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.

The debate on immigration reform will likely focus on the high rate of unemployment. (Photo: ABCNews/AP)

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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Immigration activists confirmed Thursday that marches are planned for several cities on May Day to press the Obama Administration and Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform.  Immigrant advocates want to put pressure on the president to follow through on campaign promises to reform the nation’s immigration system. They also want a stop to enforcement raids and deportations.

“On May 1, we’ll go out on the streets to tell Barack Obama’s government and the Congress that we need an immigration reform with a path to legalization for millions of the undocumented,” Juan José Gutiérrez, director of Movimiento Latino USA, told Univision Interactive Multimedia (UIM) in Los Angeles.

Activists in L.A., Gutierrez added, will start demonstrating this Saturday, April 4, on the 41st anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “We will tell (the president) that the date is coming, the countdown to the 100 days when he promised to send an immigration reform proposal to Congress,” he said.

Gutiérrez said Obama had promised L.A. activists to send a bill to Congress before his first 100 days in office during a meeting in December 2007.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Biden tells Central American leaders immigration reform will have to wait. (Photo: Reuters)

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.”

Alternatives to detention are significantly cheaper, AI says. (Photo: Amnesty International/Steven Rubin)

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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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

One day after the U.S. announced it will beef up security along its southern border, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives in Mexico today to discuss drug-related violence and economic issues. Clinton’s counterpart, Patricia Espinoza Castellano, said at a Mexico City press conference yesterday that the American measures are “coherent with the fight against organized crime.”

Mexico's Foreign Minister Patricia Espinoza. (Photo: AP)

Clinton’s visit comes in advance of a trip by President Barack Obama himself, who will travel south in April to meet Mexico’s head of state, President Felipe Calderón. In response to news of growing drug cartel-related violence in Mexico –and recently in some American cities close to the border– the Obama Administration seems determined to engage and cooperate much more closely with Mexico than the Bush Administration did.

The security measures announced yesterday include sending more immigrations, customs, anti-drug and gun law enforcement officers to the border. In response Espinoza, the Mexican foreign minister, expressed hope for a renewed, closer relationship with Mexico’s northern neighbor.

Espinoza added that the security issue will feature prominently during Clinton’s visit, which she called the start of “a new age of cooperation between both governments.”

She also stated that her government will talk to Clinton about U.S. immigration policies. “We have insisted on an end to raids and to the separation of families (through deportations),” she said. (more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Cardinal George - Photo: AP

It was not the first time a Catholic leader has called for changes to the nation’s immigration policies. But Saturday’s appeal by Cardinal Francis George, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was notable in that it was aimed directly at President Barack Obama and his promise of change.

“I stand with other faith leaders and all of you gathered here today and with every immigrant family in this nation to call on our government to end immigration raids and the separation of families,” George said at a Chicago church where a prayer forum was held to call for renewed debate on immigration reform. “Such reform would be a clear sign this administration is truly about change.”

The cardinal’s call came after a week in which, for the first time in office, President Obama spoke at length about immigration before a mainstream audience; and after he told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus he will address immigration reform soon, with some (unspecified) action to come in the next couple of months.

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At a time when Latino and immigration advocates are closely watching every decision coming from the West Wing, President Barack Obama’s appointment last week of a Dominican American attorney from Maryland as head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division has generated complaints and discomfort.

But Thomas Perez, the nominee for Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, and until now the Maryland Secretary of Labor, is not the reason for the griping.

Rather, advocates who are weighing Obama’s commitment to immigration reform are angry about the president’s decision to pass over California’s Thomas Saenz, counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and a former vice president of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF.)

Obama’s change of heart –the job was reportedly offered to Saenz and then withdrawn — was interpreted as a lack of will on the part of the White House to engage in a prolonged confirmation fight that could have been a prelude to a Congressional debate on the administration’s immigration reform proposals.

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