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.

The following editorial appeared in the Sacramento Bee on Monday, Aug. 22:

It’s not amnesty, back-door or otherwise. It’s just a little more sanity in our broken immigration system.

The Obama administration has announced that it will suspend deportation proceedings against thousands of illegal immigrants who aren’t a danger to public safety, including those who came to America as young children and have graduated from high school and gone on to college or into the military.

Other “low-priority” cases likely to benefit under the new policy are veterans and spouses of veterans, caregivers for a seriously ill relative or for a person with a mental or physical disability and those with family members who are citizens.

It only makes sense to target limited manpower and resources to deporting those who are violent criminals and drug smugglers, or who pose a national security threat.

This is not a blanket policy; immigration officials will review, case by case, nearly 300,000 people now in the deportation pipeline to distinguish those who may qualify for relief from those who should be expelled as soon as possible. It also doesn’t automatically grant citizenship, though many could eventually apply for legal status.

Predictably, zealous activists against illegal immigration, along with elected officials in their thrall, are railing against this change. They are still not facing the reality that if they got their way, we would have to figure out how to find and deport more than 10 million people.

With this new policy, President Barack Obama is doing administratively much of what Congress hasn’t had the courage and common sense to do legislatively by passing the DREAM Act, a bill to give relief to college students who are illegal immigrants.

“Young people who arrived here at an early age and either serve in the military or are in good academic standing should not be removed from the country and separated from their families,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who urged Obama to make the change, said in a statement. “Instead, they should be allowed to reach their full potential as productive American citizens.” She has introduced 14 private bills in the past two sessions of Congress to block deportations of such students their only recourse until now.

This new policy is a necessary step that upholds our tradition as an immigrant nation, but it is not a long-term solution. We still have to get serious about comprehensive reform to create a system that is fair and sensible.

San Diego, California (CNN) — In August 2005, as part of a public arts project, David Smith — aka “The Human Cannonball” — was fired out of a cannon across the border from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego. He was caught in a net 150 feet from the border, and he had his passport in hand just in case he had to show it to the U.S. Border Patrol.

For several years, that was considered the best show ever to visit the border. Not anymore.

This week, President Obama — who has already declared that he is running for re-election — kicked off his 2012 Latino outreach effort by traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, and delivering a speech on immigration.

This wasn’t easy. Finding the border can be tricky when it is your first visit in the 26 months since becoming president.

Besides, immigration isn’t Obama’s favorite topic. You remember that subject in high school that you hated, because, well, you had no interest in it and so you weren’t good at it?

For Barack Obama, that subject is immigration. He’s terrible at it. He doesn’t seem to understand it. And he doesn’t appear to care about it. So he settles for using it as a political tool.

There is a sizable community of immigrants — legal and illegal — in Illinois. Yet, during his stint in the state Senate, Obama demonstrated little interest in the issue and proposed no bills specifically aimed at immigrants.

When Obama ascended to the U.S. Senate, he voted for a so-called “poison pill” amendment to a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would “sunset” a proposed guest worker program after five years. All of this was to please organized labor, but it doomed the compromise.

After becoming president, Obama broke his promise to Latino voters to make immigration reform a top priority and address it early in his administration. Then he added injury to insult by racking up a record number of deportations — nearly 800,000 in his first two years in office. The Department of Homeland Security deports about 1,000 people a day.

We know this because, in a futile attempt to convince Obama’s critics that he’s tough on border security, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano brags about those figures in speeches and before Congress like a proud fisherman posing for a photo while holding the catch of the day.

And how do you get to the point where you’re deporting more illegal immigrants than any U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “Operation Wetback” in 1954? You use local police as a force multiplier, letting municipalities enforce immigration law and deliver to you the apprehended immigrants — while you’re suing the state of Arizona for doing the same thing.

All of which brings us to that speech on the border. This would have been a good opportunity to apologize for his administration’s excesses, and maybe announce a new policy that — while still tough — is fairer and more humane.

But that’s not Obama’s style. He approaches a speech like this as an opportunity to make himself look good and his opponents look bad. Some of the content was terrific; some was farcical. Overall, the president’s speech was menudo (Mexican stew). It had a little of everything mixed in.

On the positive side, you had uplifting stories like that of Dr. Jose Hernandez, the son of immigrant farm workers, who grew up picking vegetables in Central California and became an astronaut. There was common sense about how idiotic it is for our country to educate foreign students, then send them home because we make it so difficult for them to stay. There was the heartwarming assurance that people could be proud of their heritage and still love the United States of America.

But, on the negative side, this was a political speech. And so it was full of deceptions and half-truths, finger-pointing and the ducking of responsibility.

We learned that it was Republicans who demanded the building of border fencing. (True, but Obama left out the part about how he voted for it in the Senate.)

We learned that, while in the Senate, Obama helped forge “a bipartisan coalition” to advance immigration reform. (Actually, Obama undermined that coalition when he helped torpedo immigration reform.)

We learned that Republicans killed the DREAM Act. (They didn’t. Five Senate Democrats did — Jon Tester, Max Baucus, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, and Ben Nelson — when they bolted from party leaders and voted against cloture.)

We learned that the administration focuses on deporting “criminal aliens.” (It’s true that — through initiatives like Secure Communities, a cooperative agreement between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials — the number of criminal aliens being deported is way up from the previous administration. But even so, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the total number of criminal aliens apprehended is less than 200,000. That still leaves hundreds of thousands of “noncriminal” deportations. In fact, Obama admitted in his remarks that those subject to removal include “families that are just trying to earn a living or bright, eager students or decent people with the best of intentions.”)

And finally, we learned that Obama thinks the United States shouldn’t be “in the business of separating families.” (Guess what? That is exactly the business we’re in. The Obama administration, for purely political reasons, separates hundreds of families every day.)

Are we done now? Enough gamesmanship, Mr. President. How about some leadership? You’ve shown you can get out in front of issues you care about. Try caring more about this one.

President Obama went to the border this week to share his usual campaign message of hope and change. He wound up spreading fertilizer.

The Obama administration is changing the government’s strategy in enforcing immigration laws while repealing birthright citizenship would expand the population of illegal immigrants, who, depending on how you look at it, may or may not be a burden on taxpayers.

USA Today published a Pro Publica round-up report that enumerated how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shifted policies in who the agency targets for deportation, which in turn has reduced the threat of deportation for millions of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, the number of removals this year lags slightly behind last year’s figures through 11 months, despite reports that the Obama administration is deporting more illegal immigrants than ever.

Whoever is in the Oval Office in 2050 would have considerably more unauthorized immigrants — at least 5 million — to deport if birthright citizenship is repealed, according to a report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.

“The unauthorized population would rise to 24 million in 2050 under a scenario in which citizenship would be denied to U.S.-born children with one unauthorized immigrant parent, even if the other parent were a citizen,” the report states. Illegal immigration is currently at the lowest it’s been in decades.

But would that be a drag on taxpayers, or a benefit? Depends on how you look at it, Edward Schumacher-Matos, a Washington Post columnist, wrote in the Post:

The truth is that unauthorized immigrants are probably a net burden on taxpayers in the short term, but only if you consider education as a cost and not as an investment in the nation’s future, as it was seen a century ago.

So, how does Congress view illegal immigrants who aspire to attend college? We may find out before November, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “intends to move the DREAM Act” before mid-term elections. The proposed legislation, which has been floating around Congress for the better part of a decade, would pave the way toward legal resident status — and possibly citizenship — for young illegal immigrants if they meet certain requirements.

For cities and towns who believe illegal immigrants are a drag on society — and aim to deter them from taking jobs or renting housing in their communities — passing laws with that in mind are not constitutional, a federal appeals court ruled.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, which struck down ordinances adopted by the City of Hazelton, Pa. that also served as models for like-minded towns and states around the country, “is the broadest statement by a court to date on the vexing question of how much authority states and towns have to act on immigration matters that are normally the purview of the federal government,” The New York Times reported.

Despite a down economy and deterrents such as the Hazelton ordinances and other enforcement efforts, the push/pull of illegal immigration persists. Immigration agents in Riverside found 37 smuggled aliens from six countries jammed inside a tiny bedroom where some claim they had been held for weeks, according to an ICE press release. Six job recruiters were indicted for forcing 400 laborers from Thailand to work after luring them to the United States in what the FBI called the largest human-trafficking case in U.S. history, The Associated Press reported.

It’s not just allegedly greedy businesses that are breaking the law. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post both had stories about misconduct and corruption among Border Patrol agents and customs inspectors.

The Border Patrol is “grappling with a spate of misconduct cases in its ranks, which have expanded from 4,000 agents in the early 1990s to 21,000 today,” the Times reported while the number of Customs and Border Protection “corruption investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year,” according to the Post.

Corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period. The vast majority of corruption cases involve illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border.

But, as the Whittier Daily News reported, some agents are allegedly stealing from the government — and taxpayers — too.

Two former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were arrested Friday on charges stemming from allegations they falsely claimed nearly $600,000 worth of work hours.

With a 79-19 Senate vote, Congress has corrected one of the more draconian immigration policies to be visited upon foreign-born spouses of American citizens.

Called the “widow’s penalty,”‘ the policy allows immigration officials to annul spouses’ applications for permanent residency when their American husbands or wives die before the marriage is two years old.

The new immigration measure will allow foreigners married to U.S. citizens to apply for permanent residency without waiting two years, and the death of a spouse won’t be a determining factor in the outcome.

The Department of Homeland Security has stopped deporting widows and widowers of US citizens, “a sign of the Obama administration’s interest in new approaches to immigration.”

This will temporarily halt the policy of deporting some immigrants whose American spouses had died and left their legal status in limbo.