Immigration officials back away from deportation program; Effort quickened process but raised rights issues

By Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 6, 2011

Federal immigration officials have quietly backed away from a program in Arizona and other Western states aimed at quickly and efficiently deporting illegal immigrants rather than keeping them in costly detention centers.

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, including thousands from Arizona, have been deported under the program over the past several years. Called stipulated removal, it allows the government to quickly deport illegal immigrants held in detention centers as long as they forgo a hearing before a judge to review their legal rights and to determine if they want to fight their case.

The phaseout follows controversies and concerns.

Immigration officials hailed the program as cost-effective deportations for people who wanted to go home. Critics worried that the government was strong-arming immigrants to accept deportation without regard for their due-process rights.

Immigration officials changed course in September 2010 after a federal appellate court ruled that an immigrant held in an Eloy detention center had his rights violated. After that, speedy removals were offered only to illegal immigrants with lawyers, who could help them fight their cases. Lawyers are not provided at taxpayer expense in deportation proceedings.

Since then, immigration officials have not deported a single illegal immigrant through the program in Arizona, said Vincent Picard, a spokesman for ICE in Phoenix. Picard could not provide statistics for other states.

ICE officials did not publicize the dramatic policy change. Many immigrant lawyers and critics of the program were unaware the change had been made.

Time and money

In a deportation proceeding, an illegal immigrant has the right to appear in front of an immigration judge to decide whether to contest the case. The immigrant also has the right to hire a lawyer.

But under stipulated removal, an immigrant who doesn't want to fight deportation gives up the right to a hearing. The immigrant also gives up the right to an appeal. Once the immigrant agrees to those stipulations, the judge signs a deportation order, even if the immigrant is not in the courtroom.

Supporters of stipulated removal, which remains in effect in other parts of the country, say it benefits both the government and illegal immigrants. The program can save time and money.

The illegal immigrant is typically deported within a day or two. In comparison, an illegal immigrant facing deportation can spend weeks or even months in detention. In 2011, the average time was 29 days, according to ICE statistics.

The average daily cost of detention in 2011 was $112.83, said Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman.

"Such agreements between ICE and the alien are advantageous to the government in that it relieves the immigration court of the need to have a hearing, saves ICE additional detention costs, and allows the alien to return to his/her country expeditiously," Picard said in an e-mail.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank that favors strict immigration enforcement, said the program should be expanded, not scaled back.

Offering stipulated removal only to immigrants who hire their own lawyers bogs down the judicial process and defeats the purpose of the program: to quickly remove illegal immigrants with no legal grounds to remain in the U.S. who want to go home, Vaughan said. It also clogs up immigration courts, making less room for immigrants with strong legal cases to remain in the U.S.

"I see the greater use of stipulated removal as expediting the inevitable, with the result being swifter access to hearings for the people who are more likely to benefit from them," she said.

Phillip Crawford, a former field director for ICE's enforcement and removal operations in Arizona, said it is a shame that stipulated removals have been curtailed.

The program, he said, had several levels of "safeguards" to ensure that the rights of illegal immigrants were protected and that participants understood what they were signing. Each case was reviewed by ICE officers during processing at detention centers, by ICE prosecutors and by an immigration judge who has the power to reject the deportation if the judge believes the immigrant had legal grounds to remain.

He also said the program targeted illegal immigrants from Mexico convicted of aggravated felonies with little chance of legally remaining in the U.S.

"It was an excellent program," Crawford said.

Rights protected?

Critics say stipulated removal circumvents immigrants' rights and largely targeted immigrants who had not committed crimes.

A 30-page report released in September by the National Immigration Law Center accused government officials of pressuring illegal immigrants to accept quick deportation by threatening long detention stays if they tried to fight to remain in the U.S. The government also often didn't provide adequate interpretation and translation to immigrants who didn't speak English, the report said.

The report found that 80 percent of those deported through the program hadn't committed crimes.

The report also found that 96 percent of those deported didn't have lawyers. Therefore, the report concluded, many of those without criminal records may have been eligible to remain in the U.S. if they had had a chance to fight their case.

Instead of deportation, the non-criminals also may have qualified for less-severe voluntary departure, which gives immigrants the chance to return to the U.S. if they qualify for a green card, said Karen Tumlin, managing attorney for the Law Center. Instead, by accepting stipulated removal, immigrants are generally barred from coming back to the U.S. for as long as 10 years and face felony charges for illegally re-entering the country.

The report was based on 20,000 government documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Tumlin said she was unaware that ICE had stopped offering stipulated removals to immigrants unless they had a lawyer. The Arizona Republic discovered the new policy in September, when it began examining the Law Center report.

"If that's true, it would be welcome news," Tumlin said.

The change, she said, alleviates concerns that the quick removals were violating the due-process rights of illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants placed in deportation proceedings can sometimes fight their case in court if they meet certain conditions, such as having resided in the U.S. for a long period of time, having no criminal record and having children born in this country.

Evolving program

Launched in 1995 to help alleviate overcrowding in federal, state and local detention centers, the stipulated-removal program was rarely used until President George W. Bush's administration began ramping up immigration enforcement in 2004. The high rate continued during the first two years of President Barack Obama's administration. According to ICE, 32,635 people were deported in 2010.

From 2004 to 2010, immigration officials deported more than 160,000 under the program, according to the National Immigration Law Center's September report.

The report found that more than 24,000 came from the detention center in Eloy, the highest number of any facility in the country.

Internal government e-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information lawsuit and posted online by the National Immigration Law Center show that in 2005 alone, 5,787 illegal immigrants from Mexico detained in Eloy were deported through the program and that stipulated removals accounted for more than 50 percent of all deportations at the center.

In September 2010, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that immigration officials at Eloy had violated the rights of Isaac Ramos. Ramos, an illegal immigrant from Mexico with prior criminal convictions, had agreed to stipulated removal while being detained in Eloy in 2006. The court ruled that the government failed to make it clear to Ramos that he was giving up his right to talk to a lawyer, who could have explained the process and the penalties. The court also ruled that the immigration judge who signed Ramos' deportation order failed to determine if Ramos had agreed to stipulated removal "voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently," as required.

Ramos, who is married to a legal permanent resident and has two U.S.-citizen children, had argued that he should be allowed to return to the U.S. since his rights to due process were violated. The court, however, denied that request.

Since backing away from using stipulated removal, ICE has worked out a different approach in Arizona, Picard said.

Illegal immigrants who do not have legal representation and do not want to contest their cases are given the option of attending "prompt hearings," Picard said.

Held in front of immigration judges, the hearings ensure that immigrants facing deportation are advised of their "full array" of rights under the law, he said. Immigration judges also confirm that the immigrants are aware of any possibility to legally remain in the U.S.

"Only if the judge is satisfied that the aliens are removable under the charges filed against them, and are making a knowing and intelligent waiver of their rights, will the judge order their removal," Picard said.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2011/11/06/20111106immigration-arizona-deportation-program.html#ixzz1cx6wDGx2

Nearly 7,000 deportation cases in Georgia to be reviewed for possible dismissal

By Jeremy Redmon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, August 26, 2011

Thousands of suspected illegal immigrants facing deportation in Georgia will have their court cases reviewed for possible dismissal as the Obama administration tightens its focus on violent criminals and national security threats.

There were 6,861 pending cases combined in immigration courts in Atlanta and the Stewart Detention Center in southwest Georgia as of July 31, the most recent date for which these statistics are available, U.S. Justice Department figures show. Nationwide, there were 289,033 pending cases as of that date.

It’s unclear how many of those cases could be closed under plans the Obama administration announced this month. Federal officials don’t keep statistics on how many involve the people they are focusing on, including those who have committed violent crimes, repeat violators of immigration law, people who recently crossed the border illegally and fugitives from immigration authorities.

Opponents of the government's plans say President Barack Obama is playing politics and ignoring federal immigration laws. Supporters say the government needs to prioritize because it has limited resources to detain and deport illegal immigrants.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced plans for the nationwide, case-by-case review in a letter to U.S. senators Aug. 18. She said a team of officials will review all pending cases based on guidelines Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued June 17. Those guidelines say ICE prosecutors may give special consideration to several groups, including illegal immigrants who were brought here as young children, graduated from high schools here or served in the U.S. military.

A Homeland Security spokesman said the government is still deciding how it will do the case-by-case review and when the work will begin.

But the government has already started closing cases in Georgia based on ICE's guidelines.

On Tuesday, Pedro Morales, 19, of Dalton and Luis "Ricky" Hernandez, 18, of Calhoun were freed from the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin after their attorney cited the ICE guidelines and Napolitano’s letter in court. Both were illegally brought here from Mexico as young children. And both have attended public high schools in North Georgia.

Other Atlanta-area immigration attorneys say they will use similar tactics. Carolina Antonini said that before Napolitano sent her letter this month Antonini told some of her clients facing deportation: “ ‘Look, I am going to request some things, but it is probably not going to work. Start packing your bags.’ My advice to them now is: ‘Don’t pack your bags. Unpack. This is not over.’ ”

Critics are blasting the new policy, accusing Obama of ignoring federal immigration law and making the United States appear more inviting to illegal immigrants.

“You simply cannot overstate the abuse of executive power that this represents,” said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based organization that supports tougher immigration enforcement. “This administration has just gone completely rogue on this.”

Illegal immigration has long been a hot-button issue in Georgia. Critics say illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from U.S. citizens and burdening taxpayer-funded resources. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are 425,000 illegal immigrants in Georgia, the seventh-highest total among the states.

Complaining that the federal government has failed to seal the nation’s borders, Georgia lawmakers this year enacted one of the toughest state laws targeting illegal immigration. A federal judge, however, has temporarily put parts of that law on hold amid a court challenge. Other parts of the law went into effect July 1, including a provision that punishes people who use fake identification to get jobs here.

The author of Georgia’s new law -- House Bill 87 -- said the Obama administration’s new approach amounts to “political pandering leading up to an election.”

“Signaling via regulation that they intend to do less enforcement rather than more enforcement is exactly the wrong direction we should be going in as a nation,” said state Rep. Matt Ramsey, R-Peachtree City.

Proponents of the new policy say it makes sense to focus more on deporting violent criminals and terrorists, given the government’s limited resources.

"This case-by-case approach will enhance public safety,” Napolitano wrote in her letter to senators. “Immigration judges will be able to more swiftly adjudicate high priority cases, such as those involving convicted felons. This process will also allow additional federal enforcement resources to be focused on border security and the removal of public safety threats.”

In Georgia, the government has just seven immigration judges. That works out to nearly 1,000 cases per judge, based on the Justice Department’s most recent count.

Meanwhile, it takes 353 days on average for a case to be resolved in Atlanta’s immigration courts, according to a study by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization that monitors the federal government. Nationwide, the average is 302.

In interviews this week, Hernandez and Morales -- who were both facing deportation to Mexico -- praised the new approach.

“I grew up being an American,” said Morales, who was illegally brought to the United States from Mexico when he was 7. “I don’t know nothing about Mexico. Mexico is a foreign country to me. And they were trying to send me there.”

Morales was arrested in Whitfield County in June on a charge of driving without a license. He graduated from Whitefield Career Academy and is planning to study auto mechanics at Georgia Northwestern Technical College.

Like Morales, Hernandez was arrested during a traffic stop last summer in Whitfield. He was charged with possession of marijuana, but that charge was dropped, his attorney said. Hernandez is now a senior at Gordon Central High School and plans to study construction in college.

“It’s good,” he said of the new policy, “because now we have more opportunities to go to college and have a better life now, a better job. And we know we will not be deported.”
Find this article at:

http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/nearly-7-000-deportation-1145575.html

The New Operation Wetback: Immigration and Mass Incarceration in the Obama Era

By JAMES KILGORE
Counterpunch
4 August 2011

Last week Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) joined a demonstration in Washington D.C. to protest the refusal of President Obama to use his executive powers to halt the deportations of the undocumented. Gutierrez’ arrest came only two days after Obama had addressed a conference of the National Council of La Raza. Conveniently forgetting the history of the civil right struggles that made his Presidency a possibility, Obama reminded those attending that he was bound to “uphold the laws on the books.”

With over 392,000 deportations in 2010, more than in any of the Bush years, many activists fear we are in the midst of a repeat of notorious episodes of the past such as the “Repatriation” campaign of the 1930s and the infamous Operation Wetback of 1954, both of which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Latinos.

But several things are different this time around. A crucial distinction is that we are in the era of mass incarceration. Not only are the undocumented being deported, many are going to prison for years before being delivered across the border. While the writings of Michelle Alexander and others have highlighted the widespread targeting of young African-American males by the criminal justice system, few have noted that in the last decade the complexion of new faces behind bars has been dramatically changing. Since the turn of the century, the number of blacks in prisons has declined slightly, while the ranks of Latinos incarcerated has increased by nearly 50%, reaching just over 300,000 in 2009.

A second distinguishing feature of the current state of affairs is the presence of the private prison corporations. For the likes of the industry’s leading powers, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, detaining immigrants has been the life blood for reviving their financial fortunes.

Just over a decade ago their bottom lines were flagging. Freshly built prisons sat with empty beds while share values plummeted. For financial year 1999 CCA reported losses of $53.4 million and laid off 40% of its workforce. Then came the windfall - 9/11.

In 2001 Steven Logan, then CEO of Cornell Industries, a private prison firm which has since merged with GEO, spelled out exactly what this meant for his sector :

"I think it's clear that with the events of Sept. 11, there's a heightened focus on detention, both on the borders and within the U.S. [and] more people are gonna get caught…So that's a positive for our business. The federal business is the best business for us. It's the most consistent business for us, and the events of Sept. 11 are increasing that level of business."

Logan was right. The Patriot Act and other legislation led to a new wave of immigration detentions. By linking immigrants to terrorism, aggressive roundups supplied Latinos and other undocumented people to fill those empty private prison cells. Tougher immigration laws mandated felony convictions and prison time for cases which previously merited only deportation. Suddenly, the business of detaining immigrants was booming. PBS Commentator Maria Hinojosa went so far as to call this the new “Gold Rush” for private prisons.

The figures support Hinojosa’s assertion. While private prisons own or operate only 8% of general prison beds, they control 49% of the immigration detention market. CCA alone operates 14 facilities via contracts with ICE, providing 14, 556 beds. They have laid the groundwork for more business through the creation of a vast lobbying and advocacy network. From 1999-2009 the corporation spent more than $18 million on lobbying, mostly focusing on harsher sentencing, prison privatization and immigration.

One significant result of their lobbying efforts was the passage of SB 1070 in Arizona, a law which nearly provides police with a license to profile Latinos for stops and searches. The roots of SB 1070 lie in the halls of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a far right grouping that specializes in supplying template legislation to elected state officials. CCA and other private prison firms are key participants in ALEC and played a major role in the development of the template that ended up as SB 1070.

For its part, GEO Group has also been carving out its immigration market niche. Earlier this year they broke ground on a new 600 bed detention center in Karnes County, Texas. At about the same time the company bought a controlling interest in BI Corporation, the largest provider of electronic monitoring systems in the U.S. The primary motivation for this takeover was the five year, $372 million contract BI signed with ICE in 2009 to step up the Bush initiated Intense Supervision Appearance Program. (ISAP 11). Under this arrangement the Feds hired BI to provide ankle bracelets and a host of other surveillance for some 27,000 people awaiting deportation or asylum hearings.

Sadly, the Obama presidency has consistently provided encouragement for the likes of CCA and GEO to grow the market for detainees. While failing to pass immigration reform or the Dream Act, the current administration has kept the core of the previous administration’s immigration policy measures intact. These include the Operation Endgame, a 2003 measure that promised to purge the nation of all “illegals” by 2012 and the more vibrant Secure Communities (S-Comm). Under S-Comm the Federal government authorizes local authorities to share fingerprints with ICE of all those they arrest. Though supposedly intended to capture only people with serious criminal backgrounds, in reality S-Comm has led to the detention and deportation of thousands of people with no previous convictions.

At the National Council of La Raza’s Conference Obama tried to console the audience by saying that he knows “very well the pain and heartbreak deportation has caused.” His words failed to resonate. Instead Rep. Gutierrez and others took to the streets, demonstrating that “I feel your pain” statements and appeals to the audacity of hope carry little credibility these days. It is time for a serious change of direction on immigration issues or pretty soon, just as Michelle Alexander has referred to the mass incarceration of African-Americans as the New Jim Crow, we may hear people start to call the ongoing repression of Latinos a “New Operation Wetback.”

James Kilgore is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois. He is the author of three novels, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, Freedom Never Rests and Prudence Couldn’t Swim, all written during his six and a half years of incarceration. He can be reached at waazn1@gmail.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/kilgore08042011.html

One of the nation’s largest immigrant detention facilities may be built in Southwest Ranches

By Roshan Nebhrajani
The Miami Herald
Posted on Fri, Jul. 22, 2011

A 24-acre stretch of land in Southwest Ranches, just off of U.S. 27 bordering Pembroke Pines, may be the future home to one of the nation’s largest immigrant detention facilities.

The proposed center will have 1,800 beds, far surpassing the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, which has capacity for 700, according to the Immigration Customs Enforcement.

“The new facility’s size is consistent with the existing demand for beds in the Miami area,” said ICE public affairs officer Dani Bennett.

South Florida is home to two of the state’s five facilities: the Krome Service Processing Center and the Broward Transitional Center.

The transitional center “houses only non-violent populations with less serious or no criminal history,” according to Bennett.

Krome is divided into three pods for detainees with serious or criminal backgrounds and six dormitories for non-violent detainees.

Krome has 581 beds and normally operates at or near maximum capacity, according to ICE spokesman Nestor Yglesias.

The new facility is going to be built to meet a demand for 1,500 to 2,000 beds in the South Florida area. It will reduce transfers and enable detainees to have better access to legal services in their area, Bennett said.

But immigrant activists have rallied against the new detention facility.

The Florida Immigrant Coalition conducted a phone survey polling the citizens of Southwest Ranches of their opinions of the new facility. The coalition asked: “Do you want a prison in Southwest Ranches?”

Of the 229 residents that responded, 203 — 89 percent — selected no, according to Natalia Jaramillo.

Additionally, “growers are worried about it because it would create an exodus of farm workers,” Jaramillo said.

Community organizer and immigrant rights activist Diego Sanchez thinks the new center will increase immigrant raids. “We’ve seen a lot of those already and it’s only going to get worse,” Sanchez said.

Southwest Ranches was selected over Florida City and Belle Glade, which also applied for the center.

“It would have been a heck of a boost for the economy. It would have created jobs during construction as well as permanent jobs,” said Otis Wallace, Florida City mayor. “But ICE is currently negotiating with Southwest Ranches, and what that means is that all other negotiations are off.”

The Corrections Corporation of America, a private corrections management company, purchased the land in Southwest Ranches in 1998, and has since been marketing the land to officials in Southwest Ranches and government agencies for possible development, according to CCA spokesman Steve Owen.

Although the deal between ICE and Southwest Ranches is, for now, tentative, once Corrections Corporation of America gets the green light to build, they can get the center built “pretty quickly,” according to Owen.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/22/v-print/2326928/one-of-the-nations-largest-immigrant.html#ixzz1T1ax2Mns

Detainees in New Mexico beg to be deported through safe territory

“Please Save Us”

By Andrew Beale
Alibi.Com; V.20 No.27 | July 7 - 13, 2011

This Week's News/Opinion

The Tijuana / San Diego border

Almost 50 people held on immigration charges in New Mexico signed letters saying that if they are deported over the state's border, they will be immediately kidnapped or killed.

One missive, written in June in broken English, was sent to David Hill of the nonprofit No More Deaths by 21 detainees held at the facility in Torrance County, N.M. “Please save us,” they wrote. They pled to be deported through the Arizona or California border instead.

They said that if sent through either New Mexico or Texas, they will be kidnapped by a drug gang known as Los Zetas and will almost certainly die.

The letter-writers knew each other only from being in the detention center together, according to No More Deaths. One of the men had been kidnapped after a previous deportation, and he shared the story with others in the facility.

The detainees’ letter also says the municipal police in Mexico kidnap deportees and turn them over to gangs that hold them for ransom. “They take you to an abandon alley or house and waiting for you is this group Los Zetas at gunpoint your eyes are bandaged and your feet and hands are tied, and so begins the nightmare!”

“It's not entirely clear to us when, in fact, and how they're going to be deported and what their immigration status actually is.”

Peter Simonson, executive director of ACLU-NM

No More Deaths started a letter-writing campaign on behalf of the detainees, and about 7,000 letters were sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The participation has been more than double anything we’ve done before with this campaign,” says Hill, a volunteer who works in Nogales, Ariz.

Other activist groups were relieved that dangerous deportations were being spotlighted, Hill says. Several national nonprofits, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have become involved in the case.

Peter Simonson, executive director of ACLU-NM, says he has been in contact with the detainees and sent an email to the directors of the Torrance County Detention Facility. But, he adds, there is no appeal process possible through the U.S. justice system. He says the ACLU is considering the possibility of appealing to an international body, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights—a course of action that ACLU-NM has never pursued before. Any decision rendered by such an organization would not be legally enforceable, he says. “Basically, the hammer behind it would be political pressure.”

“The humanitarian consequences ... are enormous, as is evidenced by the case of these detainees that are terrified for their lives.”

Lena Graber, a policy associate with the National Immigration Forum

Simonson says he's unsure of the locations of some of the detainees. “It's not entirely clear to us when, in fact, and how they're going to be deported and what their immigration status actually is.”

No More Deaths released a statement on its website on Thursday, June 23, indicating that seven have already been deported. A volunteer with the organization, Hannah Hafter, says other letter-writers are being held indefinitely at a facility in El Paso. Since they perceive a threat to their lives, they may be able to apply for asylum. Still, many are frantic about the indefinite detention, she says, and wish they could be returned to Mexico to continue supporting their families.

Representatives of ICE declined to comment for this story but issued a response to the call for safer deportations. ICE recommends the detainees contact the Mexican Consulate with safety concerns. The response notes “ICE recognizes the current situation relating to violence in Mexico,” but the agency does not allow people to choose the location they will be deported to.

The statement goes on to say that as of March 3, ICE has not been deporting “criminal aliens”—that is, immigrants facing criminal charges unrelated to immigration status—through Ciudad Juárez.

Hafter says the response letter from ICE is upsetting. “It’s basically both acknowledging that they know that this is happening to people and saying that they don’t do anything about it, and it’s not their responsibility.”

Furthermore, reaching out to the Mexican Consulate or other government agencies for help could be dangerous. Simonson says the detainees told him in conversation that Mexican immigration services have been known to collaborate with drug cartels. He says the detainees told the ACLU that “the receiving immigration office is actually conspiring with the drug cartel to hand people over to the drug cartel so they can be held for ransom.”

ICE generally sends deportees to a different location from where they were apprehended, according to Lena Graber, a policy associate with the National Immigration Forum.

“They believe that it's part of a fair strategy of deterrence to re-entry,” she says. “The humanitarian consequences for that are enormous, as is evidenced by the case of these detainees that are terrified for their lives.”

Hill of No More Deaths says getting people deported through Arizona or California would be a great help to the people who sent the letters, but more drastic policy reform is needed on the border.

“The things that people are experiencing immediately on deportation are happening all over the border—kidnappings, extortion, beatings, ” he says. “Obviously, we would like to see fundamental immigration reform.”

http://alibi.com/news/37758/article.html

Nuevas prisiones de ICE preocupan a la comunidad inmigrante

Activistas temen que la política migratoria de Obama empeore en 2012
Por Jorge Cancino
Univision.com
Fecha: 02/07/2011

Un reportaje del diario La Opinión de Los Angeles, sobre la construcción de nuevos centros de detención para inmigrantes indocumentados, revivió recientes denuncias sobre el trato que reciben miles de extranjeros sin papeles apresados por la Oficina de Aduanas y Control Fronterizo (ICE).

Según el periódico, ICE firmó contratos para la edificación de nuevos centros en zonas cercanas a ciudades con alta concentración de inmigrantes y donde se llevan a cabo el mayor número de arrestos.

En los primeros dos años de la administración del Presidente Barack Obama, el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS) deportó a poco más de 800 mil indocumentados, cifra récord reconocida por las propias autoridades federales.

La Opinión aseguró que se encuentran en planes de desarrollo varios centros en California, Florida, Illinois, Nueva Jersey y Texas.

"Están equivocados"

"Pareciera que no nos tienen miedo", dijo a Univision.com Jorge Mario Cabrera, director de comunicaciones de la Coalición por los Derechos Humanos de los Inmigrantes de Los Angeles (CHILA). "Creen (el gobierno federal de Obama) que nuestro poder político no es suficiente como para descarrilar el tren que ellos han hecho marchar a velocidades máximas desde hace dos años. Están equivocados".

Cabrera reiteró que de la alta cifra de deportados por el gobierno en los dos últimos años, "entre seis y siete de cada 10 no tenía antecedentes criminales que representaran una amenaza para la seguridad nacional". La cifra manejada por CHIRLA y respaldada por varias organizaciones nacionales que defienden los derechos de los inmigrantes se encuentra muy por encima de la anunciada por el gobierno, quien asegura que cerca del 70 por ciento de los expulsados sí tenía antecedentes criminales serios (crimen, asesinatos, violaciones y drogas, entre otros).

"Pero sobre todo me preocupa que sea el propio director de ICE, John Morton, quien dijo el martes en Chicago que la agencia no tiene recursos para instalar un sistema de videoconferencia para que los inmigrantes arrestados en centros lejos de sus hogares puedan hablar con sus familiares", cuestionó Cabrera. "Sin embargo tienen recursos para erigir nuevas cárceles. Es tremendo, tremendo".

A pedido de México

La instalación de sistemas de videoconferencias fue sugerida por el Consulado General de México. Morton también reconoció que la agencia que dirige tiene "muchos" centros de detención en el área de Chicago y aseguró que el mayor número de extranjeros deportados por Estados Unidos es de origen mexicano.

"Así como él (Morton) describe esa situación en Chicago, me temo que de la misma manera está describiendo la situación de miles y miles de inmigrantes en el país, y que alguien estará haciéndose rico a costa de que estas miles de personas estén ahora en un centro de detención, y todavía quieren hacer más cárceles. Es inhumano privarlos de libertad completamente y retenerlos indefinidamente. Hay gente que nos dice que están ahí seis, cuatro meses, más tiempo… Pareciera que no hay guías claras que indiquen qué tiene que hacer ICE con los inmigrantes arrestados. Están haciendo lo que les venga en gana".

Morton se reunió en Chicago con representantes de organizaciones que defienden los derechos de los inmigrantes, autoridades policiales y de la gobernación de Illinois, para hablarles de la participación de los estados en el polémico programa federal Comunidades Seguras, una de las principales herramientas del gobierno para arrestar a indocumentados.

Illinois se retiró en mayo del programa argumentando que no cumple con su objetivo y quebró la confianza que la comunidad tiene en la policía, y que con ello se perdió un elemento clave en el combate al crimen.

Base de datos en la mira

Comunidades seguras es una gigantesca base de datos a cargo de ICE que cruza información con centros carcelarios, gobiernos locales y otras agencias federales para buscar a extranjeros con antecedentes criminales. El programa fue lanzado en seis ciudades en 2006 y en estos momentos funciona en 42 estados. La oficina de fiscalización del DHS lo investigará a partir de agosto tras una andanada de denuncias y Morton anunció, hace dos semanas, cambios en atención a innumerables quejas recibidas por el gobierno.

La base de datos también coteja las huellas dactilares tomadas por las policías a sospechosos detenidos por cualquier infracción.

Pero los cambios a Comunidades Seguras no son suficientes para aplacar el nerviosismo de las organizaciones pro inmigrantes. "Lo malo es que muchos están diciendo que es mejor que hagan las nuevas cárceles y tener a nuestros familiares cerca, para poder hablarles, para poder verlos. Eso no está bien. Con el anuncio de la construcción de nuevos centros el gobierno del presidente Obama está en proceso de implementar grandes centros de concentración de inmigrantes como nunca antes se había visto en Estados Unidos", apuntó.

ICE asegura que las obras forman parte de "un plan para reformar y mejorar el trato a los inmigrantes y adaptarlos al tipo de inmigrante detenido", ya que hoy en día casi la mitad está en cárceles locales bajo contrato, se lee en la nota de La Opinión.

"No hay garantías de que mejorará el trato a los inmigrantes detenidos, ninguna", dijo Cabrera. "Sigue pendiente la denuncia sobe los centros de ICE que hizo la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH), que en los centros de detención de inmigrantes se viola el debido proceso", recordó.

El informe de la OEA

A finales de julio de 2010 la CDIH concluyó en un informe que en las cárceles de ICE los inmigrantes indocumentados son mantenidos en "condiciones inaceptables", y que en algunos casos el derecho al debido proceso "ha sido afectado".

"La frecuente subcontratación del personal de tales instalaciones a través de compañías correccionales privadas generan obstáculos considerables para que la atención ofrecida a los migrantes detenidos resulte compatible con sus derechos humanos básicos", precisó.

Agregó que dos tercios de los inmigrantes detenidos por ICE se encuentran confinados en recintos carcelarios estatales y municipales y no en sitios especializados, una situación que calificó de "lamentable".

En cuanto a los indocumentados homosexuales, transexuales o enfermos mentales, la CIDH reveló que éstos son mantenidos incomunicados con el alegato de protegerlos por su vulnerabilidad, pero en realidad esa es "una manera de castigar a las víctimas", denunció.

Dramáticas carencias

Otro delicado aspecto visto y constatado por los expertos de la Comisión fue la falta de acceso a abogados de los menores detenidos. En su gran mayoría, los menores deben defenderse por sí mismos, resaltó la Comisión.

Dijo además que la Border Patrol (Patrulla Fronteriza) no hace las preguntas pertinentes cuando detiene a menores indocumentados para determinar si son víctimas de tráfico de personas o califican para solicitar asilo en Estados Unidos.

Otro frente de críticas al gobierno de Obama por su política carcelaria para indocumentados se genera por el alto número de detenidos y el costo que ello significa, un movimiento de varios millones de dólares cada año.

Una investigación del Center for American Progress (CAP) hecha en 2010 encontró nexos entre empresas que administran penales de inmigrantes y personajes que impulsan iniciativas para criminalizar la migración indocumentada en estados tales como Arizona.

El informe detalló que leyes como la polémica SB1070 tienen como objetivo que cientos de indocumentados ingresen a prisión por las ganancias que generarían.

Andrea Nill, una de las consultoras que participó en el estudio, dijo en abril a Univision.com que todo apunta a que leyes contra la inmigración indocumentada como la SB1070 de Arizona “le permiten al sistema tener más indocumentados en sus prisiones”.

Asimismo, un reciente reporte de The Associated Press, atribuido a auditores gubernamentales, dio cuenta que unos 55 mil inmigrantes estuvieron recluidos en prisiones federales el año pasado.

Bajo el programa Comunidades Seguras, las identidades de todos ellos fueron cotejadas por ICE.

La GAO señala además que el número de inmigrantes arrestados y deportados por ICE aumentó 70% desde 2009, y que las infracciones de tránsito y los delitos de drogas representan la mitad de los ilícitos que han derivado en esas detenciones.

"Nosotros seguimos insistiendo en que el gobierno debe detener las deportaciones y centrar la atención en la reforma migratoria", dijo Cabrera. "Más cárceles es una respuesta equivocada. Pareciera que no nos tienen miedo", reiteró y dijo que la comunidad hispana "lo tendrá en cuenta" en las elecciones presidenciales de 2012.

http://noticias.univision.com/inmigracion/noticias/article/2011-06-30/alarma-nuevas-prisiones-ice

Thousands Poised to Enter Deportation Process After Mass ICE Arrest

By Judson Berger
FoxNews.com
Published June 21, 2011

The Obama administration announced Tuesday that federal agents swept up 2,400 illegal immigrants in a nationwide raid last month, starting what will likely be a months-long process of figuring out what to do with them.

The sweep, the product of a seven-day enforcement operation called "Cross Check," was described as the largest of its kind.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, in coordination with other federal agencies and local officials, tracked down illegal immigrant criminals in all 50 states and are now housing them in ICE jails across the country.

For some detainees, the next step will be a one-way flight to their home country. For others, the process could take much longer.

The illegal immigrants arrested in the sweep last month were divided into three basic categories: fugitives who had outstanding deportation orders against them, those who already had been deported and illegally re-entered the U.S., and at-large convicted criminals.

Those in the first two categories will once again be slated for deportation, though those in the second category could also face prosecution in the U.S. for the crime of illegal re-entry. The timing of their deportation would vary, depending on factors like travel documents, the availability of flights and whether their home countries will take them.

But those in the third category will be placed into removal "proceedings" before a federal immigration judge. That judge then has the discretion to order them deported or grant some form of relief to remain in the U.S.

"They're afforded due process," a federal immigration official said.

And that process can take a while. According to a report last fall by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, it took an average of 280 days for the immigration courts to act on cases in fiscal 2010, the last year for which data was available.

ICE could not provide a breakdown of what's happened to the 2,064 convicted criminals and fugitives swept up in prior Cross Check arrests. However, the agency reported that more than 122,000 criminal aliens have been removed from the country since Oct. 1.

ICE officials touted the latest raid as a message to illegal immigrant criminals that they will get caught. Among those arrested were a Libyan living in Denver convicted of first-degree sexual assault against a child and a Filipino living in Orlando convicted of battery on a law enforcement officer.

"The results of this operation underscore ICE's ongoing focus on arresting those convicted criminal aliens who prey upon our communities and tracking down fugitives who game our nation's immigration system," ICE Director John Morton said in a statement.

The operation also sends a message to states and cities that have lashed out against a separate federal-local partnership known as Secure Communities -- through which FBI fingerprints are checked against Homeland Security Department databases to see if a suspect is in the country illegally. Some states, like New York, recently came out against the program, expressing concern that it is preventing people in the immigrant community from working with law enforcement.

But ICE stressed that in the Cross Check raid federal officials were only targeting serious offenders. It came after new guidelines were issued for Secure Communities to focus the screening efforts on dangerous criminals.

While the administration is narrowing its immigration enforcement to criminals and fugitives, others say that approach is not doing the trick.

Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors in Virginia, called the arrests announced Tuesday a "drop in the bucket." He expressed concern that federal officials are still letting far too many illegal immigrants off the hook for minor crimes, which can lead to major crimes. In Prince William County, two illegal immigrants with prior records were charged in connection with deadly crimes in the span of just six months.

Stewart acknowledged that many of those swept up in the latest arrests will likely face deportation.

"They're probably going to deport most of them. ... These are very serious criminals," he said. "But again, it's just the tip of the iceberg."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/21/feds-announce-mass-arrest-illegal-immigrants/#ixzz1Q6TWVFIc

Global capitalism and 21st century fascism; The global economic crisis and the attack on immigrant rights are bound together in a web of 21st century

By William I. Robinson
Al Jazeera
08 May 2011

The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity. The stakes have never been higher; our very survival is at risk. We have entered into a period of great upheavals and uncertainties, of momentous changes, fraught with dangers - if also opportunities.

I want to discuss here the crisis of global capitalism and the notion of distinct political responses to the crisis, with a focus on the far-right response and the danger of what I refer to as 21st century fascism, particularly in the United States.

Facing the crisis calls for an analysis of the capitalist system, which has undergone restructuring and transformation in recent decades. The current moment involves a qualitatively new transnational or global phase of world capitalism that can be traced back to the 1970s, and is characterised by the rise of truly transnational capital and a transnational capitalist class, or TCC. Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to accumulation beyond the previous epoch, and with it, to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour - and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world, in the wake of the global rebellions of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Emergent transnational capital underwent a major expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, involving hyper-accumulation through new technologies such as computers and informatics, through neo-liberal policies, and through new modalities of mobilising and exploiting the global labour force - including a massive new round of primitive accumulation, uprooting, and displacing hundreds of millions of people - especially in the third world countryside, who have become internal and transnational migrants.

We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions.

Militarised accumulation, financial speculation - and the sacking of public budgets

By the late 1990s, the system entered into chronic crisis. Sharp social polarisation and escalating inequality helped generate a deep crisis of over-accumulation. The extreme concentration of the planet's wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment, and dispossession of the majority, even forced participants in the 2011 World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos to acknowledge that the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide is "the most serious challenge in the world" and is "raising the spectre of worldwide instability and civil wars."

Global inequalities and the impoverishment of broad majorities mean that transnational capitals cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated. By the 21st century, the TCC turned to several mechanisms to sustain global accumulation, or profit making, in the face of this crisis.

One is militarised accumulation; waging wars and interventions that unleash cycles of destruction and reconstruction and generate enormous profits for an ever-expanding military-prison-industrial-security-financial complex. We are now living in a global war economy that goes well beyond such "hot wars" in Iraq or Afghanistan.

For instance, the war on immigrants in the United States and elsewhere, and more generally, repression of social movements and vulnerable populations, is an accumulation strategy independent of any political objectives. This war on immigrants is extremely profitable for transnational corporations. In the United States, the private immigrant prison-industrial complex is a boom industry. Undocumented immigrants constitute the fastest growing sector of the US prison population and are detained in private detention centres and deported by private companies contracted out by the US state.

It is no surprise that William Andrews, the CEO of the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA - the largest private US contractor for immigrant detention centres - declared in 2008 that: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts … or through decriminalisation [of immigrants]." Nor is it any surprise that CCA and other corporations have financed the spate of neo-fascist anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and other US states.

A second mechanism is the raiding and sacking of public budgets. Transnational capital uses its financial power to take control of state finances and to impose further austerity on the working majority, resulting in ever greater social inequality and hardship. The TCC has used its structural power to accelerate the dismantling of what remains of the social wage and welfare states.

And a third is frenzied worldwide financial speculation - turning the global economy into a giant casino. The TCC has unloaded billions of dollars into speculation in the housing market, the food, energy and other global commodities markets, in bond markets worldwide (that is, public budgets and state finances), and into every imaginable "derivative", ranging from hedge funds to swaps, futures markets, collateralised debt obligations, asset pyramiding, and ponzi schemes. The 2008 collapse of the global financial system was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.

This is not a cyclical but a structural crisis - a restructuring crisis, such as we had in the 1970s, and before that, in the 1930s - that has the potential to become a systemic crisis, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on a host of unknown contingencies. A restructuring crisis means that the only way out of crisis is to restructure the system, whereas a systemic crisis is one in which only a change in the system itself will resolve the crisis. Times of crisis are times of rapid social change, when collective agency and contingency come into play more than in times of equilibrium in a system.

Responses to the crisis and Obama's Weimar republic in the United States

In the face of crisis there appear to be distinct responses from states and social and political forces. Three stand out: global reformism; resurgent of popular and leftist struggles from below; far-right and 21st century fascism. There appears to be, above all, a political polarisation worldwide between the left and the right, both of which are insurgent forces.

A neo-fascist insurgency is quite apparent in the United States. This insurgency can be traced back several decades, to the far-right mobilisation that began in the wake of the crisis of hegemony brought about by the mass struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the Black and Chicano liberation struggles and other militant movements by third world people, counter-cultural currents, and militant working class struggles.

Neo-fascist forces re-organised during the years of the George W Bush government. But my story here starts with Obama's election.

The Obama project from the start was an effort by dominant groups to re-establish hegemony in the wake of its deterioration during the Bush years (which also involved the rise of a mass immigrant rights movement). Obama's election was a challenge to the system at the cultural and ideological level, and has shaken up the racial/ethnic foundations upon which the US republic has always rested. However, the Obama project was never intended to challenge the socio-economic order; to the contrary; it sought to preserve and strengthen that order by reconstituting hegemony, conducting a passive revolution against mass discontent and spreading popular resistance that began to percolate in the final years of the Bush presidency.

The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to undercut mobilisation from below for more far-reaching transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the co-option of leadership from below; its integration into the dominant project. Dominant forces in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North America are attempting to carry out such a passive revolution. With regard to the immigrant rights movement in the United States - one of the most vibrant social movements in that country -moderate/mainstream Latino establishment leaders were brought into the Obama and Democratic Party fold – a classic case of passive revolution - while the mass immigrant base suffers intensified state repression.

Obama's campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilisation and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channelled it into the electoral campaign, and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilised the insurgency from below with more passive revolution.

In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response to the crisis - for a project of 21st century fascism - to become insurgent. Obama's administration appears in this way as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis, but rather side-lined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933.

21st century fascism in the United States

I don't use the term fascism lightly. There are some key features of a 21st century fascism I identify here:

The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power
This fusion had been developing during the Bush years and would likely have deepened under a McCain-Palin White House. In the meantime, such neo-fascist movements as the Tea Party as well as neo-fascist legislation such as Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB1070, have been broadly financed by corporate capital. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as prone to seek fascist political arrangements to facilitate accumulation: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy (particularly petroleum) sector.

Militarisation and extreme masculinisation
As militarised accumulation has intensified the Pentagon budget, increasing 91 per cent in real terms in the past 12 years, the top military brass has become increasingly politicised and involved in policy making.

A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and contradictions
In this case, immigrants and Muslims in particular. The Southern Poverty Law Centre recently reported that "three strands of the radical right - hate groups, nativist extremist groups, and patriot organisations - increased from 1,753 groups in 2009 to 2,145 in 2010, a 22 per cent rise, that followed a 2008-9 increase of 40 per cent."

A 2010 Department of Homeland Security report observed that "right wing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on the fears about several emergency issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right wing radicalisation and recruitment." The report concluded: "Over the past five years, various right wing extremists, including militia and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruitment tool."

A mass social base
In this case, such a social base is being organised among sectors of the white working class that historically enjoyed racial caste privilege and that have been experiencing displacement and experiencing rapid downward mobility as neo-liberalism comes to the US - while they are losing the security and stability they enjoyed in the previous Fordist-Keynesian epoch of national capitalism.

A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats
The ideology of 21st century fascism often rests on irrationality - a promise to deliver security and restore stability is emotive, not rational. 21st century fascism is a project that does not - and need not - distinguish between the truth and the lie.

A charismatic leadership
Such a leadership has so far been largely missing in the United States, although figures such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck appear as archetypes.

The mortal circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion

One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is the dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population - that portion marginalised and locked out of productive participation in the capitalist economy and constituting some 1/3rd of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in a planet of slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control - otherwise known as "police states". This system becomes ever more violent.

Theoretically stated - under the conditions of capitalist globalisation - the state's contradictory functions of accumulation and legitimation cannot both be met. The economic crisis intensifies the problem of legitimation for dominant groups so that accumulation crises, such as the present one, generate social conflicts and appear as spiralling political crises. In essence, the state's ability to function as a "factor of cohesion" within the social order breaks down to the extent that capitalist globalisation and the logic of accumulation or commodification penetrates every aspect of life, so that "cohesion" requires more and more social control.

Displacement and exclusion has accelerated since 2008. The system has abandoned broad sectors of humanity, who are caught in a deadly circuit of accumulation-exploitation-exclusion. The system does not even attempt to incorporate this surplus population, but rather tries to isolate and neutralise its real or potential rebellion, criminalising the poor and the dispossessed, with tendencies towards genocide in some cases.

As the state abandons efforts to secure legitimacy among broad swathes of the population that have been relegated to surplus - or super-exploited - labour, it resorts to a host of mechanisms of coercive exclusion: mass incarceration and prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, manipulation of space in new ways, highly repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity through petty consumption and fantasy.

A 21st fascism would not look like 20th century fascism. Among other things, the ability of dominant groups to control and manipulate space and to exercise an unprecedented control over the mass media, the means of communication and the production of symbolic images and messages, means that repression can be more selective (as we see in Mexico or Colombia, for example), and also organised juridically so that mass "legal" incarceration takes the place of concentration camps. Moreover, the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes allows for 21st century fascism to emerge without a necessary rupture in electoral cycles and a constitutional order.

The United States cannot be characterised at this time as fascist. Nonetheless, all of the conditions and the processes are present and percolating, and the social and political forces behind such a project are mobilising rapidly. More generally, images in recent years of what such a political project would involve spanned the Israeli invasion of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, to the scapegoating and criminalisation of immigrant workers and the Tea Party movement in the United States, genocide in the Congo, the US/United Nations occupation of Haiti, the spread of neo-Nazis and skinheads in Europe, and the intensified Indian repression in occupied Kashmir.

The counterweight to 21st century fascism must be a coordinated fight-back by the global working class. The only real solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power - downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below.

William I. Robinson a professor of sociology and global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201142612714539672.html

Measure to hasten inmate deportations nears OK

By Mike Faulk
Yakima Herald-Republic
April 15, 2011

Legislation to reduce the state's prison population by making it faster and easier to deport immigrant inmates is nearing approval in Olympia.

House Bill 1547 would reduce the state's average daily prison population by 127 and save the $1.2 million in the 2012 fiscal year, said John Scott Blonien, assistant secretary for the state Department of Corrections, said.

The bill, which would send immigrant inmates directly to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, applies only to immigrant prisoners convicted of nonviolent and nonsexual crimes. The category represents a small share of the state's total inmate population of 16,000.

"These are individuals who without fail would have been deported anyway," Blonien said. "It's just a question of when the deportation takes place."

The bill has been overwhelmingly approved by both the House and Senate, but differences between the bill's two versions must be reconciled.

The House version says an arrest warrant would be issued for the inmate for the remainder of his or her sentence, a safeguard that would land offenders back in prison if they re-enter the country during that time. The Senate version calls for the warrant to remain in effect indefinitely.

Immigrants rights groups want language added to clarify how offenders facing deportation will be made aware of their rights under the newer and, theoretically, faster release and deportation process.

"While this bill is not directly dealing with deportation, it can affect people's means to contest a deportation order," Jorge Baron, executive director of the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, said.

Baron said the legislation affects legal and illegal immigrants alike. Because those facing deportation have no right to an attorney in immigration proceedings, Baron said the legislation needs a requirement to keep inmates informed of the proceedings before they're carried out.

Baron said under the current process, inmates who could face deportation have time to contact immigrants rights groups such as his to arrange private counsel for immigration court.

"Without any indication they'll be turned over, they won't have time to pursue options under this bill," he said.

But Blonien says a process already exists in federal court for those facing deportation to be advised of their rights to contest it. He said it would be "extremely awkward" to require state- appointed defense council to advise people on federal immigration policy and state courts to verify it.

"Before the judge gives an offender the opportunity to stipulate or agree to a deportation, there's a full panoply of rights they're advised of," Blonien said.

The bill passed the House in March and passed the Senate April 5. It now heads back to the House for a vote on the two amendments added by the Senate.

http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2011/04/15/measure-to-hasten-inmate-deportations-nears-ok

Pilot fingerprint program in three Colorado jails to aid deportations

By Kieran Nicholson
The Denver Post
February 15, 2011

Fingerprints of inmates booked into three jails in Colorado can now be forwarded electronically to federal databases, and returned information could lead to deportations of illegal immigrants.

The Secure Communities Program kicked off today in Arapahoe and El Paso counties, as well as Denver, according to the Colorado Department of Public Safety.

"These are counties that have stepped forward," said Lance Clem, a public safety spokesman.

In January Gov. Bill Ritter approved Colorado's participation in the program. Colorado joins at least 35 other states in the measure.

"This is a very important program that will have a positive impact upon public safety, will enhance our ability to identify criminal aliens, and will focus upon the timely deportation of those who continue to victimize our community," Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said.

As part of the program, jailers will receive immigration status information within two hours of submitting fingerprints to federal databases, which will lead to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement placing a "deportation detainer" on illegal immigrants.

The pilot program, which started at 7 a.m. and should last about six to eight weeks, aims to "ensure a smooth transition" for other sheriff's offices across the state, Robinson said.

Every inmate booked into the jail is fingerprinted and all fingerprints will be submitted to the federal data base via the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Robinson said.

"It will be seamless," he said.

Robinson, who sat on the Governor's Immigration Task Force, said his office has some concerns over a "backlog" of inmates, or an "uptick" in the jail's population, but it "shouldn't cause overcrowding."

"We are very glad it was implemented," Robinson said.

The County Sheriffs of Colorado and the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police both support the program, Robinson said, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is aiming for nationwide implementation by 2013.

Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_17393883

Georgia detention center is largest in nation

Facility in Stewart, Ga. houses detainees facing deportation from U.S.
By Jeremy Redmon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 16, 2011

ATLANTA — Georgia doesn't have the most illegal immigrants among the states. Not by far. That distinction, according to official estimates, falls to California.

But Georgia can claim it is tops in something else. It is home to the biggest and busiest jail in the nation for people facing deportation, federal records show.

On average, the privately run Stewart Detention Center in southwest Georgia held 1,614 detainees per day during the fiscal year ending in September.

That is the most of any of the 252 jails where the federal government houses suspected illegal immigrants, according to figures supplied by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall, Texas, ranked second with an average daily count of 1,527 detainees, followed by the Eloy Federal Contract Facility in Eloy, Ariz., with 1,487.

Stewart — which is located in Lumpkin and houses detainees from Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina — had the highest count partly because it can hold the most at 1,924.

But ICE also has expanded its enforcement efforts in states that send suspects to Stewart, including Georgia. Among those efforts is a federal fingerprint-sharing program called "Secure Communities." State legislators, meanwhile, are preparing to crack down on illegal immigration, which could send more people to one of several jails where the federal government holds people in Georgia.

Taxpayers, of course, are footing the bill for jailing illegal immigrants in the state and across the nation. ICE's budget for detaining people stood at $1.77 billion last fiscal year. As of the end of December, ICE was holding 33,442 people in jails nationwide.

Activists have called on ICE to shut down Stewart and its other jails in Georgia, complaining they are located in isolated corners of the state far from immigrants' families and attorneys. They also have urged ICE to use less expensive alternatives to detention, such as freeing immigrants on bond and requiring them to check in with the government periodically.

"We are putting a whole bunch of money into a failed immigration system," said Anton Flores-Maisonet of Georgia Detention Watch, a coalition of organizations seeking the closure of all ICE jails in Georgia. "And in the end, the only people who are going to profit are the private prison industries that we are contracting with here in Georgia."

Critics say suspected illegal immigrants could flee while on bond.

"You have to hold people, especially in immigration, because the flight risk is huge," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that advocates for tighter immigration controls.

Federal immigration officials said they are required to hold certain offenders in their detention centers, including those who have committed violent crimes. They said they keep tabs on others by making them wear electronic monitoring devices. ICE had a $69.9 million budget for such alternatives last fiscal year.

"One of our long-term goals is ensuring key detention facilities are located near the site of apprehensions, legal service providers, hospitals and medical providers, immigration courts and transportation hubs," ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said. "This nationwide evaluation is ongoing."

Corrections Corp. of America, a $1.6 billion business based in Nashville, owns and operates the Stewart jail. Federal taxpayers pay Stewart County $60.50 per inmate held at that jail per day through an agreement with ICE. That works out to $97,647 per day, based on the last fiscal year's average daily inmate count.

The county, however, keeps only 85 cents per inmate per day for its administrative costs and pays CCA the rest, or $59.65 per inmate per day.

Since 2007, the county has collected about $1.7 million through this arrangement, county officials said. That represents more than half of the county's $3 million annual operating budget.

The jail is the county's largest employer with about 340 workers, most of whom are from the local area, CCA and county officials said. Jobs are crucial in Stewart, where nearly one in five families live below the federal poverty level, according to U.S. census figures.

Some detainees are sent to ICE jails after they are caught crossing the border illegally or overstaying visas. Most in Stewart wound up there after being charged with other crimes, some as minor as traffic offenses, others as serious as rape, robbery and murder. They aren't sent to Stewart, however, until after they complete sentences for any crimes they commit in the United States. Some are transferred to Stewart from state prisons and county jails. Most are originally from Central America and South America.

Those held at the jail wear color-coded uniforms and are segregated, based on the crimes they have committed. The most violent criminals wear red, while the least violent wear blue.

ICE and CCA officials gave a reporter from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution a roughly hourlong tour of the jail. Dozens of detainees were observed quietly watching television, reading and making phone calls from large rooms where they sleep on bunk beds. Others are held in two-man quarters.

Some of the detainees were playing soccer in a fenced-in courtyard. They also have access to Wii video games and a library.

Detainees can voluntarily work for $1 to $3 a day cooking and cleaning, said Mike Swinton, the jail's warden. They can save that money or spend it on MoonPies, pork rinds, chicken ramen noodles or other goods sold in the jail store.

Oscar Leon, 25, who lived in Norcross, spent two months in Stewart late last year before he was deported to Mexico. He said he was struck by how many detainees passed through Stewart. Hundreds leave each week, but buses routinely pull up to the jail, carrying more people to replace them, said the Phoenix High School graduate. Leon was sent to Stewart last year after pleading guilty to driving without a license in Georgia.

"It's just like a well-oiled machine, you know," Leon said in a telephone interview last month from the jail. "One in, one out. One in, one out. It's amazing how many people come in and out in one week."

http://www.correctionsone.com/corrections/articles/3199855-Ga-detention-center-is-largest-in-nation/

Felony Immigration Cases Reach Record Levels in Certain Parts of California

Hispanically Speaking News
January 11, 2011

Authorities announced Friday that the number felony prosecutions in the Eastern District of California in fiscal year 2010 for illegal re-entry after deportation hit their highest level in at least 12 years.

In the most recent fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, there were 432 felony re-entry cases filed in the Eastern District involving 432 defendants, a seven percent increase compared to fiscal year 2009. The fiscal year 2009 figure of 404 defendants represented a 48 percent increase over fiscal year 2008, and a nearly 130 percent increase compared to fiscal year 2007. The cases all consisted of prosecutions for illegal re-entry to the United States following a prior deportation.

The previously deported aliens targeted for criminal prosecution were those who had been re-arrested in the Eastern District of California after serving prison time for aggravated felonies committed in the United States. Most defendants convicted of felony re-entry receive sentences of between two to six years.

The Eastern District of California covers 34 counties in the Central Valley and the Sierras, from the Los Angeles County line to the Oregon border. Authorities say the local increase in felony immigration cases stems from greater investigative and prosecutorial resources dedicated to such offenses. Both this year and last year, the U.S. Department of Justice authorized additional resources to bring immigration prosecutions in the Sacramento and Fresno offices.

“The criminal aliens targeted for prosecution by this office are those who pose a genuine public safety threat to our communities,” said U.S. Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner. “They are persons who previously had been convicted of serious crimes and then deported, only to return to California and engage in further criminal activity. No matter where one stands in the larger debate over federal immigration laws, there should be little debate over the prosecution of serious criminals who illegally return to California after prior deportations. I commend the diligent work of the agents and prosecutors who have worked so hard to bring these cases over the past year.”

The fiscal year 2010 felony re-entry convictions included an alien with numerous prior state and federal convictions, including robbery, burglary, kidnapping, child molestation and soliciting lewd acts, who had been previously removed from the country five times. Another defendant, with three prior removals, had past convictions for drug trafficking, vehicle theft, lewd and lascivious acts with a child under age 14, and alien smuggling. A third case involved a defendant with eight prior removals who had seven convictions for battery, along with convictions for burglary, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, and illegal re-entry to the United States.

“These prosecutions send an important message to criminal aliens who believe they can treat deportation as little more than a revolving door,” said Timothy Aitken, the field office director who oversees ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in Sacramento. “If you commit crimes in this country, get removed, and come back illegally, we will seek to prosecute you and put you in federal prison. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. ICE is bringing all of its tools to bear against those who show no regard for those laws.”

The felony re-entry statistics do not include other immigration prosecutions, such as cases involving the production or distribution of counterfeit immigration documents and aliens in possession of firearms. In fiscal year 2010, authorities noted there was also a sharp increase in misdemeanors prosecutions for illegal entry. Many of those prosecutions involved aliens who were apprehended in the vicinity of rural marijuana gardens in the Eastern District of California during law enforcement operations.

http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/notitas-de-noticias/details/felony-immigration-cases-reach-record-levels-in-certain-parts-of-california/4242/

Controversial immigration check at Santa Cruz County Jail speeds efficiency

By Stephen Baxter
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Posted: 01/04/2011

SANTA CRUZ — Nearly five months since a controversial fingerprint immigration check started at Santa Cruz County Jail, federal and local authorities say it has accelerated the deportation of illegal immigrants who have serious criminal histories.

The new Immigration and Customs Enforcement program, called Secure Communities, started Aug. 10 in Santa Cruz and has been rolled out to 38 of the state’s 58 counties. It checks jail inmates’ fingerprints against Department of Homeland Security immigration records and FBI criminal records.

County Jail staff used to fax a list of inmates’ names to federal authorities, but they now press the inmates’ fingertips on a machine and send the information to ICE in minutes.

“With this new program, literally some of the holds are coming through within an hour or two of their arrest,” said Jeff Marsh, chief deputy of the County Jail.

Fewer of the short-term inmates with immigration issues and serious criminal histories slip through the cracks and are released, Marsh said.

ICE holds are essentially triggered when an inmate has prior immigration issues and has been arrested for a serious crime, or if the person has a serious criminal history in addition to being an illegal immigrant, said Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman from Laguna Niguel.

The person must have previous contact with the FBI or Homeland Security, Kice said.

Since August, 119 County Jail inmates have been taken into ICE’s custody through Secure Communities, according to the most recent ICE records that ended Nov. 30.

Of those 119 inmates, 43 were deported to their home country, Kice said.

Tuesday, 28 inmates in Santa Cruz County Jail had ICE holds, according to jail records.

Those inmates will be in custody until their case is adjudicated in Santa Cruz, then ICE officials can transport them to an immigration court or a detention facility if the inmate has a criminal record, Kice said.

A match in the ICE system is based on the “totality of a person’s criminal and immigration history,” Kice said.

“In many instances, non-criminal aliens coming into ICE custody have been previously arrested for criminal offenses, though they were never convicted. They also may have been deported before or have outstanding orders of deportation. Other non-criminal cases that would be prioritized for enforcement are aliens with an affiliation to a known street gang or persons who have overstayed their visa,” Kice wrote in an e-mail.

The new system in Santa Cruz has made a difference for inmates who are in custody for public drunkenness and typically stay for four hours, Marsh said. In that time, ICE could match a person and ask for a hold.

Some immigration advocates have balked at that change, worrying that police could racially profile suspects to trigger immigration checks and deportation.

Santa Cruz police spokesman Zach Friend said that has not been the case.

“Secure Communities has nothing to do with Santa Cruz police. It simply doesn’t involve us,” Friend said.

The Santa Cruz police manual also says as much, Friend said.

Suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant is not a legitimate basis for an officer’s first contact with a person, the manual states. To try to protect victims and witnesses of crime who are illegal immigrants, the manual also instructs police not to report them to ICE unless “circumstances indicate that such reporting is reasonably necessary.”

Many Santa Cruz leaders have long supported the city’s so-called Sanctuary City status to protect illegal immigrants against harassment. Members of the City Council spoke out against federal immigration raids in Beach Flats in the early 1980s and against a 2006 raid that netted 107 people in Santa Cruz, Watsonville and Hollister.

Tony Madrigal, a Santa Cruz city councilman who has worked with immigrant issues for years, said residents have raised concerns with Secure Communities since August.

He and people he has spoken to view it as part of a larger issue of communication between immigrants and police, Madrigal said Tuesday.

“When crime has happened in Santa Cruz, (police) have said they can’t do it alone. But everyone in the community needs to feel that there’s that two-way trust. The willingness to cooperate constantly needs to be nurtured. So when something like Secure Communities is considered, there needs to be a conversation with local stakeholders,” Madrigal said.

A community group in Watsonville planned to meet this afternoon to discuss their issues with Secure Communities, Madrigal added.

Marsh, the chief deputy of the jail, said the County Jail had no choice but to implement it.

California leaders signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal government to roll out the program throughout the state, Kice said. Santa Cruz was chosen as one of the earlier counties based on its criminal population in the geographical area and the case load that ICE could handle, ICE spokeswoman Kice said.

“Jurisdictions cannot opt out of Secure Communities as it is an information sharing between federal partners,” Kice said.

For more information on ICE or to lodge a complaint of racial profiling, visit www.ice.gov/about/offices/enforcement-removal-operations/secure-communities.

ICE HOLDS

Number Santa Cruz County inmates who are also being held for immigration issues:

Aug. 13, 2010: 26

Jan. 4, 2011: 28

SOURCE: County Jail, Sheriff’s Office

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_17010874?source=email&nclick_check=1

Coziness between jails, ICE worries immigrants

By DEEPTI HAJELA
The Associated Press

November 12, 2010

NEW YORK (AP) — Luis Guerra swore he had nothing to do with any murder, that whoever picked him out of a lineup was wrong. Still, he was held at the Rikers Island jail for more than a year before the charges were dropped.

It didn't end there. Federal immigration officials stepped in because Guerra was in the country illegally, brought over from Mexico as a child. He ended up in federal immigration detention in Texas before being allowed to return to Manhattan; he's now waiting to find out whether he'll be shipped to a country he hasn't seen since he was 9.

Merely being at Rikers put him on the radar of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, said Guerra, 21, who's trying to get a college degree while awaiting word on his future. City authorities made "a mistake, and now I'm paying for their mistake," he said. "I was living a normal life before."

Removing illegal immigrants who come in contact with the criminal justice system is a significant part of ICE's nationwide enforcement efforts, but it needs the cooperation of local law enforcement to do so. The relationships that make it work are causing concern not just in New York, but also in places like Arlington County, Va.; Washington, D.C.; Santa Clara County, Calif.; and San Francisco.

Immigrant advocates and some politicians find it disturbing that local officials work with ICE on identifying illegal immigrants. In New York, they say, it puts a city that owes its existence to immigrants in the deportation business and breeds fear among immigrants that any contact with authorities — even reporting crimes — could have severe consequences.

"It is really not a good idea to have large segments of your community be afraid of law enforcement," said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at the New York University School of Law and part of its Immigrant Rights Clinic.

Guerra, testifying at a City Council hearing on the issue Wednesday, said he saw that firsthand after his 2007 arrest on a second-degree murder charge.

"There were people who witnessed the murder, people who could have cleared my name," he said, "but they were afraid to go to the police after they heard what was happening to me with immigration."

ICE has had a presence at New York's main jail complex for at least 15 years. The city Department of Correction says federal regulations require it to comply with things like detainers that ICE puts on inmates it wants custody of.

In the 2010 fiscal year, 3,155 out of 13,386 foreign-born inmates had ICE detainers, and 2,552 of them were released directly into federal custody when they were discharged from Rikers, the department said. Nationwide, about half of the nearly 393,000 people removed from the country in the past year were criminals, according to Homeland Security Department statistics.

"Our top priority is to identify and remove criminal convicted aliens who post a threat to the community and to national security," said ICE spokesman Ivan Ortiz-Delgado.

ICE says the city is obligated to hold anyone the agency has put a detainer on, and Department of Correction spokeswoman Sharman Stein echoed that.

If anything, ICE should be taking more people into the detention and deportation system, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration.

He argued that every illegal immigrant is deportable at any time, and that as it is, ICE exercises discretion in terms of whom it detains. Advocates' fears of a dragnet dragging are overblown, he said.

"I'd be ecstatic if this program worked the way immigrant rights groups fear it does," he said.

The federal agency often comes under fire for its practices, with critics citing issues like transfers of detainees far away from family and friends, and people in the system having limited access to legal resources that could allow them to stay in the country.

The city is going along with that by not exercising more care in who gets turned over to ICE, critics say. It's one thing for people convicted of violent felonies to be turned over, they say; it's another for someone convicted of a misdemeanor or of nothing at all.

That would include Jose Reyes, a legal resident from the Dominican Republic. Arrested in May 2009 after an argument with his ex's new boyfriend, an immigration detainer was put on him because of a misdemeanor drug arrest from 1997. He was able to avoid deportation after that case was reopened and the charge taken down to disorderly conduct.

"They say they're trying to arrest only criminals," he said through a translator at Wednesday's hearing. "It is not fair that people who have these small convictions are deported."

Critics also worry what the future holds as the Secure Communities program, a more extensive immigration enforcement effort not yet in use in New York City, continues to be implemented around the country as part of a national rollout planned by 2013.

There is confusion over whether localities can opt out of the program, under which the fingerprints of anyone arrested for anything from a traffic violation to a violent crime are automatically checked against federal immigration records.

Arlington County, Washington and Santa Clara County voted recently to opt out the program, saying it could lead to racial profiling, and San Francisco officials tried — with no luck — to drop it.

"I understand that the goal of the relationship between ICE and the Department of Correction is one that is based on the goal of public safety, and keeping New York City residents safe from individuals who are criminals and could do harm," Council Speaker Christine Quinn, among New York's most powerful politicians, said Wednesday.

But, she said, "many appropriate concerns have been raised that the way the Department of Correction is working with ICE is in a way that has granted them such latitude that the implementation of this program goes far beyond."

http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/coziness-between-jails-ice-worries-immigrants-1.2452731

Shaping State Laws With Little Scrutiny

by Laura Sullivan
National Public Radio
October 29, 2010

When you walk into the offices of the American Legislative Exchange Council, it's hard to imagine it is the birthplace of a thousand pieces of legislation introduced in statehouses across the county.

Only 28 people work in ALEC's dark, quiet headquarters in Washington, D.C. And Michael Bowman, senior director of policy, explains that the little-known organization's staff is not the ones writing the bills. The real authors are the group's members — a mix of state legislators and some of the biggest corporations in the country.

"Most of the bills are written by outside sources and companies, attorneys, [and legislative] counsels," Bowman says.

Here's how it works: ALEC is a membership organization. State legislators pay $50 a year to belong. Private corporations can join, too. The tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and drug-maker Pfizer Inc. are among the members. They pay tens of thousands of dollars a year. Tax records show that corporations collectively pay as much as $6 million a year.

With that money, the 28 people in the ALEC offices throw three annual conferences. The companies get to sit around a table and write "model bills" with the state legislators, who then take them home to their states.

Lobbying Or Education?

One of those bills is now Arizona's controversial new immigration law. It requires police to arrest anyone who cannot prove they entered the country legally when asked. Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants could be locked up, and private prison companies stand to make millions.

The largest prison company in the country, the Corrections Corporation of America, was present when the model immigration legislation was drafted at an ALEC conference last year.

ALEC's Bowman says that is not unusual; more than 200 of the organization's model bills became actual laws over the past year. But he hedges when asked if that means the unofficial drafting process is an effective way to accelerate the legislative process.

"It's not an effective way to get a bill passed," he says. "It's an effective way to find good legislation."

The difference between passing bills and "finding" them is lobbying. Most states define lobbying as pushing legislators to create or pass legislation. And that comes with rules. Companies typically have to disclose to the public what they are lobbying for, who's lobbying for them or how much they are spending on it.

If ALEC's conferences were interpreted as lobbying, the group could lose its status as a non-profit. Corporations wouldn't be able to reap tax benefits from giving donations to the organization or write off those donations as a business expense. And legislators would have a hard time justifying attending a conference of lobbyists.

Bowman says what his group does is educate lawmakers.

"ALEC allows a place for everyone at the table to come and debate and discuss," he says. "You have legislators who will ask questions much more freely at our meetings because they are not under the eyes of the press, the eyes of the voters. They're just trying to learn a policy and understand it."

Much about ALEC is private. It does not disclose how it spends it money or who gives it to them. ALEC rarely grants interviews. Bowman won't even say which legislators are members.

Is it lobbying when private corporations pay money to sit in a room with state lawmakers to draft legislation that they then introduce back home? Bowman, a former lobbyist, says, "No, because we're not advocating any positions. We don't tell members to take these bills. We just expose best practices. All we're really doing is developing policies that are in model bill form."

So, for example, last December Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce sat in a hotel conference room with representatives from the Corrections Corporation of America and several dozen others. The group voted on model legislation that was introduced into the Arizona legislature two months later, almost word for word.

Bowman says that type of meeting is an informational exchange, meant to help legislators understand policy.

But first ALEC has to get legislators to the conferences. The organization encourages state lawmakers to bring their families. Corporations sponsor golf tournaments on the side and throw parties at night, according to interviews and records obtained by NPR.

Bowman says that's nothing special: "We have breakfasts and lunch. They're at Marriotts and Hyatts. They're normal chicken dinner. Maybe sometimes they get steaks. Yeah, we feed the people. We think that it's OK to eat at a conference."

Videos and photos from one recent ALEC conference show banquets, open bar parties and baseball games — all hosted by corporations. Tax records show the group spent $138,000 to keep legislators' children entertained for the week.

But the legislators don't have to declare these as corporate gifts.

Consider this: If a corporation hosts a party or baseball game and legislators attend, most states require the lawmakers to say where they went and who paid. In this case though, legislators can just say they went to ALEC's conference. They don't have to declare which corporations sponsored these events.

'Scholarships' For Conferences

Kirk Adams, Arizona's House speaker, went to ALEC's most recent gathering in San Diego.

"I have been to ALEC's conferences and they have been pretty educational — the ones that I've been to," he says, adding that the time he spends with corporate executives does not influence his opinions on the issues.

"If we were to believe that a dinner with a lobbyist would purchase a member's allegiance to an issue, then we have much larger problems than that," Adams says. "It's just simply not been my experience at all."

When asked if he paid his own way to the ALEC conference, Adams acknowledges he accepted money from the group to help pay for the trip. ALEC calls this a "scholarship."

Many ALEC members receive these scholarships. But it's not clear who's really paying.

Michael Bowman initially said state Sen. Pearce, who also accepted a scholarship, would know who paid for his trip. But the Arizona lawmaker said ALEC paid for it. Later, Bowman said Bob Burns, another Arizona state Senator, would know. Burns was in charge of pooling money for the scholarships. He did not respond to NPR's repeated requests asking where the money came from.

In an office at the Arizona statehouse, a review of records show that not one Arizona legislator who went to the conference reported receiving any gifts of meals, parties, golf outings or banquets tickets from a private corporation.

Pearce and a dozen others wrote that they received a gift of $500 or more from ALEC.

A review of the two dozen states now considering Arizona's immigration law shows many of those pushing similar legislation across the country are ALEC members.

In fact, five of those legislators were in the hotel conference room with the Corrections Corporation of America the day the model bill was written.

The prison company didn't have to file a lobbying report or disclose any gifts to legislators. They don't even have to tell anyone they were there. All they have to do is pay their ALEC dues and show up.

Produced by NPR's Anne Hawke.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130891396