Last Friday the Obama administration announced that, by executive order, it would direct Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies to halt the deportation, for at least two years, of a group of young illegal aliens meeting certain criteria, and in addition grant these youths employment authorization. Read more...

A recent Associated Press article indicated that, notwithstanding the pending Supreme Court decision in the lawsuit the federal government filed against the state of Arizona to enjoin its co-enforcement of immigration laws — key facets of which are likely to be upheld — many legal analysts believe that various open-borders and immigrant advocacy groups intend to continue filing lawsuits based on the Arizona statute, primarily the portion that authorizes state and local police to question suspects as to their immigration status based on articulable facts. Read more...

I went to my local big-box home improvement store yesterday. At checkout, I paid with plastic because I rarely have much real money with me at all these days: Who needs it, and why risk a lot of cash in the event you're mugged? Such is the state of affairs today, for better or worse. Read more...

Earlier in this electoral season, when the Republican Party nomination was still being hotly contested, candidate Mitt Romney gave a nod to those in favor of enforcement of the nation's immigration laws by speaking approvingly of his good friend, Kris Kobach — formerly a Justice Department official during the Bush administration, presently Kansas Secretary of State, and author of various immigration enforcement provisions, allegedly including portions of the Arizona statutes now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. Read more...

A short while back, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck announced, with the support of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, that he was promulgating a new "Special Order 7", under which officers will no longer immediately impound the vehicles of unlicensed drivers for 30 days if they meet certain criteria such as having car insurance and no prior convictions for driving without a license. Read more...

A few days ago, my colleague, Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, sent me a news article from The Chicago Tribune.

The article, originally published October 30, 2011, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and is quite interesting. It lays out the phenomenon of individuals — aliens, all — who have fled from serious criminal charges in the metropolitan Chicago area to return to their home country of Mexico, where they live openly despite the existence of felony warrants against them and apparently without fear of being located or extradited. It's a troubling indictment of an apparently broken system where U.S. state, local, and federal officers don't seem to be doing much to bring these individuals back to face trial. Read more...

During the European Renaissance, Italian masters developed the term chiaroscuro to describe studies of strong contrasts — based on the juxtaposition of light and dark — in their drawings and paintings. The term is still used today and in fact its context has broadened to encompass other things, including the printed word, when the literature in question is reflective of such strong contrasts. Read more...

Recently, I wrote a blog about jobs, unemployed workers, and federal monies provided to state and local governments to jump-start "shovel ready" projects. I wondered who, in fact, was manning the shovels, given that there appeared to be no controls in place to ensure that the jobs that presumably resulted from these various public works projects went to American citizens and lawfully authorized workers. It's a question worth investigating and, to my knowledge, no one has done it. Read more...

The administration snuck a couple of immigration-related policy actions past the public this weekend. (Weekend news items, the media-wise tell us, are less likely to garner attention, and therefore outrage.) Read more...

The current dysfunctional state of our nation's immigration processes, and the large number of illegal aliens present in the United States, is a matter of interest and deep concern to me. (You're probably thinking to yourself, "Well, duh, if it weren't, you wouldn't be writing for the Center for Immigration Studies." Fair point.) Read more...

On Wednesday, the Daily Caller published the story of an accused child molester, one Amado Espinoza-Ramirez, who was arrested by Chicago police last August and charged with 42 counts of predatory sexual acts. He was booked into the Cook County Jail, which is operated under the auspices of the Cook County Sheriff's Office. Because the suspect was an alien, the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) filed a detainer against him once they became aware of the arrest. Read more...

On Thursday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on the testimony of the agency's Director for Homeland Security and Justice Issues, David C. Maurer, before the House of Representatives' Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Management. The topic was "Preliminary Observations on DHS's Efforts to Improve Employee Morale". Read more...

As noted by Mark Krikorian and Janice Kephart, President Obama recently toured Disney World in central Florida to announce his determination , via executive fiat in lieu of cooperative action with Congress, to open up America, The Theme Park, to the world's huddled masses by loosening existing restrictions and streamlining issuance of visas. Read more...

In the unique and often insular world of immigration law enforcement, "cutting sign" is the phrase used to describe tracking illegal alien border crossers through natural, often hostile desert or mountain, terrain. These tracking skills, still used by Border Patrol Agents today, primarily along our Southwestern border with Mexico, were originally learned from Native Americans many decades ago and have been passed on since through training and on-the-job experience. Read more...

Forrest Gump, quoting one of his momma's homey aphorisms, tells us that life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. How true. Here's proof:

A Texas television station is reporting that an American teen runaway took on the identity of an illegal alien from Colombia who was wanted on criminal warrants from that country. The teen, Jakadrien Turner, got picked up by the local cops in Houston, who alerted federal officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which took her prints but according to the news account did nothing with them. (Huh?) They did, however, put her through deportation proceedings where, anonymous ICE officials tell us, she steadfastly maintained her assumed identity, so they obtained an order of removal and forthwith sent her back to Colombia. If that excuse is supposed to give ICE a pass on this, I'm not buying it. Read more...

The ancient Greeks gave us the story of Prometheus, one of the Titans, who was punished by Zeus for giving the gift of fire to mere mortals.

Residents of Los Angeles County received their own (unwelcome) gift of fire during a long and terrifying extended New Year's weekend when a disgruntled German immigrant named Harry Burkhart allegedly set ablaze a sizeable number of vehicles, many of them in garages attached to, or underneath, densely populated apartments and condos. By a miracle, no one was killed or seriously injured. Read more...

Quite recently, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama took to the Senate floor to chastise Sen. Dick Durban of Illinois, after the latter criticized the state of Alabama for having passed an immigration enforcement statute. Read more...

Every once in a while, some little newsy tidbit comes along that warms the cockles of even my cynical heart.

In this case, it's a realization that perhaps Honest Abe Lincoln (or P.T. Barnum, or whoever actually uttered the words) was right when he said that "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Read more...

Our Division of Smoke-and-Mirrors has just sent us a late-breaking article about a new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposal to post an unmanned border crossing kiosk in the Big Bend National Park. The park is home to some of the most rugged terrain on our shared border with Mexico and is a notorious drug- and alien-smuggling venue. Read more...

This just in from our "Closing the Barn Door After the Horses Have Left" Department.

According to a Friday Chicago Tribune article, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart wants the County Council to amend a "controversial" ordinance prohibiting his office from notifying the Chicago field office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau when illegal alien arrestees are taken into custody for serious crimes. The ordinance goes so far as to also prohibit the sheriff's agency from honoring detainers placed by ICE officers against these individuals, even if ICE does discover that they have been taken into custody. Read more...

The Arizona Republic recently reported on how the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau in Arizona and other western states has backed off of a program of stipulated removal ("removal" is the legal phrase used these days in lieu of "deportation"), in which a deportable alien who would rather go home than wait long periods of time, quite possibly while in detention, signs an agreement stipulating to the legal charges against him Read more...

Every now and again, a friend or acquaintance will remind me of "the old Chinese curse, 'may you live in interesting times.' " I don't know whether the provenance imputed to the saying is true or not, but the import of the words says much about human history and mankind's collective psyche: that living in interesting times can be as much bane as it is boon. Read more...

As I imagine many did who are interested in the subject of immigration, I watched the show "Lost in Detention," even knowing in advance that it would not likely advocate a pro-immigration enforcement point of view (I was not wrong). The show aired last night as a part of the PBS Frontline series, and for at least some period of time, it can still be viewed on the internet. Read more...

It's natural that, with the advent of the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks on our nation, one's thoughts would drift to the first responders who go about protecting us throughout the nation on a daily basis. They so often go unnoticed until trauma or tragedy strikes, as it did so quickly and so violently on September 11, 2001. It's a sad truism that only then do we seem to stop, take stock, and come to recognize their dedication and quiet heroism. Read more...

Credible sources are telling me that ICE has reorganized its Secure Communities program management office (SC PMO), and reassigned many of the personnel who have been a part of the office for quite some time. Read more...

Earlier this month, Director John Morton of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) publicly announced that the federal government had terminated memoranda of agreement (MOAs) with several state signatories regarding ICE's Secure Communities program.

According to news reports, this is because the MOAs "may have given a false impression that participation was optional." Read more...

I just finished reading a snarky little blog a friend forwarded me for review. The blog, "Report Reveals Basic Misunderstanding of Deportation Process," by Ben Winograd, purports to be a critique of my recent backgrounder on removal proceedings. Read more...

Secure Communities (SC) is a sound program that helps protect the law abiding from the effects of crimes committed by aliens.

It's a shame that U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) has made such a muddle of explaining to ordinary Americans what the initiative is and how it works. Worse, they have done the program real harm with a constant stream of misinformation and disinformation put out on a near-daily basis. Nowhere is this more true than in their manipulation of statistics.

In a nutshell, ICE:

This just in from our You-Can-Have-Your-Cake-and-Eat-It-Too Department.

Very recently, the RAND Corporation examined border effectiveness metrics. The following nugget can be found in Chapter One of the report, entitled "Measuring Illegal Border Crossing Between Ports of Entry: An Assessment of Four Promising Methods": Read more...

I've been thinking about alien criminals. Specifically, I've been pondering with dismay a disturbing trend: it seems that they've begun to develop a constituency in this country. When and how did that start?

Although I don't remember falling asleep, I'm concerned that I may have had a Rip Van Winkle moment and awakened to a dystopic version of America in which personal responsibility no longer counts for anything, and the notion of consequences for bad acts doesn't apply. Read more...