By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Napolitano (Photo: Washington Times/AP)

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided an engine remanufacturing plant in Bellingham, Wash. on Tuesday, it looked like the Bush administration policy of work-site enforcement would continue under the new White House. This, despite President Barack Obama’s campaign statement that “communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids.”

“The Obama administration decided against ‘change we can believe in’ and, instead continued the Bush legacy,” the Standing Firm pro-immigrant blog said. “I CANNOT believe the administration is allowing this to happen.”

Today, the mood is much lighter among immigration advocates, after the director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, late yesterday ordered a review of the operation, the first work-site raid to take place since she took office:

This is a great victory and the first step to winning Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Immigrants at an Arizona detention center. Photo: NPR/AP

The system for keeping undocumented immigrants in detention pending the resolution of their cases, and, for many of them, their deportation, has been under strong criticism recently after detainee deaths exposed the deplorable treatment inmates receive in some of those jails.

Turns out some of the jails also represent a windfall for the communities that host them.

According to a report by The Boston Globe, this year “the federal government budgeted $1.7 billion nationwide” to cover the expenses of holding detainees. Thirty thousand of them are held on any given day, “almost four times as many as in 1995.”

The Globe’s Maria Sachetti wrote,

Bristol (County, Massachusetts) and other cash-strapped county jails are increasingly embracing the immigration business, capitalizing on the soaring number of foreign-born detainees and the millions of federal dollars a year paid to incarcerate them. Bristol County alone has raked in $33 million since 2001 (…)

“That money is a tremendous boost for us,” said Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph D. McDonald Jr., whose jail houses 324 immigrants, up from 44 a decade ago, bringing in $15.6 million last year. “We aggressively try to market ourselves to get as many of those inmates into our doors as we can.”

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

“The reason for this letter is to let you know what is happening at this Immigration detention center,” a man identified as J.E.R. wrote in a letter to a central Virginia Spanish-language newspaper, referring to the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. He then described how a German immigrant held at the facility died for lack of medical attention.

Guido Newbrough's parents, Jack and Heidi - Photo: New York Times

“He was never given attention for the strong pain that afflicted him,” J.E.R. wrote. “One morning, he got up asking for assistance, he was knocking on the door seeking help and the jail guards threw him on the floor and dragged him to a corridor and then to a cell called ‘the hole,’ where the person is isolated from the rest and cannot use the phone.”

From ‘the hole,’ he asked for help and he died a day after Thanksgiving. (Jail officials) say he died of natural causes, but those of us who were there know that he died because of negligence.

The narration fits what the family of Guido R. Newbrough told The New York Times about the death of the German-born man, who spent 42 of his 48 years in the United States and apparently did not know he was not an American citizen.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

American Fraternity's Nora Sándigo announces the lawsuit. (Photo: El Nuevo Herald)

In a move that was noticed almost exclusively by Spanish-language media, a Miami-based organization representing 600 children of immigrants has sued none other than President Barack Obama.

American Fraternity Inc. filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court to demand that President Obama stop the deportations of the children’s parents.

Two of the children said they started a hunger strike to ask that their mother not be deported to Nicaragua.

The organization’s executive director Nora Sándigo, who is the children’s legal guardian, told BBC Mundo:

Some of the kids are children of persons with a court date and imminent deportation proceedings, others have one of their parents in jail with a date for exiting the country already set.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Gillibrand (Image: El Diario/AP)

The immigration-related backlash against the designation of Kirsten Gillibrand continued over the weekend, when New York’s main Hispanic newspaper El Diario/La Prensa called the congresswoman “a disappointing choice” to succeed Hillary Clinton as U.S. Senator from New York.

In the meantime, Gillibrand –who will take the oath of office Tuesday— met with Queens elected officials and local leaders and promised to be more open-minded about the issue.

She also gave a one-on-one interview to local news channel NY1. Some of her remarks were interpreted as a shift in tone on the hotly-contested issue of immigration reform, although after listening to the entire interview that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“I think amnesty is the wrong approach,” Gillibrand said, in the quote that El Diario highlighted. “I would do it very differently, I would right-size immigration and make sure that every person who wants to be working in this country legally has a way to be here legally and to come in properly and make it so that they never have to worry about it.”

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