The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently announced the addition two New Jersey police departments to the highly-controversial program known as 287(g), which deputizes local officers to enforce federal immigration laws. Now the state’s Attorney General Anne Milgram is warning officers in the Garden State not to engage in racial or ethnic profiling. The AG also reminded officers that they cannot ask about a person’s immigration status “as part of an on-the-street encounter.”

The Morristown Police Department and the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office are ready to join the program that has recently faced a barrage of renewed criticism from pro-immigration and Hispanic advocates. Last week, a coalition of 500 organizations launched a national campaign against it.

The program, created under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, grants “a state and local law enforcement entity … delegated authority for immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions,” according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (more…)

Over 500 local and national advocacy groups have promised to “voice their discontent” in coming months with the Obama administration’s continuation of 287(g), a Bush-era program that allows local police to enforce U.S. immigration laws.

The groups sent a two-page letter (plus 13 pages of signatures) to President Obama last week, asking him “to immediately terminate the 287(g) program operated by the Department of Homeland Security.” The letter will be followed by “vigils, marches and other activities across the country,” said the National Immigration Law Center in a press release.

The 287(g) program — named for a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act — has been heavily criticized for leading to racial profiling and creating a climate of fear in immigrant communities.

“The Obama administration has responded to documented violations within the 287(g) program by expanding it and creating an illusory complaint process,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the center, in the statement. “Ostracizing potential victims of and witnesses to crime and providing them with a disincentive to trust the authorities will make all our communities less safe.”

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PHOENIX, Arizona — When the school counselor gave her the news, it broke Olivia’s heart. Her father had been detained by deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. In the worst case scenario, he might have already been deported.

Olivia is a fictional character in The Tears of Lives, a play produced by Phoenix’s New Carpa Theater Company and written by James Garcia. But stories like hers are common in Arizona.

The play — a fundraising effort to keep Phoenix’s sole day laborer center from shutting down — is holding up a mirror to audiences, challenging them to acknowledge the situation faced by immigrant families torn apart in raids by local sheriff’s deputies who are authorized to act as immigration agents.

“We wanted to expose audiences to stories they might never see — said Garcia — put a third dimension to the immigrant story. Because most Americans’ image of immigrants is of people coming over a (border) wall, or being handcuffed on a sidewalk.”

Watch a segment of the play/Video by Valeria Fernández

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On his first visit to Los Angeles, three months after becoming the chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), assistant secretary for Homeland Security John Morton said all his agency wants to do is become more efficient.

“We will try to apply immigration laws in a tough, smart and thoughtful manner,” said Morton to a small group of reporters invited to meet him last week as part of his tour of Southern California.

He said that if people expected ICE to stop doing its job, they would be disappointed. “That is not the point”, said Morton, who is a career prosecutor.

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PHOENIX, Arizona — While the Obama administration has established new federal guidelines to focus on employers that break the law by hiring undocumented workers, local authorities in Maricopa County are going in the opposite direction, and increasing the crackdown on employees. Just today sheriff’s deputies conducted one of the largest raids to date at a paper plant in Phoenix.

Last Friday dozens of children took to the streets to call for an end to immigration raids by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and to bring attention to the social and economic impact the raids have had on their families.

“I want to tell Sheriff Joe Arpaio to let my parents alone and let them free. And leave the people that are working out, and (instead) get the people that are killing others and robbing,” said Katherine Figueroa, a 9-year-old U.S. citizen.

Katherine’s parents Sandra and Carlos Figueroa –both undocumented — were arrested in June in a raid at a Phoenix carwash where they worked , and charged with identity theft. Katherine found out about their arrest when she saw her dad detained on a local TV news program.

It’s been two months since Katherine has shared a meal with her parents. She now stays with one of her aunts.

“He needs to stop the raids is not fair what he’s doing to people,” said Katherine who held a cardboard sign in the shape of a colorful orange and black butterfly.

Listen to Katherine here:

[audio:http://www.jocelyngonzales.net/FI2W/children3.mp3]

The Monarch butterfly was the theme for the young marchers because it endures an epic migration between Mexico and the U.S. for its survival.

Chanting “Obama, Obama we want our parents back,” the children walked in the hot Arizona summer from Madison Jail, were their parents are detaine to Sheriff Arpaio’s offices in downtown Phoenix.

Listen to the children chanting:

[audio:http://www.jocelyngonzales.net/FI2W/children1.mp3]

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Immigrants in a Louisiana detention center began a hunger strike this week to protest the dismal conditions in which they say they are being held.

The detainees’ decision comes in the same week that two new reports –by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC)– showed that the U.S. government continues to violate the rights of detained immigrants –held for breaking civil, not criminal, laws.

The hunger strike is also a response to the Obama administration’s refusal to change the system for inspecting  immigration detention centers that was created during the Bush era and for enforcing minimum standards the government set in 2000. This decision, according to The New York Times, “disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country.”

Immigrants at the detention center in Basile, Louisiana, decided to start the protest after reporting “egregious violations to jail staff, immigration officials and advocates,” said the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which is supporting them. According to About.com’s immigration specialist Jennifer McFadyen, this is the fifth hunger strike in four weeks at the jail.

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While New York immigration advocates demonstrated Wednesday against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, evidence kept piling up that the U.S. government is violating the rights of immigrants in detention.

Immigrants in some detentions centers in Texas and Arizona are held in “unacceptable conditions,” with their rights to due process “compromised,” concluded a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which visited the centers just last week.

A separate report released Tuesday by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), said that “information not available to the public until now reveals substantial and pervasive violations of the government’s own minimum standards for conditions at facilities holding detained immigrants.”

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