.

Amid the debate over which aliens should constitute a high priority for deportation under the Obama amnesty, and which should be permitted to stay and given more opportunities to cause crime before becoming a priority, amnesty advocates have begun to question the deportation even of aliens convicted of violent crimes. Read more...

Since the Obama administration remains quiet about the details of its non-legislative amnesty, the public's best sources of information are draft memos leaked over the past year as the administration contemplated the best method for "sidestepping" the legislative process. A previous blog post covered a draft memo from DHS which called the measure a "non-legislative amnesty" that is "controversial, not to mention expensive."

A memo from February 26, 2010, is worth reading for those interested in seeing how the administration got to the point it's at today. The memo was first leaked by The American Spectator, and it's available online in PDF format. Read more...

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement, recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to stop his controversial decision to advance a non-legislative amnesty, stating that the policy is "undermining the enforcement of our immigration laws" and is a "direct assault on the fourteen million Americans and legal immigrants who are looking for a job to support themselves and their families." The letter is available online in PDF format. Read more...

President Obama's long-lost Uncle Omar was picked up by law enforcement on August 24 while driving drunk in Massachusetts. His blood alcohol level was reportedly nearly twice the state's legal limit. He was charged with driving under the influence, driving to endanger, and failure to use a turn signal. Read more...