Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been sued by the U.S. Justice Department for refusing to cooperate with a civil-rights probe into police practices and jail operations

By Yvonne Wingett and JJ Hensley

The Arizona Republic

Keeping the heat on Arizona’s immigration policies, the U.S. Justice Department has sued a Phoenix-area community college system for allegedly discriminating against non-citizens by requiring them to show extra paperwork before they could be hired

By Scott Wong

The suit, filed against the Maricopa County Community College District on Monday, comes less than two months after the Justice Department sued Arizona over the state’s tough new law targeting illegal immigrants. The department also is investigating possible civil-rights abuses by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a border hawk who calls himself “America’s toughest sheriff.”

Republican Gov. Jan Brewer has been feuding with the Obama administration over its legal challenge to the immigration law. More recently, she condemned a State Department human-rights report to the United Nations Human Rights Council that took issue with the law, which requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop or detain if they suspect that person is in the country illegally.

That particular provision of the law has been put on hold by a federal judge.

The latest lawsuit followed a yearlong Justice Department probe that officials say revealed “a pattern or practice of discrimination” by the community college system. During an 18-month period, nearly 250 non-citizen job applicants were required to present green cards and other work-eligibility documents beyond those required by federal law.

“For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.”

By Nina Bernstein, New York Times, Posted Aug. 29, 2010

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

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El Universal, News Report, Posted: Aug 28, 2010
MEXICO CITY — A woman from El Salvador who was forced to work as a cook for the paramilitary group Los Zetas shared her story with the Mexican newspaper El Universal. The woman, idenitfied as Marisolina, said she was held captive for three months because she didn’t have relatives to pay her ransom. She said she was forced to work and wash clothes for the criminal organization responsible for the recent massacre of 72 immigrants.

“I washed the blood of those people many times. As I washed the clothes, pieces of flesh would come out,” she told El Universal.

One of her captors called himself “the butcher” because he was in charge of killing immigrants who couldn’t pay them.

“Above the butchers were the bosses, who gave the orders of who would be made to disappear,” she said.

Marisolina was released by her captors during a military operation in which other migrants were rescued. But, she said, they warned her not to let her “big mouth” kill her.

Photo by Phil Soto

La Opinión, News Report, Posted: Aug 27, 2010
MEXICO CITY — Immigrant organizations, mothers of the disappeared and coordinators of shelters for deportees blame the Mexican government for the massacre of 72 Central and South Americans in Tamaulipas.

Xicotencalt Carrasco, director of the Belen Posada del Migrante shelter in Saltillo, Coahuila told La Opinión the Mexican government was guilty due to inaction, corruption and lack of respect.

Carrasco said that more than two years ago his shelter and other groups had presented a report on the deaths of migrants in Mexico, but the government was focused on debating the numbers.

Amnesty International reported in April that Mexican authorities had failed to implement effective measures to prevent the abuse and kidnapping of migrants by criminal organizations.

“Often they operate in complicity or with the consent of public officials,” said the organization.

In October 2008 and February 2009, two caravans of Central American women travelled through Mexico in search of their disappeared sons, but none of the authorities agreed to help them, according to pastor Luis Angel Nieto of the organization “Nuestros Lazos de Sangre.”

The Attorney General for the Republic (PGR) believes those killed were immigrants who failed to cooperate with Los Zetas.

In a separate article, La Opinión reports that one of the investigators looking into the massacre disappeared and was later found dead, presumably killed by Los Zetas.

New America Media, News Report, Valeria Fernández , Posted: Jul 29, 2010
PHOENIX, Ariz. ——A judge has blocked for now parts of a controversial law that made it a state crime for a person to be an undocumented immigrant in Arizona. The news brought relief to thousands of families who were waiting until the last minute to decide whether to leave the state. But the ruling won’t change what has made Arizona one of the most hostile environments for immigrants in the nation.

At the heart of SB 1070 is a concept that has been the cornerstone for a slew of laws enacted over the years, making life harder and harder for immigrants.

It’s called attrition through enforcement.

The preamble of SB 1070 states the concept clearly: “The legislature finds that there is a compelling interest in the cooperative enforcement of federal immigration laws throughout all of Arizona. The legislature declares that the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.”

The very definition of attrition is a wearing down or weakening of resistance. GOP State Senator Russell Pearce, the mastermind behind SB 1070, has never made it a secret that this was his goal: to make the lives of undocumented immigrants in Arizona so difficult that they would have no other choice but to leave.

His supporters, including former Maricopa County chief prosecutor Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio—have recognized that fear is an essential part of the strategy. They have used it to its fullest extent by taking state laws created to fight smugglers and unlawful employers and turning them against immigrants.

In three years, Arpaio’s deputies have arrested 4,000 undocumented immigrants. Some would argue that is a drop in the bucket, given that an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants reside in the state. But fear has magnified those numbers, prompting many thousands of other immigrants to flee Arizona for friendlier places.

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La Opinión, News Report, Valeria Fernández, Translated by Elena Shore, Posted: Jul 27, 2010
PHOENIX, Ariz.— Amparo De Paredes fills a giant bucket with bottles of water as a bunch of girls run around the house, playing with two adopted puppies.

They aren’t her daughters, but these days it feels like they are her own, especially since their mothers were arrested by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department in two raids on the Sizzler’s restaurant chain on June 12.

“I don’t have kids, but it touches my heart to see what is happening,” says Amparo, a 52-year-old Guatemalan immigrant.

As hundreds of immigrant families leave the state days before the implementation of the new law, SB 1070, which makes it a state crime to be undocumented, those who stay are living in uncertainty.

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Watch this video made by Jason Aragon from PanLeft where he shows one of the many acts of civil disobedience taking place in Arizona as the date for SB 1070 to go into effect comes close.

Seven people were arrested by Phoenix Police on Thursday outside the U.S. District Court in Phoenix. Meanwhile the federal government was presenting arguments against the new law that makes it a state crime to be an undocumented immigrant.

Watch this video made by Dennis Gilman of Civil Disobedience outside court proceedings.

New America Media, News Report, Valeria Fernández, Posted: Jul 23, 2010
PHOENIX, Ariz.—A week before Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is slated to go into effect, its immediate future rests in the hands of one federal judge. If the judge does not grant an injunction, halting the implementation of the law, then as of next Thursday, July 29, it will be a state crime to be undocumented in Arizona.

In two separate hearings in a Phoenix courtroom on Thursday, attorneys representing a broad coalition of civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice argued that portions of SB 1070 need to be enjoined because they usurp the federal government’s authority to regulate immigration law.

Defense attorneys said Arizona only wants to do its part when it comes to an issue that has gotten out of control in the border state, and the law does not conflict with federal immigration policies but rather allows for cooperation.

Judge Susan Bolton peppered attorneys with probing questions aimed at dissecting SB 1070, section by section: How can the police determine who is removable from the country and who is not? Would SB 1070 require police to hold someone indefinitely until they determine they are in the country illegally? What would happen to people who don’t have documents but are in the process of applying for a humanitarian visa? Why can’t a state create its own policy to have uniformity in the way police departments handle immigration?

The sticking point for the judge seemed to be the fact that Arizona had created a new state crime of being in the country illegally, conflicting with previous Supreme Court decisions that said states couldn’t have their own immigration registration systems.

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