History > 2006 > USA > Immigration (II)

U.S. Court Orders City

to Ensure Aid for Battered Immigrants

August 30, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

A federal judge yesterday ordered the city to stop illegally denying food stamps and other aid to battered immigrant women and children and to overhaul the error-plagued computer programs and training manuals that continue to lead welfare workers to turn them away.

The judge determined that high-level city policymakers had long been aware of the systemic problems, but did little or nothing to fix them until a group of battered women filed a lawsuit late last year. As a result, if the city and state continue to fight the lawsuit, the judge said, he will be highly likely to find them liable for “deliberate indifference” to violations of the plaintiffs’ federal and state rights.

“It is not the policy of the United States, nor of the State of New York, to leave destitute the battered immigrant wives and children of lawful U.S. residents just because their abusive husbands are no longer supporting them or providing them with a basis for obtaining aid,” the judge, Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, wrote in his 83-page decision. He certified the lawsuit as a class action and issued a preliminary injunction against the city and state.

The judge commended the city for fixing some of the problems since February, when he issued a partial injunction and held nine days of hearings in the case. But he added that problems persisted because of inadequate training, poor computer design and faulty directives.

“The simple truth, moreover, is that the ameliorative actions now taken by the city and state defendants would not likely have been taken if this lawsuit had not been brought and had the court not issued its initial injunction,” he wrote.

The decision is awkward for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is preparing to unveil a plan for attacking poverty in the city, a central goal of his second term. The plan is expected to focus on children, young adults and the working poor.

Jane Tobey Momo, senior counsel for the city, said officials were reviewing the opinion to determine the city’s next steps. “While we are disappointed in the court’s findings,” she wrote in a statement, “we are pleased that the court recognized and commended the city for the extensive recent steps taken to ameliorate the difficulties in delivering benefits to noncitizen immigrants.

“The difficult and changing federal and state statutes, regulations and policies present continuing challenges to the process,” she added.

When the lawsuit was filed in December by the New York Legal Assistance Group and the Legal Aid Society, the lawyers called it a last resort, saying that officials had failed to fix problems that forced hundreds of women to choose between staying safe and feeding their families, despite government policies aimed at supporting them until they can get on their feet.

The suit seeks back benefits that range from a few hundred dollars to one or two thousand dollars per family in the class. “That represents months of being able to get by,” said Ronald Abramson, a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which worked on the case for months without charge, but is now likely to be able to collect more than a million dollars in legal fees from the city.

About a dozen plaintiffs, mostly identified only by initials, include a woman from Senegal helping to prosecute the man accused of torturing her and murdering her sister; a Mexican mother of two whose husband chased her with a gun; and a Bangladeshi woman whose husband, since hospitalized for mental illness, kicked her in the abdomen while she was pregnant, cut up her clothes and threatened to kill her when she tried to go to work.

Several fled to domestic violence shelters, only to find themselves unable to buy food or medicine for their children. In an affidavit, one breast-feeding mother wrote of going hungry and of feeling powerless as she and her young children lost weight.

The abuse, documented in orders of protection, police reports and letters from domestic violence shelters, was not in question. Nor was eligibility for aid, often affirmed through administrative “fair hearings,” only to be denied again or automatically cut off.

One of the basic problems lay in the pull-down computer menu that caseworkers used when entering information about a noncitizen applying for aid. The list of eligible immigration categories mistakenly omitted “battered qualified alien,” the category in which these women and children fit.

That problem was fixed recently, after Judge Rakoff’s February order, but other deficiencies remain. The judge called the violations “the direct results of the flawed design of the city’s computer system, the pervasive errors in the city’s training materials and policy directives, and the widespread worker ignorance resulting from inadequate training of the city’s employees.”

“The Court readily concludes that, given the pervasive and systemic nature of the various problems resulting in the unlawful denial of benefits to plaintiffs, plaintiffs have established a very high likelihood that the city will be found liable on all the plaintiffs claims,” he wrote.

In 45 pages devoted to legal findings, he determined that the plaintiffs had established “an overwhelming likelihood of success on their contention that the city, in its failure to adequately train its employees, was ‘deliberately indifferent’ to the violation of plaintiffs’ federal rights.” He added that the state was “vicariously liable” because it supervises the city’s provision of public aid and had failed to change its own programming problems and faulty directives.

Jason Brown, a spokesman for Gov. George E. Pataki, said state officials would not comment until they review the decision.

Mr. Abramson said even last winter, when the judge ordered the city to provide aid to the named plaintiffs, the city’s lawyers returned to court saying their efforts had been stymied because the computer system “errored-out” many of the cases.

But eventually all the families involved in the lawsuit received aid, said Caroline Jane Hickey, a lawyer with New York Legal Assistance Group. “We are thrilled with Judge Rakoff’s decision to protect the rights of a population with almost no voice,” she said.

She cited the case of the Mexican mother identified as J.Z. in the lawsuit, who has since been able to move into public housing in the Bronx with her two children. She has passed a high school equivalency test and found a job at her children’s school.

“She has managed to completely turn her life around,” Ms. Hickey said. “She plans to be a nurse.”

    U.S. Court Orders City to Ensure Aid for Battered Immigrants, NYT, 30.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/nyregion/30immigrant.html

Risky Measures by Smugglers Increase Toll on Immigrants

August 9, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX, Aug. 8 — The deaths of nine people Monday in the crash of a sport utility vehicle fleeing the Border Patrol is evidence of the growing practice of smugglers packing as many people as they can into vehicles and driving recklessly to avoid capture.

With federal agents flooding traditional smuggling routes and thousands of National Guard troops now helping out, smugglers have sought to get the most people over the border in the quickest of ways. That often means cramming people into vehicles, usually vans and S.U.V.’s, in which people have been found under seats and the dashboard and, in larger vehicles, hidden in the gas tank.

The Yuma County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday that the three men and six women killed were among 21 Mexicans “stacked like cordwood” in a Chevrolet Suburban whose driver lost control after crossing a spike strip laid down by Border Patrol agents.

Twelve people were injured, including five critically. The driver had made a U-turn apparently to avoid a Border Patrol checkpoint, sped as fast as 80 miles per hour and crashed shortly after driving over the spikes on a state highway 30 miles north of Yuma, said Maj. Leon Wilmot of the sheriff’s department.

The driver, Adan Pineda, 20, was charged Tuesday with transporting illegal immigrants, and Major Wilmot said he might face additional charges when the investigation was complete.

Jennifer Allen, executive director of the Border Action Network in Tucson, an advocacy group, said escalating deaths and the spate of crashes showed that the crackdown on the border had deadly consequences that policy makers in Washington often ignored. Ms. Allen questioned the use of the spike strip, which Border Patrol officials said appeared to have been properly deployed and generally causes vehicles to slow to a stop.

“The practices are lethal,” Ms. Allen said. “It should not be a death sentence to flee the Border Patrol.”

The Border Patrol said it began seeing a surge in vehicle deaths in 2003, the start of a major push in border enforcement. Deaths in motor vehicle accidents jumped to 40 that year from 22 the previous year.

Since October, the start of the government’s fiscal year, there have been 42 deaths in accidents during illegal crossings at the Mexican border, already more than the 36 recorded all of last year.

“You are seeing smuggling organizations and the people who put their hands in smuggling organizations with a total disregard for human life,” said Mario Martinez, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in Washington.

The vehicles either crossed the border in rough terrain or picked up people who had already crossed at arranged places in the field or in safe houses, Mr. Martinez said.

Local police said the crashes often involved increasingly risky smugglers desperate not to get caught and not to lose their payment, generally around $3,000 a person, for delivering immigrants to their destinations.

Major Wilmot said the smugglers “even ram into patrol cars trying to get away.”

Figures were not immediately available for the number of injuries in such crashes, Mr. Martinez said, but they are believed to be high. In February, a van carrying 28 people crashed near the Mexican border in San Diego, injuring 20 people.

In April, near Sonoita, Ariz., 4 illegal immigrants died and 21 were injured when their truck overturned.

Often, officials said, the vehicles are in disrepair, making the trip ever more perilous.

In general, as enforcement tightens across the 2,000-mile border, smuggling by car seems to be increasing. Arrests of illegal immigrants in the San Ysidro section of San Diego and the Otay Mesa section of Chula Vista, together the biggest ports of entry, have increased in recent years.

Arrests of people being smuggled in cars tripled to just under 50,000 last year from 19,000 in 2001. This year, however, such captures have decreased to about 14,000 since October, with customs and Border Patrol officials theorizing that smugglers have been deterred by additional screening of vehicles put in place in January, more officers and dogs searching cars, and other efforts.

Advocates for immigrants said the deaths Monday and an overall increase in recent years arise from immigrants making ever more desperate efforts to cross the border.

Last year, a record 473 died along the Southwest border, most of them succumbing to desert heat that regularly exceeds 100 degrees or drowning in rivers. This year, 353 people have died, a 6 percent drop from the same period last year.

    Risky Measures by Smugglers Increase Toll on Immigrants, NYT, 9.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/us/09crash.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Nine Passengers Are Killed in Chase at Border

August 8, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL GIBLIN

PHOENIX, Aug. 7 — Nine suspected illegal immigrants were killed and 13 others were injured after a sport utility vehicle overturned while being pursued by Border Patrol agents near Yuma, Ariz., on Monday, officials said.

The vehicle, a Chevrolet Suburban, was carrying 22 people when it flipped, said Lloyd Frers, a senior agent for the Border Patrol.

Five people died at the scene, and four died after being taken to Yuma Regional Medical Center. Agents had spotted the vehicle on a desert road that circumvents a Border Patrol checkpoint on Highway 95 near the California line, Agent Frers said.

“That’s a common tactic used by smugglers,” he said. “They either drop people and have them walk around or they try to drive around it.”

The driver noticed that he had been detected, made a U-turn and sped away on the dirt road through a sandy area of desert toward the highway, the Border Patrol said.

The driver was trying to avoid a spike strip, designed to flatten tires, when the vehicle rolled about 6:50 a.m., said Major Leon Wilmot of the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office.

The accident is under investigation, as is the immigration status of the passengers, Agent Frers said.

It was not immediately known how far the chase went or what speeds it reached.

Hector Yturralde of the Arizona chapter of We Are America, an immigrant rights group, said the pursuing agents should face serious consequences if they are found to be at fault.

“I’d say that’s extreme measures for undocumentation,” Mr. Yturralde said. “I never hear them doing that to these drug smugglers that are really armed. They stay away from them. They go after these poor, innocent people that are just trying to get in for work.”

The Yuma area is one of the busiest spots on the United States-Mexico border for illegal immigration, even after increased enforcement. Agents reported 6,030 arrests in June, down 48 percent from 11,522 in June of last year.

The Border Patrol’s Yuma sector is a mostly unfenced stretch of 118 miles lined with saguaro cactuses and dry riverbeds.

    Nine Passengers Are Killed in Chase at Border, NYT, 8.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/us/08immig.html

Bush makes immigration overhaul argument on border

Thu Aug 3, 2006 5:59 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland

MISSION, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush argued on Thursday for combining tougher border enforcement with a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants as he clung to a position at odds with conservative Republicans.

Bush stopped within a stone's throw of the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border on the way to his Crawford, Texas, ranch for 10 days of vacation mixed with work on the Middle East and other issues. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to join him for the weekend.

He toured a section of the border where Border Patrol agents use a "skybox" device that elevates them above ground so they can track border movements closely and uses high-tech gadgets, such as infrared.

"We want to send a clear message, we will enforce our border," Bush said at an outdoors event to several dozen people who fanned themselves against the withering heat.

While stressing the need for tougher enforcement of the porous border to limit entry of illegal immigrants, Bush sounded a note of compassion for illegal immigrants seeking to scratch out a living in the United States.

"There are people doing jobs that Americans aren't doing, the people who come across this border to do work Americans are not doing, and it makes sense to let them come on a temporary basis in a legal way," Bush said.

There are an estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States and border security has become a volatile issue that could play a role in November congressional elections.

Congressional conservatives want tighter enforcement of northern and southern borders, while others, including Bush, back legislation that would put most of the immigrants in the country illegally on a path to U.S. citizenship.

Politicians of varying stripes recognize the need to toughen border enforcement, due partly to concerns about terrorists crossing illegally into the United States.

With few days left in this year's legislative session, doubts are rising the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives can agree on a compromise immigration reform bill.

"I expect the United States Congress to do its duty and pass comprehensive immigration reform," Bush said.

U.S. House Republican leaders plans to hold 21 hearings across the country through August to build support for tough border security measures to curb illegal immigration.

White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters traveling with Bush there were "active negotiations" going on about immigration with leaders of Congress.

"He understands the legislative process. It doesn't always operate neatly, quickly or according to timelines," he said.

    Bush makes immigration overhaul argument on border, R, 3.8.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-08-03T215916Z_01_N03456886_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

U.S. Puts Onus on Employers of Immigrants

July 31, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

CINCINNATI, July 30 — Immigration agents had prepared a nasty surprise for the Garcia Labor Company, a temporary worker contractor, when they moved against it on charges of hiring illegal immigrants. They brought a 40-count federal indictment, part of a new nationwide strategy by immigration officials to clamp down on employers of illegal immigrant laborers.

Maximino Garcia, the president of the company, which provides low-wage laborers to businesses from Pennsylvania to Texas, stood before a federal judge here on Tuesday to answer conspiracy charges of aiding illegal immigrants and money laundering. If convicted, Mr. Garcia, who pleaded not guilty, could serve 20 years in jail and forfeit his headquarters building and $12 million.

The criminal charges against Mr. Garcia and his company were brought by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. The campaign has included at least five other federal indictments of business executives in Ohio and Kentucky and has sent payroll managers rushing to re-examine their workers’ papers and rethink plans for their work force.

It also created a new environment of fear in Ohio’s immigrant communities.

“It’s a very uneasy feeling,” said Sister Teresa Ann Wolf, a Roman Catholic nun who works with immigrant workers in Canton, Ohio. “People are afraid to leave the house to go to the store. They are afraid to come to church.”

Until recently, the worst that Mr. Garcia, 43, might have expected from the immigration authorities was a civil fine and the deportation of some illegal workers. In April, with President Bush under fire from both Democrats and Republicans who accused him of being lax on employers of illegal immigrants, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the new campaign. It focuses on those suspected of violations with felony charges that could lead to huge financial penalties and the seizing of assets.

The White House is hoping the increased enforcement will strengthen Mr. Bush’s hand in the battle over immigration reform, Homeland Security Department officials said, by pre-empting House Republicans who are pressing a bill they passed in December that centers on enforcement and border security but does not provide a way for illegal immigrants to become legal. The president supports a bipartisan Senate measure that enhances enforcement but also opens a path to citizenship for illegal immigrant and creates a guest worker program.

For years, workplace raids were a low priority for immigration authorities. Testifying in June before a Senate immigration subcommittee, Richard M. Stana, a director in the Government Accountability Office, reported that civil fine notices issued to employers dropped to 3 in 2003, from 417 in 1999.

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was created in 2003 and is known as I.C.E., acknowledge that past efforts were lackluster.

“We found that the fines were not an effective deterrent,” said Julie L. Myers, the Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary who heads I.C.E. “Employers treated them as part of the cost of doing business.”

While the old immigration agency brought 25 criminal charges against employers in 2002, this year Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already made 445 criminal arrests of employers, officials said. Some 2,700 immigrant workers were caught up in those operations, and most were deported, the officials said.

Hiring illegal immigrants “has been a low-risk, high-reward enterprise,” said Brian M. Moskowitz, the agency’s special agent in charge for Ohio and Michigan. “We want to send the message that your cost of business just went up because you risk your livelihood, your corporate reputation and your personal freedom.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents said they homed in on Garcia Labor because of a contract it had with ABX Air, a cargo airline that flies express shipments for DHL, with a fleet of 112 airplanes based at its privately owned airport in Wilmington, Ohio. From 1999 to 2005, the indictment charges, Garcia Labor sent more than 1,000 illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans, to sort freight at ABX Air.

Companies like Garcia Labor have sprung up across the United States. Instead of hiring immigrants directly, employers create a buffer by contracting with a labor company, which is responsible for verifying its workers’ documents. Employers can argue that that they were not aware that workers provided by a contractor did not have valid papers.

According to the indictment, in a single month, May 2003, the Social Security Administration informed Mr. Garcia that 186 of his employees who were working at ABX Air had invalid Social Security numbers. Garcia Labor continued to send laborers to ABX Air even after they answered no when asked on applications if they were eligible to work in the United States, the indictment says.

“This was a huge, gaping vulnerability,” Mr. Moskowitz said. “You had people who you really don’t know who they are having access to the underbelly of an airplane.”

Two other executives associated with Garcia Labor were accused along with Mr. Garcia. His lawyer, James Perry, said he could not comment on pending litigation.

Douglas Steele, a human resources manager for ABX Air, pleaded guilty in April to one misdemeanor charge of hiring illegal immigrants and agreed to a $10,000 fine. ABX Air said in a statement last week that the company ended its contracts with Garcia Labor in February 2005 and had sued Garcia Labor for breach of contract.

In April, federal indictments were brought against two temporary labor companies in Canton, identified as HV Connect Inc. and TN Job Service. In raids in mid-May, agents arrested four supervisors from Fischer Homes, a home builder in northern Kentucky, as well as 76 illegal immigrant workers at company construction sites.

On July 20, two other Kentucky corporations, Asha Ventures and Narayan, pleaded guilty to harboring illegal immigrants. They provided workers for Holiday Inn and other hotels in Kentucky. The next day, federal agents shut down a prosperous Chinese restaurant, Bee’s Buffet in Fairfield, Ohio, and took away the owner, Jing Fei Jiang. He was charged with importing illegal Asian workers who were living in the basement of his home.

The impact of the blitz was immediate, both among illegal immigrants and American Latinos. The wave of anxiety came as immigrants were feeling new confidence after two nationwide demonstrations in the spring where they rallied for immigration reform.

“People took a giant step backwards,” said Sylvia Castellanos, a leader of a Cincinnati coalition of Hispanic immigrants. Neighborhood gatherings stopped, she said. Owners of Hispanic groceries and restaurants reported slower business.

“It is causing people to watch their backs,” said Rubén Castilla Herrera, a Mexican-American leader of the Latino Leadership Initiative, an Ohio group. He said Latinos were worried that they could come under law enforcement suspicion.

“All I have to do is take off my tie and I can be confused,” Mr. Herrera said. “What’s to say whether I am legal or illegal?” Mr. Herrera said many Ohio immigrants believed the I.C.E. raids were timed to respond to the spring marches. Agency officials said their operations were not related to the protests.

Juan Jose Perez, a lawyer in Columbus who represents many Hispanic businesses, said that under the labor laws, managers were not required to verify their workers’ documents exhaustively. He said managers were scrambling to find out what they should do to protect themselves and to take care of their workers if they learned that some were illegal immigrants.

“The need for workers continues,” said Mr. Perez, a Mexican-American who said he started out as a Texas farmworker and is now the head of a law firm and the chairman of the Ohio Republican Hispanic Assembly. Despite the anxiety among immigrants, “nobody is going home,” he said. “They remain and become fearful and try to become more anonymous.”

That was what was happening Saturday up the listing, garbage-strewn stairs of a dingy clapboard house in Cincinnati where seven immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala had been detained in an immigration agency sweep in mid-July. Some illegal immigrant residents escaped capture because they were at work that day.

“The fright nearly killed me,” said Silvia T., 39, a Mexican who was one of the few building residents willing to open their door to a stranger. Two relatives were caught in the raid and deported, she said. Now she stays indoors with the jitters as rumors swirl daily about another raid.

“Migration takes us away with no respect,” said Silvestre G., 55, another building resident, who is from Guatemala. “They forget that we have human blood in our veins too.”

The immigrants asked that their last names not be published.

Mr. Moskowitz, the special agent, said the agency’s priority was not to deport immigrant workers, but to stop employers who built their businesses on cheap immigrant labor.

“These are not crimes of passion,” he said. “Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night and says, ‘I’m going to hire illegal aliens.’ These are people who have made a conscious decision that they can profit from this.”

    U.S. Puts Onus on Employers of Immigrants, NYT, 31.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/us/31immig.html?hp&ex=1154404800&en=22c0248494be5d18&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog

July 31, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

HAMILTON, Ohio, July 30 — “I’m outspoken about illegal aliens,” Sheriff Richard K. Jones of Butler County told a visitor to his office. “You may have picked up on that.”

To eliminate doubts about his views, Sheriff Jones posted six billboards by roadways in this proudly conservative blue-collar county. “Hire an illegal — break the law!” the signs warn, with a photograph of the sheriff.

He also took out half-page advertisements in local newspapers to convey his message, and he set up a blog to promote a boycott of local businesses that employ illegal immigrants. The sheriff then opened a tip line so citizens could report any employers they suspected.

And right outside the sheriff’s office, yellow street signs read “Illegal Aliens Here,” with an arrow pointing to the adjoining jailhouse.

“I wanted to let the federal government know that if they couldn’t find any illegals, I’ve got some right here in my jail,” said the sheriff, a conservative Republican.

The sheriff has drawn complaints from Hispanic business owners, who say their customers stay home and their sales drop whenever he speaks out.

“Every time the sheriff talks on the radio, people call me to ask if the immigration police are in the street,” said Miguel Garcia, 31, a legal Mexican immigrant who owns Supermercado Garcia, a grocery store in Hamilton.

In May, Sheriff Jones sent his deputies to a construction site after a report that tension was brewing between American and immigrant workers. He detained 18 immigrants for questioning, prompting objections from the American Civil Liberties Union that he had overstepped his authority.

Sheriff Jones says that he does not try to enforce federal immigration laws, but that he can apply state labor and tax laws to combat what he calls “the underground economy.”

His goal, he says, is to prevent labor exploitation.

“People that hire illegals make lots of money on other people’s backs,” Sheriff Jones said. “There isn’t much sympathy for that in this county.”

    Sheriff Defies Immigrants by Billboard and by Blog, NYT, 31.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/us/31sheriff.html

Study Finds Disparities in Judges’ Asylum Rulings

July 31, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, July 30 — An examination of thousands of immigration cases has found wide disparities in the rate at which judges grant asylum to people seeking haven in the United States, according to a study released Sunday by a private research group.

One judge in Miami denied 96.7 percent of the asylum cases before him in which the petitioner had a lawyer. It was the highest denial rate in the nation between the beginning of the fiscal year 2000 and the first few months of fiscal year 2005 , the study found. In contrast, a New York judge granted asylum in all but 9.8 percent of such cases.

Ten percent of the nation’s immigration judges denied asylum cases in 86 percent or more of their decisions, while another 10 percent of judges denied asylum cases in 34 percent of their rulings during that same time period, the study found.

The report, which examined 297,240 immigration cases from fiscal year 1994 through the first few months of fiscal year 2005, was done by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group connected to Syracuse University. The data was collected from the Justice Department, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts.

Because of factors that included changes in immigration law, the clearinghouse divided the asylum cases into two groups, those decided from 1994 to 1999, and those decided from 2000 to 2005.

The study found wide variations in how different nationalities were treated. It reported that more than 80 percent of asylum seekers from Haiti and El Salvador were denied asylum for the period beginning in 2000, while fewer than 30 percent of asylum seekers from Afghanistan or Myanmar, formerly Burma, were denied.

David Burnham, co-director of the research group, said the findings seemed to call into question the government’s “commitment to providing a uniform application of the nation’s immigration laws in all cases.’’

Mr. Burnham said a copy of the report had been provided to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the Justice Department did not return calls for comment on Sunday.

The study echoes a report released last year by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency created by Congress in 1998. The commission study, which examined the processing of asylum cases from 2000 through 2004, found that more than 80 percent of Cubans were given a permanent right to stay in the United States, along with more than 60 percent of Iraqis. By contrast, just more than 10 percent of those from Haiti and fewer than 5 percent from El Salvador were granted asylum.

That study also found that only 2 percent of asylum seekers without a lawyer were granted asylum, compared with 25 percent of those who had a lawyer.

The study by Mr. Burnham’s group found that 7 percent of asylum seekers lacking legal representation won asylum, compared with 36 percent of those with lawyers.

The handling of asylum cases has become a delicate issue recently as federal appeals judges have assailed what they have described as a pattern of biased and incoherent decisions from immigration judges in asylum cases, which make up the bulk of immigration appeals.

In September, the federal appeals court in Philadelphia said it had been repeatedly forced to rebuke immigration judges for “intemperate and humiliating remarks.” Citing cases from around the country, the court described “a disturbing pattern” of misconduct in immigration rulings that sent people back to countries where they had said they would face persecution.

In November, Richard A. Posner, a prominent and relatively conservative federal appeals court judge in Chicago, concluded that the handling of asylum cases by immigration judges had “fallen below the minimum standards of legal justice.”

Concerned about what he described as “intemperate or even abusive” conduct by some immigration judges, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales called for a comprehensive review of the immigration court system in January.

    Study Finds Disparities in Judges’ Asylum Rulings, NYT, 31.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/us/31asylum.html

Senegalese Teenager Wins Right to Study in the U.S.

July 29, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

It was the unexpected success of his East Harlem high school robotics team in April that forced Amadou Ly, 18, to reveal his secret: He was an illegal immigrant from Senegal, left at 14 to fend for himself in hopes of completing an American education, but caught instead in what seemed like a losing battle against deportation.

But when the secret became front-page news in The New York Times, scores of strangers rallied to his side. To pressure the Department of Homeland Security on his behalf, volunteer lawyers built a team that included 6 senators, 23 members of the House of Representatives, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Senegalese ambassador. Word spread that even the man in the Oval Office had weighed in.

And yesterday, Amadou carried home the prize: a student visa that will allow him to stay in the United States legally and go to college.

“It’s like a dream has come true,” he said, already picking out the English and math courses he will take at the New York City College of Technology in the fall. “Every day in this country is like a gift. To tell you the truth, all the people who really helped me, I won’t be able to thank them all — but I’ll do my best to make them proud.”

In the end, Amadou’s story won over everyone, said Ilona Cohen, a lawyer with the well-connected law firm WilmerHale, which orchestrated intensive lobbying in Washington while in New York lawyers at Latham & Watkins and the Legal Aid Society brainstormed on strategy. Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of Homeland Security, agreed to drop the deportation proceedings, opening the way for Citizenship and Immigration Services to grant the student visa.

“Public officials really put pressure on ICE because they had the foresight to understand that the country really needs people like Amadou,” Ms. Cohen said.

Yet so many agencies, complex rules and expiring deadlines were involved that until yesterday the outcome still seemed uncertain, said Amy Meselson, the Legal Aid Society lawyer who had added Amadou to a caseload of hundreds of unaccompanied minors facing deportation when he showed up in immigration court alone in April.

Last week, everything seemed to hinge on renewing Amadou’s passport from Senegal, which had been confiscated by federal officials in 2004 and meanwhile had expired. Government lawyers were willing to lend it briefly to Ms. Meselson, and she described a frantic cab ride with Amadou to the Senegalese Consulate last Friday, minutes before it closed. Senegalese officials made a special exception in extending it.

Another last-minute wrinkle arose when the college official expected to sign the necessary foreign student forms turned out to be “incommunicado in a cabin in Maine,” she said. A substitute was eventually found to do the job.

Part of the urgency, Ms. Meselson said, was that officially, Amadou was only days away from accumulating 180 days of illegal presence in the United States, a milestone that could have barred him from returning for three years if forced to leave.

“It’s totally amazing,” she said, reflecting on how things turned out.

Amadou’s mother brought him from Dakar on a visitor’s visa when he was 13 and left him here after the visa expired. He did odd jobs to buy food and school supplies, and took shelter with a family friend who could sign his report card when he enrolled at Central Park East High School. Deportation proceedings against him began in November 2004 after a state trooper in Pennsylvania reported him to immigration authorities. Amadou had come to the trooper’s attention as a passenger in a car accident.

But last year when Amadou’s underdog robotics team beat those from the city’s elite schools and was invited to compete nationally in Atlanta, he revealed that he had no government-issued identification to board a plane. While his teammates flew to Atlanta, he set off on an 18-hour train journey to join them. By the time he arrived, response to the article had drawn wide news media coverage, as well as a shower of money for college tuition.

At the time, the lawyers thought his best chance was passage of a measure known as the Dream Act, which offers a path to citizenship to some young people. But the measure is languishing in Congress in an impasse of competing immigration legislation.

On the one hand, Ms. Cohen said, Amadou’s story is “a triumph of good government.” On the other, she added, “it’s about the nature of a system that only provides relief for one kid — with well-connected attorneys — at a time.”

    Senegalese Teenager Wins Right to Study in the U.S., NYT, 29.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/nyregion/29student.html

Three Wounded Soldiers Take Another Oath

July 25, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, July 24 — President Bush presided over a citizenship ceremony Monday for three foreign-born soldiers wounded in Iraq and renewed his call for Congress to pass legislation overhauling immigration law.

“We are stronger and more dynamic when we welcome new citizens like these,’’ Mr. Bush said at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, adding, “As the nation debates the future of our immigration policies, we must remember the contribution of these good men.’’

More than 33,000 noncitizens serve in the United States military. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush signed an executive order making them immediately eligible for citizenship when they serve on active duty.

Now, with the House and the Senate at odds on the president’s immigration proposal, the immigrant troops have become part of a national political debate.

Two weeks ago the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a hearing on the importance of the military and how immigration law changes might affect its future. The session, in Miami, brought forth emotional testimony from Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who choked up as he talked about the struggles of his Italian immigrant parents.

The Senate session, like Monday’s presidential appearance at Walter Reed, was intended to promote what Mr. Bush calls “comprehensive immigration reform,’’ a bill that would both impose tough border security measures and put most illegal immigrants already in the country on a path to legalization. The House has rejected that approach in favor of a measure addressing border security only.

As in the past, Mr. Bush said in his remarks Monday that the United States “can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time.’’ He said this was “a joyful day’’ for himself and for the three soldiers: Specialist Noe Santos-Dilone, 21, originally from the Dominican Republic and now of Brooklyn, and two natives of Mexico, Specialist Sergio Lopez, 24, of Bolingbrook, Ill., and Pfc. Eduardo Leal-Cardenas, 21, of Los Angeles.

All were seriously wounded — two lost limbs — by homemade bombs in Iraq. Mr. Bush said he had met one of them, Specialist Santos-Dilone, at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington this year.

“He grabbed my hand, and he said, ‘I’m not a citizen of the United States, and I want to be,’ ” the president recalled, adding, “Now here’s a man who knows how to take it directly to the top.’’

    Three Wounded Soldiers Take Another Oath, NYT, 25.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/washington/25bush.html

Officials Search Arizona Desert for Immigrants

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL GIBLIN

PHOENIX, July 19 — The authorities searched Wednesday for as many as 200 illegal immigrants who they said may have been abandoned by smugglers this week in the desert west of Phoenix.

The search began after Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies and United States Border Patrol agents found 90 illegal immigrants hiding Tuesday along a remote road about 50 miles from Phoenix.

They were found without water or shelter as temperatures hovered around 110 degrees, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said. Seven were taken to hospitals to be treated for dehydration.

The immigrants told the authorities that three people in their group had died and that hundreds more remained hidden in the desert. The authorities have been unable to verify those claims.

The discoveries were surprising because so many people were left with such little protection from the midsummer heat.

The authorities have used helicopters, planes, off-road vehicles and dogs in the search. But the heat and the location have made the task difficult, said Lt. Paul Chagolla of the Sheriff’s Office.

“Part of the problem is that it’s so remote, cellphones don’t work very well and pretty much you have to have a search radio,” Lieutenant Chagolla said.

Those who were taken into custody were all believed to be Mexicans, Sheriff Arpaio said. The group included men and women ranging in age from about 15 to 35.

No charges will be filed, Sheriff Arpaio said, and deportation arrangements were being made.

Based on interviews with those in custody, the authorities said they believed smugglers had led the illegal immigrants across the border in several groups and told them to stay out of sight in a dry riverbed until the smugglers returned to take them to California and Nevada.

A deputy driving on a road used mostly by farmers about 20 miles north of Interstate 10 saw a vehicle in the desert Tuesday afternoon. As he and another deputy investigated, dozens of people emerged from the brush, pleading for water and food. Others scattered into the desert.

The authorities rescued 85 people on Tuesday and 5 on Wednesday, Lieutenant Chagolla said.

    Officials Search Arizona Desert for Immigrants, NYT, 20.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/us/20immigrants.html

Immigration Enforcement Benefits Prison Firms

July 19, 2006
The New York Times
By MEREDITH KOLODNER

As the Bush administration gets tougher on illegal immigration and increases its spending on enforcement, some of the biggest beneficiaries may be the companies that have been building and running private prisons around the country.

By the fall of 2007, the administration expects that about 27,500 immigrants will be in detention each night, an increase of 6,700 over the current number in custody. At the average cost these days of $95 a night, that adds up to an estimated total annual cost of nearly $1 billion.

The Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group (formerly the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation) — the two biggest prison operators — now house a total of fewer than 20 percent of the immigrants in detention. But along with several smaller companies, they are jockeying for a bigger piece of the growing business.

Corrections Corp. and Geo are already running 8 of the 16 federal detention centers.

With all the federal centers now filled and the federal government not planning to build more, most of the new money is expected to go to private companies or to county governments. Even some of the money paid to counties, which currently hold 57 percent of the immigrants in detention, will end up in the pockets of the private companies, since they manage a number of the county jails.

“Private companies are positioning themselves as suppliers, and are positioned to take the majority of new beds available,” said Anton High, an analyst with Jefferies & Company, the brokerage firm. He has recommended that his clients buy Corrections stock.

Louise Gilchrist, vice president for marketing and communication at Corrections Corp., said her company would have no trouble meeting the federal government’s needs. “We believe as their demand increases, they will need to rely on providers who have bed space available,” she said. “The company feels it is well positioned.”

Wall Street has taken notice of the potential growth in the industry. The stock of Corrections Corp. has climbed to $53.77 from $42.50, an increase of about 27 percent, since February when President Bush proposed adding to spending on immigrant detention.

Geo’s stock rose about 68 percent in the period, to $39.24 a share from $23.36.

The increasing privatization of immigrant detention has its critics. Immigrant advocates say health care at some centers has fallen short. They contend that some centers have treated immigrants as if they are criminals — restricting their movements unnecessarily, for instance — even though many are still awaiting a ruling on their legal status.

Because those who cross the border illegally are not considered criminals, they are not automatically assigned a lawyer. But, the advocates say, there have been repeated instances when immigrants have not had access to working phones to call for legal assistance.

“Private prisons have unleashed an entrepreneurial spirit in this country that is unhealthy,” said Judith Greene, director of the nonprofit research group Justice Strategies. “Standards are violated on a regular basis in order to cut costs.”

The companies counter that they are living up to their contractual obligations. “If you develop a reputation as a company that cuts corners, you will lose your contracts,” said Steve Owen, director of marketing at Corrections. The allegations, he added, “are completely false.”

Immigration experts say the need for more prison space is not a result of an increase in the number of people entering the United States illegally. According to the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, the number of unauthorized immigrants arriving in this country is down by about 50,000 a year from the late 1990’s.

Instead, the increase in spending on detention is part of a crackdown on illegal residents living in the United States as well as an expected increase in the number of immigrants captured as they try to cross the border.

The government also plans to detain more immigrants, especially those from countries other than Mexico, while they await their hearings, instead of releasing them on their own recognizance. This effort to end what is known as “catch and release” means more capacity is needed immediately.

“The issue is not how many immigrants,’’ said Joe Onek, a senior policy analyst at the Open Society Institute. “There’s incredible pressure on the administration from members of its own party and from some sectors of the population to crack down.”

Revenues for the prison management companies will grow not only because of the rising number of detainees, but also because profit margins are higher at detention centers than prisons, analysts say.

Last year, the Correction Corp.’s revenue from holding immigrants jumped 21 percent, to $95 million from $70 million in 2004. Geo, the second largest prison operator, received $30.6 million last year, about the same as the year before.

While the companies would not comment on profit margins from their immigration business, Wall Street analysts said that detention centers produce profit margins of more than 20 percent.

That compares with margins in the mid-teens for traditional prison management, they said, because prisoners are provided with more costly services like high school degree programs and recreational activities.

Even with the expected growth in the number of immigrant detainees, the main source of income for the private prison companies will continue to be revenue from state and federal governments for housing regular inmates.

The state and local prison population totaled more than 1.5 million last year, with about 100,000 of those held in privately managed prisons. But the number of state and federal inmates rose by just 1.4 percent from June 2004 to June 2005, slower growth than the average 4.3 percent annual increases from 1995 to 2000.

By contrast, the number of immigrants in detention is expected to increase by about 20 percent over the next three months alone.

Federal immigration contracts generated about $95.2 million, or 8 percent, of Correction Corp.’s $1.19 billion in revenue last year, and about $30.6 million, or 5 percent, of Geo’s $612 million total income.

In the first quarter of 2006, Corrections Corp.’s detention revenue rose to $25.5 million. The federal immigration agency is now the company’s third-largest customer, after the federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Marshals Service.

The detention market is projected to increase by $200 million to $250 million over the next 12 to 18 months, according to Patrick Swindle, a managing director at Avondale L.L.C., an investment banking firm that has done business with both Geo and Corrections Corp. He said that a company’s capacity would play an important role in how much of the market it would be able to capture.

The company “currently has 4,000 empty beds in their system,” Mr. Swindle said. “They are bringing on an additional 1,500 beds within the border region.’’

“Reasonably, about 3,000 to 4,000 beds could be made available” for immigrant detention, he said.

Having empty cell space that can be made available quickly is considered an advantage in the industry since the government’s need for prison space is often immediate and unpredictable. Decisions about where to detain an immigrant are based on what is nearby and available. Immigration officials consider the logistics and cost of transportation to the detention center and out of the country.

“We can use the beds whenever and wherever we like,” said Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We are funded for a certain number of beds but there are many beds around the country that are available and it depends where and when we need them if we use them.’’

While companies do not release how much space they currently have available, analysts estimate that Geo has about 1,500 empty places. To increase capacity, the company announced in June that it was building a 576-inmate expansion of the 875-inmate Val Verde Correctional Facility it owns in Del Rio, Tex.

George C. Oley, Geo’s chief executive, said in a statement at the time of the Val Verde announcement: “We are moving forward with the expansion of this important facility in anticipation of the expected increased demand for detention bed space by the Federal Government.”

Despite the two companies’ dominance, they face competition from smaller players in the corrections business. A new federal detention center set to open in Texas at the end of July will be run by the Management and Training Corporation, a privately owned company based in Utah.

The Cornell Companies, based in Texas, currently operates two centers that hold detainees. It is the third-biggest private corrections company, though significantly smaller than Corrections Corp. and Geo, controlling just 7 or 8 percent of the market, according to Mr. Swindle.

“What’s great about the detention business,” Mr. High of Jefferies said, “is not that it’s a brand-new channel of demand, but that it is growing and significant.”

    Immigration Enforcement Benefits Prison Firms, NYT, 19.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/business/19detain.html?hp&ex=1153368000&en=be2dc3fdbe7c848d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Texas Hospitals Reflect the Debate on Immigration

July 18, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

DALLAS — The doctors and nurses at Parkland Memorial Hospital knew a lot about Zahira Domínguez, a maternity patient who was beginning to feel the squeeze of her contractions.

They knew that she had been born in Mexico, was a 15-year-old student at a Dallas high school and had gone to her prenatal checkups. They knew she was scared about giving birth.

What the hospital staff did not know, because they did not ask, was whether Ms. Domínguez was an illegal immigrant.

“I don’t want my doctors and nurses to be immigration agents,” said Dr. Ron J. Anderson, the president of Parkland.

Patients like Ms. Domínguez — uninsured Hispanic immigrants with uncertain immigration status — have flocked in recent years to public hospital emergency rooms and maternity wards in Texas, California and other border states. Their care has swelled costs for struggling hospitals and increased the health care bills that fall to states and counties, giving ammunition to opponents of illegal immigration who complain of undue burdens on local taxpayers.

As a result, health care has become one of the sorest issues in the border states’ debate over illegal immigration. Facing harsh criticism from residents, public hospitals are confronted with an uneasy decision: demand immigration documents from patients and deny subsidized care to those who lack them, or follow the public health principle of providing basic care to anyone who needs it.

In Texas, two of the biggest public hospitals chose differently.

The Parkland Health and Hospital System, which serves Dallas County, offers low-cost care to low-income residents with no questions asked about immigration status.

“We decided that these are folks living in our community and we needed to render the care,” Dr. Anderson said.

In Fort Worth, in neighboring Tarrant County, JPS Health Network requires foreign-born patients to show legal immigration documents to receive financial assistance in nonemergencies, like elective surgery and the treatment of routine or chronic illnesses. Executives said that their first responsibility was to legal residents, but that they were uncomfortable about having to make such distinctions.

“I don’t think you should ask the hospital to make moral decisions for the State of Texas or, for that matter, for the United States,” said Robert Earley, a senior vice president of JPS.

To some Fort Worth residents, the hospital — which does provide emergency and maternity care to illegal immigrants — has nonetheless sent a message that illegal immigrants are not welcome.

“Whenever immigrants go to the hospital, the first thing they are asked is, ‘Who are you and where are your immigration papers?’ ” said José Aguilar, a leader of Allied Communities of Tarrant, a coalition of church-based community groups that has pressured the JPS board to reverse its policy. “They are being scared away.”

Across Texas, the debate over illegal immigration has spilled into county commission hearings and hospital board meetings. A study ordered by commissioners in Harris County, which includes Houston, found that about one-fifth of the patients in its health system last year were immigrants without documents, most of them from Mexico. Their numbers had increased 44 percent in three years, the study found, and their care had cost the county $97.3 million, about 14 percent of the health system’s total operating costs.

“We have a lot of United States citizens that need our help in health, and we should pull them up before we pull up someone here illegally,” said Tim Gallagher, 45, a software salesman from Plano, north of Dallas, who in an interview expressed views widely shared in the state. Mr. Gallagher said he favored deporting illegal immigrants who sought care from public facilities, even if the patient was a mother who gave birth to an American citizen.

“If somebody here needs health care, they should get it, and then if they are illegal, they should go bye-bye,” said Mr. Gallagher, who wrote a letter on the subject to The Dallas Morning News.

In California, hospitals spent at least $1.02 billion last year on health care for illegal immigrants that was not reimbursed by federal or state programs, according to federal government estimates. Hospital officials there said the ailing health care system was being pushed to its limit.

“Emergency rooms and hospital doctors are forced to subsidize the lack of immigration enforcement by the federal government,” said C. Duane Dauner, president of the California Hospital Association. “It amounts to an unfunded mandate for us to treat everybody.”

California received $66 million in federal money in 2005, the first year of a four-year national program to help pay for emergency care for illegal immigrants. But it was “not even a down payment” on the total cost, Mr. Dauner said. With more than 1.4 million of California’s residents uninsured and more than half of California’s hospitals operating in the red, Mr. Dauner warned that care for illegal immigrants could tip some hospitals into bankruptcy.

Even so, the surging numbers of illegal immigrants in the health care system have fed some misconceptions, hospital administrators said.

While Texas border hospitals often get “anchor babies” — children of Mexican women who dart across the border to give birth to an American citizen — most illegal immigrants who go to major hospitals in Texas can show that they have been living here for years, said Ernie Schmid, policy director at the Texas Hospital Association. Many immigrant families have mixed status; often a patient with no documents has a spouse or children who are legal.

Most immigrant patients have jobs and pay taxes, through paycheck deductions or property taxes included in their rent, administrators at the Dallas and Fort Worth hospitals said. At both institutions, they have a better record of paying their bills than low-income Americans do, the administrators said.

The largest group of illegal immigrant patients is pregnant women, hospital figures show. Contrary to popular belief here, their care is not paid for through local taxes. Under a 2002 amendment to federal regulations, the births are covered by federal taxes through Medicaid because their children automatically become American citizens.

These cases are not affected by new regulations that went into effect on July 1 requiring Medicaid patients to provide proof of citizenship, Texas health officials said. They said they believed that only small numbers of illegal immigrants had received other Medicaid benefits.

Administrators at Parkland said the hospital delivered 11,500 babies last year to mothers who were probably illegal immigrants, representing at least 56 percent of its maternity patients.

One was Ms. Domínguez, whose family brought her to Dallas from Mexico 11 years ago. Guided through Parkland’s prenatal care, the frightened teenager had an unexceptional labor and a robust baby girl.

Many immigrants have sought low-cost care by going to Parkland’s emergency room, where, by federal law, they must be examined and treated, as is the case in any emergency room. Leticia Martínez, 24, walked into the emergency room one morning weak with cramps, fearing a miscarriage in her two-month pregnancy.

Ms. Martínez said she had been sure she would get care at Parkland because her first baby had been born there. “They help economically,” she said. “They don’t ask the immigration question.”

Dr. Anderson fiercely defends Parkland’s open policy. “It’s much wiser to render care than to wait until they are very sick,” he said.

In Fort Worth, JPS Health Network also provides low-cost prenatal care and delivery for illegal immigrant mothers. It does not offer them help for other nonemergency care.

In January 2004, the JPS board of managers voted to offer its financial assistance program to all Tarrant County residents, legal or otherwise. But eight months later, with illegal immigrants starting to fill the hospital, the managers reversed course in a meeting where they agonized over their votes, the minutes show.

The policy has given the hospital a mixed reputation among Hispanics in Fort Worth.

Edy Patricia Rodríguez, 18, an illegal immigrant whose husband is an American citizen, cuddled her newborn recently in a private, state-of-the-art room at the JPS hospital. The child, Pablo F. Ibarra, born June 28, thrived in the network’s care, and his mother was satisfied.

But misunderstandings about immigration status clouded the case of Victoria Canales, a Mexican immigrant who had sought care for advanced liver disease, said her husband, Jesus Canales, 36.

Mrs. Canales was a legal resident and a member of the JPS network’s low-income program. But hospital staff members seemed confused about her case, Mr. Canales said, and twice sent her home when she had gone to seek relief from the liquid filling her body.

Humiliated, Mrs. Canales was reluctant to return to the hospital until she could no longer manage at home, Mr. Canales said. She died June 26.

JPS officials say they do not refuse care to people who need it, but are wrestling with the demands of county residents and changing state laws.

Mr. Earley, the JPS vice president, said, “We have been bounced around like a basketball on this issue.”

    Texas Hospitals Reflect the Debate on Immigration, NYT, 18.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/us/18immig.html?hp&ex=1153281600&en=27d6da486d773d3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Deal in Colorado on Benefits for Illegal Immigrants

July 12, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE KELLEY

DENVER, July 11 — Colorado legislators have struck a compromise over illegal immigration law, forging a deal that Democrats and Republicans said could be the most far-reaching state overhaul in the country.

The law will restrict nonemergency benefits like food stamps, supplemental security income and Medicaid to legal residents of Colorado who are 18 or older. Children will be exempt from the law, which takes effect Aug. 1. Colorado has an estimated 250,000 illegal immigrants.

Business owners will be required to provide proof that their workers have legal immigration status.

The agreement, approved late Monday by the State House and Senate, which were meeting in a special session, will also place two other measures on the ballot in November, ensuring that immigration will remain a heated debate topic through the summer.

One of the measures would allow the Colorado attorney general to sue the federal government if existing federal immigration laws are not enforced. The other measure would require businesses to confirm the legal status of their employees to receive deductible business expenses.

Republicans had sought tighter rules and wanted to put all the measures before voters. The deal puts some of the changes in place without a referendum.

Debate during the five-day session was often intense, with accusations of racism among some lawmakers. The Senate president, Joan Fitz-Gerald, a Democrat, said the issue transcended party politics.

“This goes beyond being a political problem; it’s also a moral challenge to do this correctly,” Ms. Fitz-Gerald said.

The special session of the Legislature, where Democrats control both chambers, was called by Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, after the State Supreme Court last month removed an initiative from the November ballot on whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to receive some state benefits. The ballot measure was proposed by members of Defend Colorado Now, a group opposed to illegal immigration, but was removed after the court said it was unconstitutional because it dealt with more than one subject.

Across the nation, lawmakers have introduced more than 500 pieces of immigration legislation this year, enacting 57 bills, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.

“Collectively they are a strong statement of state interest and getting something done on this issue,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonpartisan organization that follows national immigration legislation and promotes stricter policies.

Mr. Stein stopped short of saying the overhaul was the toughest in the country, saying, “It’s certainly one of the strongest bills passed out of state legislature, but that’s the best you could say.”

    A Deal in Colorado on Benefits for Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 12.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/us/12colorado.html

‘Pit Bull’ of the House Latches On to Immigration

July 11, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. has no tolerance for illegal immigrants, either in his political life or personal life.

“My housekeeper in Wisconsin was born in Wisconsin,” says Mr. Sensenbrenner, the Republican congressman and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “My housekeeper here is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Nicaragua.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner is so loath to risk dealing with illegal immigrants that when his Cadillacs need cleaning, he prefers do-it-yourself car washes that require tokens. “They don’t have Montezuma’s picture on the front of them,” Mr. Sensenbrenner says of the tokens.

He is sitting in his Capitol Hill office dominated by two life-size portraits of himself. He looms heavily here, as he does in the thick of the national debate over immigration in which he has defied President Bush’s plans for reform and arguably holds more sway than anyone else in Congress. A bipartisan irritant from a state nowhere near the Mexican border, he has outsize influence on the fate of the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

In each portrait in his office, Mr. Sensenbrenner appears regal and contented — in contrast to the rumpled and fed-up image he conveys in real life. He is commonly described as “prickly,” “cantankerous” and “unpleasant.” And this is by his friends.

“I would describe Jim as — what’s a nice word — how about ‘idiosyncratic’?” says Representative Dan Lungren, a California Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Lungren equates Mr. Sensenbrenner’s leadership to something the Green Bay Packer guard Jerry Kramer said about his coach Vince Lombardi. “He treats us all equally,” Mr. Lungren says of Mr. Sensenbrenner. “He treats us all like dogs.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner, 63, can be neutrally described as a Washington piece of work — a big-bellied curmudgeon with a taste for old Caddies, pontoon boats and enormous cigars. He is equally at home discussing policy minutiae or the details of his Dalmatian’s recent intestinal problems. His honking voice and Upper Midwestern enunciations make him one of the most mimicked politicians on Capitol Hill. (“Noooo interviews in the hallway” is a familiar refrain as he blows past reporters.)

One could dismiss him as something of a cartoon, except that Mr. Sensenbrenner has been a feared and vital character in some defining political dramas, like the Clinton impeachment, the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the current legislative donnybrook over immigration, an issue that he calls his toughest in nearly four decades of public life.

He has approached the matter with characteristic stubbornness, righteousness and, of course, brusqueness. He delights in placing himself above the chummy niceties of Washington. (On the subject of his crotchety nature, he smiles big and becomes almost giddy — most unSensenbrenner-like.)

His conservative populism and maverick tendencies play well in a state that has elected political outliers including Senators Joseph R. McCarthy and William Proxmire. They also suit the solidly Republican district outside Milwaukee that first elected Mr. Sensenbrenner in 1978.

But he does not always suit the House Republican leadership, many Senate Republicans and the Bush White House. He has been the chief promoter of the House’s “enforcement first” approach to immigration overhaul, emphasizing border security, criminal penalties for illegal immigrants and sanctions against employers who hire them. The president and the Senate have favored a package that offers illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

In recent weeks, Mr. Sensenbrenner has refused to yield on anything, derided what he calls the “amnesty” of the Senate bill and warned that he is willing to walk away without a compromise. He says his views have been influenced by the flood of immigration-related cases coming through his office and what he sees as the failure of previous immigration reform efforts he has worked on.

He is known as one of the toughest negotiators in Congress, which invites another canine metaphor from a colleague. “Sensenbrenner is a pit bull,” says Representative Ric Keller, a Florida Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “And the Senate negotiators he’s up against are wearing Milk-Bone underwear.”

During a 50-minute interview that feels, at times, like a lecture, Mr. Sensenbrenner says:

¶“You have to be prickly to prod people into accomplishing something.”

¶“I’ve adopted a philosophy of telling it like it is.”

¶“I’ve been referred to ... as a difficult child.”

¶“If you go along to get along, you don’t get anything accomplished.”

For as much as Mr. Sensenbrenner decries the impulse to “go along to get along,” he also pays close attention to what is said about him. This is underscored by how wary colleagues are of speaking on the record about him.

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who has been mentioned as a possible successor as Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would gladly talk about Mr. Sensenbrenner. But later, a spokeswoman for Mr. Smith called to demur, saying, “It’s not the right time for us to comment.”

To a surprising degree, Democrats on the committee praise Mr. Sensenbrenner for his fairness, efficiency and willingness to heed the concerns of the minority party. He has also been lauded for spearheading an extension of the Voting Rights Act.

“The House leadership has relied on me to do some very difficult jobs over the years,” says Mr. Sensenbrenner, who served as a House manager during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and whose six-year stint heading the Judiciary Committee will end in January.

He clearly enjoys being a high-profile committee chairman — even his wife of 29 years, Cheryl, calls him Mr. Chairman (“but only when she’s mad at me,” he says).

He is easily annoyed when his authority is disregarded. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for instance, recently promoted a compromise immigration plan that would have focused on enforcement and border security first, then carry out the more contentious changes. Asked about the McCain proposal, Mr. Sensenbrenner stares blankly and flips his hand dismissively.

“McCain has not called me to propose that,” he says, even though the notion had been widely discussed on Capitol Hill. It is as if no such possibility could exist until the House chairman was personally informed of it.

Mr. Sensenbrenner goes on to say that he has no relationship with Mr. McCain, with whom he served two terms in the House in the 1980’s. “There’s some senators who come back from whence they came, and McCain is not one of them,” Mr. Sensenbrenner says. ‘‘When he left, we never saw him again.’’

“I deal with Specter,” he adds, referring to Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

When asked what it is like to negotiate with Mr. Sensenbrenner, Mr. Specter pauses for several seconds. Then he says, “He is a lot more cordial in person than his reputation.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner projects the self-assurance of a lucky man. He reaped a fortune from a great-grandfather who invented the Kotex sanitary napkin. He won $250,000 in 1997 on a lottery ticket he purchased while buying beer. He lists assets of almost $11 million, according to public filings.

Mr. Sensenbrenner was born in Chicago, graduated from Stanford University and, while at college, worked as an aide to a Republican congressman. After earning a law degree, he began an uninterrupted political career that started in the Wisconsin Assembly and landed him in the United States House of Representatives at age 35.

Not given to navel gazing, he prefers, he says, to spend time on his pontoon boat on a Wisconsin lake, smoking behemoth cigars imported from Honduras or the Dominican Republic. The family Dalmatian, Solomon — also known as Stinky — comes along, too.

Mr. Sensenbrenner concludes with an aside about Stinky — specifically, the case of giardia that the dog picked up a few weeks ago, which requires Mr. Sensenbrenner to force-feed Stinky four pills a day. This is not easy.

But the chairman says he picked up a strategy from a guy he met in the beer tent of a church festival. He places the pills in the dog’s throat, and blows in his face. Stinky then swallows them. “I’d never tried that before, blowing in a dog’s face,” Mr. Sensenbrenner marvels.

He has never tried it with a senator, either. “I have given them pills that don’t taste very good,” he says. “I’ve done that.”

    ‘Pit Bull’ of the House Latches On to Immigration, NYT, 11.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/washington/11sensenbrenner.html?hp&ex=1152676800&en=2bb5e6f0715b7350&ei=5094&partner=homepage

States try to block illegal workers

Updated 7/10/2006 8:58 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Charisse Jones

At least 30 states have passed laws or taken other steps this year to crack down on illegal immigrants, often making it harder for undocumented workers to find jobs or receive public services.

Acting while Congress struggles to set policy regarding the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, states have enacted at least 57 laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and a USA TODAY analysis. Among major themes of the state legislation: fining businesses that hire undocumented workers and denying such companies public contracts if they don't verify the legal status of employees.

"The trends ... have leaned toward the punitive side," says Ann Morse, an immigration expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The No. 1 topic has been employment in terms of deterring employers and employees."

Examples:

•A Colorado law enacted in June prohibits awarding state contracts to businesses that knowingly employ illegal immigrants.

•A Louisiana law approved in June subjects businesses that have state contracts and more than 10 employees to fines if they don't fire workers known to be undocumented.

•A Georgia bill enacted in April has a phased-in requirement that public employers and government contractors and subcontractors verify information on newly hired workers through a federal program.

The U.S. Senate and House have passed widely divergent immigration bills. The Senate's legislation would put most undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship. The House bill would make illegal immigrants felons and increase penalties for hiring them.

Some lawmakers and advocates of stricter immigration enforcement say the flurry of legislation reflects states' mounting frustration with federal officials.

"State and local politicians and the grass-roots in those states are up in arms over Washington's conspicuous lack of leadership," says John Keeley, spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter controls on immigration. "Immigration ... is a driving factor for the three biggest budget items states face: education, health care and criminal justice."

Under federal law, states must provide some services to illegal immigrants, including public education and emergency medical care. States do not have to provide commercial licenses, food assistance, health care, unemployment benefits or other services.

States' focus on workers' documentation is unfair, says Brent Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights group. "It feels like we're back to the days when it's OK to discriminate against minorities," he says.

    States try to block illegal workers, UT, 10.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-states-illegal-workers_x.htm

Threat of Terrorist Crossings Is Stressed at Border Hearing

July 8, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREN HASTINGS and JULIA PRESTON

LAREDO, Tex., July 7 — Terrorists as well as illegal immigrants could slip across a southern United States border that is porous and vulnerable, law enforcement and immigration agents said Friday, as House Republicans took the debate over immigration overhaul to the Texas-Mexico border.

At a hearing in this bustling port of entry on the Rio Grande, House Republicans highlighted the threat of terrorist infiltration to justify their tough plan for border enforcement and to suggest that a Senate immigration bill was weak on security.

The hearing was the second to be led by Representative Ed R. Royce, Republican of California and chairman of the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation. House Republicans, facing an issue that has sharply divided their party, have tried through the hearings to build public pressure on the Senate to focus primarily on immigration enforcement. The first hearing was on Monday in San Diego.

Senate proposals would "tie the hands" of local law enforcement officers in working with immigration authorities, Mr. Royce said, and would require consultation with Mexico over construction of a proposed border fence.

Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. of Zapata County, who has joined with 16 other sheriffs in the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition, said a smuggling "infrastructure" that brought illegal workers and illegal drugs into the country could easily be exploited by terrorists.

A bill adopted by the House in December centers on security, calling for 700 miles of walls along the border and making it a crime to be in the United States illegally. A Senate bill passed in May would create a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants while enhancing border enforcement.

Democrats on the panel participated in the hearings but denounced them as divisive and called on the Republicans to address the immigration problem as a whole. "The purpose of these hearings is totally political," said Representative Charlie Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas.

Outside the hotel where the hearing took place, a handful of protestors carried signs reading "Border Security Is National Security." Inside, whoops, applause and an "amen" or two came from a clearly divided audience.

Reynaldo Garza, acting chief of the Border Patrol for the Laredo sector, said that last year, agents in his area — which stretches along 170 border miles — caught illegal crossers from 70 countries other than Mexico, including some from countries linked by the United States to terrorism. Chief Garza said that an increase in Border Patrol officers alone would not stop the flow, and that more remote sensors, video systems and unmanned surveillance aircraft were also needed.

The sheriffs, seeking to avoid partisan debate, pleaded for federal action, saying they were swamped with illegal immigrants and increasingly violent gang members, drug runners and human smugglers.

"Our pleas for help are based largely on failures on the part of the U.S. government," said Sheriff Rick Flores of Webb County. "Many of our problems are federally caused."

A Mexican military ID card and a piece of Sudanese currency recently found discarded along the border offer hints, Sheriff Flores said, that illegal immigration has become more sophisticated. He described an episode in which "black-clad men with duffel bags" had surprised a group of quail hunters near the border.

"This is not a partisan issue," he said. "It's a red-white-and-blue issue."

Karen Hastings reported from Laredo, Tex., for this article, and Julia Preston from New York.

    Threat of Terrorist Crossings Is Stressed at Border Hearing, 8.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/us/08immig.html

House and Senate Hold Immigration Hearings

July 6, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

PHILADELPHIA, July 5 — At odds over immigration, lawmakers from the Senate and the House held rival hearings on Wednesday on opposite coasts, competing for public support for their sharply differing proposals and moving no closer to compromise.

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, sponsors of a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in May, chose the day after the Fourth of July to hold a hearing wrapped in patriotic themes at the National Constitution Center here.

Most of the speakers embraced the Senate's approach, which calls for a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants and a guest worker program, as well as enhanced border security and punishment for employers who hire illegal workers.

In San Diego, Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California and chairman of the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation, was chosen to lead a meeting in a Border Patrol station that featured agents and local sheriffs.

Mr. Royce framed the hearing with a warning that the United States was "losing ground" on securing the borders against terrorists. One of the main speakers, Darryl Griffen, the San Diego Border Patrol chief, said his agents continued to be swamped by illegal immigrants.

Democrats at the hearing accused Republicans of fanning sentiment against immigrants while delaying action on reform. "The leadership wants us to start here with hearings that are really a dog and pony show," said Representative Brad Sherman of California.

A Republican bill adopted by the House in December focuses on border security and makes it a crime to be in the United States illegally. House Republicans have rejected Senate proposals for a route to citizenship for a majority of illegal immigrants, calling it amnesty.

Mr. Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, led the hearing here, shaping the session to feature employers and politicians who spoke of critical labor shortages in local businesses and an urgent need for immigrant labor.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York said his city's economy would be "a shell of itself" without the city's immigrants, 40 percent of the population, and would "collapse" if illegal immigrants were deported en masse. Mr. Bloomberg called for a national fraud-proof employee identification card that would allow employers to determine easily the legal status of immigrants.

Carol Green Rossi, representing the Pennsylvania Tourism and Lodging Association, said hotels in her state were "constantly in the recruitment mode" for immigrant labor but faced troubling and costly problems with inefficient guest worker programs and systems to verify immigration status.

Mayor Louis Barletta of Hazelton, Pa., which has adopted strict measures to punish employers who hire illegal immigrants and landlords who rent to them. said a recent wave of killings by illegal immigrants had "terrorized" the city. In addition, Mayor Barletta said, municipal services are "buckling under the strain" of illegal immigration.

In San Diego, a group of immigrants' rights activists held a vigil while more than 100 protesters who want to reduce illegal immigration packed the hearing room and an area outside.

"We want our borders secure," said Don Schenck, 69, a retired postal worker from Corona, Calif., who was one of the protesters. "We want no amnesty for people who broke our laws."

In Alexandria, Va., President Bush paid a surprise morning visit to a Dunkin' Donuts owned by two Iranian-American brothers to emphasize his support for comprehensive immigration reform, a catchword for the Senate approach. Mr. Bush said he opposed amnesty and wanted not only enhanced border enforcement but also a "rational plan" that would not lead to mass deportations.

"I'm also realistic to tell you that we're not going to be able to deport people who have been here, working hard and raising their families," Mr. Bush said.

White House officials said Mr. Bush was not stepping back from a compromise he has floated in recent days, in which border security measures would be put in place as much as two years before guest worker and immigrant legalization programs. But the president restated that he did not want the security measures in a separate bill, as House Republicans insist.

"What this White House has been clear about is you don't do borders only," said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman.

Senators said Mr. Bush was moving toward their position, but House Republicans said he was moving toward theirs. "I think things have moved remarkably in the direction of border security in the past few weeks," Mr. Royce said.

Mr. Specter acknowledged the political duel with the House.

"We don't have to match them, we have to exceed them," he said of his House counterparts, adding that the Senate could not sit by "like a potted plant" while the House held hearings across the country.

The Senate announced Wednesday that Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would hold a hearing in Miami on Monday. The topic is "Contributions of Immigrants to the U. S. Armed Forces."

Cindy Chang contributed reporting from San Diego for this article.

    House and Senate Hold Immigration Hearings, NYT, 6.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/washington/06immigration.html

Bush Signaling Shift in Stance on Immigration

July 5, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, July 4 — On the eve of nationwide hearings that could determine the fate of his immigration bill, President Bush is signaling a new willingness to negotiate with House Republicans in an effort to revise the stalled legislation before Election Day.

Republicans both inside and outside the White House say Mr. Bush, who has long insisted on comprehensive reform, is now open to a so-called enforcement-first approach that would put new border security programs in place before creating a guest worker program or path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally.

"He thinks that this notion that you can have triggers is something we should take a close look at, and we are," said Candi Wolff, the White House director of legislative affairs, referring to the idea that guest worker and citizenship programs would be triggered when specific border security goals had been met, a process that could take two years.

The shift is significant because Mr. Bush has repeatedly said he favors legislation like the Senate's immigration bill, which establishes border security, guest worker and citizenship programs all at once. The enforcement-first approach puts Mr. Bush one step closer to the House, where Republicans are demanding an enforcement-only measure.

"The willingness to consider a phased-in situation, that's a pretty big concession from where they were at," said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, whose closeness to Mr. Bush dates to his days as a top Republican National Committee official. "It's a suggestion they are willing to negotiate."

In a sign of that willingness, the White House last week invited a leading conservative proponent of an enforcement-first bill, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, to present his ideas to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oval Office.

Ms. Wolff said the president found the Pence plan "pretty intriguing."

In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Pence said the president used precisely those words in their talk. Mr. Pence said that the meeting was scheduled to last 10 or 20 minutes but went on for 40, and that the president "was quite adamant throughout the meeting to make the point that he hoped I would be encouraged."

Mr. Bush has little choice but to negotiate, although he is on delicate terrain. Some House Republicans remain deeply opposed to even a guest worker program, and any move closer to the House could upset the delicate bipartisan compromise that enabled legislation to pass the Senate.

Polls show the public is deeply troubled by the problem of illegal immigration, and Mr. Bush, who has made the issue his domestic policy initiative, is eager for a victory on Capitol Hill. But a carefully constructed White House strategy to prod the House and Senate into compromise collapsed last month when skittish House Republicans opted for field hearings instead.

The House hearings begin Wednesday in Laredo, Tex., and San Diego and will continue throughout the summer. In the Senate, Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will convene his committee on Wednesday in Philadelphia.

The meetings will undoubtedly expose the deep Republican rift just as the elections draw near, and some say they are simply a way to stave off legislation until after November. Democrats, eager to pick up Congressional seats, intend to use the hearings to drive home the idea that Republicans have failed to address illegal immigration, a tactic that could further complicate prospects for a bill before Election Day.

One major question is whether Mr. Bush would give up on a path to citizenship for some of the estimated 11 million to 12 million people living here illegally. He has said repeatedly that it is impractical to deport those who have lived in the United States for a long time and built lives here; the Senate bill permits some longtime illegal residents to become eligible for citizenship if they learned English and paid taxes and a fine.

Many House Republicans deride such a proposal as amnesty. Mr. Pence would require illegal immigrants — even those in the United States for decades — to leave the country briefly before returning, with proper documentation, to participate in a guest worker system. Private employment agencies would set up shop overseas to process applications; after six years in a guest worker program, an immigrant could apply for citizenship.

"I believe it's amnesty if you can get right with the law by paying a fine but never have to go home," Mr. Pence said.

Whether Mr. Bush would accept that is not clear. Aides to Mr. Bush, including Karl Rove, the White House chief political strategist, and Tony Snow, the press secretary, say he remains adamant that any bill must address the status of the immigrants who are here illegally.

But one Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately abandon the idea of a path to citizenship.

Giving up, though, would doom the legislation in the Senate. Mr. Pence met last week with leading Republican senators, including Mr. Specter, John McCain of Arizona and Mel Martinez of Florida.

In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Specter said that proponents of the Senate bill "are determined to see comprehensive" legislation, and that "comprehensive means all parts, including the 11 million." But he also said that he was very interested in Mr. Pence's approach, and that the tenor of the meeting was that the Senate could "move toward a middle ground" with the House.

The question now is whether President Bush will be able to find that middle ground in time for the midterm elections. Mr. Cole, the Oklahoma Republican, was not optimistic.

"Our people would like to have some sort of solution," he said, "but my instinct tells me this is much more likely to be a post-November, or a 2007 kind of deal than it is to happen between now and then."

Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.

    Bush Signaling Shift in Stance on Immigration, NYT, 5.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/washington/05immig.html?hp&ex=1152158400&en=11ca89d55b943953&ei=5094&partner=homepage

On Lucille Avenue, the Immigration Debate

June 26, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

ELMONT, N.Y. — The streets where Patrick Nicolosi sees America unraveling still have the look of the 1950's. Single-family homes sit side by side, their lawns weed-whacked into submission to the same suburban dream that Mr. Nicolosi's Italian-American parents embraced 40 years ago when they moved to this working-class community on Long Island.

But when a school bus stops at the white Cape Cod opposite his house, two children seem to pop up from beneath the earth. Emerging from an illegal basement apartment that successive homeowners have rented to a Mexican family of illegal immigrants, they head off to another day of public schooling at taxpayer expense.

This is a neighborhood in the twilight zone of illegal immigration, and wherever Mr. Nicolosi looks, the hidden costs of cheap labor hit home.

There is the gas station a dozen blocks away where more than 100 immigrant day laborers gather, leaving garbage and distress along a residential side street — and undercutting wages for miles, contends Mr. Nicolosi, 49, a third-generation union man and former Wonder Bread truck driver who retired after a back injury. There are the schools and hospitals filled with children from illegal apartments like the basement dwelling, which Mr. Nicolosi calls "a little dungeon, windowless."

"Two children are in school, and one is handicapped — that's $10,000 for elementary school, $100,000 a year for special education," he said. "Why am I paying taxes to support that house?"

One man's frustration over a family in a basement goes a long way toward explaining the grass-roots anger over immigration policy that many members of Congress say they keep hearing in their districts. And it also illustrates the unsettling consequences such anger can set in motion.

It is the economics of class, not the politics of culture or race, that fires Mr. Nicolosi's resentment about what he sees in Elmont, which is probably as diverse a suburb as exists in the United States. Like many working-class Americans who live close to illegal immigrants, he worries that they are yet another force undermining the way of life and the social contract that generations of workers strived so hard to achieve.

"The rich, they're totally oblivious to this situation — what the illegal immigration, the illegal housing, the day labor is doing to us," he said. "Everyone's exploiting these people — the landlords, the contractors. And now we can't afford to pay taxes. People like me who want to live the suburban dream, we're being pushed out unless we join the illegality."

Instead, unlike most people, Mr. Nicolosi joins the civic fray. A self-appointed watchdog, he tries to get local officials to investigate houses that he and his allies suspect of violations, and to crack down on day laborers spilling into front yards.

But this spring, as the immigration debate ignited nationally, the results of his crusade unfolded like a parable about being careful what you wish for — leaving the Mexican family uprooted, neighbors unhappy, and Mr. Nicolosi himself more frustrated than ever.

Elmont, just over the Nassau County line from Queens, has always drawn immigrants or their children. In the decades since Mr. Nicolosi's father, a bus driver, moved his family here from the city, families from every continent have joined the Italian and Central European generations who settled the first subdivisions. Its population of 33,000 is about 46 percent white, 35 percent black and 9 percent Asian, and 14 percent of its residents are Hispanic.

Mr. Nicolosi, a compact, animated man, says he is fighting to save the modest suburban lifestyle that these families seek, regardless of ethnicity.

In the last four years, Elmont raised school taxes by 57 percent and added 40 elementary school classrooms — partly filled, district officials agree, by families in illegal rentals, both immigrant and native-born. In response, Mr. Nicolosi ran for the school board three times, losing yet again in May. As president of the Elmont East End Civic Association, he prods the police to enforce laws against loitering, and in letters to newspapers laments the erosion of suburbia with examples uncomfortably close to home.

Recently, for example, to the dismay of his wife, a police crossing guard, he publicly cited their children — a doctor, a teacher and a law school applicant — as examples of a generation that is being priced out of Long Island by soaring property taxes.

The Cape Cod across Lucille Avenue from Mr. Nicolosi's home is among hundreds of houses that he and his associates have turned in to officials since 2002, he said, based on anonymous complaints collected by a local weekly. They checked the addresses for telltale signs like multiple electric meters — with no regard, he insisted, to the occupants' ethnicity or citizenship.

But even among those who echoed Mr. Nicolosi's concerns, many called him a busybody and a troublemaker. There was sympathy for the family in the basement, and for their landlords, the Cervonis, a young couple with a baby and a construction business who bought the house from an absentee landlord in 2004 and moved in.

"What could we do, throw them out?" asked Luciana Cervoni, who called the tenants hard-working and quiet. "They've lived here for six, seven years now."

In a dungeon?

"If that were the case, we would have moved a long time ago," said the mother in the basement, Ariana O., 30, allowing a glimpse of its two-bedroom finished interior that showed how homey the couple had made it for their three children: a boy of 10, a developmentally disabled girl of about 6, and a year-old baby — the last two born in the United States.

Ms. O. and her husband, Placido, a mason, asked that their last name be withheld, for fear of immigration authorities. They were aware of past housing-code citations generated by Mr. Nicolosi's complaints. Nothing had come of those, so they were not too worried.

But as the national debate flared, so did Mr. Nicolosi's frustration at what he saw in his neighborhood. Those clipped front lawns? Mowed by underpaid Latino workers. Those tidy homes? Contractors hired immigrants off the books to repair roofs and replace pipes, Mr. Nicolosi said, instead of training, and decently compensating, someone like the 20-year-old American up the block who needed a job.

"They're telling us Americans don't want to do these jobs," Mr. Nicolosi said. "That's a lie. The business owners don't want to pay. I know what my grandparents fought for: fair wages and days off. Now we're doing it in reverse."

Trying not to feed the cycle, Mr. Nicolosi said, he had paid a premium to use nationally known home-improvement chains when he renovated his house. But by now he knew that was no guarantee that the people who did the work were legal, let alone fairly paid, he said.

"It's either a country of law and order and what my parents fought for, or we just turn it over to big business," he went on, working himself into a speech that connected many dots.

He pointed to American companies in Mexico that paid wages too low to keep Mexicans from streaming north to sell their labor on American streets. He angrily denied bigotry and avowed pity for the immigrants, squeezed by low wages and high rents.

"They will never, ever better themselves," he said of the Mexican family.

And as he drove his black S.U.V. through a neighborhood where garden shrines outnumber basketball hoops, his world view darkened what he saw. Passing a small house, he shared his suspicion that it illegally harbored multiple immigrant families, because a dozen children regularly played out front.

But the homeowners later set the record straight. "We're a family here — we're no immigrants," declared Fanny Echeverria, 40, quickly adding, "What makes him better than immigrants?"

She and her husband, George, have five children between them, and their yard is a magnet for neighbors' children. Ms. Echeverria is a native New Yorker of Greek and Dominican heritage, her husband a naturalized United States citizen born in Chile. And they own one of Long Island's most highly rated French restaurants, Soigné, in Woodmere.

Indeed, Mr. Echeverria's biography served as a counterpoint to Mr. Nicolosi's pessimism. He was 10 when his family came to America in 1979, and he was an illegal immigrant himself until the 1986 amnesty.

Still, he echoed Mr. Nicolosi's concerns about immigrants in unsafe basement apartments. "They cannot get a steady job because they are here illegally, so they cannot pay for housing," he said.

On the other hand, they avoid middle-class tax burdens, Mr. Nicolosi contends, sounding almost envious. He and a neighbor often joke that they should move to Mexico and return illegally: "Then we don't have to worry about health care, don't have to worry about paying taxes. And if I worked for $100 a day I'd be better off. After I pay taxes I don't even have $100 a day."

From the basement, what struck the Mexican couple, however, was that Mr. Nicolosi did not work.

"The man has nothing to do except look," the wife said in Spanish as her husband cooked dinner. Recalling the Latino workers she saw renovating his house, she added, "If we weren't here, who would do the work?"

In Guanajuato, Mexico, Mr. O.'s best option was a job at General Motors that at the time paid $10 a day, he said. Like everyone, he added, "we came for a better life for our children."

What of the union battles of Mr. Nicolosi's grandparents? "That's what we're doing now," Ms. O. said. Taxes? "We all consume," Mr. O. argued, with a gesture that took in the dining table, the television and a picture of the Last Supper. "I'm paying the rent, so I'm paying the homeowner's taxes."

But upstairs that day, their landlords were deciding to evict the family. An official had called, alerting them to a new complaint by Mr. Nicolosi, the Cervonis said. This time, with heightened public attention, it would lead to hefty fines unless the basement was vacated.

Joseph Cervoni broke the news to the tenants the night President Bush spoke to the nation about immigration. As word spread, neighbors blamed Mr. Nicolosi. Carolyn Gilbert, a retired secretary who advocates an electrified fence at the Mexican border, said he had no conscience. "People forget the human dimension," she said.

Louise Cerullo, 84, a registered Republican like Mr. Nicolosi, protested: "They're human beings. If they can work and pay their rent, what's wrong with that?"

The talk reached Mr. Nicolosi soon after his school board defeat. He denied complaining, then threatened to sue local officials for identifying him, and questioned the timing of the crackdown.

"They did it now to shut me up," he said.

On the first Saturday in June, the Mexican family moved out. Watching from next door, Ms. Gilbert worried about the children's schooling, and wondered where they could go. Probably, she said, to another basement apartment.

"For every problem, there's a solution," she added. "For every solution there's another problem."

    On Lucille Avenue, the Immigration Debate, NYT, 26.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/nyregion/26neighbors.html?hp&ex=1151380800&en=c614e5723df7e0ce&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Busy School for Border Patrol in New Mexico

June 24, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

ARTESIA, N.M., June 22 — Cadets must double up in dorms, and prefabricated temporary classrooms have sprouted almost everywhere. Scores of agents have been withdrawn from policing the border to serve as instructors. And next year, twice as many trainees as this year are expected to troop through the cramped quarters.

All in all, the Border Patrol Academy here in the desert of southeastern New Mexico is bursting at the seams and bustling with activity as the agency strives to train enough cadets to fulfill President Bush's plan adding 6,000 agents by the end of 2008 as part of his border security program.

Charles C. Whitmire, the acting chief of the academy, said Thursday at the conclusion of a two-day tour for the news media that the president's goal would be met.

"The answer is absolutely," he said.

The carefully choreographed media tour was intended in part to raise the agency's public profile and calm fears that the academy might not be up to the mammoth training task. It produced made-for-television images of prospective agents going through the paces, including shooting weapons, making vehicle stops, learning Spanish — a requirement for all agents — and studying immigration law.

Several of the cadets, a broad range of former members of the military and law enforcement agencies, recent college and high school graduates, and even a few former missionaries, said the physical training was the most difficult. The recruits hit the deck for endless push-ups, situps and other exercises, along with frequent runs in the heat of the desert, to get them in shape for border assignments in often hostile, dangerous terrain where an agent frequently patrols alone. On average, only 1 in 30 applicants ends up an agent.

"On the first day I was wondering, 'What did I get myself into?' " said Sarah Felix, 21, of Los Angeles, one of 10 recruits whom officials picked to speak with reporters. "The physical training was not what I expected."

But she has persevered, she said, out of a determination to be a federal agent, an idea planted by a recruiter who stopped by at her job as an airport security screener.

"I saw pictures of them running around the desert," Ms. Felix said, "and I thought I'd like to give that a try."

Much of what the prospective agents do is typical of police and federal law enforcement training: firearms practice, and mastery of arrest and pursuit techniques. But there are some distinct differences, among them hours of instruction in Spanish and immigration law, and practice in navigating four-wheel-drive vehicles over rough terrain.

Recruits take 750 hours of training over 19 weeks — the longest of any law enforcement agency, Border Patrol officials said — with Spanish classes accounting for the biggest portion, 221 hours. All agents must speak the language well enough to question suspects and issue commands during arrests.

"It's a challenge for them," said Greg Burwell, a Spanish-language instructor. "Some of them just can't pick it up."

One cadet, Todd Huffaker, 27, of Grand Junction, Colo., said he wanted to marry his knowledge of Spanish gleaned as a Mormon missionary in Mexico with an interest in law enforcement inspired by relatives in the field, including a brother-in-law who is a Border Patrol agent.

"I agree with the mission," Mr. Huffaker said, "first and foremost preventing terror and also antismuggling operations."

The recruitment of agents and their retention have long been challenges for the agency, which began the decade with little more than 4,000 of them and would have 18,000 by the end of 2008 under the president's plan. The agency recently raised the maximum age of cadets to 40 from 37 and has stepped up recruiting with a television commercial draped in patriotic themes and broadcast in large cities in the North and the Midwest, the idea being to widen the pool of applicants beyond the Southwest, a customary stronghold.

The agency has also been having particular trouble recruiting blacks and Asians, with whites accounting for 35 percent of recent hires and Latinos 62 percent. Blacks and Asians each account for less than 1 percent.

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol's parent, is soon expected to begin an audit of the agency's hiring and training practices, in light of misgivings in Congress and elsewhere over its ability to train enough agents in so short a period.

The agents' union, the National Border Patrol Council, has expressed concern that to meet demands, recruits may be rushed through the academy too quickly. It has suggested that the agency look for other sites to supplement the academy, part of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center here, which also trains federal air marshals, Indian reservation police officers and commercial pilots authorized to carry firearms in cockpits.

"Congress needs to take a look beyond Artesia," said the union's president, T. J. Bonner, a Border Patrol agent in San Diego.

Mr. Whitmire, the academy's acting chief, estimated that perhaps twice as many cadets as the current level of 570 at any given time would come through next year. But he said he would not know with certainty until Mr. Bush and Congress reached agreement on next year's budget.

At least for now, the loss of agents in the field to have them work at the academy has worsened a shortage of senior agents in some areas, Mr. Whitmire said.

"Clearly any person that is here is one less person in the field taking care of business," he said, though he added that the deployment of National Guard troops to the border — the total by August is expected to rise to 6,000 — would help ease the strain.

    A Busy School for Border Patrol in New Mexico, NYT, 24.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/24/us/24patrol.html?hp&ex=1151208000&en=ed5a0b00fdef00e0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

New Scrutiny of Illegal Immigrants in Minor Crimes

June 20, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — It did not sit right with the sheriff in this law-abiding city that illegal immigrants who landed in his jail for minor crimes were later released into the community and never deported.

The immigrants had been arrested for drunken driving or striking a spouse, usual police blotter material in a foothills county on the eastern rim of the Rockies.

Immigration agents, overwhelmed by a decade-old surge in illegal immigration to Colorado, said they had neither the time nor the resources to pick up the illegal immigrants whose violations were not grave.

But to Sheriff Jim Alderden of Larimer County, the facts seemed plain.

"They violated our borders and then they committed other crimes," Sheriff Alderden said. "I think these offenders should be deported."

Across the country, local law enforcement officials and irritated taxpayers are turning up the pressure on federal immigration authorities to identify illegal immigrants who are behind bars and deport them after they are freed.

Although that has generally been the practice with violent felons, illegal immigrants who commit lesser crimes are often overlooked by federal authorities, who say their resources are scarce.

Now, however, immigration agents say they are beginning to take the first steps to change that. The agents say they are rethinking the triage that led them to pass over the estimated hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with lesser offenses, even if they were imprisoned.

In some cases, the federal agents are allowing local authorities to screen immigrants to help detect those who should be deported.

In 2005, at least 270,000 illegal immigrants spent time in local jails and state prisons, according to the Justice Department. In federal prisons, more than 35,000 inmates, 19 percent of the total, were immigrants.

Although not all the immigrants in federal prisons were illegal when they went in, their felony convictions made it likely that they would lose any legal status and be required to leave the United States when they came out.

In a report in April, the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department estimated that in the coming year 302,000 immigrants who should be deported upon release would be sent to local jails and state prisons.

But based on recent deportation results, the inspector general predicted that most of those immigrants would be freed here. Shortages of money, agents and detention beds have created an unofficial "mini-amnesty" for criminal immigrants, the inspector general found.

The country is polarized between those who want a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and those who want to deport them. But just about everyone agrees that the doubly illegal, immigrants with no documents and who have committed crimes, are not welcome.

In some states, the numbers have soared. Up to 25 percent of the 22,000 inmates in the Los Angeles County jails on any day are illegal immigrants, Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the sheriff's office there, said. The county's annual costs for housing the illegal are at least $80 million, Mr. Whitmore said.

In California state prisons, at least 20,000 inmates have been listed for deportation by immigration authorities, officials said.

In Colorado, immigrants behind bars have become part of the debate on the costs of illegal immigration. According to federal figures, Colorado paid $46 million in 2005 for the upkeep of illegal immigrant inmates.

On average, Sheriff Alderden said, about 6 percent of the 546 beds in his spotless jail have been filled by Mexicans, a majority illegal. He estimated that illegal Mexican inmates cost Larimer $1 million a year.

The overall crime rate in the county's immigrant communities is not high, officials said. But jail officers remember many illegal immigrants whom they book repeatedly.

It used to be that when an illegal immigrant's offense was a misdemeanor, "it didn't pay to call immigration," Sheriff Alderden said. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they were busy rounding up violent felons, as the law requires, and most of the felons were in state prisons.

Last month, the situation changed. Under a pilot program, every day the sheriff sends the immigration agency a list of the foreigners in his jail. Federal agents visit regularly to interview those inmates and identify those who have to leave the country.

In the first two weeks, 26 inmates were added to the deportation list.

Fernando Guadarrama, 21, a construction worker from Mexico, was one of the 26 caught in the expanded net. Newly outfitted in an orange jail uniform, Mr. Guadarrama said his bad luck began when an officer pulled over his pickup because the rear license plate light was out. He had just a Mexican driver's license and, overconfident after seven years in the United States, he told the officer that he could not obtain an American one because of his illegal status.

Mr. Guadarrama found himself in the Larimer jail and then in an interview with an immigration agent, on the roster for a quick departure from the United States.

Mr. Guadarrama was philosophical as he made hasty plans to move his Mexican wife and two children, both American citizens, back to Mexico and start a small business there.

"I thank God every day for the United States," he said. "It allowed me to make enough money to have a decent life."

Immigration officials say limited resources had forced them to adopt a "pecking order" of immigrant criminals to detain. But John P. Torres, director of detention and deportation operations at the immigration agency, said it had stepped up screening in city and county jails, focusing on the centers with large numbers of immigrants.

Despite the political furor, there have been no moves to curtail prison terms for illegal immigrants or to deport them before they finish serving their sentences, corrections officials said.

In some states, the agency has signed agreements with corrections departments to let prison staff members screen immigrant inmates. Immigration agents then place "holds" on the immigrants to be deported when they are released.

Now the bottleneck is detention space. A center with 340 beds in Aurora, a Denver suburb, is for all the detained immigrants from Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, all with booming immigrant populations.

The center is run by the Geo Group of Boca Raton, Fla., a large company in the prison industry. Detainees said the center was clean and orderly. But they live in bunk barracks with at least 24 people to a room, and overcrowding often forces them to sleep in plastic cradles on the floor.

Criminal immigrants are held in a separate wing, with mauve walls. One inmate, María del Carmen Ramírez, 29, said immigration agents determined she had no legal documents in a screening in a county jail. Ms. Ramírez said she had worked for 12 years cleaning the houses of wealthy people in Denver.

"I'm here illegally, like every other Mexican," she said.

She had thrown a punch at her husband in a feud, she said, and he had called the police.

"I didn't hurt an American," Ms. Ramírez said. "I hit one of my own people."

Now scheduled for deportation, Ms. Ramírez said she would leave behind three young children.

In Colorado, sympathy for immigrants like Ms. Ramírez is dwindling. In 2006, the State Legislature adopted six bills that focused on illegal immigration. They include a law that requires the police to report suspected illegal immigrants to immigration authorities if they are arrested for any crime other than minor traffic violations or domestic violence.

Another measure that Gov. Bill Owens signed last week created a State Patrol unit of 24 officers to combat smuggling.

Republican lawmakers joined with former Gov. Richard D. Lamm, a Democrat, in a campaign to place an item on the ballot in November to bar illegal immigrants from using any state public service, except emergency medical care and public schools.

"We've got enough of our own homegrown criminals," Mr. Lamm said. "Why are we importing more?"

    New Scrutiny of Illegal Immigrants in Minor Crimes, NYT, 20.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/us/20jails.html

Here Illegally, Working Hard and Paying Taxes

June 19, 2006
The New York Times
By EDUARDO PORTER

MINNEAPOLIS — It is 5:30 in the evening as Adriana makes her way to work against a flow of people streaming out of the lattice of downtown stores and office towers here. She punches a time card, dons a uniform and sets out to clean her first bathroom of the night.

A few miles away, Ana arrives at a suburban Target store at 10 p.m. to clean the in-house restaurant for the next day's shoppers. At 5:30 the next morning, Emilio starts his rounds at the changing rooms at a suburban department store. A half-hour later, Polo rushes to clean the showers and locker room at a university here before the early birds in the pool finish their morning swim.

Adriana, 27; Ana, 27; Emilio, 48; and Polo, 52, are all illegal immigrants, denizens of one of the most easily overlooked corners of the nation's labor force and almost universally ignored by the workers, shoppers and students they clean up after.

"It's like you are invisible," Adriana said.

Invisible, perhaps, but not hidden. In contrast to the typical image of an illegal immigrant — paid in cash, working under the table for small-scale labor contractors on a California farm or a suburban construction site — a majority now work for mainstream companies, not fly-by-night operators, and are hired and paid like any other American worker.

Polo — who, like all the workers named in this article, agreed to be interviewed only if his full identity was protected — is employed by a subsidiary of ABM Industries, a publicly traded company based in San Francisco with 73,000 workers across the country and annual revenues of $2.6 billion. Emilio works for the Kimco Corporation, a large private company with 5,000 employees in 30 states and sales of about $100 million.

More than half of the estimated seven million immigrants toiling illegally in the United States get a regular paycheck every week or two, experts say. At the end of the year they receive a W-2 form. Come April 15, many file income tax returns using special ID numbers issued by the Internal Revenue Service so foreigners can pay taxes. Some even get a refund check in the mail.

And they are now present in low-skilled jobs across the country. Illegal immigrants account for 12 percent of workers in food preparation occupations, for instance, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center. In total, they account for an estimated one in 20 workers in the United States.

The building maintenance industry — a highly competitive business where the company with the lowest labor costs tends to win the contract — has welcomed them with open arms. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, more than a quarter of a million illegal immigrants are janitors, 350,000 are maids and housekeepers and 300,000 are groundskeepers.

The janitorial industry has been transformed in recent years as a handful of companies have consolidated by taking over hundreds of small local operators. That activity has gone hand-in-hand with the steady advance of immigrants, legal and illegal — almost all of them Hispanic — who have been drawn into what was once an overwhelmingly American-born work force.

Adriana works for Harvard Maintenance, a New York contractor that has some 3,700 janitors and cleans landmarks like Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium. ABM Industries, Polo's employer, is the biggest contractor in Minneapolis and St. Paul, with about 35 percent of the market and a portfolio of high-profile customers that include the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and some downtown buildings.

ABM is a coast-to-coast force in the business, responsible for cleaning a virtual Who's Who of the nation's best-known buildings, at one time even including the World Trade Center in New York, where several illegal janitors died on 9/11.

Despite a murky legal status, ABM hired Polo just as it would hire any other worker. His wife and daughter — who already worked at the university — recommended him to their supervisor, who collected Polo's application and paperwork, gave him an ABM uniform and put him on the payroll. He makes $11.75 an hour, has health insurance and gets two weeks of paid vacation every year.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made it a crime for companies to knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Employers say they do their utmost to comply.

"We don't ever knowingly hire undocumented workers," said Amy Polakow, a spokeswoman for Kimco.

Harvard Maintenance issued a statement: "While we are dismayed that an employee allegedly has submitted fraudulent documentation," it said, "we screen all new hires and make sure they provide proper paperwork."

Buying the Documents

A written statement from ABM said that "if an individual were found to have presented falsified work authorization documents to gain employment, their employment would be terminated."

Still, in many cities it would be hard to put together a cleaning crew without resorting to an illegal work force.

Adriana used to work for ABM too, she said. But last year Harvard Maintenance, a rival contractor that entered the Minneapolis market two years ago, won the contract to clean her building. Adriana guesses that except for a couple of legal immigrants from Ecuador and a couple of Somalis, the rest of the three dozen or so janitors on her shift are illegal immigrants.

And when the contractor changed, the work force in her building did not. "All the workers," Adriana said, "are the same ones."

Illegal immigrants operate in a kind of parallel employment universe, structured in many ways like the legal job market but with its own rules and procedures.

To begin with, acquiring the necessary documentation to work is a routine transaction these days. In Minneapolis, one only has to mill about for a few minutes in a Kmart parking lot known to immigrants and a young Guatemalan with a Patrón tequila hat will approach on his bike and quietly offer to help.

A set of Polaroid photos can be purchased for $10 at the photo outlet- sporting goods store up the street — a quick snap against a white backdrop tucked among the soccer balls and jerseys of national squads from all over the world.

The documents themselves cost $110. Within two hours of having received the photos, the Guatemalan is cycling back into the parking lot to make the drop of the ID package. It includes a green card with the customer's photo and somebody's fingerprints, along with a Social Security card, for which the number was plucked out of thin air.

Some illegal immigrants do not even need the green card. Until the late 1990's, Mexican illegal immigrants typically arrived in Minnesota with their birth certificate and Mexican voting card, which could be used to obtain a legal Minnesota state ID.

But getting a Social Security number could be a little more complicated in the old days. Lily, 38, another janitor cleaning a building downtown, knew no one in Minneapolis when she arrived illegally from Guatemala 14 years ago. So when a neighbor said she needed papers, she called the smuggler who brought her across the border at his home in Mexico.

He asked her to make up a nine-digit number, which she did by combining the date she left Guatemala and the date she arrived in the United States two months later. She sent him some photos and $75 and received her fake papers by return mail.

Documents in hand, getting a job is straightforward. A common first step for new immigrants is to apply to a temporary work agency for the first job. But as immigrant communities have grown, new arrivals have been able to tap into networks of friends, relatives and former neighbors to help them navigate the United States and jump straight into a permanent job.

When Adriana and her sister arrived in Minneapolis from Mexico in 1998, their mother was waiting for them. She paid the smuggling fee of $1,700 per person and helped Adriana into her first job at the building where she worked and where she knew the supervisor well.

"You know, it's the chain," Adriana said. "I just got a job in my building for a cousin."

In some industries with many illegal immigrants, like construction, farming and landscaping, employers often turn to labor contractors to assemble crews of workers — transferring onto them the responsibility of checking the paperwork. That helps establish deniability in case of an immigration raid.

By contrast, the big building maintenance contractors do much of the hiring themselves. But some still distance themselves from the job market itself by delegating hiring to supervisors in individual buildings — often immigrants themselves — who will receive the job applications, help fill in official documents and copy supporting papers.

Adriana said she never had to step into ABM's offices, which are across the Mississippi River from downtown Minneapolis. She said that the supervisor knew she did not have proper papers.

Cheaper Labor

Starting about 30 years ago, as illegal immigration began to swell, building maintenance contractors in big immigrant hubs like Los Angeles started hiring the new immigrant workers as part of a broader effort to drive down labor costs. Unions for janitors fell apart as landlords shifted to cheaper nonunion contractors to clean their buildings. Wages fell and many American-born workers left the industry.

Between 1970 and 2000, the share of Hispanic immigrants among janitors in Los Angeles jumped from 10 percent to more than 60 percent, according to a forthcoming book by Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, titled "L.A. Story: Work, Immigration and Unionism in America's Second City." (Russell Sage Foundation, August 2006.)

The pattern repeated itself as immigrants spread throughout the rest of the country. By 2000, Hispanic immigrants made up nearly 1 in 5 janitors in the United States, according to Ms. Milkman's research, up from fewer than 1 in 20 in 1980.

When the Service Employees International Union started to reorganize the industry in the late 1990's, it adapted its approach in some cities to appeal to illegal workers. For instance, union contracts in Los Angeles include clauses instructing employers to contact the union if an immigration official "appears on or near the premises" and barring the employers from revealing a worker's name or address to immigration authorities.

Building maintenance contractors and those who contract their services underscore their efforts to keep illegal immigrants off the payroll. But beyond that they are reluctant to discuss the presence of illegal immigrants in the janitorial work force.

In a statement, Target pointed out that its stores were cleaned by outside contractors. "As in the past," it read, "if we find any illegal behavior by our vendor, we will immediately terminate their contract."

Mr. Mitchell said ABM had "put in place policies, procedures and ongoing managerial training for compliance with immigration law." Harvard Maintenance's statement added that "we believe our screening programs currently in place are among the best in the building services industry."

For all these efforts, however, it is remarkably easy for illegal immigrants to get a regular, above-board job.

The law requires employers to make workers fill out I-9 "employment eligibility" forms and provide documents to prove they are legally entitled to work.

But the employers benefit from one large loophole: they are not expected to distinguish between a fake ID and the real thing. To work, illegal immigrants do not need to come up with masterpieces of ID fraud, only something that looks plausible. "To bring a criminal prosecution we need to show an employer knowingly hired an illegal immigrant," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the branch of the Department of Homeland Security that enforces immigration rules. " 'Knowingly' is the key word."Yet the standard of plausibility is not particularly tight. "Some of these documents are so visibly wrong that you don't need to be an expert on what a Social Security card looks like," said Michael Mahdesian, chairman of the board of Servicon Systems, a private contractor that cleans aerospace and defense facilities as well as office buildings in California, Arizona and New Mexico.

Mr. Mahdesian said Servicon was more careful than other contractors — forced by the nature of its clients in the military industry to make more rigorous checks to keep illegal immigrants out. But he said that each time Servicon took over a cleaning contract in a new office building, it found that 25 percent to 30 percent of the workers it inherited from the previous contractor were working illegally, and had to let them go.

"Most companies in this industry doing commercial office buildings take the view that it is not their job to be the immigration service," Mr. Mahdesian said.

Companies have little to fear. The penalty for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants includes up to six months in jail — or up to five years in particularly egregious cases — and fines that range from $275 to $11,000 for each worker. Yet fines are typically negotiated down, and employers are almost always let off the hook. Only 46 people were convicted in 2004 for hiring illegal immigrants; the annual number has been roughly the same for the last decade.

In a rare raid, about 50 illegal workers — including a handful of ABM janitors — were arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in 2002, according to Tim Counts, a spokesman for the Minnesota office of immigration and customs enforcement. With one exception — the Wok & Roll Chinese restaurant in the airport terminal — no charges were brought against the companies that hired them, Mr. Counts said.

Pushing for Unionization

Despite becoming a fixture of the labor market, illegal immigrants remain vulnerable at work. Wages declined as illegal immigrants entered the janitorial labor pool. Janitors' median earnings fell by 3 percent in real terms between 1983 and 2002, when the Labor Department changed the definitions of building maintenance jobs and other occupations.

Meanwhile, earnings across all occupations rose by 8 percent, after accounting for inflation. Though unionization has helped push janitors wages back up in many cities, they remain lower in markets with many illegal immigrants in the labor force.

In New York City, janitors cleaning commercial buildings make $19 an hour. Mike Fishman, president of the Service Employees International Union's local in New York, points out that the union never lost ground in the city, and it is still unusual to find illegal immigrants cleaning office buildings there.

In Southern California, by contrast, unions were decimated in the 1980's, and only started recovering in the late 1990's. According to Mike Garcia, president of the union's main local in the state, Southern California's unionized janitors earn between $8.50 and $11 an hour.

Unscrupulous employers still victimize illegal workers frequently. Veronica, a 39-year old illegal immigrant from Mexico, had been working for a temporary employment agency for about a year, crating boxes of beauty products for Aveda, when the agency fired her, then rehired her under a different Social Security number to avoid paying her for the vacation time she had earned.

"They don't want you to gain seniority," she said.

When Adriana started her cleaning job downtown, she said, the supervisor recorded her on the payroll under a different name. But rather than change the entry on ABM's payroll, he asked her to buy a set of documents with the new name — forcing her to live for years with two identities, one for work and one for everything else.

Adriana only managed to recover her real name by tagging it on as a middle name when Harvard took over the contract at her building and she reapplied for her job. Now, the name on her state ID is similar to the one on her Social Security card and paycheck.

Many get caught using bad Social Security numbers and lose their jobs. The Social Security Administration sends "no match" letters every year to about eight million workers and about 130,000 employers. Though the letter warns employers not to fire workers because of the mismatch, many do.

Lily, the Guatemalan immigrant, used to clean the offices of General Mills in suburban Minneapolis for a building contractor named Aramark. Earlier this year, she said, the company fired her and other workers, stating that it had received a letter from the government claiming the workers' Social Security numbers were wrong.

"They wanted to get rid of the people the supervisor didn't like," Lily said.

In a statement, Aramark said it "fully complies with federal laws and guidelines regarding employment eligibility, and has procedures in place to confirm employment eligibility of our employees. Should we discover that an employee does not have proper documentation, their employment with Aramark is terminated."

It added that it did not fire workers simply on receipt of a "no match" letter, but gave workers up to 90 days to fix the problem.

The one thing that illegal immigrants did not have to worry about, at least until recently, was the immigration police.

But life has been getting tougher. Minnesota, for instance, tightened its requirements to award state ID's or driver's licenses.

And, lately, immigration authorities have been pursuing illegal immigrants more aggressively. Since April, there have been high-profile raids at several work sites across the country, including IFCO Systems, a pallet and shipping container maker, where agents apprehended nearly 1,200 illegal workers and some managers.

Since Oct. 1, 2005, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 2,100 people in "work site enforcement investigations," compared with 1,145 for the entire previous fiscal year and 845 in fiscal 2004. It is also bringing more serious charges — such as harboring illegal immigrants and money-laundering of illicit profits — against employers who hire them.

Agents have also been sweeping through Minneapolis and other cities, seizing immigrants who had been served with deportation orders and expelling them from the country.

But immigrants adapt. Pablo Tapia, the leader of a church-based community group, has been holding tutorials for immigrants on how to avoid being deported. One rule is "don't open the door" if immigration authorities come knocking. Another is "stay calm and do not run" if agents raid the workplace.

"Just keep working," Mr. Tapia recommends. "If you run, it can be used against you in court."

    Here Illegally, Working Hard and Paying Taxes, NYT, 19.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/19/business/19illegals.html?hp&ex=1150776000&en=a94929a93349f54f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Economic View

Immigration Math: It's a Long Story

June 18, 2006
The New York Times
By DANIEL ALTMAN

MUCH of today's debate about immigration revolves around the same old questions: How much do immigrants contribute to production? Do they take jobs away from people born in the United States? And what kinds of social services do they use? Yet every immigrant represents much more than just one worker or one potential citizen. To understand fully how immigration will shape the economy, you can't just look at one generation — you have to look into the future.

Sociologists and economists are just beginning to study the performance of second- and third-generation members of immigrant families. Because of the variety of experiences of people from different countries and cultures, it's not easy to generalize. But recent research has already uncovered some pertinent facts.

Education is a good place to start, because it's strongly correlated with future earnings. Children of immigrants complete more years of education than their native-born counterparts of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. "You can expect a child of immigrants whose parents have 10 years of education to do a lot better than a child of natives whose parents have 10 years of education," said David Card, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Being a child of immigrants, he said, "sort of boosts your drive."

As a whole, though, the second generation also tends to move toward the American average, Professor Card said. Some graduate from high school even though their parents didn't, but some whose parents have doctorates will earn only bachelor's degrees.

Still, it can take several generations for poor immigrant families to catch up to American norms. "For the largest immigrant group — that is Mexicans and Mexican-Americans — the picture is progress, but still lagging behind other Americans," said Hans P. Johnson, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. "They're doing much better than their parents, graduating from high school, but they still have very low graduation rates from college."

But despite the lag in education, Mr. Johnson said, Mexican immigrants and their families don't have much trouble finding jobs. "One of the paradoxes of Mexican immigration is that you have these workers with low skills but incredibly high employment rates," he said. "The second generation isn't able to maintain employment levels that are quite so high, but they're basically in the same ballpark."

Second generations of immigrant families are managing to climb the skills ladder, too. A recent survey by the Census Bureau reveals that 40 percent of the female workers and 37 percent of the male workers in the second generation took professional or management positions, up from 30 and 24 percent, respectively, in the first generation. The survey, taken in 2004, included many adults whose parents came to the United States decades ago, noted William H. Frey, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who compiled data from the survey. With more recent immigrants, he said, it's possible that lower education rates may eventually lead to worse outcomes.

Other factors could also make success more difficult for today's children of immigrants, compared with those of the past.

One is increased competition. The children of Italians and Poles who came to the United States around the turn of the 20th century didn't face much of it, because the government imposed quotas on immigration after their parents arrived, said Roger Waldinger, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. By contrast, the children of recent arrivals face competition from successive waves of immigrants from numerous regions.

Inequality of income and wealth is another factor that could affect opportunities. "The second generation of Italians and Poles came of age in an era of historically low inequality," Professor Waldinger said. "The second generation of Mexican immigrants is coming of age in an era of historically high inequality, and that has to work to the disadvantage of those with low levels of schooling."

But there are also forces working in the opposite direction. For one thing, the children of today's immigrants will have much better access to education and the labor market than those of a century ago. "It almost certainly will be the case that tomorrow's third generation will have better outcomes than today's third generation," Mr. Johnson said. "The conditions today are better in terms of educational opportunities."

Adding to that, members of several immigrant groups have often risen quickly to — or even started at — the top of the wage scale. Professor Waldinger said that "the median for Indian immigrants is 16 years of schooling" and that, on balance, "the Indians, the Koreans, the Chinese — they're already successful." One reason, he added, is that society is "much more open to outsiders" in top jobs and at elite colleges than it ever was before.

EVEN if successive generations of immigrants manage to become as economically successful as native-born Americans, a big question will remain: How many people do we really want in the United States? From the standpoint of government fiscal policy, Professor Card said, you could argue that the only immigrants you'd want in the United States were those "whose children are going to get Ph.D.'s" and would therefore be economically productive.

Some people might argue that a larger population raises housing prices and causes more pollution, he said. But there can be advantages to size, too. "If you have population growth, you can finance intergenerational transfer systems" like Social Security and Medicare, he said. And lest we forget, he said, "big countries have more power."

Mr. Frey agreed that waves of immigration could help to solidify a country's position in the world. In that respect, he said, Europe and Japan have a problem. "They have a very aging society because they don't like immigrants," he said. "They're going to end up on the back burner of the global economy."

    Immigration Math: It's a Long Story, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/business/yourmoney/18view.html

Dollars and Dreams: Immigrants as Prey

June 11, 2006
By GARY RIVLIN
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO

IT was when his immigration attorney asked him for $3,000 several years ago that Celso Lima Mejia started to wonder whether his lawyer was taking him for a very costly ride. Mr. Mejia, a Guatemalan immigrant who was residing illegally in the United States, said he had already paid Miguel Gadda $3,600 to help him apply for asylum. Mr. Mejia recalled in a recent interview that Mr. Gadda promised him that the legal fees — a large chunk of his annual pay of about $20,000 as a handyman — would land him a coveted prize: a green card allowing him to come out from the shadows and live in the United States as a permanent resident.

But immigration authorities rejected the application, and Mr. Mejia said Mr. Gadda pressed him for the extra $3,000 to appeal the decision. Until that point, Mr. Mejia said, Mr. Gadda had done virtually no work on the case — "He hadn't even done any prep work with me before my hearing" — but his asylum application had revealed him to immigration authorities. Mr. Mejia, who is now 29, felt that he had to keep fighting, so he scrounged up the money. And that was the last time he saw Mr. Gadda.

When Mr. Mejia found a deportation order in his mail in 2001, he rushed in panic to his lawyer's office. "But the office wasn't there anymore, and there was nowhere to find him," said Mr. Mejia, who gained permanent resident status — his green card — after turning to a second lawyer he described as "my angel."

Mr. Mejia wasn't Mr. Gadda's only victim. When the State Bar of California disbarred Mr. Gadda in 2002, it cited him for professional misconduct and legal incompetence involving eight illegal immigrants he had advised. (Mr. Mejia's case was not among them.)

Mr. Gadda is hardly alone. As the number of illegal immigrants in the country has swollen to what the Department of Homeland Security conservatively estimates at nine million, so have the ranks of those who inhabit the immigration business's underbelly, posing as well-meaning advisers to those in search of a new job, a new home and a green card if not full citizenship. Immigrants, strangers in a foreign land for whom a green card means a ticket to a fuller life, are ideal prey for con artists and would-be consultants out for a quick buck.

ANALYSTS, lawyers and immigration specialists say that the current debate over immigration reform is also providing a perfect business environment for those who prey on the undocumented in the Chinatowns, barrios and other immigrant enclaves around the country.

"Every time there's talk of a new law passing, these scammers basically pop up" and aim at immigrants, said Victor D. Nieblas, an immigration lawyer based in Los Angeles who teaches at Loyola Law School there. "It's big business."

The worst offenders, Mr. Nieblas and others said, tend to be immigration consultants, or "notarios" — nonlawyers who, whether or not they are qualified to do so, are in the business of helping aliens negotiate the immigration system. Even the name "notarios" rankles immigrant advocates: in many Latin American countries, a "notario público" is a professional licensed to represent people in legal matters.

"For unscrupulous attorneys and other practitioners, a change in the law represents a kind of open season on aliens," said Jennifer J. Barnes, the general counsel for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a unit of the Justice Department. "That's what's happened in the past when we've enacted changes in immigration law, and I'm sure if a new law passes this time, we'll see people out there trying to take advantage of the situation."

Yet that seems to be happening already. People who closely monitor the national immigration debate may know that the House of Representatives and the Senate are so far apart on their immigration bills that no new amnesty laws may be enacted — but that information reaches illegal immigrants only in fractured pieces. Even then, immigrant advocates say, some notarios and others milking the process for financial gain warp and bend the true parameters of asylum opportunities to take advantage of legions of hopefuls.

Mr. Nieblas, who is a host of a weekly immigration advice program on a Spanish-language radio station in Southern California, said he was already hearing from callers who contended that local notarios were "asking them for money so they can start processing people under the new law, though there is no new law."

Lori A. Nessel, an associate professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law who runs its Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, has picked up on the same chatter on the East Coast.

"The concern is that you have these notarios out there saying, 'Pay now and get your applications in now for the amnesty,' when there's no reason to be taking people's money until there's a law," Professor Nessel said.

Nelly Reyes is a well-regarded immigration consultant in San Francisco who has spent the last 15 years helping her Spanish-speaking clients fill out forms, translate documents and navigate the federal bureaucracy. She earns roughly $60,000 a year, and says that she could make several times that amount if she emulated the practices of some of her more nefarious competitors. "I've gotten two or three calls over the last month from people saying, 'Let's go into business together, this is the time to start making a lot of money,' " Ms. Reyes said.

By her estimation, more than half her counterparts should be put out of business, because they are either scam artists or incompetents selling skills they do not possess.

"What's scary right now," Ms. Reyes said, "is that people are saying, 'Whatever it takes, whatever I must pay to become legal.' "

"It's that attitude that people can take advantage of," she added.

Over the past three years, Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, has secured judicial orders to shut down a dozen notarios around the state. That includes the Aplicación de Oro, a large immigration consulting firm in West Texas that a judge ordered closed in January after Mr. Abbott said that its two owners had "scammed" hundreds of immigrants out of thousands of dollars each, according to a press release. In California, the state attorney general, Bill Lockyer, has obtained civil judgments against roughly two dozen immigration consultants since 2000, a department spokesman said.

But advocates for immigrants say that California and Texas are the exception to the rule, and that most local district attorneys, who are also charged with monitoring consumer fraud, contend that their resources are too thinly stretched to devote much — if any — time to investigating immigration consultants. Moreover, advocates say, the problem is so widespread in California, Texas, New York and other states where illegal immigrants tend to live that even the most well-meaning efforts seem futile.

"The authorities will close down one of these shops, and a couple of weeks later they'll open up someplace else," said Mr. Nieblas, who is also an officer in the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "There are literally hundreds of these businesses in the Los Angeles area alone that are targeting the community."

At the moment, the most common fraud perpetuated on illegal immigrants — and certainly the most lucrative — is the kind that Mr. Mejia and his new lawyer believe almost had him sent back to Guatemala. "There are any number of immigration scams, but the asylum scam is by far and away the most popular right now," said Nora Privitera, a lawyer for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco. The brilliance of asylum fraud, at least from the perspective of the perpetrator, is that the federal government ends up sending most of the casualties back to their lands of origin.

"Their victims are typically deported and can't rat on them," Ms. Privitera said.

There are two general versions of the asylum scheme. The more simple of the two has a lawyer or notario convincing an illegal immigrant to pay the going rate of about $5,000 — more if a client is willing to pay for appeals — to apply for asylum. The payment changes hands, even though the illegal immigrant is unlikely to secure asylum status, which is meant for those who would face persecution back in their home country if they were deported.

That is among the accusations that the State Bar of California was leveling at Walter Pineda, an immigration lawyer, in a San Francisco hearing room last week. According to immigration experts, people typically emigrate from Mexico to search for better economic opportunities, not because they fear for their safety. Even so, Mr. Pineda routinely encouraged his Mexican clients to file "meritless" asylum applications, according to the state bar, which has accused him of more than two dozen counts of incompetence and five counts of moral turpitude for what it called "repeatedly and knowingly" lying to his clients.

The bar association contends that Mr. Pineda would routinely "take client money to file frivolous applications, spend no time actually trying to develop a viable position for the clients to stay legally in the United States, lose the applications for asylum and take more money to file frivolous appeals."

Doron Weinberg, Mr. Pineda's lawyer, said, "We admit to the general facts, but as you can imagine, we deny every judgment that has my client doing something reprehensible."

An immigration lawyer typically works hard for a $5,000 fee — assembling evidence, prepping witnesses, drawing up arguments to convince a skeptical immigration hearing officer that a client deserves asylum. Then there are cases like those of Mr. Mejia, the Guatemalan handyman who lost $6,600 pursuing his asylum case.

Guatemalan rebels kidnapped Mr. Mejia, the son of a government employee, when he was 7 years old and the country was in the midst of a prolonged civil war; two years after securing his release, his family fled Guatemala for the United States. Like so many illegal immigrants, Mr. Mejia and his parents did their best to live their lives out of the view of the authorities — until a family friend referred Mr. Gadda to them a half-dozen years ago.

Another lawyer might have been able to make a credible case that Mr. Mejia deserved asylum. But Mr. Gadda apparently was unwilling or unable to do so. Mr. Mejia says he believes his own experience reflects the accusations that the California bar made against Mr. Gadda: that he proved willing to collect fees but not to do the work for which he was paid.

"This was a lawyer who took money from his clients and repeatedly failed to perform legal services," said Sherrie B. McLetchie, the lead lawyer for the California bar in the disbarment proceedings against Mr. Gadda. And the undocumented "are among the most vulnerable clients any lawyer can represent," she said.

Despite his travails, Mr. Mejia stayed the course. It would eventually cost him over $10,000 more in legal fees beyond what he paid Mr. Gadda, but Ilyce Shugall, a local immigration lawyer, was able to secure him a green card in April. "I worked after work, and I worked on weekends," to pay the added fees, Mr. Mejia said.

Ms. Shugall said that Mr. Gadda "had made such a mess out of the asylum claim that we decided to drop it." Instead, Ms. Shugall, who works for the law firm of Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale in San Francisco, pursued an alternative claim known as a "cancellation-of-removal" order. Such orders grant green cards to anyone who has lived in the United States for at least 10 years and can demonstrate that a parent or a child in the country legally would suffer "exceptional and unusual hardship" if the applicant was deported. Mr. Mejia, who arrived here in the late 1980's and later became the primary care provider for his ailing parents, met that criteria and won his green card.

MR. MEJIA was fortunate to have an advocate like Ms. Shugall, because cancellation-of-removal orders are often central to the other type of fraud involving an asylum claim. In it, a deceitful notario or lawyer tells potential clients that they qualify for a cancellation order, but does not disclose a crucial prerequisite: that even if they are care providers for a legal but ailing resident who is a parent or child, they must still prove that a loved one would suffer extreme hardship if the authorities deported the caregiver.

"That's a very difficult standard to meet, but people are not told that part of it," said Ms. Privitera of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. The most insidious aspect of this unfortunate legal strategy, Ms. Privitera said, is that first the lawyer or immigration consultant must get someone into the system, because only if there is a removal order in place can someone petition to have the order rescinded, which would lead to a green card. The simplest way to do this is to request asylum, so the client will typically pay thousands of dollars for a futile asylum claim and, after the loss, will spend thousands of dollars more to pursue a legalization strategy that is far more likely to snare a deportation order than a green card.

"Once you're in immigration court, there's only two ways out," Ms. Privitera said. "You get granted something, or you get told to leave. There's no prosecutorial discretion for people who come into court because they've been defrauded."

Illegal immigrants who escape this trap are those who find a capable lawyer willing to take on their botched cases before they are deported — immigrants like Silvia Castillo of San Jose, Calif. Ms. Castillo, along with four other plaintiffs, has filed a suit accusing Rose Ann Martinez, an immigration consultant, and several San Francisco Bay Area lawyers of conspiring "on a fraudulent immigration scheme." Ms. Castillo, a housekeeper and single mother of two, said the process cost her about $10,000.

"My mother basically spent her entire life's savings," said Glancy Robles, her 16-year-old daughter.

According to the complaint, filed earlier this year in California, Ms. Martinez persuaded Ms. Castillo and her fellow plaintiffs, all of them illegal immigrants from Mexico, to pursue the cancellation-of-removal strategy. But, court papers say, Ms. Martinez never informed her clients that they also had to file an asylum application, which would put them in peril of deportation. The victims also contend that Ms. Martinez failed to tell them that a cancellation-of-removal order was rare and that they would be successful only if they also proved that their deportation would cause extreme hardship for a parent or child. Ms. Martinez declined to comment.

Because both of Ms. Castillo's children were born in the United States, they are citizens. But both are healthy. Ms. Castillo lost her case — and her family would have been forced to move back to Mexico if not for the intervention of Vaughan de Kirby, a San Francisco lawyer.

Mr. de Kirby was able to convince a judge that sending Ms. Castillo back to Mexico also meant deporting her two children, both of whom were in school at the time. He also was able to prove that her two daughters would experience extreme hardship if they were forced to leave the country, thereby clearing up the mess that he said Ms. Martinez — and the outside law firm she commissioned — had made of Ms. Castillo's case.

"Immigration consultants serve a valuable function, because they can operate at a cost factor for people who can't afford an attorney," Mr. de Kirby said. "But unfortunately they're not well regulated, and there are abuses."

Mr. Nieblas, the Los Angeles immigration lawyer, is not nearly so generous in his comments about notarios. He estimates that he meets with as many as 20 people a month who have shown up in his office after an immigration consultant has botched a case through incompetence or malfeasance. If it were up to him, he said, he would outlaw immigration consultants altogether.

Another Los Angeles immigration lawyer, Alan R. Diamante, says that "70 to 80 percent of my clients have either been victims of a notario, or a lawyer working together with a notario." He, too, says he does not believe that notarios play a legitimate role in handling the legal mechanics of immigration.

LIKE other lawyers interviewed for this article, both Mr. Nieblas and Mr. Diamante said that they would never advise clients to reveal their residency status to authorities on the chance that they might secure a cancellation-of-removal order. He said that the stakes were very high, and the chances of winning low.

"I've had clients come to me and say, 'I've got a son who is suffering from this disease or that disease, let me turn myself in,' " Mr. Nieblas said. "I always tell them no. But some then just find someone else to handle the case. They've heard from people on the streets that this is the perfect opportunity to get a green card, and they don't want to believe me — and they can always find a notario who'll take their case."

The undocumented are not always on the losing end of immigration schemes. In Chinatown in San Francisco, for instance, an immigrant can spend $20,000 to $40,000 over six to seven years fighting to secure a green card, said Steve W. Baughman, a local immigration lawyer. Alternatively, he said, the same person can find an unscrupulous consultant who, for roughly $5,000, "will teach you how to lie and cheat your way into a bogus asylum claim."

For example, the granting of asylum is nearly automatic for a Chinese expatriate who claims religious and political persecution because he or she is a member of the Falun Gong spiritual sect. So some immigration consultants, Mr. Baughman said, maintain libraries of materials and videos about the group so that illegal immigrants can fake membership in Falun Gong when an asylum officer quizzes them.

"I can hardly blame people for doing it," he said. "It's the supply side that needs to be dealt with."

The federal government's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman, does what it can to spread the word that illegal immigrants must be careful about whom they turn to when seeking legal assistance. "If people snuck in the country illegally, we still don't want them to be taken by someone hanging out a shingle on a street corner, claiming they're an immigration expert when they're not," Mr. Bentley said.

Yet the abuses of immigration consultants are hardly a top priority, Mr. Bentley acknowledged, for an agency now tucked inside the Department of Homeland Security.

The San Francisco district attorney's office will "vigorously prosecute any complaints we receive" about immigration consultants, said an assistant district attorney, June Cravett. Her office, she said, is trying to spread the word that it offers a haven for illegal immigrants who feel that they have been fleeced by a scam artist.

BUT limited resources mean that her office does not set up sting operations or the like, Ms. Cravett said. "Unfortunately, we haven't received that many complaints," she said.

The local authorities in Los Angeles have adopted a similar approach, said Mr. Diamante, a former president of the local Mexican American Bar Association. "They do one major token case every five years, it gets a lot of attention, and then that's it," he said.

Immigrant advocates and law enforcement officials in California point to the district attorney's office in Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, as a model enforcement program. But they say that while county officials have taken impressive steps to crack down on unscrupulous notarios, the office's experiences and limited resources still underscore how hard it is to rein in the problem.

"There are so many of them it's really hard to go after every single one," said Martha J. Donohoe, a deputy district attorney in the county who oversees her office's efforts to monitor immigration consultants. "Basically our focus has had to have been going after the really bad actors."

When she has a law clerk, Ms. Donohoe says, her office can monitor the immigration consultant industry more proactively. Otherwise, her office must wait until it receives complaints from local advocacy groups that represent illegal immigrants, she said.

"I hate to say it, but by the time we go after someone, they've typically hurt so many people," Ms. Donohoe said. "Typically it takes years to bring one of these cases, and the word has to really spread that someone is a bad, bad actor before we get people who are here illegally to bring a complaint."

    Dollars and Dreams: Immigrants as Prey, NYT, 11.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/business/yourmoney/11migrate.html

Bush Says Deportation 'Ain't Gonna Work'

June 8, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:34 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rejecting an argument being made by some conservatives in his own party, President Bush said Thursday that the idea that the United States could force millions of illegal immigrants to return home ''ain't gonna work.''

Bush told a gathering of Hispanic leaders that the immigration system is broken and Congress needs to pass ''commonsense'' reform that strengthens the border while allowing more foreigners in to work temporarily and giving those who sneaked in years ago a chance to become citizens.

''There are those here in Washington who say, `Why don't we just find the folks and send them home,''' Bush said. ''That ain't gonna work.''

He said although it sounds simple, it is impractical to insist that the 12 million illegal immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S. leave and come back legally. Some prominent conservatives in his party say allowing those immigrants to become citizens without returning home would amount to amnesty.

Bush defined amnesty as allowing those immigrants to automatically become citizens. He said instead they first should be required to prove that they have been working and abiding the law, pay a fine, learn English and wait behind those who have been in the country legally.

''We don't have to choose between the extremes,'' Bush said. ''There's a rational middle ground.''

Bush is trying to get Congress to pass his immigration plan, but a block of conservative lawmakers have been firmly opposed to it and prefer legislation that would take a harder stance against those who break the law to sneak in the country. House and Senate negotiators have yet to meet to resolve the differences in the two different approaches.

Bush's remarks came during a 15-minute speech at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in which he also talked about his faith in God. ''I rely upon the Almighty for strength and comfort,'' Bush told the participants gathered in a hotel ballroom just a couple blocks from the White House.

''This morning we come together to give our thanks for all our blessings, and recognize our nation's continuing dependence on divine providence,'' he said.

On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov

    Bush Says Deportation 'Ain't Gonna Work', NYT, 8.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Immigration.html?hp&ex=1149825600&en=0783779a5073a0ed&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Suggests Immigrants Learn English

June 8, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

OMAHA, June 7 — President Bush urged immigrants on Wednesday to learn English and history and civics with the goal of "helping us remain one nation under God."

On the second day of a campaign-style trip to sell his immigration bill to the public and to skeptical conservatives in Congress, Mr. Bush also directed his homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, to create a "task force on new Americans" to expand local initiatives to help immigrants integrate into American society.

"One aspect of making sure we have an immigration system that works, that's orderly and fair, is to actively reach out and help people assimilate into our country," Mr. Bush said in a speech at a community college here. "That means learn the values and history and language of America."

While the task force is largely symbolic — there is no new money for it — the president's fresh emphasis on assimilation is part of a strategy by the White House to unite Republicans in the House and Senate around what Mr. Bush calls "comprehensive immigration reform."

The House has passed a border security bill. The Senate measure, favored by the president, includes a temporary guest worker program and a plan for citizenship for some illegal immigrants who have been here several years, so long as they work, pay taxes and learn English.

Mr. Bush dipped into the issue carefully, steering clear of a hot-button provision in the Senate bill that directs the federal government to "preserve and enhance the role of English as the national language" — a provision that White House aides say the president supports. It falls short of the goals of a more controversial movement to make English the official language.

After meeting with immigrants who are learning English and receiving assistance from the Juan Diego Center, a Catholic Charities organization here, Mr. Bush used his speech to feature immigrant business owners. He singled out an auto repair shop owner, Salvador Piña, who received a $10,000 loan from Catholic Charities and now owns his building and has three employees.

"When you hear people like me talking about assimilation," Mr. Bush said, "that's what we're talking about, helping people assimilate into America, helping us remain one nation under God."

    Bush Suggests Immigrants Learn English, NYT, 8.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/washington/08bush.html

Utah Guard Set for Projects on U.S. Border

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 5, 2006
The New York Times

YUMA, Ariz., June 4 — The first National Guard troops sent to assist immigration agents prepared Sunday to work on projects near a fortified stretch of desert along the Mexican border.

The 55 Utah National Guard members will begin work on Monday extending fences, improving gravel roads and working on border lighting near the town of San Luis, Ariz., which is part of the nation's busiest Border Patrol station.

"They are putting everything together so they can hit the ground running," said Maj. Hank McIntire, a spokesman for the Utah National Guard.

The troops are part of President Bush's plan to send up to 6,000 National Guard members to the four border states to perform support duties that will allow immigration agents to focus on border security. The Guard members will not perform significant law enforcement duties.

The National Guard members, who arrived in Arizona on Saturday, also were briefed on the duties of the Border Patrol and given tips on staying hydrated in the triple-digit heat of the Arizona desert.

Officials say 300 National Guard soldiers from Arizona are expected to begin arriving at the state's border in mid-June.

About 170 troops are already helping federal and state officers there with communications, fence construction and anti-drug efforts.

    Utah Guard Set for Projects on U.S. Border, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/us/05guard.html

Border Patrol Draws Scrutiny as Its Role Grows

June 4, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX, June 2 — With a proposed major expansion, the Border Patrol may soon overtake the F.B.I. as the largest federal law enforcement agency. But the stepped-up mission comes as the Border Patrol wrestles with recruitment and training difficulties, and several agents face accusations of misconduct.

In response to concerns, the inspector general's office of the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the Border Patrol, said it would audit the agency's recruitment, hiring and training practices to determine if it can handle the rapid expansion. A spokeswoman, Tamara Faulkner, said the review could begin this month.

David V. Aguilar, the chief of the Border Patrol, told Congress last week that the extraordinary growth was vital to national security, particularly as the authorities seek to clamp down on illegal crossings along the Mexican border. The agency has swelled to more than 11,000 agents from 4,000 15 years ago, with 6,000 more proposed by President Bush by 2008 as a cornerstone of his immigration overhaul.

"The nexus between our post-Sept. 11 mission and our traditional role is clear," Chief Aguilar said. "Terrorists and violent criminals may exploit smuggling routes used by migrants to enter the United States illegally and do us harm."

But as the Border Patrol seeks more agents, its training academy in Artesia, N.M., needs expansion, and some watchdog groups question its ability to prepare so many new agents in so little time. As a temporary measure, thousands of National Guard troops will soon be dispatched here in Arizona and elsewhere along the 2,000-mile border to assist with logistics and support work.

"This is not something where you can snap your fingers and have thousands go on the job," said Deborah W. Meyers, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. "It is a demanding job, and training is important and intense."

Big buildups in border security in the 1990's coincided with a rash of embarrassing disclosures about wayward agents and questions about how well the agency screened recruits. Those concerns have surfaced again as several agents have been accused of misconduct and immigrant smuggling, including one agent from Mexico who was hired in 2002 even though he is not a United States citizen, as is required.

In January, the Mexican agent, Oscar Antonio Ortiz, who had falsely claimed citizenship on his job application, pleaded guilty to charges of immigrant smuggling and other crimes and is awaiting sentencing. Mr. Ortiz, 28, had told recruiters he had used cocaine in the past, and investigators later discovered that he had previously been arrested, though not prosecuted, on suspicion of smuggling after immigration officers at San Ysidro, Calif., detained him with two illegal immigrants in his car.

In March, two Border Patrol supervising agents in California, Mario Alvarez, 44, and Scott McClaren, 43, were also charged with smuggling. The agents had helped set up an antismuggling program with the Mexican authorities. They have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial in San Diego.

In recent years, several agents have also been convicted of assaulting border crossers and other abuses. Advocates for immigrants have long accused the agency of too often stopping people, particularly Latinos, without proper justification and of giving little public accounting of any results of abuse accusations.

"It seems like they just hired Border Patrol agents from Ohio and brought them down here and put them in our communities," said Fernando Garcia, director of the Border Network for Human Rights, a group based in El Paso that monitors law enforcement at the border in Texas and New Mexico.

Todd Fraser, a spokesman for the Border Patrol, said a relatively few rogue agents had drawn more attention than the vast majority of honorable ones, including several who had won praise inside and outside the agency for efforts to rescue immigrants stranded in the desert.

Mr. Fraser said much of the concern about agent misconduct was outdated and overblown. Agents, he said, go through increasingly extensive preparation for jobs that often involve great risks, including the threat of confrontation with armed smugglers.

"Border Patrol agents go through a long and intensive training program that makes them among the most highly trained and professional officers out there," he said.

Some critics have also expressed greater confidence in the agency. Representative Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat who in the early 1990's called for a federal commission to oversee the agency because of its many problems, said it had made great strides in raising standards and curtailing questionable tactics.

"I certainly think over the years we are seeing border enforcement become more professional," Mr. Becerra said. "They have done a lot to get in line with professional standards."

The Border Patrol has over the years had trouble keeping agents and hiring enough to compensate for the losses. The agents' union blames entry-level pay, which is $35,000 to $40,000, depending on experience, generally lower than many local and state law enforcement agencies.

The work, too, is demanding and calls for solitary patrols in the dead of night in forbidding terrain, often arresting the same people over and over again. In all, the agents are responsible for 6,000 miles of land border with Mexico and Canada and 2,000 miles of coastline around Florida and Puerto Rico.

"It is mind-numbingly boring to sit in one spot 10 hours a day and watch people stream by and be told your job is not to chase them but call the guy behind you," said T. J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the agents' union, referring to a common tactic of stationing agents and vehicles as a deterrent to smugglers. "The problem is there often is no guy behind you, because we are short-staffed."

A large number of agents left shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to take better-paying jobs in the newly expanded air marshal service. Many have since returned to their old posts, however, and the patrol reports attrition has fallen to about 6 percent, after spiking to nearly 20 percent post-9/11.

To help meet recruitment goals, the agency has begun an advertising campaign that emphasizes the potential excitement of the job; has raised the maximum starting age to 40 from 37, to attract more military veterans fresh from their service; and has shortened the 20-week training course for recruits who have a command of Spanish, which all agents are required to know.

The large unknown, Mr. Bonner and others said, is whether Congress will provide the money in coming years to hire agents and whether the agency can bring in enough quality recruits to meet Mr. Bush's goals.

Although Congressional legislation authorized 2,000 more agents this year, the final budget wrangling left money for only 1,500. "It's going to be tough, and it's going to be a challenge, but we are confident we will be able to do it," said Maria Valencia, an agency spokeswoman. "But the money is the key part in all of this."

The Border Patrol traces its roots to a Texas Ranger named Jeff Milton, one of the last of the Old West gunslingers who gained fame as one of the men who helped hunt down Geronimo and patrolled the relatively newly drawn Mexican border in the 1880's with horse and pistol. A 1948 biography of him is subtitled "A Good Man With a Gun."

Its agents, some still riding horseback among the tumbleweeds, rely on an arsenal of guns and high-power weapons that surely would have awed Milton, as well as tools he could never have imagined: pilotless aerial drones, all-terrain vehicles, infrared night scopes, embedded motion sensors. These days, the job still attracts applicants with a bit of cowboy in them, people who enjoy the outdoors and do not mind the often rough-and-tumble borderlands.

Devin Harshbarger, 25, is in his first two months on the job at the Casa Grande station 50 miles southeast of here, some 700 miles from his hometown, Cheyenne, Wyo.

"After 9/11, I wanted to do my part to help keep terrorists out," Agent Harshbarger said, adding that he was also drawn to working outdoors.

The job also attracts people motivated by the immigration debate.

Adolfo Diaz, 30, an Air Force veteran who is another new recruit, said he got tired of illegal immigrants crossing his family ranch near the Arizona-Mexico border.

"Individuals have come to the house, and they have threatened neighbors and families," Agent Diaz said. He described his first arrest, of some 25 people hiking across the desert, as scary because he and the two other agents were outnumbered.

But there is debate whether the new agents can significantly ebb the flow of people crossing the Mexican border, a never-ending stream that another new recruit, Christine Treviño, called "really crazy."

Last year, with 11,106 agents, the Border Patrol arrested 1.2 million people on charges of illegally crossing into the United States; in 1995, with 4,876 agents, it arrested 1.3 million. Arrests peaked in 2000, with 1.6 million made by 9,078 agents, and have swung up and down since even as the ranks of agents has swelled. The Border Patrol estimates that 98 percent of the arrests each year are made on the Mexico border and says a majority of the people detained are Mexicans who are returned to their country, usually within hours.

The data, and the mix of political, economic and social factors that contribute to illegal immigration, make it difficult to explain the erratic nature of apprehensions and undermine "the widely accepted assumption that border security will be automatically improved by the hiring of more agents," found an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group connected to Syracuse University.

    Border Patrol Draws Scrutiny as Its Role Grows, NYT, 4.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04border.html