Homeland Security Focus Areas

Border and Port Security, Immigration and Customs

NYTimes.com

June 26, 2008 

160 Arrested in Immigration Raid at a Houston Plant

By THAYER EVANS

HOUSTON — Federal immigration agents arrested 160 employees on Wednesday in a raid on a used clothing and rag exporting plant.

The authorities said it was the largest workplace raid ever here. Most of those arrested were from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, officials said, and 70 percent of them were women.

It was the second major raid in Houston in just over two months. Federal agents arrested 20 workers at a Shipley Do-Nuts factory on April 16.

The roundup on Wednesday at Action Rags USA, which is just north of the Houston Ship Channel, began at 7 a.m. and was conducted by about 200 immigration agents, said Robert Rutt, special agent in charge of the Office of Investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Houston.

It was part of more than a yearlong investigation by the agency that was prompted by accusations that Action Rags had hired illegal immigrants, Mr. Rutt said.

In addition to the 160 arrested, the plant’s employees included 2 United States citizens and 13 to 19 legal residents, Mr. Rutt said. They were released.

The company’s hiring practices are being investigated for potential criminal violations, Mr. Rutt said.

“By attacking this issue in a comprehensive, strategic way, we believe we can force the culture of corporations to change,” Mr. Rutt said.

William F. Estes, who identified himself as a lawyer for Action Rags, said the company was shocked by the raid.

“We want to abide by the law, and we’re going to abide by the law,” Mr. Estes said. “If we have an illegal employee, we don’t know it. No way. Tell us what the law is, and we’ll obey it.”

After the white immigration vans had driven away, Maria Lopez huddled across the street from the plant with friends. Four of her friends worked at the plant, Ms. Lopez said.

After one of them called, crying, at 7:20 a.m., she went to the plant, where family members and friends of other employees had gathered.

Ms. Lopez said her friends at the plant had lived in Houston for more than 10 years, but none were legal residents. She said she was worried that they would be deported.

“It’s not fair,” said Ms. Lopez, 27, a legal resident. “They’re working to support their families. This shouldn’t have happened.”

Border Patrol casts wide net for recruits

By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff  |  June 20, 2008

JACKSON, Tenn. - In a highway-side hotel crowded with enthusiasts attending the Miss Tennessee beauty pageant, the US Border Patrol is hunting for new agents to keep America safe.

The first round of applicants did not look too promising. It included a former carnival worker, a pizza maker who said he was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, and an unemployed hotel clerk whose eyes lit up when she asked about carrying weapons.

They sat in the cramped Old Hickory conference room glued to a television showing glamorous images of federal agents barking into two-way radios and swooping low across the desert Southwest in gleaming helicopters.

"Would you have to do all of that?" one attendee asked.

Welcome to the Border Patrol's unique recruitment drive, essentially a road trip across America and beyond, part of a presidential mandate to boost the force from 12,000 two years ago to 18,000 by December, the highest in the 84-year-old agency's history.

Agents say they are pulling out all the stops to find adventurous recruits willing to live along the 1,900-mile border with Mexico, where all new agents start. Teams of recruiters are hitting not only colleges, churches and career centers, but also NASCAR races - the patrol paid $2.6 million this year to sponsor a racecar - professional bull-riding events, US military bases overseas, and even declining former railroad cities like Jackson - nearly 1,000 miles from the Mexican border.

For the first time, the Border Patrol has also formed a "Minority Recruitment Strike Team" to attract more African-Americans, who now make up only 1 percent of the patrol. The 16,500-member patrol is 52 percent Latino and 45 percent white.

In Jackson - a city of 60,000 that also happens to be hosting the beauty pageant this week - a visit by members of the minority recruitment team showed how challenging it can be to find recruits of any background who are willing to move to the border.

Agents tout the opportunity to work outdoors and serve America without joining the military or risking their lives overseas. The Border Patrol's chief mission is to stop terrorists along the nation's northern and southern borders, but they also apprehend illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Recruits can earn $70,000 a year after only three years on the job, a big draw in Tennessee, where the per capita income barely tops $22,000.

But there is a downside: Agents can be assigned to remote and dusty desert towns along the border, far from the gleaming green fields of Tennessee. Recruits must pass a physical fitness test that includes running 1.5 miles in 13 minutes or less, learn Spanish, and work odd hours, since the border is patrolled around the clock.

On Wednesday morning, the Border Patrol launched its efforts at the Tennessee Career Center, a government-run employment agency, where men and women cast quizzical glances at the two uniformed agents who stood smiling in the lobby.

The city's unemployment rate is 6.5 percent, higher than the state average, and the number of jobs placed through the center sank 42 percent this summer, from 2,955 last year to 1,708. But few job-seekers approached the agents.

"I thought they were sheriffs," John Bond, a 20-year-old high school graduate, said in the parking lot. "What do they do?"

Belinda Fitzgerald, a 30-year-old mother of three, is desperate for work after being laid off from her job at a temp agency. And she would address a particular shortage on the force, which currently employs only eight black women.

"Yeah, I'd get out of here," she said wearily, but she did not approach them either.

At the end of the seven-hour stint, only two names were on the sign-up sheet.

Victor Howard, the lead recruiter, was unfazed.

"Most of the time people from these areas have never seen the Border Patrol in action, so they don't have a clue," said Howard. "We'll sit there and talk to them as long as it takes."

Howard had more luck in a meeting later that day at Lane College, a historically black school on the way into town.

Two administrators at the college said they were appalled by the low numbers of black people in the Border Patrol, and promised to recruit.

"You'd think the persons in authority would have sought out African-American people before now," said Richard Hulon Donnell, vice president of the college.

Their efforts are not without controversy. Immigrants said they fear the Border Patrol's recruiting in nonborder states such as Tennessee will inflame tensions there among black, white, and Latino people.

Tennessee had the fourth largest increase in the number of Latinos in the 2000 Census, mostly immigrants, leading to tensions and debate over whether immigrants are costing people jobs. In Nashville, the Rev. T.J. Graham has urged people to join the Border Patrol on his radio show.

"They're coming to recruit people, and then they're going to turn them against us," said Blanca, 26, who would not give her last name because she is here illegally from Mexico looking for work. She arrived here a month ago, fleeing a statewide crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona.

But for some who are struggling in Jackson, the Border Patrol offered a glimpse of a different future, far from a tradition-bound town that has a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the courthouse on Main Street and is so quiet at rush hour that you can hear the birds chirping in the trees.

On Wednesday evening, eight men and women gathered around a table in the Old Hickory boardroom at the Doubletree Hotel to watch a video of the Border Patrol.

On the television, highly trained agents traversed rough terrain in ATVs and tracked illegal immigrants across the desert.

To apply, they must be US citizens, under age 40, and pass a criminal background check, among other requirements. All recruits spend four to five months in a training academy in New Mexico.

The pizza maker, David Sinclair, 34, applied despite his disabilities, because he wanted to keep terrorists and illegal immigrants out of the United States.

"It's a chance to see if I could maybe help America secure the borders," he said. "I don't want what's down there to come over here."

Some of the more promising recruits wavered after watching the video. Steven Officer, a college-educated former corrections officer who is also black, said he was worried about the stress.

Recruiters Kurtis Woods and Jerry Payne, both military veterans who impressed the group with their discipline and ability to answer any question, assured him that the job was an exciting way to help the nation.

"It's worth it because of what we do," Woods said. "You'll be out in the desert, encountering guys with 300 pounds of marijuana. I love that stuff."

Officer said he would think about it, then left.

But Brad Boling, a 27-year-old college graduate who is white, said he was leaning toward it. He and his wife were born and raised in Tennessee, but he cannot seem to find a good job in Jackson.

"It feels like there's really not much hope for me in this town," he said as he went home to talk it over with his wife. "I feel like I've got to move someplace else to do what I want to do." 

NYTimes.com

June 12, 2008 

Second Thoughts on Pulling the Guard from the Border

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

NOGALES, Ariz. — Swooping low over the Mexican border in her Blackhawk helicopter, Chief Warrant Officer Christina Engh-Schappert of the Virginia National Guard spots ... nothing. No sign of the migrants who would congregate in the washes for the mad dash to the United States. No clusters of people hiding in the bushes. Nobody in the throes of dehydration and heat exhaustion.

“At first we were constantly catching clients,” Ms. Engh-Schappert said later, using the Border Patrol vernacular for illegal immigrants. “It’s gone from pretty busy to hardly anything in our sector.”

Soon, she will be gone, too, along with 2,600 other members of the National Guard in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas where they are helping to secure the border with Mexico as part of a two-year mission called Operation Jump Start.

Phased down from a peak of more than 6,000 Guard members, the mission is scheduled to end July 15, although a smattering of Guard personnel are expected to remain or return as part of longstanding cooperation with the Border Patrol.

Here, they have built or shored up roads to give federal agents speedier access to the hilly and rocky terrain. They have fixed trucks and monitored cameras and sensors and stood guard in the wilderness, facilitating thousands of arrests by directing agents to illegal border crossers.

But just as Guard members pack up and bid farewell to the desert, an effort is intensifying to have them stay put. The Border Patrol has given the Guard credit for helping to deter and detect illegal crossings, so much so that the governors of the four border states and federal lawmakers now wonder aloud, Why stop now?

“This could be a new record for the federal government, actually abiding by a deadline,” said Dennis Burke, the chief of staff for Gov. Janet Napolitano, Democrat of Arizona, who has twice written this year to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, to plead for an extension of the mission. “The two-year deadline was arbitrary.”

Ms. Napolitano and the other governors say the Guard should stay while the Border Patrol continues a hiring frenzy toward meeting a goal of about 18,000 agents by the end of the year, double its size from 2001. It now stands at 16,471, about 5,000 more than two years ago, and the governors, as well as members of Congress, have expressed doubt that the agency will put enough agents in the field to meet its target.

“It is not as easy as running some ads and thinking you are going to have well-qualified people apply and come into the Border Patrol,” said Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat whose southern Arizona district includes the border. “The risk is high, conditions are not great, the pay is average compared to other law enforcement positions. Having the Guard there for a period of time longer until they can ramp up the Border Patrol is necessary for border improvement.”

In addition, the officials point out, the much-anticipated virtual fence, a suite of cameras, radars and other technology intended to enhance around-the-clock surveillance of the border, has been plagued with delays and glitches, although domestic security officials say it is getting back on track.

Representative Harry E. Mitchell, a Democrat from the Tucson area, on Tuesday pressed the case for keeping the Guard in place by raising concerns that rising drug violence in Mexican border towns could spill into the United States.

The reaction from domestic security officials, however, has been thanks, but no thanks.

Despite questions about the strains on the Guard and the military because of the Iraq war, President Bush, heeding the suggestion of lawmakers, sent 6,000 members of the Guard to the border, with the condition that the number would drop to 3,000 after one year and that assignments would end after two.

Domestic security and National Guard officials are not urging an extension, although they gush over the success of the Guard’s deployment.

“It was an interim bridge so we would be able to build up agents and technology, and that has been accomplished,” David V. Aguilar, chief of the Border Patrol, said last week in a telephone interview from Washington.

But, Mr. Aguilar said, “I would not be unhappy” if the Guard stayed on in large numbers.

He ticked off a wealth of statistics attributed to having the Guard in play: 580 agents freed from non-law-enforcement tasks and returned to patrol, more than 1,000 smuggler vehicles seized, a 39 percent drop in arrests for illegal border crossings.

But, Mr. Aguilar said, the impact of the Guard’s leaving “is going to be minimal,” because the agency had long planned for the July 15 departure. Also, he said, the Guard, as it has done for years, will continue to perform limited missions and training at the border to help federal law enforcement.

Border economists and sociologists say that the Guard’s successes may be overemphasized, that the drop in arrests, for example, might also indicate fewer people were trying to enter the United States because of the souring American economy while those here no longer risk going back and forth across the border.

The mission has not been trouble free. In the beginning, the Guard and Border Patrol bureaucracies did not mesh, some of those involved said, which led to confusion over orders and assignments, and which remains an occasional problem.

For the most part, however, the mission has been mutually beneficial, Border Patrol and Guard members say.

Recently, Capt. Tom Butler of the Ohio National Guard was helping to extend a graded, dirt road along the border fence here. Earlier, his team had helped to seal a tunnel that drug traffickers had burrowed under the fence. The projects have given him a sense of satisfaction.

“This will increase their response and make it safe,” Captain Butler said of the projects. “And that does feel good.”

Immigration Prosecutions Hit New High
Critics Say Increased Use of Criminal Charges Strains System

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 2, 2008; A01

Federal law enforcement agencies have increased criminal prosecutions of immigration violators to record levels, in part by filing minor charges against virtually every person caught illegally crossing some stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to new U.S. data.

Officials say the threat of prison and a criminal record is a powerful deterrent, one that is helping drive down illegal immigration along the nearly 2,000-mile frontier between the United States and Mexico. Skeptics say that the government lacks the resources to sustain the strategy on the border and that the effort is diverting resources from more serious crimes such as drug and human smuggling.

Before Operation Streamline, as the program is known, most Mexican nationals caught at the border were fingerprinted and returned to Mexico without criminal charges. Since 2005, people other than Mexicans are generally held until removed.

In testimony to Congress this spring, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that Operation Streamline "is a very good program, and we are working to get it expanded across other parts of the border" because "it has a great deterrent effect." The program is now in place in parts of Texas and Arizona.

But Melissa Wagoner, a spokeswoman for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), said there is a shortage of jail beds and public defenders in areas where the program is operating. "Operation Streamline in its current form already strains the capabilities of the law enforcement system past the breaking point," she said.

Others note that, historically, immigration violations have been processed by U.S. administrative courts. Criminalizing illegal immigration while turning a blind eye to employers who provide the jobs that lure migrants makes for good election-year politics but poor policy, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

"This strategy pretty much has it backwards," he said. "It's going after desperate people who are crossing the border in search of a better way of life, instead of going after employers who are hiring people who have no right to work in this country."

First piloted in December 2005 near Del Rio, Tex., Operation Streamline requires that virtually everyone caught illegally crossing segments of the border be charged with at least a misdemeanor immigration count and jailed until they are brought to court and, if convicted, eventually deported. A conviction jeopardizes any future legal entry to the United States.

Federal officials credit the program and other measures for contributing to a 20 percent drop in apprehensions of illegal immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2007, to 859,000. That figure is on track to drop an additional 15 percent this year.

While apprehension statistics can be misleading -- they obviously do not account for border-crossers who evade capture -- federal authorities say the decline coincides with a decrease in financial remittances from illegal immigrants in the United States to families in Mexico.

In areas where it has been applied -- which total about 500 miles, or one-fourth of the border -- Operation Streamline has slowed border traffic more substantially.

The number of apprehensions fell by nearly 70 percent in the last quarter of 2008 along a 120-mile stretch near Yuma, Ariz., after the program was phased in between December 2006 and June 2007, and by nearly 70 percent along the 210-mile span near Del Rio. Apprehensions fell 22 percent after Operation Streamline was initiated in October along 171 miles near Laredo, Tex.

Overall, the number of criminal immigration cases filed by U.S. prosecutors nearly doubled between January and February. They accounted for the majority of new Justice Department prosecutions nationwide in February -- about 7,250 out of 13,500 -- outnumbering all white-collar, civil rights, environmental and other criminal cases combined.

The surge in prosecutions accompanies other get-tough immigration-enforcement efforts, such as last month's raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, where federal authorities detained 389 workers; 297 were convicted of immigration-related felonies, mainly using false documents to obtain jobs.

The prosecution data was collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an independent research organization at Syracuse University that analyzes monthly Justice Department prosecution statistics.

A Justice spokesman, Dean Boyd, challenged the specifics but not the conclusions of the group's findings, which are based on data compiled by the department's Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. He said some of the increase in prosecutions may be due to improved reporting. The department declined last week to provide its own count of immigration prosecutions.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said the program has had "great success" in areas with relatively low migrant traffic because the threat of imprisonment and criminal prosecution has sent a "major message" to most border-crossers, "who turn out to be people who are simply looking for work."

"It's worked beautifully. Crime has dropped 76 percent in Del Rio, with the lowest level of illegal crossings they have ever seen," said Rep. John Culberson, a Houston area Republican who has worked with two border-district Democrats to promote the program. "Law enforcement is simple if you just enforce the law rigorously."

But experts warn against exaggerating Operation Streamline's potential. The crackdown comes amid a softening U.S. economy, which tends to decrease illegal immigration. And migrants and smugglers have responded to past enforcement efforts by moving to more remote areas.

Mukasey said the program would be much more difficult to expand to high-traffic areas, such as the Tucson sector, where the Border Patrol made 378,000 apprehensions in 2007, nearly half its total. That number is more than three times the total apprehended in the Yuma, Laredo and Del Rio sectors combined.

In fact, Tucson is emerging as the battleground for Operation Streamline's "zero tolerance" concept, presenting a case study of the challenges in ramping up the nation's legal machinery to tackle the estimated 1 million-plus people a year who cross the border illegally or overstay their visas. Authorities there have launched a modified version of the program that they hope to expand in coming months.

John M. Roll, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Arizona, said that since January, authorities from the Justice and Homeland Security departments and the federal courts have worked closely to increase Operation Streamline-related prosecutions. They began with 40 cases a day, are prosecuting 70 now and hope to reach 100 per day by September.

In four months this year, the court's magistrate judges imposed 3,700 sentences for Operation Streamline-related minor offenses, close to the 4,700 petty and misdemeanor cases they handled in all of 2007. The court also handled 2,800 felony cases, mostly immigration-related, in Tucson last year, for a total of about 7,500 cases, making it the nation's third-busiest.

Meeting the 100-case-a-day goal would nearly triple the court's workload, to more than 20,000 cases. But even that effort would address only about 5 percent of the apprehensions made in Tucson last year.

David Gonzales, the U.S. marshal for Arizona, said the program is swamping federal courthouses and jails.

"If [Streamline] was all we were doing, that would be fine. But we also have to deal with all other federal prisoners in southern Arizona and all other prisoners federal agencies bring in," Gonzales said.

Other federal officials are more critical, warning that the focus on immigration is distorting the functions of law enforcement and the courts. Several Arizona officials noted that U.S. prosecutors there last year were so short on resources, they chose not to prosecute a number of marijuana seizures of less than 500 pounds, although they later revised the guideline to 20 pounds.

"We're concerned about the misdirection of resources," said Heather Williams, first assistant to the federal public defender of Arizona. Each day her office's lawyers spend on misdemeanor border-crossing cases, she said, "they're not talking about a drug case, a sex crime, a murder, assault or any number of white-collar cases -- and the same is obviously true of the prosecutors."

"This is taking on a life of its own," she said.

Williams also warned that the program tests the U.S. legal system's promise of fairness to the accused. "If we as a U.S. citizen were placed in any other country on the planet, and had to resolve a case in a day that could result in being deported and having a criminal record, we would be outraged, and so would our government," she said.

Boyd, the Justice Department spokesman, said the government has not seen decreases in all other types of prosecutions and is increasing resources to support five border-area U.S. attorney's offices.

Michael Friel, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security agency that includes the Border Patrol, said that even if Operation Streamline-related prosecutions near Tucson deter only a few illegal immigrants, that will free up resources that can be deployed elsewhere. He noted that U.S. authorities have been able to expand the program bit by bit since starting with a five-mile stretch near Del Rio.

"Obviously," Friel said, "we think it's proving to be an effective tool as part of a larger strategy to gain effective control of the border."

Staff writer Carrie Johnson contributed to this report.

NYTimes.com

May 24, 2008 

270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push

By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were “committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.

Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”

The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.

“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. “It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law.”

Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.

If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

“My family is worried in Guatemala,” one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families.”

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron’s Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.

Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.

In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.

“We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish,” said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. “When you start, you can’t stay awake,” she said. “But after a while you get used to it.”

The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.

Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.

At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was “honored to represent such good and brave people,” saying the immigrants’ only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.

“I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values,” Mr. Nadler said.

Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,” Judge Bennett told the immigrants. “Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”

After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.

“That’s not the defense of justice,” Mr. Nadler said. “That’s just politics.”

Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.

“The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message,” Mr. Clausen said, “that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty.”

Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.

“You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out,” Mr. Rigg said.

Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues “could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel.”

Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants’ detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, “have tried to be fair in their charging.”

The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”

NYTimes

April 22, 2008

National Briefing | South

Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”

April 14, 2008

Crackdown on Immigrants Draws Protests in Phoenix

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHOENIX (AP) — The mayor wants the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate whether the local county sheriff has violated any civil rights laws with his recent high-profile crackdowns on illegal immigrants.

The “saturation patrols” have drawn protests from civil rights and immigrant-rights advocates, but they have drawn support from backers of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County and from people who believe the government has not done enough to curb illegal immigration.

In an April 4 letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, Mayor Phil Gordon asked the agency and the Justice Department’s civil rights division to examine what he called discriminatory harassment and improper stops, searches and arrests by sheriff’s deputies in Maricopa County, which encompasses the metropolitan area.

“Over the past few weeks, Sheriff Arpaio’s actions have infringed on the civil rights of our residents,” Mr. Gordon wrote. “They have put our residents’ well-being, and the well-being of law enforcement officers, at risk.”

Justice Department officials said they would review Mr. Gordon’s letter but declined to comment further.

Sheriff Arpaio said it was ironic that Mr. Gordon wrote the letter the same day that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials observed his deputies arresting residents and illegal immigrants in the town of Guadalupe and approved of the sheriff’s work.

“I think the mayor is disconnected from the people he represents, and he doesn’t get the point,” Sheriff Arpaio said Saturday. “Now he’s going to Washington to confuse the issue and try to get the public against me.”

Mr. Gordon “is degrading my office and my deputies by insinuating that they’re violating all these civil laws,” the sheriff said. “We don’t profile.”

In the past month, sheriff’s deputies and trained volunteers have gone into neighborhoods with large Hispanic populations, stopping people for routine traffic violations and asking some of them about their immigration status. Dozens of illegal immigrants have been detained.

Immigration and Customs officials say Sheriff Arpaio is not violating the formal agreement he has with their office that allows sheriff’s deputies to enforce immigration laws.

Last week, the Arizona Ecumenical Council and American Jewish Committee issued a joint letter saying the patrols “evoked a ‘police state’ atmosphere” and led to “detainment on the basis of a racial profile and dehumanization of innocent people.”

They were joined Friday by the Arizona chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, which echoed calls for a Justice Department investigation.

NYTimes.com

April 8, 2008 

Challenges Arise to Border Fence Project

By ADAM LIPTAK

Securing the nation’s borders is so important, Congress says, that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, must have the power to ignore any laws that stand in the way of building a border fence. Any laws at all.

Last week, Mr. Chertoff issued waivers suspending more than 30 laws he said could interfere with “the expeditious construction of barriers” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The list included laws protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom.

The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.

The delegation of power to Mr. Chertoff is unprecedented, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. It is also, if papers filed in the Supreme Court last month are correct, unconstitutional.

People can disagree about the urgency of border security and about whether it is more or less important than, say, the environment. Congress is entrusted with making those judgments, and here it has spoken clearly. In the process, it has also granted the executive branch more of the sort of unilateral power the Bush administration has so often claimed for itself.

No one doubts that Congress may repeal old laws through new legislation. But there is a difference between passing a law that overrides a previous one and tinkering with the structure of the Constitution itself. The extraordinary powers granted to Mr. Chertoff may test the limits of how much of its own authority Congress can cede to another branch of the government.

Mr. Chertoff explained the reasoning behind the law in a news release last week. “Criminal activity at the border,” he said, “does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation.”

Mr. Chertoff has issued three similar waivers, and a challenge to the constitutionality of one of them has just reached the United States Supreme Court. If the court decides to hear the case, its decision will almost certainly apply to last week’s waivers as well.

The case was brought by two environmental groups, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club. They sued Mr. Chertoff last year over his decision to suspend 19 laws that might have interfered with the construction of a border fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Arizona.

Congress, the groups said, had given Mr. Chertoff too much power.

“It is only happenchance that the secretary’s waiver in this case involved laws protecting the environment and historic resources,” the groups told Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of Federal District Court in Washington. “He could equally have waived the requirements of the Fair Labor Relations Act to halt a strike, or the provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in order to force workers to endure unsafe working conditions.”

(Happenchance? You don’t see that word every day, and certainly not in a court filing.)

The groups said Congress cannot hand over unbridled power to the executive branch even as it cuts the courts out of the picture. They relied mostly on a 1998 Supreme Court decision striking down the Line Item Veto Act, which had allowed the president to cancel parts of laws.

In December, Judge Huvelle rejected the challenge and allowed construction to proceed. She said she had no jurisdiction to decide whether Mr. Chertoff was correct in saying the waivers were necessary, and she ruled that the delegation of power to him was constitutional.

“The court concludes that it lacks the power to invalidate the waiver provision merely because of the unlimited number of statutes that could potentially be encompassed,” Judge Huvelle wrote.

A petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case was filed three months later.

Did you notice the missing step? In addition to forbidding judges from second-guessing Mr. Chertoff’s decisions, Congress forbade federal appeals courts from becoming involved at all. After losing before Judge Huvelle, the groups’ only recourse is to hope the Supreme Court decides to hear their appeal.

In their petition, the environmental groups said the Supreme Court had never upheld a broad delegation of power like that given to Mr. Chertoff without the possibility of judicial review of executive branch determinations. Nor, they said, has any appeals court.

It is the combination of those two factors — the broad granting of power to the executive branch and cutting the judicial branch out of the process — that makes the 2005 law so pernicious, the groups say.

The government’s response is due next week. In a brief filed in the district court last year, Justice Department lawyers told Judge Huvelle that the urgency of border security must trump other interests. They added that Congress may delegate particularly broad powers in the areas of national security, foreign affairs and immigration because the Constitution gives the executive branch great authority in those areas.

The line-item veto decision does not apply, the government lawyers said, because Mr. Chertoff is not repealing laws for all purposes, just suspending them for his fences.

It is true, of course, that Congress gave up its powers here voluntarily. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had a response to that point in his concurrence in the line-item-veto case.

“It is no answer, of course, to say that Congress surrendered its authority by its own hand,” he wrote. “Abdication of responsibility is not part of the constitutional design.”

Justice Kennedy made a broader point, too, one perhaps more apt today than it was 10 years ago.

“Separation of powers was designed to implement a fundamental insight,” he wrote. “Concentration of power in the hands of a single branch is a threat to liberty.”

Online: Court documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles and columns: nytimes.com/adamliptak.

Border fence will skirt laws

Environmental rules waived to finish barrier

By Richard Marosi and Nicole Gaouette

Tribune Newspapers

1:34 AM CDT, April 2, 2008

WASHINGTON — In an aggressive move to finish 370 miles of barriers on the U.S. border with Mexico by the end of the year, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that it will waive federal and state environmental laws to meet that goal.

The two waivers are the most expansive the department has issued on the southwest border. They will allow Homeland Security to slash through a thicket of more than 30 environmental and cultural laws to speed construction.

Environmentalists and border communities have strenuously opposed some of the planned infrastructure projects, saying they will damage the land and disrupt wildlife.

Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday that the Homeland Security Department is committed to minimizing the impact to the environment. He said that draft environmental assessments show the projects will have only "insignificant impacts on the environment and cultural resources."

But environmental and wildlife groups said the waivers are intended to sidestep growing and unexpectedly fierce opposition, especially in Texas and Arizona, where concerns were raised about endangered species and fragile ecosystems along the Rio Grande.

"The Bush administration's latest waiver of environmental and other federal laws threatens the livelihoods and ecology of the entire U.S.-Mexico border region," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope. "Secretary Chertoff chose to bypass stakeholders and push through this unpopular project on April Fool's Day. We don't think the destruction of the borderlands region is a laughing matter."

The government's push to build the fence came after Congress failed to overhaul Immigration laws, a debate that sparked an outcry over illegal border crossings. In 2006, conservatives in Congress championed the Secure Fence Act, despite the reluctance of President Bush, who has insisted that a comprehensive approach is needed.

Congress subsequently gave Chertoff the power to waive federal law to hasten construction. The Homeland Security Department has faced intense opposition from border communities and has had to go to court against more than 50 property owners simply to survey land for the fence.

Legal experts said the two waivers will make it extremely difficult for successful legal challenges based on environmental or cultural claims. But the waivers will not affect the legal battles between the Homeland Security Department and private landowners.

300 miles finished

Homeland Security has completed about 300 miles of pedestrian and vehicle barriers. Another 370 miles remain to be built, along with all-weather roads, cameras, lighting and other infrastructure projects, officials said.

Republicans in Congress hailed Chertoff's decision, saying the accelerated plans for completing border projects will help stem illegal Immigration and drug smuggling.

"It's great; this is the priority area where most of the illegal activity is going on and where most of the deaths are occurring," said Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), chairman of the Immigration Reform Caucus.

But backers of comprehensive Immigration reform said the waivers do little to address the fundamental weaknesses of Immigration policy and will not lead to tighter border controls. "This isn't the first time the DHS has used this authority, and each time it has resulted in increased frustration by all stakeholders," said Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.).

Little warning

Until Tuesday, the department had given few hints that waivers would be used. Homeland Security had followed the environmental impact statement process, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The public was allowed to comment on the draft environmental impact statements and assessments. Some environmental groups said they were awaiting the final reports when Chertoff made the announcement.

Chertoff said the department has been a careful steward of the environment, even after exercising waiver authority. Three previous waivers have been issued by Homeland Security.

One in September 2005 was issued to complete about 14 miles of fence near San Diego, and another in January 2007 was to build infrastructure near the Barry M. Goldwater military range in southern Arizona. A third waiver was issued in October 2007 near the San Pedro National Riparian Conservation Area, also in southern Arizona.

Los Angeles Times

NYTimes.com

March 29, 2008

National Briefing | New England

Rhode Island: Order to Combat Illegal Immigration

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Linking the presence of undocumented workers to the state’s financial woes, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri signed an executive order that includes steps to combat illegal immigration. The order requires state agencies and companies that do business with the state to verify the legal status of employees. It also directs the state police and prison and parole officials to work harder to find and deport illegal immigrants. The governor, a Republican, said that he understood illegal immigrants faced hardships, but that he did not want them in Rhode Island. Under his order, the state police will enter an agreement with federal immigration authorities permitting them access to specialized immigration databases.

Texas Landowners Delay Border Fence

By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN

Associated Press Writer

2:53 PM CDT, March 16, 2008

McALLEN, Texas

Some resistant South Texas landowners and a deliberate federal judge have come between the government and its goal of nearly 700 miles of Mexican-border fencing by the end of the year.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen has ordered the government to negotiate with owners over the price of access to the land, an extra step that has slowed the project.

Most landowners in Arizona, California and Texas have allowed the government on their property, but some have refused, prompting the Department of Justice to sue.

Communities along the Rio Grande in South Texas have fought hardest. They fear being cut off from the river and agricultural lands and bristle at the imposition of a plan hatched in Washington, D.C.

Officials want to determine which properties they need and whether they have to buy the land or seize it through eminent domain. They also want to determine whether alternatives, such as lighting, more Border Patrol agents or technology would work better in some areas.

Most of the nearly 500 property owners in the fence's path gave voluntary access to their land and more than 30 miles of fencing has already been built.

Barry Morrissey, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Washington, D.C., said last week: "We remain optimistic that we can stay on schedule."

Not with the help of Hanen. He has repeatedly denied government motions for immediate access in Texas, and instead held hearings for property owners to voice their concerns before ultimately siding with the government.

One landowner has held up dozens of other cases for more than a month. The outcome could mean further delays for 38 more cases scheduled for hearings this week.

On March 7, Hanen gave the government two weeks to prove it had made a bona fide effort to negotiate a price for temporary access to Cameron County landowner Eloisa Tamez's property.

"I don't consider ... that they've negotiated with me when all they've done is contact me to sign a waiver," said Tamez.

On Tuesday, the government offered $100 for six months of access to Tamez's one acre, a remaining piece of a Spanish land grant to her family in El Calaboz, according to her attorney, Peter Schey.

But Schey said they will not agree upon a price until the government defines access. Will it be intrusive surveying, or will a house on the property have to be torn down or moved?

Schey, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, wants the government to negotiate with property owners who voluntarily signed waivers because they did not know they could negotiate.

Schey filed a countersuit on behalf of Tamez and is seeking class-action status for all affected property owners.

"In order for this wall not to be built on a foundation of illegality and lawlessness," property owners must have a chance to take back their waivers, Schey said. "They've been hoodwinked."

NYTimes.com

February 15, 2008

Major Immigrant Smuggling Ring Is Broken in Phoenix, Police Say

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX — In a case highlighting this city’s prominent role in the smuggling of illegal immigrants across the border, the authorities conducted a series of raids on Thursday, arresting what they said were the leaders of a ring that helped transport hundreds of people to way stations in Phoenix.

In some ways, it was just a typical day here, where the police regularly discover houses with dozens of people held by smugglers until they can pay their passage from Mexico. In a separate operation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and the Maricopa County sheriff here announced the arrests of more than 100 people suspected of being in the country illegally who were on probation for various crimes.

But the raids on Thursday morning, by a task force of state, local and federal officers, provided a glimpse behind what the authorities described as one of the more elaborate operations that bring thousands of people across the border in this state, which has more illegal crossings than any other.

At dawn, officers swarmed houses, mostly in western Phoenix, seizing ledgers, money, weaponry and people suspected of involvement in a major, lucrative cell that controlled the transportation of people from a border town, Naco, to Phoenix.

The authorities made 20 arrests, including those of two Cubans accused of directing the operation. They also detained 210 illegal immigrants and discovered 13 so-called drop houses that were way stations for smuggled immigrants, the police said. In all, the authorities planned to arrest about 75 people, they said.

Oddities abounded along the way.

At the house of one man described as a ringleader, the police found several hundred roosters bred and grown for his cockfighting hobby. Another housed a shrine with a life-size statue of Jesus and a pile of $1 and $5 bills and burning candles at his feet, apparently offerings for good fortune.

In another house, a large family photo of a suspect showed him holding a baby, the hand gripping the girl displaying four large, ostentatious rings. An antique four-poster bed filled a small bedroom.

“We often see ‘Scarface’ or ‘Godfather’ posters,” said Lt. Vince Piano of the Phoenix Police Department, a lead investigator. “That’s the mentality.”

Roger Vanderpool, the director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, said toppling organizations like the one on Thursday was central to disrupting smuggling.

“It’s organized crime,” Mr. Vanderpool said. “Going after the head of the snake, cutting it off, is the effective way of dealing with organized crime.”

Several years ago, as border crackdowns in California and Texas funneled illegal immigrant traffic into Arizona, Phoenix supplanted Los Angeles as the prime transshipment point in the Southwest for human smuggling, federal investigators say.

The role has brought increased violence, including assaults and occasionally the killing of people unable to make full payment for their crossing, shootouts among smugglers stealing one another’s human cargo and kidnapping.

There has been a surge in the discovery of drop houses, where illegal immigrants are kept while waiting to be transported to destinations across the country, aided by an extensive freeway network here not heavily guarded by a Border Patrol focused to the south.

Where drop houses were rarely found a decade or so ago, nearly 100 were discovered last year in Phoenix and several so far this year, including one on Thursday afternoon with 35 people. This suggests that despite reports of immigrants’ leaving Arizona under pressure from the economic downturn and a crackdown by the authorities, others continue to arrive.

The group arrested on Thursday morning, the authorities said, primarily drove people who had just crossed the border at Naco to Phoenix, nearly 200 miles away. They often had their own security escort to ward off bandits known as bajadores.

The suspects were said to have worked with a smuggling ring that is based in Naco, Mexico.

The two men described as ringleaders, Jose Luis Suarez-Lemus of Peoria, Ariz., and Roel Ayala-Fernandez of Phoenix, were charged by the state attorney general’s office with several crimes, including human smuggling, money laundering, conspiracy and participating in a criminal syndicate. They may also face federal charges.

The immigrants, who were charged about $2,500 for their transit, were smuggled across the border through the San Pedro River Riparian National Conservation Area, a remote desert site, the authorities said.

The group typically transported two to four loads of six to 10 people a day mainly using rental cars, perhaps several hundred people in all, the authorities believe. The organization made as much as $130,000 a week.

February 8, 2008

Arizona Law Banning the Hiring of Illegal Immigrants Is Upheld

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHOENIX (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday upheld an Arizona law that prohibits businesses from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and rescinds the business licenses of those that do.

The ruling by the judge, Neil V. Wake of Federal District Court, was a defeat for employers who argued that it was an unconstitutional effort by a state to regulate immigration.

The ruling was a victory for advocates of tougher immigration enforcement who reject the position that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility.

Judge Wake rejected arguments by business groups that federal immigration law severely restricted Arizona’s ability to punish people who knowingly employed illegal immigrants.

He concluded that the Arizona law did not conflict with federal immigration law, which he said specifically let states regulate business licensing.

The issue of the law’s legality is pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit because the business groups challenging it have appealed an earlier order by Jude Wake in another case. The challengers are expected to challenge the new ruling, too.

The Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, approved the law last year amid frustration over what they said were inadequate federal efforts to confront illegal immigration.