1. ICE searches for war criminals
2. Court dismisses AZ countersuit
3. Issue heats up in 2012 race
4. RomneyCare aids illegals
5. AL farmers worry about labor
1.
U.S. immigration authorities boost efforts to hunt war criminals
The U.S. government — Immigration and Customs Enforcement in particular — steps up efforts to find, prosecute and deport people accused of human rights violations who try to hide here.
By Paloma Esquivel
Los Angeles Times, october 23, 2011
When Carlos de Graca Lopes took over as director of Sao Martinho Prison in Cape Verde in 2001, he arrived with a warning for inmates: He had one hand made of velvet and another made of iron. Grab the velvet hand and be rewarded. Grab the iron hand and face the consequences.
Over the next five years, Lopes ruled with his iron hand, according to a government indictment filed against him in Cape Verde. More than 150 times, the indictment alleges, he ordered or executed the beating and torture of prisoners, including spraying them in the face with water so they could not breathe and handcuffing them to an iron bar for weeks.
In 2006, despite a government order that Lopes remain in the island country off Africa's Atlantic coast while under investigation, he was granted a tourist visa to the United States, where he quickly disappeared.
There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of people like Lopes in the U.S., alleged human rights and war crimes violators who managed to emigrate to this country, often with legal authorization. Although federal immigration officials have long sought to find and deport such offenders, efforts to prevent their entry and punish violators has grown in the last few years.
In 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, made up of historians, investigators and legal experts whose job it is to identify and track human rights violators and war criminals around the world.
Their work has led to several high-profile arrests, among them a Moreno Valley martial arts instructor and a Santa Ana maintenance man who are accused of massacring at least 160 men, women and children during the Guatemalan civil war; a Georgia man who was allegedly part of a Serbian paramilitary group that killed thousands during the Bosnian war; and a Chicago-area grocery store worker wanted in Rwanda on charges of genocide and war crimes.
Nearly 10 years ago, Amnesty International issued a report calling the U.S. a haven for torturers and identifying more than 1,000 suspected human rights violators living in the country. At the time, federal officials invested little in resources to track them down, the rights group said. But Homeland Security and Justice Department officials, who for years had focused on deporting Nazi war criminals, were looking to expand their efforts to include alleged offenders from Central America, Bosnia, Rwanda and other countries.
Over the next few years, arrests mounted and the Justice Department launched its own unit with a similar objective to ICE's war crimes center.
"As we began to be successful, we got more resources, more bodies," said ICE Unit Chief Tom Annello. "We went from being just a program that had oversight over this to one that was more proactive and engaged."
The ICE center now has about 28 full-time employees, including attorneys, researchers and analysts. They use declassified U.S. government documents and other data to identify possible culprits. The compiled names, which so far include more than 3,000 people suspected of human rights violations, are then shared with U.S. agents and officials tasked with approving visas.
Vienna Colucci, a senior policy advisor at Amnesty International who worked on the 2002 report, said that the U.S. has made progress but that dealing with the problem through immigration "isn't ideal." Preventing a person from entering the country or deporting them without handing them over to a court, "doesn't help to stop atrocities," she said. "You're sending back somene who is a severe abuser to those countries where they were committing those crimes."
The U.S., she said, needs to be more willing to use criminal prosecution at home.
Over the years, Congress has adopted laws aimed at allowing the prosecution of torture and human rights abuses committed abroad, a move applauded by human rights groups.
But the laws cover only atrocities committed after the laws were adopted, or sometimes only apply to U.S. citizens or members of the military. So far only one person, Chuckie Taylor, the son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, has been successfully prosecuted. Taylor was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 97 years in federal prison.
More often, officials said, they settle for lesser charges that can later result in deportation.
"We'll go after them for visa fraud, perjury, jaywalking. We don't care," Annello said.
Even minor charges can require extensive investigation, often including traveling to the alleged violator's home country, interviewing witnesses and gathering documents to present in court.
Special Agent Brian Andersen, who worked on the Lopes case, has traveled to Rwanda, Liberia and elsewhere in Africa to investigate alleged war crimes. Andersen, a onetime social studies teacher who got into law enforcement in the late 1990s, said he's been deeply moved by the work.
"These are, in my opinion, some of the most important cases that I have ever worked or that I will ever work," he said.
Since 2004, ICE has arrested more than 200 people for human rights violations and deported more than 400, ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said. The agency is pursuing more than 1,900 cases involving suspects from about 95 countries.
After arriving in the U.S., Lopes went to the one place where he stood a chance of going undetected — Brockton, Mass., a city near Boston that has a Cape Verdean community of about 10,000 people.
The father of seven found an apartment with other migrants and got a job at a temp agency. Immigration agents began tracking him after getting a tip from the FBI in Senegal. About a year after Lopes arrived, authorities found him making frozen pizzas for grocery stores.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ice-war-crimes-20111019,0,451828...
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2.
Federal Court Dismisses Arizona Countersuit Over Illegal Immigration
By Mickey McCarter
HSToday, October 24, 2011
A federal court Friday dismissed a countersuit by the state of Arizona against the US federal government, generally ruling that the court could not adjudicate Arizona's claims that the US federal government had not secured the US Southwest border, thereby leaving Arizona to harm through illegal immigration.
Judge Susan Bolton, of the US District Court for Arizona, said her court could not rule upon some dimensions of Arizona's claims because of their political nature and upon others because federal law does not compel Arizona to enact and enforce its own immigration laws, as the state did with the controversial measure SB 1070.
The US Justice Department sued Arizona to stop enforcement of SB 1070, prompting Arizona's countersuit. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, expressed disappointment in the dismissal of the countersuit Friday.
"Today's US District Court decision to dismiss Arizona's suit against the federal government is frustrating but not entirely surprising," Brewer said in a statement. "It is but the latest chapter in a story that Arizonans know all too well: the federal government ignores its Constitutional and statutory duty to secure the border. Federal courts avert their eyes. American citizens pay the price."
Brewer contended that Arizona had the right to defend its international border and to identify and arrest illegal immigrants in the state. Despite dismissal of the Arizona countersuit, Brewer insisted the federal government still failed to secure US borders, leaving Arizona to bear increased costs for policing illegal immigrants.
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http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/today-s-news-analysis/single-article/fed...
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3.
Illegal immigration heats up U.S. politics
By Bill Straub
Evansville Courier & Press, October 22, 2011
WASHINGTON — States like Arizona and Alabama have passed laws cracking down on illegal immigrants that are tougher than those enforced on the federal level. Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are competing to determine who can come down the hardest on undocumented workers.
"And the reason we're so animated about stopping illegal immigration is there are 4.5 million people who want to come here who are in line legally; we want that to happen in an orderly and legal process," said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, viewed in many quarters as the frontrunner. "And in terms of how to secure the border, it's really not that hard. You have a fence, you have enough Border Patrol agents to oversee the fence, and you turn off the magnets. And that's employers that hire people who they know are here illegally."
A study released in July 2010 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated that illegal immigration costs taxpayers about $100 billion a year based on an analysis of federal, state and local government spending data. Dan Stein, the organization's president, said the study establishes that illegal aliens are "a drain on government coffers."
Critics maintain that cost estimate is hysterically overblown. The Congressional Budget Office, in a December 2007 report, found that unauthorized immigrants impose a net cost on state and local budgets but added there is no way to determine the size of, or even the best way of measuring, the impact. The CBO indicated that the costs are considerably less on the federal level because education, usually a state responsibility, represents the largest expenditure and most unauthorized immigrants are prohibited from receiving many of the benefits that the federal government provides through Social Security and such need-based programs as Food Stamps and Medicaid.
President Obama has called for comprehensive reform of what he characterizes as a "broken" immigration system but he has been unable to sufficiently generate congressional interest.
"Regardless of how they came, the overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families," Obama said in a speech delivered in El Paso, TX, in May. "But we have to acknowledge they've broken the rules. They've cut in front of the line. And what is also true is that the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally."
Obama notes that the Border Patrol now has 20,000 agents, more than twice as many as there were in 2004. A fence along the Mexican border is virtually complete. The number of intelligence analysts has tripled, and unmanned aerial vehicles have been deployed to patrol the skies from Texas to California. The U.S. has joined with Mexico to fight the transnational criminal organizations that have affected both countries.
The president said any comprehensive reform should hold businesses accountable for hiring illegal aliens. Undocumented workers should undergo "a lengthy process" before becoming eligible for citizenship. And there should be a process to help farmers hire the out-of-country workers they need.
The renewed emphasis on immigration issues, ironically, arrives at a time when statistics indicate the number of undocumented workers entering the U.S. is declining and expulsions are increasing.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, an estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States in March 2009, down by about 1 million from 2007. The Department of Homeland Security marked a similar decline, placing the number of illegal residents at 10.8 million in January 2010, down from 11.8 million in January 2007.
Although the numbers are well dispersed, most of the population lives in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and New Jersey.
Pew attributes the reduction to developments in both the U.S. and Mexico. On the U.S. side, declining job opportunities and increased border enforcement renders the U.S. less attractive. Recent economic growth in Mexico, meanwhile, likely reduced the factors that often lead Mexicans to cross the border.
The number of undocumented workers being returned to their homelands also is at an all-time high. The Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency reported last week that 396,906 illegal aliens were deported between October 1, 2010 and Sep. 30, 2011. Of those, almost 55 percent were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors — an 89 percent increase over 2008.
"These year-end totals indicate that we are making progress, with more convicted criminals, recent border crossers, egregious immigration law violators and immigration fugitives being removed from the country than ever before," said John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Though we still have work to do, this progress is a testament to the hard work and dedication of thousands of ICE agents, officers and attorneys around the country."
The numbers were reached despite a significant, and controversial, policy change. In a memorandum issued on June 17, Morton advised ICE officials to exercise "prosecutorial discretion" in an effort to clear a backed-up immigration court docket and focus resources on high priority cases. The change, which could lead to the closure of low priority cases, potentially affects 300,000 removal proceedings.
Morton asserted that the agency "has limited resources to remove those illegally in the United States."
"ICE must prioritize the use of its enforcement personnel, detention space, and removal assets to ensure that the aliens it removes represent, as much as reasonably possible, the agency's enforcement priorities, namely the promotion of national security, border security, public safety and the integrity of the immigration system," Morton said in the memorandum.
Janice Kephart, director of national security policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the directive shows "the extent the Obama administration is willing to go to deceive America into accepting unprecedented executive branch immigration law rewrites and changes in immigration processing to get around their federal responsibility to enforce immigration law."
The change, she said, "sets a course that prevents the enforcement of immigration law, provides a de facto amnesty, and is effectively worker authorization for much of the current illegal population."
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http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/oct/22/illegal-immigration-heats-u...
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4.
Medical help for illegal immigrants could haunt Mitt Romney
On the Republican campaign trail, he derides any such public aid. But the healthcare law he signed as Massachusetts governor allows it.
By Noam N. Levey
Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2011
The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.
Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.
The program, widely supported in Massachusetts, drew little attention when Romney signed the trailblazing healthcare law. But now it could prove problematic for the Republican presidential hopeful, who has been attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting educational aid for children of undocumented immigrants in Texas.
"We have to turn off the magnet of extraordinary government benefits," Romney said at the recent Fox News-Google debate in Florida.
Perry has defended the Texas program, saying it is better to educate young people, even if they are in the country illegally, to help them become productive members of society.
Similarly, supporters of the Massachusetts program note there are ultimately higher costs for denying care to sick patients regardless of their immigration status.
The Massachusetts program, which cost more than $400 million last year, paid for 1.1 million hospital and clinic visits. It's unclear how many undocumented patients benefited because the state does not record that data.
The Romney campaign referred questions to Tim Murphy, who served as Romney's state health and human services secretary. Murphy said the governor never intended the Health Safety Net to serve undocumented immigrants.
"Our view when we signed the law was that all benefits would be for people in the commonwealth who were here legally," Murphy said, noting that the regulations implementing the program were written after Romney left office in 2007.
But Massachusetts officials involved in crafting the healthcare law said there was broad understanding when Romney signed it that at least some people who would benefit would be in the country illegally.
That's supported by language in the law. Although it explicitly bars undocumented immigrants from getting certain health benefits, it does not prohibit them from receiving aid through the Health Safety Net.
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http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-romney-healthcare-20111024,0,6849099...
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5.
Labor Worries Rise As Planting Season Nears In Ala.
By Debbie Elliott
NPR, October 24, 2011
Alabama farmers are facing a labor crisis because of the state's new immigration law as both legal and undocumented migrant workers have fled the state since the strict new rules went into effect last month.
So far, piecemeal efforts to match the unemployed or work release inmates to farm jobs are not panning out, and farmers are asking state lawmakers to do something before the spring planting season.
Farmer Guiseppe Peturis says he's tried to hire workers through the state unemployment office before, but the workers didn't stay for more than a day.
Peturis says he's a Republican, but is no fan of Republican Gov. Robert Bentley's plan to get jobs for out-of-work Alabamians by passing the nation's toughest immigration law. Among other things, it calls for police to detain suspects if there's reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally.
Peturis says he's tried to hire through the state unemployment office before, but didn't have much success.
"Two of them left in 30 minutes; didn't even tell us they [were] going to leave," Peturis says. "One worked an hour and says it was too hard on his back."
The Impending Planting Season
In Baldwin County on the Gulf Coast, strawberry planting season is just a few weeks away. Farmers are wondering if they'll have the crews to get the plants in the ground.
"We need help doing it and we need help that's going to come back every day," says Mark Krupinski, whose family farms about 900 acres in Foley, Alabama. He says the work is hard, and when local people ask him about a job, they want to drive tractors, not labor in the fields.
"That isn't the kind of job most of us want to do," he says. "I don't blame them for not wanting to do [it], but somebody's got to do it if we're going to keep eating for the price that we are eating at."
Alabama Agriculture Commissioner John McMillian says there's no doubt the immigration law has left farmers in a lurch. He says they're concerned about where the labor is going to come from since legal immigrants are leaving along with the illegal ones.
By the time the prime harvesting season rolls around in late spring and early summer, McMillian says farmers will need thousands of workers, and he's not sure the unemployed can fill the demand.
"A lot of the unemployed people, certainly the heaviest concentration of unemployed people are in our cities. And in most cases, you're talking at least an hour of travel one way to get to the farming operations," McMillian says.
Independent efforts to bus job seekers from Birmingham to farms have only had about a 10 percent success rate.
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http://www.npr.org/2011/10/24/141638999/labor-worries-rise-as-planting-s...
