One of the most alarming effects of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty, if enacted in anything close to its current form, would be the legalization of tens of thousands of illegal aliens who have already been a public safety threat in their community. The eligibility criteria established for the amnesty and most of the new guestworker provisions excuse a wide variety of criminal behavior, including gang membership, drunk driving, vehicular manslaughter, identity theft, and immigration fraud (see this analysis). In addition, the bill offers amnesty to those who have repeatedly and flagrantly violated immigration laws. Read more...

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to adopt 22 amendments to the Schumer-Rubio bill, none of which fundamentally improves the bill, and a few that make it worse. Read more...

In addition to the instant amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens and their families and huge new guestworker programs, the Schumer-Rubio bill will change the rules to allow more than 1.4 million family visa applicants to bypass the current waiting list and be admitted immediately and begin working, even before they are approved for a green card. This little-noticed re-write of the V visa rules will also admit another 2.9 million immigrant visa hopefuls to enter the country as temporary visitors. Read more...

A thorough analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of S.744 finds that the enforcement and compliance provisions of the Gang of Eight bill are designed to reward and protect lawbreakers while undermining many effective and common-sense provisions in our immigration law. A number of the provisions mask their true intent under innocuous or downright misleading titles.

The enforcement-related measures in this bill have profound implications for public safety and will greatly hamper federal and local law enforcement programs designed to prevent criminals and terrorists from settling and operating here. Because the bill essentially excuses nearly all forms of immigration and identity fraud, the integrity of our immigration system is greatly compromised by this bill. Read more...

Statistics from U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) indicate that the agency is rubber-stamping the applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. They report that 99.5 percent of applicants have been approved, which is well above approval rates for other legal programs, which have fraud and rejection rates in the double digits. Read more...

Last week, during a budget hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) asked DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano about my recent testimony in the ICE officers' lawsuit pointing out that total removals and removals of criminals have declined by 40 percent since the implementation of the administration's lenient "prosecutorial discretion" policies. Read more...

An excellent column by former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey for the Wall Street Journal notes that "Tamerlan Tsarnaev [one of the brothers accused in the Boston Marathon attack] is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI."

This sentence is loaded in several ways, but is directly relevant to the debate over the Schumer-Rubio amnesty proposal now being debated in the Senate. Read more...

On April 8, a federal judge in Dallas heard arguments in Crane v Napolitano, the lawsuit brought by 10 ICE officers challenging the Obama administration's Deferred Action program (DACA) and "prosecutorial discretion" policies. Read more...

Last year, nearly 700,000 people were issued temporary visas to work in the United States, either for several years or indefinitely. About two-thirds are in categories requiring skills and/or education and one-third were given visas to work in unskilled jobs. Over the weekend, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that the AFL-CIO and Chamber of Commerce had agreed on a proposal to increase the number of unskilled guestworker visas above and beyond the number already being issued, and despite lingering high unemployment rates for U.S. workers affected by these visa programs.

The table below summarizes temporary visa issuances for 2012. Read more...

Congressional inquiries prompted by ICE's recent release of immigration detainees, many of whom have criminal convictions or charges, reveal that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has billions of dollars in unexpended revenues, including resources for detention space. Read more...

Contrary to the claims of illegal alien advocacy groups, many of the detainees being released by ICE under the bogus pretext of sequestration-mandated budget cuts are in fact criminals, and hardly harmless, according to a variety of sources.

Here are some categories of detainees who were released from ICE detention over the last week: Read more...

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that ICE detention capacity and Border Patrol salaries will be slashed in order to meet the requirements of the sequestration exercise. This move suggests that she views the nation's fiscal crisis as an opportunity and cover to accomplish the administration's immigration enforcement reduction agenda. Read more...

In a surprising and refreshing reversal, last year ICE leadership, when confronted with data showing a decline in criminal alien deportations in the wake of the Obama administration's "prosecutorial discretion" policies, decided to allow ICE agents in the field to use conventional, tried-and-true law enforcement techniques to identify and remove more illegal alien criminals, according to memos obtained and released by USA Today — to a point. Read more...

The stories plastered all over the front pages of newspapers in the Boston area reveal that the nanny accused of delivering what the police report called "abusive head trauma" to a one-year-old child, who later died, is an illegal alien. This case is further illustration of the serious deficiencies in our immigration enforcement system, and the tragedy that can result. Read more...

Last week ICE arrested Roberto Galo, the unlicensed Honduran who killed a young man named Drew Rosenberg in a traffic crash in November 2010, and is detaining him without bond. Galo's arrest is appropriate but, incredibly, despite the fact that Galo repeatedly violated California driving laws and killed someone, ICE had to make an exception to its policies in order to take him into custody and seek his removal. Read more...

In the latest installment of the Obama administration's "amnesty by executive decree" scheme, DHS has announced the creation of a new waiver that will enable an unknown number of illegal aliens who have married U.S. citizens or who have moved here illegally to join naturalized family members to avoid penalties enacted by Congress in the mid-1990s. Read more...

Last week, ICE quietly announced that it was terminating 32 local enforcement task force partnerships, known as 287(g) agreements, some of which have been operating successfully for as long as ten years. This follows the revocation earlier this year of seven other task force agreements in Arizona. ICE has offered no specific reasons for the cancellation of these agreements, other than that it thinks it can do a better job without its local partners. Read more...

Last month I reported the alarming news that ICE intended to take a pass on deporting Roberto Galo, a Honduran who was convicted of killing Drew Rosenberg in a 2010 traffic crash in San Francisco. Adding insult to the Rosenberg family's horrific injury, the ICE Public Advocate, whose office was created and funded to assist the public with their concerns about immigration law enforcement, has ignored repeated attempts by the victim’s father to contact him and discuss the case. Read more...

It's a good thing North Carolina (and Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia) saw fit to enact stronger E-Verify laws that go into effect in 2013, because the Obama administration is making no effort to address the rampant identity fraud that enables illegal aliens to get jobs and wreak havoc in the lives of unsuspecting Americans. Read more...

Once again, the current Congress is under pressure to change fundamental parts of our immigration system in order to fix the problems created by previous Congresses that were too generous. Special interest groups are pushing to eliminate provisions in immigration law that now help prevent green card allocations from being monopolized by immigrants from just a few countries. If the proposed changes are approved this month by the U.S. Read more...

Defenders of the visa lottery, which is slated for elimination in a bill that just passed the U.S. House on Friday, have tried to portray this program as an essential category that invigorates our immigration flow. Others, including Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), have said ending the program would be "racist, if not in its intent, than certainly in its effect." Some media descriptions of the visa lottery have also given this false impression, that the visa lottery program benefits mainly black immigrants from Africa, who they say have no other legal channels to enter. Neither portrayal of the visa lottery is accurate. Read more...

The Obama administration has quietly abandoned the pretense that it will try to deter local sanctuary policies that actively obstruct immigration law enforcement, such as an ordinance in Cook County, Ill., that orders the sheriff's officers to ignore holds placed by ICE on criminal aliens. Read more...

In one of the most absurd examples of immigration enforcement malpractice yet, this week ICE is planning to take a pass on removing a criminal alien convicted of vehicular manslaughter. On Friday, November 16, exactly two years after Roberto Galo struck and killed motorcyclist Drew Rosenberg while making an illegal left turn in a car he was unlicensed and uninsured to drive, Galo is scheduled to be released from a California jail. Read more...

The unsurprising revelation that foiled terrorist Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, arrested last week for trying to blow up the Federal Reserve building in New York, entered on a student visa has once again provoked demands for reform from lawmakers. But the types of reforms being pushed, while worthy, will not address the most fundamental problem with our student visa program, and would not have interfered with the admission of Nafis. Read more...

Criminal aliens, illegal drunk drivers, identity thieves, and gang members are breathing a sigh of relief in Prince William County, Va., as they now have much less chance of being disturbed or uprooted by ICE or local police, thanks to the latest move by the White House to dismantle the successful 287(g) enforcement program.

Last week, county officials were informed by ICE that their program was next on the chopping block, following cancellations in Arizona and North Carolina. Despite having identified about 5,000 removable aliens who had been arrested for other offenses and processing a large share of them for removal at little cost to ICE; enabling ICE agents in Virginia to give better service to other parts of the state; and despite the absence of any findings of abuse or mismanagement, the White House has decided that the program must go. Read more...

The bill that was the top priority for illegal alien advocates in California, the TRUST Act, was vetoed yesterday by Gov. Jerry Brown. This is clearly a setback for anti-enforcement activists nationwide, who had made this bill the centerpiece in their campaign against ICE's Secure Communities program, and who had hoped to inspire similar measures in other states. Read more...

A group of activists in Michigan, including the ACLU, SEIU, and the Detroit-based Latin Americans for Social and Economic Justice, has filed a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson to stop her from asking voters the question, "Are you a United States citizen?" Read more...

The good news in a new GAO report on visa fraud is that the State Department has developed a variety of new tools over the years to help detect those trying to lie and cheat their way into the United States. The bad news is that top management at State has not been particularly interested in making sure that consular officers are using these tools, even as temporary admissions are at an all-time high, and as the Obama administration seeks to open the gates wider. Read more...

Jamiel Shaw, Sr., the father of a young man murdered by an illegal alien gang member in Los Angeles in 2008, speaks directly to California Governor Jerry Brown in a poignant new video (see below). Shaw asks Brown to veto a bill passed by the state legislature that would force California law enforcement agencies to release tens of thousands of criminal aliens each year instead of transferring them over to ICE for possible removal. Read more...

A new investigative report from the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reveals extensive and troubling data integrity problems that interfere with a key border security program's effectiveness in preventing the entry of individuals using aliases. Read more...