MEXICO CITY — As President Barack Obama arrived in Mexico City Thursday, a small group of immigration activists demonstrated at the U.S. Embassy on leafy Paseo de la Reforma, close to downtown. They were there to demand comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. and a stop to immigration raids and deportations.

Children who are U.S. citizens but now live in Mexico because of their parents’ deportations were there. After President Obama said at his speech in the Democratic National Convention last year that no one “benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child,” activists had hoped he would stop deportations that break up families with an executive order. That has not happened.

The Pew Hispanic Center said this week that 73% of the children of undocumented immigrants were born in the U.S. and are U.S. citizens.

One of the protesters present was Elvira Arellano, who became known nationwide when she fought a deportation order in 2006 by seeking sanctuary inside a Chicago church. Arellano was finally deported in 2007 and now runs a shelter for deported women and children in Tijuana while continuing to work for immigration reform from the other side of the border. She came to the embassy with her 10-year-old son, Saúl, a U.S. citizen.

You can watch a slideshow on the Arellanos below or, for higher quality, go to our YouTube channel.

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Undocumented immigrants in the United States are more geographically dispersed than in the past, they make up over 5% of the nation’s labor force and are more likely than U.S.-born residents or legal immigrants to live in a household with children, a new report says.

The study, published on Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, also says that “the recent rapid growth in the undocumented immigrant labor force has come to a halt.” The undocumented population has stayed at about 11.9 million or 4% of the country’s population.

The Center, which has been studying the size and growth of the undocumented population for years, estimates that it grew rapidly between 1990 and 2006, but it has since stabilized.

Now, “unauthorized immigrants are 4% of the nation’s population and account for 5.4% of its workforce,” the report’s authors, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn wrote.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

The White House keeps sending signals that President Barack Obama intends to follow through on his campaign promise to address immigration reform in his first year in office. As the president prepared for his first official visit to Mexico (later this week), senior administration officials last week repeated the vow the president himself has made before: that action on this divisive issue will begin soon.

While pro-immigration advocates welcomed the new statements –by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Muñoz–, others pointed out that they were essentially repeating what the president himself has said recently.

Still, with the news this time being picked up by major newspapers–The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal–, momentum seems to be building for the much-expected debate on immigration.

In a story published on Wednesday, Muñoz told the Times Obama “intends to start the debate this year,” framing his initiative as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system.”

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

As census workers hit the streets across the country to start verifying addresses in preparation for next year’s head count, the chair of a key House subcommittee is urging the government to relax enforcement of immigration laws to ensure that minorities and the undocumented are not undercounted on April 1, 2010.

Immigration restrictionists and conservatives are incensed at the Census Bureau’s efforts to count “all illegal aliens in 2010.”

The 2010 Census is becoming yet another battleground in the immigration reform wars.

U.S. Rep. William Clay (D.-Mo.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, “said he plans to ask the Obama administration to suspend immigration raids over the next year,” Fox News reported. “He wants the raids put on hold so illegal immigrants don’t worry that sharing accurate information with Census workers could somehow expose them to punishment, even deportation.”

Clay said in a recent news release that the last Census “missed 3 million Americans. Many of them were African American or Hispanic, most were poor, and all of them deserved to be counted.

“…The Census is really about three things: information, federal funding, and proper political representation,” Clay added. “When we miss any American, we deprive his or her community of all three of those precious resources. Every American counts, and every American deserves to be counted.”

As we reported previously, the Census Bureau has already started reaching out to immigrant communities to ensure an accurate count. The acting director of the Census Bureau, Thomas Mesenbourg, told conservative news site CNSNews.com that the agency intends to count “every (U.S.) resident whether they’re documented, undocumented, whether they are citizens or non-citizens.”

“This means,” wrote CNSNews.com’s Nicholas Ballasy, “that a state harboring more illegal aliens can gain more House seats as long as the Census Bureau finds the illegal aliens and counts them. This also means that the illegal alien population resident in the United States during a census year has the potential to alter the regional and philosophical balance of power in Congress.” (more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Forget the tea leaves. Divining the intentions of the Obama administration with respect to immigration reform is more like reading the leaves of a fern: conflicting signals sprout every which way, leaving observers dizzy.

On the one hand, none other than Vice President Joseph Biden said this week that this is not a good economic time to pass immigration reform that would allow for the legalization of millions of foreign workers.

On the other hand, in an unusual move, Immigration and Customs Enforcement freed a group of undocumented workers it had detained during one of its much-criticized work-site raids, giving them authorization to work while their cases are decided.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, anyone?

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“In the criminal justice system, anyone arrested is assumed innocent, but in the immigration system, they’re put in detention, and then it’s the individual’s burden to prove they shouldn’t be detained,” Sarnata Reynolds told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s why you’ll see long periods of detention, because it’s an incredibly high burden.”

Reynolds is one of the authors of yet another report that is highly critical of the detention conditions people –both immigrants and wrongfully-detained American citizens– are subject to when held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The report, Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA, published Wednesday by Amnesty International, adds to other dismal appraisals published in recent weeks. Anticipating its publication, an ICE special advisor on detention said it would be taken into account, and acknowledged the need to change the detention system.

The Chronicle’s Tyche Hendricks writes about the cases of two American citizens from the Bay Area, one born in Thailand, the other from Afghanistan, who were taken into custody by ICE in 2007.

Though the men told immigration officials of their citizenship, neither had papers to prove it, and both languished in immigration custody in Santa Clara County jail –Nasir for 11 months, Simma for seven– before a lawyer finally secured their release.

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