07/05/12 For the past few weeks, it’s been hard to get Mitt Romney to say anything publicly about immigration reform. That’s a marked change from the GOP primary campaign, when the now-Republican nominee never missed a chance to burnish his anti-immigrant credentials to the nativist base of his party. Romney is trying to dodge the issue [...]
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06/27/12 Immigration reform champion Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) took to the House floor this morning to discuss the Supreme Court ruling on SB 1070, Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. Gutierrez gave a quiz titled, ”Pick Out The Immigrant.” Watch the speech below.  You’ll hear Gutierrez ask how Arizona officials determine which of the following are immigrants [...]
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06/22/12 A decision from the Supreme Court on Arizona vs. United States is expected next week, where the issue in contention is whether the law usurps the federal government’s power to regulate immigration laws. While we wait for a decision, Puente Arizona is taking the lead by strengthening “Barrio Defense Committees” in Arizona, where members of the community connect, [...]
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06/21/12 Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) is the latest in a long-line of conservatives who are spewing some anti-immigrant hate directed at the President’s latest move to protect DREAMers from deportation. However, like most people who don’t know what they’re talking about, Rep. Joe Walsh is belligerent thinking that he knows exactly what he’s talking about. At [...]
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06/08/12 Yesterday, in a near party-line vote, the House of Representatives approved an amendment by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to the Homeland Security appropriations bill that would prevent the Department of Homeland Security from prioritizing immigration enforcement.  Republicans voted to oppose sensible prioritization in favor of unfettered deportation – voted against a focus on dangerous criminals and for the indiscriminate deportation of [...]
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06/06/12 Just when you think Sheriff Joe Arpaio can’t sink any lower, he does. Arpaio, as you’ll see in the video below, proudly compares his infamous Tent City to concentration camps: I already have a concentration camp. It’s called Tent City. Concentration camps in the United States? In 2012? The strangest thing is that he’s proud [...]
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06/01/12 Alabama’s social and economic crisis continues after the state legislature passed another law that actually made worse what was already the worst racial profiling law in the nation, HB 56.  And the backlash is growing against Alabama. Yesterday, on a call with reporters, national civil and labor rights leaders announced next steps in the ongoing battle [...]
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05/23/12 Apparently, Republicans are having a hard time courting the Latino vote.  We can’t understand why. Yesterday, anti-immigrant blowhard and vice-chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee Rep. Steve King (R-IA) was speaking to a crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa about how the US should be more selective about which immigrants it allows in, when he began comparing [...]
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05/22/12 Detroit: Home to Kid Rock, Eminem, and one of America’s most rogue ICE agencies. Detroit ICE agents are known as some of the most aggressive immigration agents in the country.  Just last year, they were targeting parents they suspected of being undocumented by stalking children at an elementary school. Other victims have spoken up about [...]
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05/22/12 Alabama and its anti-immigrant legislative vendetta have been in the news for the past few weeks. And we’re awaiting a Supreme Court decision on Arizona’s SB 1070. But we can’t forget about the other states that have passed these ugly laws — like Georgia. Writing at Huffington Post on the anniversary of the passage of Georgia’s [...]
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05/21/12 Senator Scott Beason — the guy who once said that we should “empty the clip, and do what has to be done [on illegal immigration]“;  referred to people at a casino in a predominately black county as “aborigines”; and author of the worst anti-immigrant law in the country, H.B. 56 — introduced a “tweak bill” [...]
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05/18/12 Cross-Posted at Mom’s Rising: “Russian Women are no longer the best kept secret of the cold war” notes the website of Encounters International, the mail-order bride company that is lobbying hard for the passage of the scary Republican version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) — the version that passed the House of Representatives [...]
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05/14/12 Perhaps one of the most notable things about the lawsuit the Department of Justice filed against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio last week is its breadth.  Arpaio is being charged with quite a range of offenses, from mistreating Latino prisoners to mass racial profiling to intimidation of political opponents to violent misconduct.  The Associated Press today highlights [...]
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05/10/12 The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it is filing a lawsuit against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, following a months-long delay during which “America’s Most Corrupt Sheriff” refused to reform his enforcement practices or agree to the independent oversight of a monitor. The development is the latest in a series of events that began [...]
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05/04/12 The Arizona state legislature this week declined to increase funds for the developmentally disabled, declined to grant 100,000 poor children greater access to health care, and declined to fund much-needed highway and education projects—but it did consider reimbursing recalled state senator Russell Pearce for $216,000 for costs incurred during his failed 2010 campaign, when Pearce [...]
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05/04/12 At Daily Caller, which has established itself as a mouthpiece for the right-wing, the notoriously extremist Ann Coulter offers a particularly vicious rant against anyone who has ever supported immigration reform. This is her proposed solution: I myself would like to deport the people responsible for our current immigration policies. Okay. Let’s imagine her wish [...]
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05/03/12 It was brutal, violent end to the life of one of Arizona’s most notorious anti-immigrant leaders, J.T. Ready — and he killed four people along with himself. From the Arizona Republic: For several years, Arizona vigilante J.T. Ready conducted armed, civilian patrols along the U.S. border, urging the use of violence to prevent smuggling and [...]
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04/27/12 It’s certainly been an intense week for immigration advocates and activists. There’s been an enormous amount of attention to the issue in the traditional media. On Wednesday night, Rachel Maddow took an in-depth look at the politics of immigration reform, SB 1070, Mitt Romney, and the hard-core anti-immigrant work of Kris Kobach and Michael Hethmon. [...]
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04/26/12 “If there’s one thing that we can all agree on, it’s that half of us will not agree on even that,” starts off Stephen Colbert on his popular late-night TV show’s segment, The Word, wittily entitled “United, We Can’t Stand Them.” Rumor has it that immigrants are pyromaniacal, highly-contagious, economy-wrecking terrorists. And now, according to [...]
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04/20/12 Republicans are looking for a way to shore up their historically low standing with Latino voters.  Senator Marco Rubio is reportedly developing a more Republican-friendly version of the DREAM Act in part to do just that. Enter Senator John Cornyn of Texas.  In 2010 he called attempts to pass the DREAM Act a political stunt.  [...]
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04/19/12 Next week, the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on Arizona’s arch-anti-immigrant law, SB 1070—an all-important, game-changing clash between the federal supremacy clause, the need for federal immigration reform, and the belief that states can and should pursue efforts to make undocumented immigrants self-deport. Activists, officials, lawyers, and lawmakers all over the nation have [...]
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04/19/12 Are you kidding me? Yesterday we penned a blog post on how the relationship between Kris Kobach and Mitt Romney has taken a complicated turn, on account of how Romney has become the presumptive Republican nominee and now must quest after the all-important Latino vote—a demographic which hates Kobach. Kobach was an unpaid immigration adviser [...]
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04/18/12 Once upon a time, Mitt Romney was enamored with a certain Kansas Secretary of State named Kris Kobach, a disarmingly handsome lawyer known for authoring state anti-immigrant bills across the nation, including SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama.  In Kris, Mitt found someone who truly spoke to the right-wing base Mitt was so desperate to court, [...]
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04/18/12 You might remember E-Verify. It’s House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith’s pet project to singlehandedly boost the American economy by expanding regulation and costing hundreds of thousands of legal American workers their jobs.  The bill stalled after it passed the House Judiciary Committee last fall, and it’s no more politically viable or better an idea now [...]
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04/18/12 Under fire for Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law and reeling after the recent loss of support from Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Foods, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) announced today that they would begin focusing their efforts solely on economic issues, rather than social and cultural issues.  The news that the group—a shadowy organization known [...]
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04/13/12 News about Andrew Thomas, the Maricopa County attorney disbarred this week for being Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s corrupt partner in crime is really getting pickup.  We’ve written about the disbarring, but not the reason for the disbar. Talking Points Memo sums up the story of Thomas and Arpaio, the nightmare-team duo who used their positions of [...]
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04/11/12 Russell Pearce—former Arizona state senator, sponsor of arch-anti-immigrant bill SB 1070—defeated last fall in a historic recall election. Paul Babeu—hardline anti-immigrant sheriff of Pinal County, famous for the “complete the danged fence” ad he shot with John McCain—tarred this year for certain…indiscretions, and now on the defensive with both his current post and his race [...]
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