09/14/12 In Kansas, Kris Kobach–the lawyer behind the odious Arizona and Alabama “show me your papers” laws and the man driving the immigration agenda of Mitt Romney’s Republican Party–has somehow gone even further off the rails and is now embracing discredited “birther” conspiracy theories. As Talking Points Memo highlights: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an [...]
Read More »

09/07/12 UPDATE: Mitt Romney appeared with Steve King today and only had praise for the Representative who compares immigrants to dogs.  Romney said in Orange City, Iowa today: “I’m looking here at Steve King, he needs to be your Congressman again.  I want him as my partner in Washington.” UPDATE: Rep. King triples down. What is it with [...]
Read More »

08/31/12 While Arpaio was basking in the spotlight at the Tampa Bay Zoo, things weren’t as good for the nation’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff” back in his home state of Arizona. Apparently federal appeals court reinstated a suit against him, adding to his already long list a “federal civil rights and conspiracy lawsuit.”  Think Progress has more: [...]
Read More »

08/29/12 Russell Pearce, once of the champions of the Arizona anti-immigrant law, went down to defeat yesterday in his Republican State Senate primary…for the 2nd time! He lost by nearly 12 points to businessman Bob Worsley. He also lost to Jerry Lewis in a historic recall election last February. This primary was supposed to be Pearce’s comeback bid. Pearce crafted [...]
Read More »

08/27/12 Apparent by its party platform, the reins of the Republican Party’s immigration policy are in the hands of hardliners, led by anti-immigrant legal architect Kris Kobach. Ahead of this week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, some prominent Republican politicians, Party strategists, and conservative observers spoke out against the GOP’s hardline drift on immigration, recognizing the [...]
Read More »

08/24/12 With the news that Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio will be attending next week’s Republican National Convention, we have compiled a list of convention guests and delegates whose positions on immigration could be described as bad, worse, and worser.  As talk show host Carlos Galindo reacted to the Sheriff Arpaio news on Daily Kos: What would possess you to [...]
Read More »

08/23/12 Sometimes I really wonder if Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is for real. Think Progress today quoted King’s comments from a recent Iowa town hall: King said: I went to the Iowa State website and [...] I typed in “multicultural” and it came back to me, at the time, 59 different multicultural groups listed to operate [...]
Read More »

08/23/12 Kris Kobach, immigration advisor to the Romney campaign, architect of the infamous Arizona and Alabama immigration laws, and driving force behind the Republican Party’s hard line platform on immigration, today joined with Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, the head of a leading anti-immigrant organization, and Chris Crane, the head of the ICE Union, to file a [...]
Read More »

08/17/12 The beginning of deferred action made for quite an historic day yesterday, with tens of thousands of DREAMers lining up from Chicago to El Paso to Los Angeles waiting to receive assistance on their applications.  Yet in the midst of a nationwide celebration and day of victory, there remained the anti-immigrant extremists from the peanut [...]
Read More »

08/17/12 Just how far will Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer go? On Wednesday, a day when DREAMers all over the country were celebrating the beginning of President Obama’s deferred action program, Governor Brewer was busy playing the Grinch by issuing an executive order that would prevent local immigrant youth from being able to access state services like [...]
Read More »

08/16/12 Yesterday’s official launch of the deferred action program for DREAMers offered a reminder about how public policy changes can sometimes directly affect people’s lives.  Unfortunately, yesterday also brought a reminder of the way politics can butt in on even the most celebratory of days, bringing into view the sharp distinctions between the parties on immigration [...]
Read More »

08/14/12 Joe the Plumber is back. The hapless handyman from 2008 who became famous overnight for supposedly being the embodiment of the working class is now a Congressional candidate in Ohio, where, among other things, he has been blaming the Holocaust on German gun control. Last Friday he was speaking at a fundraiser in Arizona held by Republican [...]
Read More »

08/03/12 Given his long-standing history of buffoonery and anti-immigrant agitating, it should come as no surprise that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) presided over an embarrassing and offensive hearing yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Yesterday’s House Constitution Subcommittee hearing on King’s English Language Unity Act—a bill to mandate “English-only” government documents and services—featured two members [...]
Read More »

08/02/12 Yesterday was Day 6 of the Melendres vs. Arpaio civil lawsuit under way in Phoenix probing into whether Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office are guilty of routinely engaging in racial profiling. A post at Fronteras sums up how the trial has been going so far:  So far the federal judge hearing the case has [...]
Read More »

08/01/12 Tomorrow’s House Constitution Subcommittee hearing on Rep. Steve King (R-IA)’s English Language Unity Act—a bill that would mandate “English-only” government documents and services—is hardly the first indication that the House GOP is taking its cues on immigration from the anti-immigrant movement’s playbook, but it might be the most brazen. Since returning to power in 2011, [...]
Read More »

08/01/12 With his sensational spin on a new Congressional Research Service (CRS) memo, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is proving once again that he believes “immigrant” to be synonymous with “criminal”—and showing why the Republican Party is having such a hard time courting Latino voters and others with immigrant roots. Smith is the leading lawmaker behind the [...]
Read More »

08/01/12 As the trial against “America’s Toughest Sheriff”, Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio, continues,  the bar has been set high to prove that he is guilty of racial profiling, despite “offensive letters, tearful stories and reams of statistics”. From the Associated Press via the Washington Post: Arpaio has repeatedly denied the racial profiling allegations. And experts say [...]
Read More »

07/31/12 This past weekend, the editorial board of the Burlington Times-News in North Carolina roundly criticized local law enforcement officials who plan to attend a “training” hosted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in Texas. Titled “Law Enforcement is Best to Avoid Bad Company,” the editorial calls the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office and Board [...]
Read More »

07/30/12 In his column at the New York Daily News, Albor Ruiz explains the critical importance of  the immigration issue for Latino voters: Lately much noise has been coming from the Republicans about how immigration is not that big an issue for Hispanics and how it will not turn Latino voters away from Mitt Romney, their presumptive [...]
Read More »

07/27/12 Most days, Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio acts like a caricature of a Western law man: the cowboy, “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” the man who brought back chain gangs, parades prisoners around in pink underwear, and clearly believes he’s above the rule of law. “After they went after me,” Arpaio gloated in a 2009 speech to [...]
Read More »

07/26/12 Yesterday marked Day 3 of the Sheriff Joe Arpaio trial that is currently underway in Phoenix, Arizona.  It was the most emotional day of testimony yet. Below are two of the most heart-wrenching stories from immigrants who are accusing Sheriff Joe and his deputies of racial profiling: Daniel Magos, a 67 year-old Mexican native who [...]
Read More »

07/25/12 When the notorious anti-Latino and anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio took the witness stand this week at his civil rights trial in Phoenix, he chose to play a game of duck and dodge, pinning responsibility for his offensive remarks and actions on others, including his deputies and the ghostwriter of his autobiography. Unfortunately for him and [...]
Read More »

07/25/12 In court yesterday, the self-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff” ran from his record of terrorizing immigrant communities. Gone was the swagger, and under the light of overwhelming evidence, he tried to scramble away and evade responsibility for all of it. 1. “I don’t get involved in those operations. I’m not there on the street patrolling and [...]
Read More »

07/24/12 Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is expected to take the stand today, when a civil trial probing into his department’s chronic abuse of racial profiling resumes. The no-jury, single-judge trial began last week in Arizona, with plaintiffs arguing that Arpaio and his department regularly profile and detain Hispanics without probable cause, often only so that [...]
Read More »

07/20/12 This week, notoriously anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio heads to court, facing charges of civil rights violations, namely racial profiling.  (For a rundown of the worst things Sheriff Joe Arpaio has done, view this list.) Here’s what the media covered the trial: From Edvard Pettersson and William Hermann of Business Week: Stanley Young, a lawyer for [...]
Read More »

07/20/12 Cross-Posted at Mom’s Rising: I’d like to believe that most Americans, perhaps with the exception of the hard-core nativists, like Rep. Steve King and Romney advisor Kris Kobach, knows our nation’s immigration policies need to be fixed.  But behind these failed policies are real human beings:  those who make decisions about how to enforce the [...]
Read More »

07/19/12 Cross-Posted at Jack and Jill Politics: Today, at an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Steve King (R-Peanut Gallery) ominously threatened to sue DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano unless she reversed the Obama Administration’s popular new policy to grant temporary relief to DREAMers. In case you don’t know him, Rep. King is one of [...]
Read More »