1. Admin announces major overhaul
2. ICE: Deportations increasing
3. Topic drove Latinos to Obama camp
4. Firm misses background checks

1.
Immigration to Go Paperless
Agency Plans Electronic Overhaul of Case-Management System
By Spencer S. Hsu
The Washington Post, November 7, 2008; A17

The Bush administration has launched a major overhaul of the nation's immigration services agency, selecting an industry consortium led by IBM to reinvent how the government handles about 7 million applications each year for visas, citizenship and approval to work in the United States, officials announced yesterday.

If successful, the five-year, $500 million effort to convert U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' case-management system from paper-based to electronic could reduce backlogs and processing delays by at least 20 percent, and possibly more than 50 percent, people close to the project said. Those problems have long frustrated new Americans and other immigrants.

The new system would allow government agencies, from the Border Patrol to the FBI to the Labor Department, to access immigration records faster and more accurately. In combination with initiatives to link digital fingerprint scans to unique identification numbers, it would create a lifelong digital record for applicants. It also would eliminate the need for time- and labor-intensive filing and refiling of paper forms, which are stored at 200 locations in 70 million manila file folders.

Known internally as the transformation initiative, the long-awaited and much-delayed effort is considered a cornerstone of any broader effort to fix an immigration system considered one of the most broken bureaucracies in the federal government.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR200811...

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2.
Bush admin. makes immigration strides in 2008
By Eileen Sullivan
The Associated Press, November 6, 2008

Washington, DC (AP) -- The U.S. government arrested and deported record numbers of illegal immigrants — nearly 350,000 — in the past year, authorities say. It has also naturalized a record number of new Americans during the same time period, more than 1 million. Bush administration officials consider these to be great accomplishments within a system that President-elect Obama calls "broken and overwhelmed" on his transition Web site.

"We are seeing the kinds of results that the country hasn't seen for many years," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said last month.

When Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, the administration kicked up its enforcement of the immigration laws already on the books. The government also hired more people to process applications for immigrants who want to enter the country legally.

These enhancements led to increases in arrests of illegal immigrants and employers who hire them; decreases in the amount of time it takes to process immigration applications — it now takes 9-10 months for naturalization applications, compared with 16-18 months before that. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has reduced its backlog to 1.1 million, which is down from its biggest backlog of 3.6 million in 2004; it's on track to eliminate the backlog by October 2009.
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http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gEfnRmHVHzKk8Wxjs-d1t-xgY9VAD949NDE80

EDITOR'S NOTE: Further coverage of this nation-wide story is available online at: http://news.google.com/news?client=safari&rls=en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ta...

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3.
Immigration steered Latinos to Obama
By Leslie Berestein and John Marelius
The San Diego Union Tribune, November 7, 2008

Although economic concerns reduced immigration to nearly a nonissue by the time the presidential campaign drew to a close, political experts believe it was largely responsible for the record turnout of Latino voters Tuesday, 66 percent of whom supported Barack Obama.

With overall voter turnout in Tuesday's election possibly the highest in more than four decades, about 10 million Latinos cast votes nationwide, easily surpassing the goal of 9 million that Latino political organizations had set.

According to national exit poll results analyzed by the Pew Hispanic Center, only 32 percent of Latinos voted for Republican candidate John McCain, in spite of the Arizona senator's track record as a proponent of immigrant-friendly reforms. That total represents a significant drop from what George W. Bush amassed in 2004. Bush received between 40 percent and 44 percent of the Latino vote that year and 35 percent in 2000.

Of the nine states that flipped from Bush in 2004 to Obama in 2008, four – Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida, where the traditionally Republican Cuban-American base is giving way to more Democratic voters – have large Latino populations.

The reasons McCain didn't do better among Latinos are complex, political analysts said. Like the rest of the electorate, Latino voters became more concerned about the economy, the housing crisis, job security and health care in recent months.

But the heated immigration debate that dominated headlines two years ago, when hundreds of thousands marched in San Diego and other cities demanding reforms, may have been the catalyst that sent Latinos to the polls.

“It was the immigration issue that drove the process,” said Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based pollster whose company exit-polled 5,000 Latino voters in Los Angeles and Miami.

A large number of Latino voters this year were casting ballots for the first time, suggesting that efforts by national and local Latino organizations to encourage legal residents to become U.S. citizens and participate in the political process paid off.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced yesterday that 1,051,640 people became U.S. citizens between Oct. 1 of last year and Sept. 30, setting a record. Chris Rhatigan, a spokeswoman for the agency, attributed the increase partly to a flurry of people filing applications before a fee increase last year, and to efforts by organizations reaching out to immigrants eligible to naturalize.
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http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20081107-9999-1n7latino.html

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4.
Immigration lockup hired 92 guards without vetting
By Gene Johnson
The Associated Press, November 7, 2008

A privately run immigration lockup in Tacoma hired nearly 100 security guards without background checks, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) didn't catch the practice for two years, court documents show.

Sylvia Wong, an administrator in charge of hiring at the Northwest Detention Center, pleaded guilty this week in federal court in Tacoma to one count of making a false statement, for lying to investigators.

In her plea agreement, she admitted that soon after starting work in November 2005, she began hiring guards without background checks "because of the pressure she felt to get security personnel hired at the NWDC as quickly as possible."

ICE auditors discovered early this year that 92 guards had been hired without the checks. The agency acknowledges that some of the guards have been fired after subsequent background checks but won't say how many.

"In response to this investigation we have implemented a multitiered vetting process ... so that no contractor or federal employee has sole responsibility to process and approve employment documents," ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers said Thursday. "We have taken proactive steps to prevent this from happening again."

The Northwest Detention Center opened in 2004 and holds about 1,000 people accused of immigration violations, mainly detainees from Alaska, Oregon and Washington.

It's run by the for-profit, Florida-based GEO Group Inc., with yearly reviews to ensure the facility meets ICE standards.
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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008361859_immigration07...