The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.

Good deal. We would be adding 12-20 million illegal aliens on the the federal health care roles if the Democrats health system legislation passes. 12-20 million who will be on the welfare role, who will want free money, who will demand free services, overload our schools and medical systems, etc and so on. By about February, we should start hearing the stories out of our southwestern states about massive numbers of people illegally crossing the borders and people overstaying their visas.

In an address at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, Ms. Napolitano sought to dispel any notion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — might postpone the most contentious piece of an immigration overhaul until after midterm elections next November.

Liberal policy group? They are a massively far left group, about as far left as one can get. To put it plainly, this would be like a Bush appointee speaking to the neo-Nazi group Stormfront.

You really can’t call these folks in the White House liberals. That is insulting to liberals. They are completely tone deaf to the American People, and are basically telling you, the American People, to STFU and GFYS with all their policies.

I wonder how many Islamic terrorists will be provided blanket amnesty as they sneak into our country, just in time for KSM’s trial?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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Today the White House stepped up its attack on Fox News, announcing that the network would no longer be able to conduct interviews with officials as a member of the Press Pool. The Pool is a five-member group consisting of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC organized by the White House Correspondents Association. Its membership is not subject to oversight by the government.

Fortunately, the rest of the press pool stood up to Hugo Chavez, er, Barack Obama, and said that would not work. So, as Doug points out, the reporters were limited to a two minute interview each, instead of the standard whine, in a (typical) petulant act. Regardless of what one thinks of Fox News, this is the behavior of a dictator in waiting.

On to the good

ICE has launched a new initiative to audit hiring records and I-9s — the form every new hire fills out to verify identity and employment eligibility – of current and past employees.

Last year, 503 companies nationwide received inspection notices. This year, Homeland Security notified 652 companies in one day.

“It is one of those things causing indigestion among the employment community,” said George Ports with Capital Associated Industries Inc., an employer association in North Carolina with approximately 1,000 members.

I have to give the Obama administration kudos for this. We could probably dig in to their motives, but, regardless, this is something that opponents of illegal immigration have been yammering about for a long time: if you want to stop most of the illegals, you have to go after the companies who hire them, and make it painful to the offenders.

Tony Asion, director of the statewide advocacy group El Pueblo, says he’s already hearing of unintended consequences.

“What (companies) do is deny the job (to a Latino), and it could very well be to a legal U.S.-born Latino who is here,” he said.

It could be a legal immigrant, able to work. Perhaps if people like Asion would stop backing the “rights” of illegals, there wouldn’t be so much bias.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has stripped Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of his authority to arrest suspected illegal immigrants based solely on their immigration status.
But Arpaio said Tuesday he plans to continue his controversial “crime suppression operations,” despite DHS’s decision to not renew an agreement that would allow the sheriff to continue immigration enforcement on the streets. …
Arpaio said he believes DHS made the changes to stop his “crime suppression operations,” which are saturation patrols in designated areas where deputies would find illegal immigrants by stopping them for traffic infractions and minor violations.
The Department of Justice and other federal agencies are investigating the sheriff’s office on accusations of racial profiling during the crime suppression operations.
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series published in July 2008, the Tribune found the sheriff’s office’s illegal-immigration sweeps violated federal regulations intended to prevent racial profiling. The five-part series also found that the sweeps diverted resources from core law-enforcement functions, which in some cases caused response times to increase.

Ed Morrissey:

The DHS does not have the authority to dictate resource allocation of county sheriffs anywhere. The people of Maricopa County make the determination of whether their sheriff has allocated resources to their liking, not the federal government. Arpaio stands for election every four years, and so far no challenger has come within 10 points of Arpaio. If Maricopa County residents are unhappy with Arpaio’s management of resources, they’re not demonstrating it.
If the Maricopa County Sheriff Department violated civil-rights rules, then the Department of Justice has the duty to investigate and to take corrective action. So far, though, no one has proven anything of the sort — and that still wouldn’t be the jurisdiction of DHS.

The ACLU have tried and failed to prove he has violated any civil liberties and still the left go around shouting he does. But the left never need evidence. They only need things to fit their pre-imagined mold.

Yid With a Lid:

Too many people on the liberal side of the fence argue that illegal immigration is a racial issue. People who want to protect the US borders are inspired by racism, trying to keep out Hispanics (this is a different kind of racism than you are accused of if you disagree with the POTUS)

Of course fighting immigration is not a race issue. Illegal immigration is a law and order and anti-terrorism issue. People forget that the Jhadist Hosam Maher Husein Smadi who was arrested [by] the FBI after trying to blow up a building in downtown Dallas was in this country Illegally.

At a time when our southern border is becoming a war zone, and Illegals are trying to commit terror attacks, President Obama’s Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have decided to strip Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who in the last three years has handed over 22,616 illegal immigrants to Immigration for deportation, of his authority to capture Illegal Immigrants. [...]

Snooper:

News to the masses…the SHERIFF of EVERY county in the United States CONTROLS what does and what does NOT take place in his county. Period. The Fed CANNOT take powers away or grant powers to ANY Sheriff in the United States. Period. That’s the Law and if the DHS Obama GOONS want to change that, they need to address the United States Constitution. Period. This is a travesty.

This whole thing is ridiculous. Just the fact DHS is going after someone doing the job they are failing to do blows my mind.

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An Arizona sheriff known for aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration has been stripped of some of his special power to enforce federal immigration law, and he claims the Obama administration is taking away his authority for political reasons. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose office faces racial profiling allegations over crime and immigration sweeps in some heavily Latino areas of metro Phoenix, said officials from Washington won’t let him renew a deal that let his deputies make federal immigration arrests.

“Let them all go brag that they took away the sheriff’s authority. Let them all do that. That doesn’t bother me. I don’t have an ego. I will continue doing the same thing,” the Republican sheriff said, noting he can still enforce state immigration laws. “What has changed, other than the politics and the perception emanating from Washington?”

The U.S. government, which does most of the nation’s immigration enforcement, is changing its rules for allowing local police to enforce more expansive federal immigration laws. Nationally, more than 1,000 local police and jail officers have been granted the power since 2002 to make immigration requests and speed up deportations. Arpaio has more officers with the special powers than any other local police agency in the country. For more than two years, 100 of his deputies have made immigration arrests and another 60 jail officers have identified inmates who are illegal immigrants.

Even though federal officials declined to let the sheriff keep making immigration arrests, Arpaio last week renewed a deal that will let his jail officers determine inmates’ immigration status. Arpaio said federal officials offered no explanation of why his powers were cut in half. Vinnie Picard, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which grants the special powers, declined to comment on the curtailment of Arpaio’s powers or whether any of the other 62 participating local agencies across the country have been denied renewals.

The agencies face an Oct. 14 deadline to renew their agreements. So far, at least three agencies have dropped out of the program.

Giving federal powers to local police helps supplement the small staff of federal agents who enforce immigration laws in the country’s interior, said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher immigration enforcement. He said it’s hard to tell whether the limits on Arpaio’s authority will extend to other agencies and would hamper the movement for local police to confront illegal immigration. “I suspect there is some effort there to send a warning to other police departments: Don’t get too aggressive with this, because we will yank it out from under you,” Mehlman said.

Joan Friedland, immigration policy director for the National Immigration Law Center, said the federal government wasn’t making a serious attempt to rein in Arpaio, because his jail officers still have the power to question jailed people about their immigration status. “All he has to do is get people to the jail, rather than being able to question them about their immigration status on the street,” said Friedland, whose group advocates for low-income immigrants.

For his part, Arpaio said he plans to continue cracking down illegal immigration by enforcing state laws that prohibit immigrant smuggling and ban employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Arpaio said his deputies can still detain suspected illegal immigrants who haven’t committed state crimes, as long as his officers call Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to pick them up.

Critics say some of Arpaio’s deputies racially profiled people during immigration sweeps. Arpaio maintains that people pulled over in the sweeps were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes. His office is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice over allegations of discrimination and unconstitutional searches and seizures.

Arpaio’s approach to immigration has frustrated other public officials. The mayor of Mesa complained in 2008 that Arpaio didn’t warn his city of raids by deputies who were looking for illegal immigrants working at his city’s library and City Hall. And as Arpaio’s sweeps began to draw heavy criticism in 2008, then-Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, cut off immigration enforcement dollars to his office.

Napolitano, who as the country’s homeland security secretary now oversees the federal government’s immigration agencies, had said it wasn’t an attempt to change Arpaio’s approach to cracking down on illegal immigration. Rather, she said the funding was reallocated to try to clear a backlog of thousands of outstanding felony warrants across the state. [And who believes that?]

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Immigration raids yield jobs for legal workers

It seems the illegal alien hordes — which have been driving hospitals out of business and bankrupting California — aren’t just doing the work Americans won’t do.

When federal agents descended on six meatpacking plants owned by Swift & Co. in December 2006, they rounded up nearly 1,300 suspected illegal immigrants that made up about 10% of the labor force at the plants.

But the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents did not cripple the company or the plants. In fact, they were back up and running at full staff within months by replacing those removed with a significant number of native-born Americans, according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

That was the most extreme example of what has become an increasingly common result of the raids: “They were very beneficial to American workers,” according to Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain.

During flush times, illegal aliens at least supply needed labor. During a recession, they take jobs from Americans who need them desperately. Also, as even a policy analyst for pro-illegal La Raza admits:

If you’ve got a segment of the workforce that’s afraid to speak out against violations of their labor rights, then that drags down wages and working conditions for all workers.

Of course, La Raza’s solution would be the same as Comrade Obama’s: amnesty — which will hardly make it easier for Americans to find jobs.

There is an entity that actually benefits from our policy of leaving the border wide open for uncontrolled immigration: Big Government. The more illiterate peasants from Third World backwaters wind up on welfare, the faster the cancer metastasizing out of Washington will grow.

On a tip from J. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Beck’s 5 pledges are (and I’m including a screen shot of them at the bottom of this post)…

1. I believe in a balanced budget and therefore will vote for a freeze in government spending until that goal is realized.
2. I believe that government should not increase the financial burden on its citizenry during difficult economic times therefore I will oppose all tax increases until our economy has rebounded.
3. I believe that more than four decades of U.S. dependence on foreign oil is a travesty therefore I will support a plan that calls for immediately increasing usage of all domestic resources including nuclear energy, natural gas, and coal as necessary.
4. I believe in the sovereignty and security of our country and therefore will support measures to close our borders except for designated immigration points so we will know who is entering and why and I will vehemently oppose giving another country, the United Nations, or any other entity, power over U.S. citizens.
5. I believe the United States of America is the greatest country on earth and therefore will not apologize for policies or actions which have served to free more and feed more people around the world than any other nation on the planet.

I suspect that my Congressman, Jim Jordan, will agree with all 5 pledges. Sherrod Brown or Jorge Voinovich, I’m pretty sure they will avoid the topic. Where do your Congresscritters fall on the subject? Isn’t it YOUR duty to find out?

As promised…

This has been a cross-post FROM Gribbit’s Word

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A coalition of Latino groups, liberal activists and labor unions have written President Barack Obama asking him to scrap agreements between the federal government and local police departments that allow them [to] arrest illegal immigrants.

The groups — which include the American Civil Liberties Union, National Council of La Raza and United Methodist Church — asked Obama to nix 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement agencies. That includes an agreement with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has used that authority to raid businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers, make arrests and pick up suspected illegal immigrants on crime sweeps.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said earlier this summer the Obama administration plans to rework the 287(g) agreements to focus on picking up fugitive criminals.

Arpaio argues that change would weaken their effectiveness.

The ACLU and other critics say the sheriff uses the power to unfairly target and arrest Hispanics, which takes away resources from other policing arenas. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of racial profiling.

The ACLU are against enforcing laws and for enabling criminals. It isn’t surprising at all.

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What is the cost of three Canadian visitors a day? Fifteen million dollars in Obamabucks, apparently. Worse, this waste of money wasn’t something the president of “transparency” seemed disposed to let us easily discover. Still, the Boston Globe reports that $15 mil is the amount of so-called stimulus money that Obama allowed to be spent by the state of Montana on a tiny border check-point facility that sees about three visitors a day — that’s $5,000,000 per tourist for the year.

Despite Obama’s promises that the stimulus plan would be transparent and free of politics, the government is handing out $720 million for border upgrades under a process that is both secretive and susceptible to political influence. This allowed low-priority projects such as the checkpoint in Whitetail, Mont., to skip ahead of more pressing concerns, according to documents revealed to the Associated Press.

Obama claimed he’d be “different,” though. Remember that he was supposed to be the serious president that only did the right thing? Yet, he’s turned his back on any sort of effort to hold stimulus spending to account. Projects all across the country are being given to less needy government facilities instead of going where need is greatest because of the influence brought to bear on distribution of funds by powerful politicians.

But, let’s step back even another step, here. Notice that the quibbling the media is involved in is over just which government facility gets so-called stimulus cash? Is it the government facility that is in bad repair that gets it or the government facility favored by one powerful politician or another that is favored by the largess?

In truth, does it really matter which government facility gets its repairs with “stimulus” money? Weren’t we told that Obama was trying to stimulate our flagging economy with his lavish gift? How is government spending on government stimulating the economy? In truth all it stimulates is government.

Instead of scolding Obama for spending his “stimulus” cash on government facilities that are not in need of the money, we should be scolding him on spending on government itself. The supposed stimulus money should be going to the actual economy, not further government projects. Government is not the economy, it is but a drag on the same.

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The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday sued the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to uncover documents related to laptop searches at the border.

“The ACLU believes that suspicionless searches of laptops violate the First and Fourth Amendments,” the group wrote in the suit, filed in a New York District Court.

In July 2008, the Customs and Border Protection agency within DHS published formal guidelines for laptop border searches that gave CBP officials permission to search laptops and electronic devices at the border. Court cases on the topic have generally found that citizens should have diminished expectations of privacy when re-entering the country because the U.S. has a right to protect itself and control what crosses its borders.

I actually tend to agree with them, at least when it applies to American citizens crossing back into the United States. But, here it comes…….

Critics of the policy claim that laptop searches are an invasion of privacy – a personal computer holds a lot more information than a suitcase full of clothes or briefcase full of paperwork. What’s to stop CBP from copying the contents of your computer and keeping it on file indefinitely, they have argued.

Yet, the ACLU still has no problem with Obama’s snitch mail program, the collection of email addresses by Democratic operatives, nor any of the intrusive methods proposed in the Waxman-Markey cap and tax bill as well as the health system destruction bills. Apparently, giving an unknown amount of unknown people outside of the IRS access to your tax records is no big deal to the ACLU. Their view, which from 1/20/2001 to 1/19/2009 was “never trust the government,” has changed to “aww, Barry’s so cute, how could we not give him the benefit of the doubt?”

“Traveling with a laptop shouldn’t mean the government gets a free pass to rifle through your personal papers,” Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, said in a statement. “This sort of broad and invasive search is exactly what the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches are designed to prevent.”

Being an American forced to swallow the government option poison pill shouldn’t mean the government gets a free pass to your tax records and bank account information, either. Hello, ACLU? Beuller? Beuller?

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After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.

A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them, including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.

The administration recently undertook audits of employee paperwork at hundreds of businesses, expanded a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed, bolstered a program of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies, and rejected proposals for legally binding rules governing conditions in immigration detention centers.

Fantastic. Another case of George W. Obama annoying more of the brain dead zombies who voted for him. Of course, every pledge/promise from Dear Leader has an expiration date. Apparently, those who wanted illegals legalized didn’t get the memo.

But, what could be causing this?

“We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said in an interview.

Ms. Napolitano and other administration officials argue that no-nonsense immigration enforcement is necessary to persuade American voters to accept legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, a measure they say Mr. Obama still hopes to advance late this year or early next.

So, first of all, we learn that what Bush was doing was the right way to do it, since the Obama verwaltung is doing the same thing Bush did. Bush is vindicated yet again!

Second, I suspect that Ms. Napolitano may meet the White House woodshed shortly for letting the cat out of the bag regarding why the Bush era illegals policies are not only being kept in place, but expanded. Somehow, though, I suspect the American population will not say “hey, the policies are working great to stop the illegals. Let’s make the rest American citizens.” Instead, I expect the conversation to go something like “awesome! Barry is continuing to get rid of the illegals. Let’s expand the program and send as many as possible back to their home countries.”

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