State police officials in Illinois have insisted on blocking most local law enforcement agencies from participating in ICE's Secure Communities program, even in the wake of embarrassing revelations of how Cook County, the state's largest jurisdiction, routinely releases offenders that ICE is trying to remove. At the same time, they seek millions of dollars of payments from the federal government each year for illegal aliens who end up in their jails. I discussed this issue over the weekend on Fox & Friends (video below). Read more...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and other top Obama administration appointees have been trying to bully career staff into rubber-stamping approvals for green cards and other benefits, and discouraging them from investigating fraud, according to a letter sent last week from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Read more...

The most accurate indication of how well an immigration law enforcement program works is not ICE statistics, nor management school-inspired metrics, but the volume and tone of the ethnic and civil liberties advocacy groups' opposition to the program. Read more...

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that ICE is going all wobbly in defending Secure Communities, its marquee program for identifying and removing criminal aliens. Read more...

The police union in Houston, a former sanctuary city, is taking a look at the experience of Phoenix, which two years ago implemented a policy to allow its officers to call ICE to report suspected illegal aliens who were connected to other crimes. The implementation of this policy, which is similar to the one signed into law by Arizona governor Jan Brewer and later blocked by U.S. Read more...

ICE's misleadingly-named Office of State and Local Cooperation (OSLC) has announced the next step in the Obama administration's efforts to drastically diminish the scope of immigration law enforcement. According to a draft policy document now being circulated among a limited group of stakeholders, ICE chief John Morton intends to prohibit not only his officers, but also local officers with 287(g) immigration authority, from busting illegal aliens who are discovered as a result of traffic violations. Read more...

The article in today's Washington Times about a cluster of medium-sized cities starts with a description of ubiquitous gang graffiti and goes on to relate incidents of major heroin and meth busts, abductions, assassinations, extortion, kickbacks, and marginally qualified public officials earning obscene taxpayer-funded salaries while protecting their mobster associates. Read more...

Today Fox News highlighted the persistent problem of marriage fraud in the immigration process, and invited me to discuss the implications (view the video segment below). Marriage is the most common way for a foreign national to gain permanent residency – more than 415,000 marriage-based green cards were issued last year, and the number has grown by more than 50 percent in the last few years. More than two-thirds of these individuals are already living in the United States at the time of their green card application. Read more...

Don't miss today's hot topic in immigration law training – "Gang-based asylum claims" (see Third Session). Learn how to establish that your gangster clients are "members of a particular social group," that they deserve humanitarian protection due to their "political opinions" or "religion" (such as La Familia, the murderous Mexican cult-like cartel), and what the UN guidelines are on these oppressed individuals. This e-learning session was preceded by one on how to help your client get a waiver if they are denied a green card or refugee status because of their links to terrorist groups. No, this wasn't in The Onion, it was in Immigration Daily, the leading e-newsletter of the immigration bar. Read more...

Lawyers defending the people of Arizona and the state's new immigration law sought the Center's help in countering the Obama administration's claims that the law would disrupt their careful balance of immigration law enforcement priorities, unduly burden DHS agencies, and cause harassment of lawful visitors and beneficiaries of humanitarian programs, such as battered women. Read more...

Citing concern over the agency's image, ICE chief John Morton has announced a makeover and renaming of key bureaus so as to de-emphasize the immigration component of their work. This move is just silly on so many levels, but does illustrate three things: Read more...

Reports released Thursday on ICE's Secure Communities program confirm that removable aliens comprise a significant share of the nation's criminal population. According to these statistics, 11 percent of all inmates booked into participating jails are flagged by the system as removable aliens (in comparison, non-citizens comprise nine percent of the nation's total adult population – see "Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue"). Read more...

Sources inside and outside ICE report that Suzie Barr, the Napolitano crony who is now ICE Chief of Staff, has chosen the controversial former Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt to head up ICE's Office of State and Local Cooperation, pending completion of the background check. This is an interesting pick, because Hurtt is well-known as an outspoken critic of ICE/local partnerships who kept Houston as a sanctuary city, even as several of his officers lost their lives to illegal alien criminals who cycled repeatedly in and out of HPD custody without being reported to ICE. Read more...

A review of the information that has been released on Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad's immigration history reveals a familiar pattern of a terrorist easily taking advantage of weak spots in America’s immigration system. Shahzad was admitted long before 9/11, but the openings he exploited are still in place today. Until policymakers move to shrink them, they offer a sobering guarantee of job security for counter-terrorism and security personnel for the foreseeable future. Read more...

This week the Arizona state legislature passed a bill that, among other things, says that if local law enforcement officers encounter someone they suspect is an illegal alien, they should take "reasonable" steps to try to determine the alien's immigration status. A new web program sheds light on issues such as these. Read more...

Yesterday Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed a bill into law requiring Utah employers to use E-Verify to make sure their workers are legal. The bill passed both chambers of the legislature with large margins, making Utah the fourth state to require all employers to verify their workers (the others are Arizona, Mississippi, and South Carolina). Read more...

Advocates for illegal aliens must have been horrified to learn over the weekend via a Washington Post article that ICE's top manager for Detention and Removal Operations, James M. Chaparro, has directed ICE Field Offices to pick up the pace in removing not just aliens convicted of serious crimes, but – gasp! – other illegal aliens found in jails or who ignored previous orders to get out and stay out. Read more...

Statistics recently released by the Harris County (Texas) Sheriff's Office provide an interesting point of comparison for two of ICE's programs that identify and flag criminal aliens for removal – Secure Communities and 287(g). Read more...

Sources inside and outside ICE are reporting that the agency leadership intends to install an embattled ex-police chief known for his obstruction of immigration law enforcement as its liaison to the local law enforcement community. Former Houston police chief Harold Hurtt is reportedly the top candidate to lead the agency’s Office of State and Local Coordination. Read more...

The Department of Homeland Security recently released the latest figures on E-Verify use by state, specifically the number of employers, worksites, and queries so far this fiscal year (since October 1, 2009), as of February 20, 2010. Read more...

On February 4, a federal appeals court ruled that a Rhode Island state trooper had acted reasonably when questioning foreign nationals he encountered on a traffic stop, and in contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) upon discovering that they were illegal aliens en route to work. Read more...

Last week ICE completed its largest anti-gang operation ever, arresting 517 people in 83 cities across the country (476 were involved in gangs). Dubbed Project Big Freeze, ICE teamed with other federal and local law enforcement agencies to target gangsters involved in cross-border drug trafficking, under an ongoing program known as Operation Community Shield. Read more...

The tale of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who nearly blew up a Northwest Airlines plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day, reveals an alarming number of vulnerabilities in our immigration system still in place, even eight years after 9/11. One of the most troubling is the State Department's persistent failure to pull its weight in preventing terrorist travel to the United States. Read more...

On Tuesday the Pennsylvania House Labor Relations Committee unanimously approved two bills that would require the state's construction and building trades industry employers to use E-Verify and the Social Security Number Verification Service (SSNVS) to avoid hiring illegal workers and confirm the Social Security numbers of all employees. Sponsored by Rep. Read more...

In an oversight hearing this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano answered questions on a wide range of issues, including the collapse of worksite enforcement, the lack of funding for detention space, and interior checkpoints. Most of her answers were predictable and confirmed the administration's focus on arresting and removing only those illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes, and making sure employers complete the proper paperwork in hiring. Read more...

Having lost the political battle over the 287(g) program, with DHS declining to end the program or restrict its use to jails and prisons, and with continuing strong interest from local law enforcement agencies, frustrated open-borders advocates have settled on a new strategy -- sue the bastards! Certainly everyone involved should be on the lookout for possible problems with racial profiling or abuse of authority. But the latest lawsuit, filed today against Frederick County, Md., Sheriff Chuck Jenkins and a host of other defendants, looks more like a public relations stunt and last-ditch attempt to avoid deportation than a serious legal challenge. Read more...

The Obama administration investigation of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration enforcement program is starting to look a little futile. A federal source revealed today that more than 40 percent of the 500-plus arrests made in Sheriff Joe's crime suppression operations were in fact "serious" criminals of the kind Janet Napolitano claims to want help from local law enforcement agencies in identifying. This is actually a higher proportion of "serious" offenders than in many other 287(g) jurisdictions. So why has Sheriff Joe been singled out? Read more...

A national association of veteran border patrol agents has endorsed Sheriff Joe Arpaio's efforts to help with immigration law enforcement in Maricopa County, Ariz., and criticized the Obama administration's recent efforts to "water down" immigration enforcement and the 287(g) program in particular. Read more...

Overshadowed in the extensive national coverage of the Najibullah Zazi terror case is the case of Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian man arrested on Thursday, September 24, in Dallas. Smadi was taken into custody by FBI agents shortly after throwing the switch on what he believed was a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) in an SUV he had parked in the basement of a 60-story Dallas office tower, in an attempt to kill thousands of people timed to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Read more...

Last week the State Department announced the lucky winners in this year’s Visa Lottery, who will be arriving in communities near you by September, 2010. Fourteen percent of the winners (13,988 people) hail from countries of special interest in the war on terror. Here are the top twelve winning countries: Read more...