PAAAARTYYYY

More >>

Florida Senate

Budget chairman Alexander voted against the bill last year.

As the U.S. Supreme Court debates the Arizona law destined to make life miserable for brown-skinned people, advocates on both sides of the immigration-reform issue are freaking out.  Senate Bill 1070 requires Arizona cops to detain immigrants they suspect are in the country illegally and check their status. Not carrying immigration papers in public would be a state crime. If the highest court in the land says this is constitutional, won't cops in the Sun-Baked State start doing the same thing?

No, probably not. Florida is crazy but not entirely stupid. Take state Sen. JD Alexander, the Republican budget committee chairman who last year voted against Florida's proposed anti-illegal immigrant bill, which never passed the state House. Alexander happens to be a citrus grower, and big growers do not want to lose their workforce of cheap, often-illegal labor. As he told the Miami Herald last May, "I probably know more about the reality of these issues than anybody else on the floor." More >>

Are ICE officials ready to listen to this?

​The Southwest Ranches Town Council has announced the time of a proposed meeting between local residents and officials from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to discuss a controversial new immigrant detention facility project that town officials appear to have been trying to move forward with as little public involvement as possible. More >>

More >>

CCA says "STFU!"

More >>

BSO

Anthony Mangione

​Anthony Mangione, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's South Florida Office since 2007, was arrested today and is being held at the Broward County main jail at the behest of the U.S. Marshals Service. Mangione was the subject of a child pornography investigation starting in April, after AOL alerted a nonprofit group about images that were reportedly downloaded at his IP address. Mangione was placed on administrative leave earlier this year, just before he had planned to retire.More >>

More >>

More >>

An ICE raid in Miami

​A coalition of immigrant-rights groups is publicizing data obtained after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that shows a new program that aims to identify dangerous criminals who are here illegally is having major side effects, intended or not.

The "Secure Communities" program is being implemented by federal mandate in counties across the U.S. Here's how it works: when a suspect is booked at a county facility, the routine fingerprint scan is sent to a federal database of known legal immigrants. If a match is not found, the suspect isMore >>

​Here's the score in America; if you've ever "waged a violent campaign" against a communist leader, then you're a "cold-war veteran" and totally not a terrorist. And if you've publicly admitted that you "organized a wave of bombings" in that communist country, that's cool; just don't lie to a judge during an immigration hearing about your involvement in those attacks.

And that's all according to our paper of record, the New York Times. The Times is so damned objective that even though its own reporter recorded Luis Posada Carriles admitting that he planned a string of 1997 bombing at tourist spots in Havana, Cuba, it won't call Posada a terrorist. It'll just quote anonymous Cuban officials who accused the United States of harboring "the bin Laden of this hemisphere."
More >>