The fire that killed five Guatemalans revealed features of the life of the undocumented: what it means not being able to go home and how deportation does not always mean permanent removal.

Immigration courts face an “exploding” caseload where each person’s fate depends largely on who hears their case and 84% of detained respondents don’t even have representation, a report says.

Some scammers are already preying on unwitting –or desperate– Haitian applicants seeking protected status.

Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the main Congressional supporter of progressive immigration reform, apparently is fed up with President Obama’s inaction on the issue.

As President Obama prepares a State of the Union address in which he may mention immigration reform, activists want to remind him that he had promised to deal with it in his first year in office.

On New Year’s Day, Jean Montrevil was detained in an immigration lockup. Less than a month later, after being freed following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, he will stand outside another jail where immigrants are held to protest the laws that placed him a breath away from deportation.

With a lightning round of conference calls and press releases, pro-reform activists tried to tamp down gloomy predictions about the future of immigration reform in Congress after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. They argued that unlike the health care overhaul, this is an initiative that enjoys bipartisan support.

Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts senate race is widely seen as a major blow to President Barack Obama’s hope of passing health care reform. Does this mean immigration reform –which has taken a back seat to health care since Obama took office a year ago— is dead?

After two decades of growth spurred by a civil war, natural disasters and rural poverty, the Salvadorn-born population in the United States has reached about 1.1 million people, making it the sixth largest immigrant community in the nation.

New York police on Tuesday arrested eight clergy members and two community activists who were demonstrating outside a Lower Manhattan immigration detention center against the likely deportation of civic activist Jean Montrevil.