Immigration

WASHINGTON– Pro-immigration reform advocates may be applauding President Obama’s immigration meetings at the White House today, but anti-immigration groups are pushing back hard. The meetings came in advance of a planned March 21 immigration reform rally on the mall and just as several anti-immigration groups have unveiled new campaigns and strategies to obstruct any coming “amnesty” legislation.

U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton reportedly spoke at a Colorado Restaurant Association Political Action Committee meeting in Denver Thursday and told the audience that the country needs a “workable immigration system.” The comments spurred Tom Tancredo’s American Legacy Alliance to send out the kind of watchdog-style press release that seems to increasingly follow Norton speaking events, this time coming not from a Democratic Party organization but from a champion of the state’s grass roots right.

The detention policies of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Colorado and the network of facilities that has grown here in the last few years are drawing increasing attention among local lawmakers and human rights organizations.

Critics of the system say men and women held on suspicion of immigration violations in the state are housed in conditions that rival those established for violent criminal offenders, that the immigrants are becoming fodder for a booming detention industry, and that detainees are often difficult to locate in the tangle of state facilities, which include unlisted so-called subfield offices.

DENVER– Former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff minutes ago announced that he was rededicated to his primary campaign to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. He told a crowd of roughly sixty people gathered outside his campaign headquarters here that he called this fraught press conference only to “clear the air,” explaining that he had received hundreds of emails and phone calls over the past week urging him to drop his Senate bid to run for governor in the wake of news that Gov. Bill Ritter would not seek a second term. Politics watchers in the state expected he might declare that he planned to run as lieutenant governor on a ticket topped by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Romanoff sought to put an end to any speculation along those lines.

“I am running for U.S. Senate,” he said. “I will not accept any other job offers.”

A House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday morning highlighted the sharp divide in Congress over illegal immigration and what should be done about it, presaging the difficult fight ahead when Congress eventually begins to tackle proposals for comprehensive immigration reform.

A new report from the conservative Center for Immigration Studies makes a point of praising the so-called 287(g) program, calling it very “cost-effective.” The program, which was just renewed by the Obama administration, grants broad immigration enforcement powers to local law enforcement agencies.
Although the program may be cost-effective for the federal government, there is some [...]

While serious discussion of immigration policy reform has been generally avoided for the past year, the politics of immigration have weaved their way through the health care debate as a pet topic on the right, spurring some of the most heated exchanges in blog comment threads, at town hall meetings and, of course, in a joint session of Congress in September, when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson broke U.S. House decorum by shouting out “you lie” and waving a finger at President Obama for denying that national health care legislation would provide free coverage for illegal immigrants.

The immigration restrictionist group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) said it’s flooding Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and planning another round of Tea Parties, to motivate what they hope will be a huge backlash against any attempt to legalize any undocumented immigrants in the United States. The group is gearing up to fight comprehensive immigration [...]

WASHINGTON — A protracted partisan U.S. Senate skirmish has left hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans without unemployment benefits — an impasse that Democrats leaders are hoping to break this week. They have their work cut out for them.

A federal program known as 287(g), which grants broad immigration enforcement powers to local law enforcement agencies, has resulted in a “sweep of terror,” said 2nd District U.S. Rep. Jared Polis. In a floor speech today, the Boulder Democrat–who can usually be counted on to speak out in support of immigration reform–had sharp criticism for [...]