1. WH policy struggles
2. DHS refutes 'stonewalling'
3. Indian team tracks smugglers
4. Group considers recall
5. NJ cop indicted
1.
A Policy Pickle for Obama, Cabinet
On Immigration Front, White House Struggles
By Steven T. Dennis
Roll Call, November 21, 2011
Record deportations and immigration enforcement aren't what President Barack Obama's allies thought they were going to get when he took office nearly three years ago — and tensions have continued to mount with a constituency the president desperately needs for his re-election.
Anger over the 1 million deportations during Obama's watch boiled over in recent weeks after White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Muñoz defended the administration's policies in a PBS interview, with some activists calling on her to resign.
A larger group of advocates then sent a letter defending Muñoz while still criticizing the White House's policies.
The administration itself seems keenly aware of the concerns, but there's no magic solution to its immigration dilemma.
With dreams for comprehensive immigration reform dashed and more modest measures like the DREAM Act blocked in Congress, the administration has looked for other ways to deliver for the Hispanic community and frustrated reform advocates, similar to the "we can't wait" campaign on jobs.
But anything short of declaring an end to deportations for nonviolent illegal immigrants might not be enough for some advocates.
Muñoz herself still seems warmly embraced by the administration's allies on Capitol Hill, even if there remains significant anger and frustration at the White House.
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Charlie Gonzalez (D-Texas) said he sees Muñoz as an important advocate for the community inside the White House.
"To me, she is the same person that worked tirelessly when she was at National Council of La Raza," he said. "If you are unhappy with the administration, I think the president would tell you the buck does stop with him."
Gonzalez praised the administration's announcement last week detailing guidelines for prioritizing deportations, but he said Hispanic Members want more assurances that the guidelines will be enforced uniformly across the nation and that hundreds of thousands of low-priority immigrants won't be deported in the meantime.
The caucus is expected to meet soon with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to discuss the guidelines, he said.
Much of the conflict with the White House is that low-priority immigrants — including people with U.S. citizen children and no criminal records — continue to be deported by the thousands. Still, Gonzalez said, "Latinos have to appreciate the White House's dilemma. ... The president's going to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't."
White House spokesman Luis Miranda said Obama "cannot change the laws by himself" and said the GOP has blocked reform and the DREAM Act. In the meantime, the administration isn't waiting around.
"We are implementing commonsense guidelines for prosecutorial discretion, are beginning a case-by-case review process to focus federal enforcement resources on the highest-priority individuals and are making improvements to the Secure Communities program, all of which strengthen the government's ability to target criminals even more effectively," he said in an email.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who has led the fight for the DREAM Act, said he sympathizes with the White House. But he has at times urged administration officials to act more swiftly to change enforcement practices.
"The president's trying to balance enforcing the laws as written with his own personal feelings shared by Cecilia and myself that we need to do something dramatic for immigration reform," Durbin said. His DREAM Act would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrant children who go to college or join the military, but the measure has been blocked repeatedly in the Senate.
The administration's announcement Thursday on deportation will help, Durbin said, but it doesn't fix the problem.
The White House's biggest critics include Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who has already been arrested twice in protests at the White House over its policies.
But Gutierrez isn't taking it out on Muñoz. "She's the person with the job," he said. "I understand why people would call her out on the one hand, and I understand why people would say, well, it's the framework that we've been given that we're going to work in through the end of this administration."
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http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_62/A-Policy-Pickle-for-Obama-Cabinet-i...
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2.
DHS Refutes Immigration "Stonewalling" Allegations
By Julian Aguilar
The Texas Tribune, November 22, 2011
Homeland Security officials said Monday they are gathering data to appease U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, after his powerful House committee threatened to hold the agency in contempt of Congress for failing to provide immigration enforcement information.
Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is demanding that the agency release data he said will show that deportable criminal immigrants are being set free. Earlier this month, his committee issued a subpoena that ordered DHS to provide information about the controversial Secure Communities initiative. The program compares the fingerprints of individuals arrested and booked into local jails against a federal database to determine whether they are deportable under current immigration laws.
Smith accused DHS of “stonewalling” and warned that if the request for immigration-enforcement information was not met, he would "seek enforcement of the subpoena to the fullest extent of the law." A House Judiciary staff member who spoke on background said the committee could take action to hold DHS in contempt if the agency does not supply the requested information.
The DHS said it was in the process of gathering the data and cited statistics to debunk the committee’s claims that criminal aliens are being set loose.
“DHS has implemented immigration enforcement priorities that focus limited resources on convicted criminals, repeat immigration law violators, fugitives and recent entrants," said department spokesman Matt Chandler. "Through these priorities, ICE removed a record 216,000 criminal aliens in FY 2011, an 89 percent increase over 2008."
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On Nov. 4, the committee demanded DHS turn over the “names, fingerprint identification numbers and alien registration numbers” of immigrants who were arrested between November 2008 and Oct. 21, 2011, but not detained by ICE.
As of last week, the committee said all the agency had provided was a "unique ID" for each arrested immigrant, a date and time for each "encounter" and the national origins of a few hundred detainees. The "unique ID," the committee charged, is nothing more than a number from 1 to 220,955 and doesn't allow the committee to make any determination about the immigrants' criminal histories. Smith has questioned whether President Obama is directly behind the lack of compliance.
“Either DHS officials never planned to comply with the Committee’s information request, despite its manifest reasonableness, justification under the Committee’s oversight jurisdiction and similarity to information provided to the Committee during the Clinton Administration,” Smith wrote Friday in a letter to DHS. “Or DHS’s plans to comply with the request were vetoed by the White House for political reasons – to prevent the American people from learning the damage to public safety caused by ICE’s current policy of allowing the release of criminal aliens onto our streets.”
Smith’s charges came as DHS announced it would begin reviewing some of the estimated 300,000 cases currently pending before immigration judges. The review is part of an overhaul of Secure Communities that the department announced in June aimed at focusing resources on removing serious offenders first.
The agency also announced a training program geared toward teaching law enforcement officers and prosecutors to use their discretion in turning immigrants over to ICE. The program, first reported on by The New York Times, follows a memorandum issued in June by ICE Director John Morton that instructed officials to use “prosecutorial discretion” when issuing a notice of detainer or deciding “whom to detain or release on bond, supervision, personal recognizance, or other conditions.” The criteria include how long the individuals have lived in the country, the education they’ve obtained, their criminal history and whether they have U.S.-citizen relatives.
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http://www.texastribune.org/immigration-in-texas/immigration/smithdhs-st...
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3.
Indian 'Shadow Wolves' stalk smugglers on Arizona reservation
They work for the federal government — and also to protect sacred lands of the Tohono O'odham Nation along the border with Mexico.
By Brian Bennett
Los Angeles Times, November 21, 2011
Kevin Carlos hates how the drug runners tramp through the ancient cemeteries and holy places he holds dear.
That peak up there, he says, speeding toward the reservation's border with Mexico. That's where the creator lives. His name is I'itoi, the elder brother. He created the tribe out of wet clay after a summer rain. Tribe members still bring him offerings — shell bracelets, beargrass baskets and family photos — and leave them in his cave scooped out of the peak.
But the drug smugglers don't know that. On their way to supply America's drug markets, they use these sacred hilltops as lookouts, water holes as toilets and the desert as a trash can.
So Carlos hunts them.
Carlos is a member of the Shadow Wolves, a team of eight American Indian trackers who stalk drug smugglers though the desolate canyons and arroyos of the Tohono O'odham Nation reservation.
"I like to think I am protecting not only the U.S. but my area as well, my home," he says.
The Shadow Wolves work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. To join the special unit, each officer must be at least one-quarter American Indian and belong to a federally recognized tribe.
The trackers spend their days traversing the most isolated parts of the reservation, an 11,000-square-mile parcel of land in southern Arizona that shares a 73-mile border with Mexico. The nation, as it is called here, is the size of Connecticut and populated by more than 13,000 tribe members — slightly more than one per square mile.
There are no street signs and few paved roads. On the state highway, it takes three hours to drive from end to end.
The Shadow Wolves walk ridgelines, ride ATVs and roll high-powered pickups over mounds of shale and through rutted washes. They've trained their eyes to read the desert's tells:
Fresh tire tracks shimmer in sunlight.
Old footprints are crisscrossed with insect trails.
Marijuana bales leave burlap fibers on mesquite thorns.
When the U.S. Border Patrol clamped down on crossings in an area east of the reservation five years ago, smuggling rings moved their routes to the forbidding 60-mile backcountry corridor that crosses Tohono O'odham lands. Two billion dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin have moved through the reservation since then, according to ICE estimates.
The Shadow Wolves use GPS locaters, high-powered radios and other modern tools, but it is their tracking skills and their feel for the hidden box canyons, caves and seasonal watering holes that make them formidable counter-narcotics agents.
"It takes patience. These guys think they are out in the middle of nowhere, scot-free," Carlos says. "Then we find them."
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-adv-shadow-wolves-2...
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4.
Group gauges voter interest in Brewer recall
By Mary K. Reinhart
The Arizona Republic, November 22, 2011
Organizers of the successful recall of former Sen. Russell Pearce say they want to gauge support for whether Gov. Jan Brewer should be similarly ousted, based on how many people volunteer to collect petition signatures.
Randy Parraz and Chad Snow, co-founders of Citizens for a Better Arizona, also announced the creation of a "citizens posse" Monday to prevent voters from electing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a sixth four-year term next year.
The pair stopped short of threatening to oust Brewer, whose term ends in 2014.
But they encouraged disgruntled voters to sign up to volunteer online at citizensforabetteraz.com if they support a Brewer recall election, which would require more than 432,000 valid signatures. If at least 5,000 voters sign up as volunteer petition circulators, Parraz said, his group would back a recall effort against the governor.
"Our job is to listen to the citizens of Arizona," Parraz said.
Parraz said that Brewer overreached when she removed the chairwoman of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission earlier this month and that Brewer owes the public an apology. The Arizona Supreme Court last week reinstated Colleen Mathis, saying the governor didn't have sufficient cause to remove her.
Parraz also urged the governor to boost unemployment benefits. Brewer called a special session in June to extend benefits to nearly 15,000 people, paid for with federal funds, but the Republican-controlled Legislature rebuffed her.
Parraz and Snow are buoyed by the stunning defeat of Pearce, the Senate president and a hard-line illegal-immigration opponent who lost the Nov. 8 recall to GOP newcomer Jerry Lewis.
Earlier Monday, Brewer signed the official canvass certifying the recall results. Lewis will be sworn in today.
Asked if she was concerned about a recall effort against her, the governor replied, "I haven't given it any thought."
Arpaio was similarly unfazed.
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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2011/11/21/20111...
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5.
New Jersey Cop Indicted in Immigration Shakedown
Fox News Latino, November 22, 2011
Authorities say a police officer in New Jersey faces theft, attempted extortion, bribery and official misconduct charges for unwarranted motor vehicle stops of Latino men.
Elizabeth police officer Rocco Malgieri allegedly pulled over Latino men, before questioning them about their residency status and threatening to report them to federal immigration officials unless they gave him money.
A 58-count indictment returned Friday alleges the veteran officer began targeting Latino men in February for unwarranted vehicle stops while he was on duty.
Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow said Monday at least 12 people had reported that Malgieri solicited payments from them ranging from $30 to $250.
The 43-year-old officer has been suspended from the Elizabeth police department without pay.
A lawyer who previously represented Malgieri on the initial charges, Donald DiGioia, did not return a call for comment Monday.
Malgieri surrendered in March and remains free on a $20,000 bond.
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http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2011/11/22/new-jersey-cop-indi...
