By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Raymond Soeoth, a 41-year-old Pentecostal minister from Indonesia, spent more than two years under detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after his asylum claim was denied. Even after he agreed to be deported, he was drugged through forced injections — only to learn, while hallucinating at the airport, that he could not leave because his paperwork was not in order.

After becoming a plaintiff in a class-action suit, Soeoth was allowed to stay in the U.S. for at least two more years.

Soeoth’s case is one of several dramatic stories of undocumented immigrants that portray a disfunctional detention system in a special investigation The Associated Press published today. According to the news organization, “(a) computer analysis of every person being held on a recent Sunday night shows that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country — voluntarily or via deportation.”

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Immigration detention centers have seen several detainee deaths. (Photo: Univision.com/AFP)

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights announced this week it will hold a hearing on conditions at detention centers for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The hearings come after a series of detainee deaths prompted complaints from immigrant and civil rights organizations.

According to a story on Univision.com, the commission –which is part of the Organization of American States (OAS)– expects to publish a report on immigration detention centers later this year.

Santiago Cantón, the commission’s executive secretary, said at a press conference Tuesday that his panel has requested U.S. government authorization to visit some of the detention centers, but negotiations stalled over conditions for the visits.

The hearing will be held on Friday, March 20th, at OAS Washington headquarters, according to the official schedule for the IACHR’s 134th period of sessions.

The case of the detainees will be presented by the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law.

According to Cantón, the schools’ involvement and the hearing itself might help convince the U.S. government to allow the commission to visit the jails.

A recent Government Accounting Office report said the detention centers display bureaucratic deficiencies, medical personnel under staffing, slow response times to medical emergencies and poor food quality, according to a recent special report on Univision.com.

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked Congress to pass a law that would increase supervision of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and improve the treatment of immigration detainees.

Ninety immigrants have died in detention since 2003, according to the ACLU.

Some of the more high-profile deaths –like those of Guido Newbrough in Virginia and Hiu Lui ‘Jason’ Ng in Rhode Island— have brought attention to the plight of detainees.

But others are shrouded in secrecy, ACLU attorney Monica Ramirez told Univision.com.

“We don’t know all the causes for those deaths,” she said. “The government doesn’t give out information and many times we learn about what happened through families’ accounts.”

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Keith Phoenix. (Photo: AP)

The men accused of killing Jose Sucuzhañay, the Ecuadorian immigrant beaten to death with a bottle and a baseball bat on a Brooklyn street last December, have been indicted under charges of murder as a hate crime and could face up to 78 years in prison.

Keith Phoenix, 28, and Hakim Scott, 25, were charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault, all of them as hate crimes.

On Dec. 7, Phoenix and Scott allegedly attacked Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel shouting anti-Hispanic and anti-gay slurs as the brothers walked home, hugging each other, after a party.

“The acts which we charge this morning are no less despicable because the victims Jose and Romel Sucuzhañay were not gay,” Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes said in announcing the indictments, according to The New York Times.

The December attack was the second against Ecuadoreans in the New York area in less than a month, after Marcelo Lucero was beaten to death by a group of high-school students in Patchogue, Long Island. Those arrested in that killing now stand charged with a rampage of attacks against Latinos in the area.

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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

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal

Anchoring his message in his family’s immigrant story, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal last night was launched into the national political arena as one of the Republican Party’s rising stars. As the party itself tries to relaunch its image following its losses in the November election, Jindal, whose parents immigrated from India when his mother was pregnant with him, is a striking new spokesman for the GOP. 

The Louisiana governor was in charge of delivering the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress, giving him a national platform for the first time. In what Republicans probably had hoped would be a repeat of the Obama success story at the Democratic National Convention of 2004, Jindal had been scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention last year — but had to cancel because of Hurricane Gustav’s threat to his state.

Last night, Jindal started his speech acknowledging the historic quality of Obama’s election and then narrated part of his family’s immigration story. [Read the transcript at CNN.]

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Obama on the line. (Photo: White House)

Between signing the stimulus bill into law and traveling to Canada, President Barack Obama found time Wednesday to fulfill a campaign promise: he went back on the air with the nation’s most popular Spanish-language radio host, Los Angeles-based Eddie “Piolín” Sotelo.

In addition to the usual jokes and amiable bantering, the phone interview produced a small bit of news that only The Associated Press’ Spanish-language service seems to have caught: Obama told Sotelo he would call on immigration leaders in the next few months to begin preparing “a draft” proposal for comprehensive immigration reform.

Update: NPR show Tell Me More posted audio of the original interview here. You can listen to it by pressing Play.

Obama said it is necessary to start working on reform now, because getting it passed will take time. But he said he was “very committed” to making it a reality.

“Necesitamos comenzar a trabajar en ello ahora. Va a tomar tiempo avanzar eso (la propuesta), pero estoy muy comprometido de que eso se concrete”.

From ImpreMedia’s news website

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Social worker Lourdes Cienfuegos, at right, talks to an Imperial Valley resident. (Photo: La Opinión)

Sara Espinosa chose to sleep on the street rather than leave her 12-year-old son to spend the night alone at a men-only homeless shelter. As a consequence, Sara, her son and her two daughters have been sleeping in her car.

Espinosa is one of hundreds of people in conditions of extreme poverty in Imperial Valley, one of the poorest counties in California and the nation, La Opinión reporter Claudia Nuñez wrote Wednesday.

Here, the unemployment rate has already passed 24 percent, almost four times the national average, and one out of every 18 families has lost their home.

While Imperial Valley is an extreme case, a report released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center shows the economic recession “is having an especially severe impact on employment prospects for immigrant Hispanics,” according to Rakesh Kochhar, the center’s associate director for research.

The unemployment rate for foreign-born Hispanics increased from 5.1 percent to 8 percent, or by 2.9 percentage points, from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008. During this same time period, the unemployment rate for all persons in the labor market increased from 4.6 percent to 6.6 percent, or by 2 percentage points.

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