Miami Valedictorian Could Be Deported

March 2, 2012: By Seni Tienabeso @Senijr_ABC and Matt Gutman @mattgutmanABC | ABC News North Miami High School senior Daniela Palaez has a 6.7 GPA, the valedictory nod from her classmates, a brother in the U.S. Army and deportation papers to Colombia. In a hearing on Monday a federal immigration judge ordered the 18-year-old Palaez, [...]

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6 young illegal immigrants arrested in Ga. protest

ATLANTA—Six young illegal immigrants were arrested Tuesday after they sat down and blocked traffic near the Georgia state Capitol to publicly declare their status and to protest state policies targeting people who are in the U.S. illegally, the latest in a string of such “coming out” events in Georgia and other parts of the country.

The young people were protesting a policy that bars Georgia’s most competitive state colleges and universities from accepting illegal immigrants and they were opposing strict new state legislation. A federal judge on Monday blocked two key provisions of that law. The young people, who decided to risk arrest and deportation for their protest, say that’s not enough.

Federal judges have now blocked parts of similar laws in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia from taking effect. Civil liberties groups have pledged to sue to block others in Alabama and South Carolina.

“It’s time to stand up and let the world know that we need to fight for what we believe in,” said Nataly Ibarra, a 16-year-old high school student.

Four of the young people arrested are high school students, one is a recent high school graduate and one is a 24-year-old college graduate. All six face charges of reckless conduct, obstructing law enforcement and obstructing the street. The three who are under 18 were to be released to their parents. Two 18-year-olds and the 24-year-old were set to be taken to the Fulton County Jail.

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It Gets Even Worse

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

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Arizona Chuy’s Restaurants raided by IRS, Immigration Agents

Chuy’s Mesquite Broiler restaurants in Arizona and California were raided by federal agents Wednesday in the culmination of a lengthy investigation into alleged tax fraud and illegal hiring practices at the chain.

Chuy’s father-and-son owners, Mark Evenson of Paradise Valley and Christopher Evenson of Oro Valley, were arrested Wednesday along with the company accountant, Diane Strehlow of Tempe.

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Some DREAM students face nightmare scenarios

Thanks to the shameful failure of Congress to pass the DREAM Act last year, an estimated 60,000 students in U.S. high schools and colleges lost their chance to come out of the shadows and regularize their immigration status.

The DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act would provide conditional permanent residency to some deportable alien students who graduate from U.S. high schools, are of good moral character, arrived in the U.S. illegally as minors and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment.

After the legislation was blocked by a Senate filibuster in December, the Obama administration announced it would not pursue removal actions against DREAM Act students, even if they were out of status or undocumented.

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Abused and Deported: Immigrant Women Face Double Disgrace

María Bolaños has been fighting her deportation for more than a year, since a fight with her husband when she called the police to report that she was a victim of domestic violence. The police arrived at her home and, suspecting her of illegally selling phone cards, ordered her arrest.

Her case is the most well known, but activists say all programs that mix police work with immigration enforcement represent a growing threat to immigrant women who are victims of domestic violence.

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Plunge in border crossings leaves agents fighting boredom

Reporting from San Luis, Ariz. — The border fence ran right in front of Jeff Byerly’s post, a straight line of steel that stretched beyond town and deep into the desert. As a U.S. Border Patrol agent on America’s front line, Byerly’s job was to stop anyone from scaling the barrier. Hours into his midnight shift, his stare was still fixed, but all was quiet.

He pounded energy drinks. He walked around his government vehicle. On the other side of the fence, the bars in the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado closed, and only the sound of a passing car broke the silence. Byerly, 31, switched on his DVD player. Minutes later, a supervisor knocked on the window: The slapstick comedy “Johnny English” was on; Byerly was fast asleep.

Wild foot chases and dust-swirling car pursuits may be the adrenaline-pumping stuff of recruitment efforts, but agents on the U.S.-Mexico border these days have to deal with a more mundane occupational reality: the boredom of guarding a frontier where illegal crossings have dipped to record low levels.

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Family’s Saga Highlights Kinks in Immigrant Detention System

WASHINGTON – Logan Guzman likes to pretend he’s a superhero. One week he’s Spiderman. The next he’s Batman. Whichever hero he embodies, the 4-year-old’s goal is always the same: He wants to save his father.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Logan’s dad, Pedro Guzman, 30, in front of the family’s Durham, N.C., home on Sept. 28, 2009. Logan and his mother, Emily, could only look on.

“I was scared, but in the back of my mind I just felt like everything would eventually be OK because I was a citizen and he was married to me,” said Emily Guzman, 33, a mental health therapist who was born and raised in the U.S.

Nearly 19 months later, Pedro Guzman is still in immigration custody after multiple requests for release on bond were denied. He has two misdemeanor marijuana-possession charges from 1998 on his record. Because of that he’s considered a flight risk. So he waits.

ICE detained 383,524 immigrants in 2009, according to its most recent annual report. Detention facilities consist largely of county jails and privately contracted detention centers.

Pedro Guzman sits in a cell at the large-scale Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., more than nine hours from his family in Durham and two hours from the Atlanta office of his attorney, Glen Fogle.

Revisions announced in 2009 aim to give detention facilities more federal oversight, but critics say the changes aren’t moving fast enough.

The fractured network of detention facilities, often located in remote, rural towns, means that many detainees never speak to lawyers.

“Unlike in the criminal system, where if someone can’t afford a lawyer they’re appointed one, in the immigration system you have a right to a lawyer but you have to find and pay for one yourself,” said Tara Tidwell Cullen of the National Immigrant Justice Center, which provides legal services and advocates for immigration policy restructuring.

Even if detainees have the resources to find lawyers, the isolated locations of many detention facilities put attorneys financially out of reach, Tidwell Cullen said.

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State Lawmakers Push Back Against Immigration Enforcement Program

WASHINGTON — State lawmakers in Illinois and California are pushing to cut their states’ ties to an immigration enforcement program that they say was unfairly imposed on local governments against their wishes.

The program, Secure Communities, is touted as a key component of the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement strategy and has helped DHS set records for deportations and removals. The Obama administration plans to expand the program nationwide by 2013.

But the program’s success is tainted by criticisms at the local level, where law enforcement officials and immigrant rights advocates say it is expensive, distracts police from other duties, and unfairly nets undocumented people who did not commit crimes.

Worst of all, according to critics, local jurisdictions that do not want to participate in the program are unable to withdraw from it, even though the federal government originally said the program was voluntary.

A bill in Illinois, called The Smart Enforcement Act, would correct this problem, said sponsor Rep. Dan Burke.

“There should be a provision in these programs that local communities can opt out if they decide it’s not working in their best interest or it’s adding costs or there are unintended consequences,” said Burke, who represents a majority-Latino district in Southwest Chicago. “It seems like a very fair and reasonable solution to a problem that was brought up by our local sheriffs and communities.”

Secure Communities is a finger-print sharing system, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to run prints taken from local police through databases to check for immigration status. Police routinely take fingerprints after arrests, then submit them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for background checks.

The Smart Enforcement Act, like a similar bill in California, would allow counties to opt-out of the program, or block fingerprint-sharing with immigration enforcement agencies.

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ICE Set to Deport University of Arkansas Honors Student

Jonathan Chavez, an honors student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, was on his way home to visit his parents when immigration authorities nabbed him on a bus and hauled him to a private detention facility in Florida. His crime? Despite the fact that his parents have legal status in the United States, Jonathan does not possess legal status because his naturalization process was stalled when he turned 18.

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