USA Green Card Immigration Blog

(CNN) — In the latest volley between the federal government and states pushing anti-illegal-immigration laws, the Obama administration announced Thursday it was establishing a new hotline for immigration detainees who feel they “may be U.S. citizens or victims of a crime.”

The 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week hotline is part of a “broader effort to improve our immigration enforcement process and prioritize resources to focus on threats to public safety, (on) repeat immigration law violators, recent border entrants, and immigration fugitives while continuing to strengthen oversight of the nation’s immigration detention system and facilitate legal immigration,” a news release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said.

The new measure was launched by the Department of Homeland Security to ensure detained individuals “are made aware of their rights” or “properly notified about their potential removal from the country,” according to the release. The hotline number is 855-448-6903.

A new “detainer” form — which includes Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese and Vietnamese translations — also is part of the new policy. The detainer — or notice to detain — form is official paperwork giving law enforcement the authority to hold a person in custody for a time.

Administration to lower number of troops on Southwest border

“The new form allows ICE to make the detainer operative only upon the individual’s conviction of the offense for which he or she was arrested,” the release said.

Immigration rights advocates told CNN there “has long been a need for more accountability and oversight of the issuance of immigration detainers.”

“The ACLU and other advocates identified four native-born U.S. citizens who were held unlawfully in custody through immigration detainers in Los Angeles County. One of these citizens was held for two days because of an immigration detainer despite repeatedly telling officers that he was a U.S. citizen,” Laura Vazquez, immigration legislative analyst for the National Council of La Raza, told CNN in a statement. The council is a national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.

CNN attempted to get reaction on the new policy from the attorneys general in Alabama and Arizona — two states viewed as having among the most strict immigration reform laws — but were unsuccessful. An official in the Alabama attorney general’s office said Thursday officials had no comment.

The move by DHS comes just before the beginning of the new year, when new immigration laws in Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia will require businesses to enroll in the federal E-Verify program to ensure employees are eligible to work in the United States, according National Conference of State Legislatures.

E-Verify is a controversial program designed to check a prospective employee’s citizenship or immigration status.

Supporters say it helps businesses avoid unintentionally hiring illegal immigrants. Critics complain that it is expensive to operate, pushes undocumented workers further underground, and is not always accurate.

Immigration Crackdown Also Snares Americans – NYTimes.com.

A growing number of United States citizens have been detained under Obama administration programs intended to detect illegal immigrants who are arrested by local police officers.

In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

Americans said their vehement protests that they were citizens went unheard by local police officers and jailers for days, with no communication with federal immigration agents to clarify the situation. Any case where an American is held, even briefly, for immigration investigation is a potential wrongful arrest because immigration agents lack legal authority to detain citizens.

“I told every officer I was in front of that I’m an American citizen, and they didn’t believe me,” said Antonio Montejano, who was arrested on a shoplifting charge last month and found himself held on an immigration order for two nights in a police station in Santa Monica, Calif., and two more nights in a teeming Los Angeles county jail cell, on suspicion that he was an illegal immigrant. Mr. Montejano was born in Los Angeles.

This year the immigration agency has been rapidly extending its leading deportation program, known as Secure Communities, with a goal of covering the whole country by 2013. Under that program, fingerprints of every person booked at local jails are checked against Department of Homeland Security immigration databases. If the check results in a match, federal immigration agents can issue detainers, asking local law enforcement authorities to hold a suspect for up to 48 hours.

Detentions of citizens are part of the widening impact on Americans, as well as on immigrants, of President Obama’s enforcement strategies, which have led to more than 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of his term, the highest numbers in six decades.

John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency gave “immediate and close attention” to anyone who claimed to be a citizen.

“We don’t have the power to detain citizens,” Mr. Morton said in an interview on Tuesday. “We obviously take any allegation that someone is a citizen very seriously.”

Later this month, Mr. Morton said, the immigration agency will publish new forms for its detainers. The forms, in several languages, will require the police to notify suspects who are being held on federal immigration authority, he said. They will also provide a hot line where detainees can call the immigration agency directly.

Exact numbers of Americans erroneously held by immigration authorities are hard to come by, since they are not systematically recorded. In one study, 82 people who were held for deportation from 2006 to 2008 at two immigration detention centers in Arizona, for periods as long as a year, were freed after immigration judges determined that they were American citizens.

“Because of the scale of enforcement, the numbers of people who are interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are just enormous right now,” said Jacqueline Stevens, the study’s author and a political science professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Ms. Stevens has concluded that “a low but persistent” percentage of the nearly 400,000 people held for deportation each year are citizens.

One was Mr. Montejano, when a holiday shopping outing on Nov. 5 to a Los Angeles mall with his four children ended badly. After his young daughter begged for a $10 bottle of cologne, Mr. Montejano said, he inadvertently dropped it into a bag of things he had already bought. As he left the store, he was arrested.

With no prior criminal record, Mr. Montejano, 40, expected to post bond quickly at the Santa Monica police station on the misdemeanor charge and go home. He had his driver’s license and other legal identification, but because of an immigration detainer he was denied bail and held even after a criminal court judge canceled his fine and ordered the police to let him go.

Mr. Montejano was freed on Nov. 9 after American Civil Liberties Union lawyers sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement his United States passport and birth certificate.

“Just because I made one mistake,” Mr. Montejano said, “I don’t think they should have done all those things to me.”

He said he thought the police did not believe he was an American because of his appearance. “I look Mexican 100 percent,” he said.

Mr. Montejano had triggered a positive match in the Homeland Security Department databases, A.C.L.U. lawyers discovered, because immigration officials had failed once before to recognize his citizenship, mistakenly deporting him to Mexico in 1996. His records were not corrected.

An American college student, Romy Campos, was also trapped in a California jail last month for four days on an immigration detainer. After her Nov. 12 arrest in Torrance on a minor misdemeanor charge, Ms. Campos, 19, was denied bail and transferred to a Los Angeles County jail. A public defender assigned to her in state court said there was nothing he could do to lift a federal detainer.

“Can’t they see in my file or something that I’m a citizen?” Ms. Campos said she asked him. “He said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is state court. I can’t do anything about it.’ ”

After four days, Ms. Campos was released, soon after Jennie Pasquarella, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, provided her Florida birth certificate to the immigration agency.

Ms. Campos said the experience was shocking. “I felt misused completely, I felt nonimportant, I just felt violated by my own country,” she said.

Ms. Campos, a citizen of both the United States and Spain, later learned that she had a Department of Homeland Security record because she had once entered the United States on her Spanish passport.

United States citizens can also be tagged in a Secure Communities fingerprint check because of flukes in the department’s databases. Unlike the federal criminal databases administered by the F.B.I., Homeland Security records include all immigration transactions, not just violations. An immigrant who has always maintained legal status, including those who naturalized to become American citizens, can still trigger a fingerprint match.

According to Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer in Alaska, under the nation’s complex citizenship laws, many foreign-born people become Americans automatically, through American parents or adoption. Often their citizenship is not recorded in Homeland Security databases, Ms. Stock said.

Other cases of possibly illegal detentions of citizens have been recently reported in Allentown, Pa., Indianapolis and Chicago.

ICE agents generally cancel detainers immediately when they determine that the suspect is a citizen. In no recent cases was an American placed in deportation.

But Ms. Stevens cautioned: “It’s sort of like the canary in the mine. If those who have the full due process rights of U.S. citizens are being detained, it tells us a lot about potentially unlawful people who do not have those protections.”

On Immigration, Polls Show Most GOP Voters Share Gingrich Stance | Fox News Latino.

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SUMMARY

A series of polls – including one by Fox News released Friday – on immigration show that a majority of respondents, including registered Republican voters, think undocumented immigrants should have a shot at legalizing their status, as long as they meet certain criteria.

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When Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said in a November debate that undocumented immigrants who have deep roots in the United States should have a chance to legally work here, some jaws dropped.

His rivals questioned his conservative credentials. Observers wondered whether he had doomed his chances with Republican voters.

But a series of polls – including one by Fox News released Friday – on immigration shows that a majority of respondents, including registered Republican voters, think undocumented immigrants should have a shot at legalizing their status, as long as they meet certain criteria.

Some experts say the polls underscore that on the issue of immigration, at least, the GOP candidates are largely at odds with voters of their party.

“Gingrich at least put his finger on something – which is, we can play politics all we want but the reality is that these [undocumented] immigrants are integrating and becoming members of this society,” said Allert Grown-Gort, associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann, from Minnesota, assailed former House Speaker Gringrich for supporting “amnesty,” and has vowed that as president she would pursue deporting all the millions of undocumented immigrants.

But that, say many experts, is logistically impossible. And deporting — let alone finding — the millions of undocumented immigrants doesn’t ring as practical, or seem fair, to many Americans, Brown-Gort said.

“One of the ironies about immigration is that it’s the most human of stories,” he said. “Bachmann says she wants to send 11 million people back. What does 11 million look like?

“Well, it’s the entire state of Ohio,” Brown-Gort said. “When you deport somebody, you’re not just deporting them, you’re affecting — you’re doing damage to — the community, to the schools, these are steps that should not be taken lightly.”

GOP rival and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney criticized Gingrich’s stance on immigration, saying that it would serve as a magnet for more illegal border-crossers.

“That will only encourage more people to do the same thing. People respond to incentives,” Romney said. “If you could become a permanent resident of the United States by coming here illegally, you’ll do so.”

But in the Fox poll, 66 percent of the nearly 1,000 people surveyed nationally said there should be a path to citizenship if the a person meets requirements such as paying back taxes and learning English.  That goes further than Gingrich’s proposal, which just allows people who – in the example he gave – have lived here for 25 or more years to work here legally, but not be on a path to citizenship.

Nineteen percent of voters in the Fox poll thought all undocumented immigrants should be deported, and another 13 percent take the middle ground of a guest-worker program that would allow immigrants to remain in the United States for a limited time.

Regardless of political party affiliation, most respondents supported a path to legalization.

A majority of Republicans (57 percent), independents (68 percent) and Democrats (73 percent) said they supported giving undocumented immigrants a path to legalization.

Republicans were more likely than Democrats and independents to want the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. But even so, the percentage that did – 26 percent of Republicans, 14 percent of Democrats and 12 percent of independents – was dramatically smaller than those favoring giving a break to immigrants who meet certain criteria.

Another poll, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan group in Washington, showed that 43 percent of respondents favor combining enforcement with a path to legalization. Another 24 percent thought the U.S. government should focus chiefly on a path to citizenship, and about 29 percent thought the focus should be just on enforcement.

The poll found that while Republican senior citizens preferred enforcement, younger Republicans favored combining enforcement with a path to legalization.

So why has the tenor of the comments on immigration in the GOP debates been decidedly hard-line when polls reflect a Republican voter preference for something softer?

“A lot of the GOP campaigns have been ill-advised by strategists who truly don’t understand the views of likely Republican voters on the issue of immigration,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, a Washington, DC based advocacy group.

“The strategists have bought the argument of anti-immigrant restrictionists who in the past five, six years have penetrated the conservative movement.”

Aguilar, like other Latino conservatives, including  U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, has pushed for the Republican Party to soften its take-no-prisoners tone on immigration, particularly if it is to win the support of Latino voters.

“They [restrictionists] have hijacked the issue of immigration in the Republican Party,” said Aguilar, who served in the George W. Bush Administration as chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship. “While they’re a small minority [within Republicans], they’re very vocal, they have a very well-organized political machine and they’re very PR [public relations] savvy. They have convinced the people they advise that the majority of Republicans are anti-immigrant.”

It’s not just polls that indicate divergent views on illegal immigration between voters and campaign talk on the issue, Aguilar says. State Republican legislators themselves have issued warnings about, or helped shelve or defeat, hard-line immigration bills that were introduced in many states.

Of the GOP candidates, Aguilar said, “the only two that understand the importance of the Hispanic voter and view of American Republicans are Gingrich and [Texas Gov. Rick] Perry.”

Perry, who supports some hard-line positions on immigration, came under fire by his fellow GOP rivals for having backed legislation in his state that allows undocumented students to attend public colleges at in-state tuition rates. Perry also does not support the construction of a fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, calling it impractical.

“Perry started coming down in the polls,” Aguilar said. “Restrictionists said it was because of his [moderate] comments on immigration, but he came down in the polls because of his poor performance in the debates.”

Contrary to the predictions of many observers that Gingrich would hurt his surging support after his comments on immigration, he has seen an uptick in polls, Aguilar said.

Aguilar, whose group has reached out to various candidates’ campaigns to offer advice on reaching Latino voters, said a Republican candidate would be wise to support “a balanced, common-sense approach to immigration that goes beyond enforcement-only.”

That is an approach, Aguilar said, that can win a Republican candidate support from a conservative base and Latinos, including those who are disillusioned by Obama.

A recent poll by Latino Decisions suggests that immigration reform is the top issue influencing the Latino vote in the lead-up to next year’s presidential race, despite an overall waning interest in the race.

The poll reported that 42 percent of Latino voters were concerned about immigration. Unemployment – which remains higher for Latinos than for the general population — came in second, at a distant 23 percent.

Obama campaigned on a promise to reform immigration in his first year in office, a promise that is believed to have helped him win the majority of Latino votes. Increasingly, Latino voters who consider immigration a priority issue have expressed frustration over what they see as a failure by Obama to push harder for comprehensive immigration reform.

“[Republican candidates] can make inroads into a constituency that was key to Obama winning,” Aguilar said. “They need 40 percent of the Latino vote. Latinos are very upset with Obama. He pandered to them in a very crass way.”

If the Latino Decisions poll is any indication, swaying Latino voters will take work. Even though they are disillusioned,  54 percent Latinos still said in the poll that they were certain that they would vote for Obama in 2012.

Obama’s re-election campaign officials say that Republicans have been no friend to Latinos, and that they have been the obstacle to efforts to reform the immigration system.

“The choice for Hispanic Americans,” said campaign spokesperson Gabriela Domenzain, “is between  a President who passed legislation that kept two million Latinos out of poverty, provided 150,000 additional Hispanic students with the means to go to college, and fought to pass comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act and a Republican field whose leading candidates oppose the DREAM Act and a path to citizenship for immigrants and would slash funding for education, Medicare, and Social Security.”