Washington Post
Joshua Hoyt 

I have known Barack Obama since 1986, when we were both community organizers. I am still organizing on the streets of Chicago, and what I see in the Latino community makes me fear that the president is oblivious to the pain wrought by our broken immigration system. It could have a profound effect on the 2010 and 2012 elections.

It didn't have to be this way. For a brief moment last year it appeared that Obama might realign the modern political map, cementing the Latino vote into the Democratic coalition by speaking plainly to the American people on the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

Instead, he squandered a political gift handed to him by the Republican Party's nativist wing -- and its anti-immigrant rhetoric -- during the 2008 campaign. Candidate Obama promised to make immigration reform a priority during his first year in office, and the Latino vote surged to 10 million, from 7.8 million in 2004, and swung eight percentage points toward the Democrats.

Latinos gave 59 percent of their vote to John Kerry in 2004 but gave Obama 67 percent in 2008. The immigrant Latino vote expanded from 52 percent for Kerry to 75 percent for Obama, enough to deliver Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida -- and arguably North Carolina, Indiana and Pennsylvania.

But since taking office Obama has pursued a policy of increased deportations. The president's tin ear for Latino passion on this issue was clear to us in Chicago during his short tenure as our U.S. senator.

After he went into politics, Obama and I worked collegially on issues as diverse as health care for working families to citizenship for new Americans. But we last talked in September 2006, after I publicly criticized his vote as our new U.S. senator in favor of a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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LA Times
Peter Nicholas 

Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already.

Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections.

In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators -- Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who have spent months trying to craft a bill.

According to a person familiar with the meeting, the White House may ask Schumer and Graham to at least produce a blueprint that could be turned into legislative language.

The basis of a bill would include a path toward citizenship for the 10.8 million people living in the U.S. illegally. Citizenship would not be granted lightly, the White House said. Undocumented workers would need to register, pay taxes and pay a penalty for violating the law. Failure to comply might result in deportation.

Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman, said the president's support for an immigration bill, which would also include improved border security, was "unwavering."

Participants in the White House gathering also pointed to an immigration rally set for March 21 in Washington as a way to spotlight the issue and build needed momentum.

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Mennonite Weekly Review
Matthew Krabill 

Immigration is a hot topic these days. The discussion usually centers on issues of the economy and the law.

My work resettling refugees in Phil adelphia has made me realize the brokenness of our systems and the hard work required to reform them.

But perhaps the most overlooked part of the conversation is the impact immigrants have on the American religious landscape.

Literature abounds on the decline of the church in the United States. Words like “emerging” and “missional” describe predominantly Anglo grassroots and institutional responses.

But few people recognize that U.S. Christianity is growing in other ways. While American Christianity declines in the Anglo heartlands, its immigrant counterparts are flourishing and proving to be a source of renewal.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Immigrants always carry their religion with them. Furthermore, most immigrants to the United States since 1965 are Christian (unlike Europe, where they are Muslim). As a result, the advent of newcomers signals religious revitalization and de-Europeanization, but not de-Christianization.

Consider the Catholic Church in the United States. In the mid-1960s U.S. Catholics were in the throes of a crisis, losing members and closing parishes. Today, not only are one in three American Catholics now Hispanic, these immigrants are worshiping in 3,500 parishes across the country and creating unique forms of spirituality and devotional expression by drawing on their experiences of struggle, migration and community. The same could be said of Koreans, immigrants with the fastest growing churches over the last two decades.

What has happened to the Catholic Church is also becoming the experience of other Protestant denominations, including Mennonite Church USA. Just as migrations from Western Europe and Russia shaped Mennonite identity, so too are newer groups of migrants from Africa, Latin America and Asia impacting the denomination.

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The Nation
Jackie Stevens 

In January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that by February 26 it would be transferring roughly 250 detainees from the privately run Varick Detention Center in Manhattan to the Hudson correctional center in Kearny, New Jersey. About 12,000 people annually, mostly New Yorkers who would be held at the Varick center, will now be distributed to facilities outside the city. ICE claims it is making the transfer to provide "outdoor recreation space and visitation services," but civil rights advocates paint a darker picture.

"We view this as a lose-lose situation," says Udi Ofer of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), which, along with numerous other New York civil rights organizations, is disturbed that ICE is shifting people from one intolerable facility to another and not releasing them. The groups also worry that the move will deprive the Varick inmates of their free legal services.

The conditions at the Varick center were certainly dismal. On February 16, following months of requests and an ACLU letter on behalf of the The Nation and the investigative fund of The Nation Institute, ICE granted its only media tours of the facility, allowing confirmation of complaints in a September 2008 petition from Varick inmates. The dorms are packed with rows of narrow beds, fifty in all; the law library has dated resources; there is no privacy; and there is no natural light, ever.

The agents hosting the tour seemed embarrassed and emphasized the upcoming transfer as we looked through a long hall window at men slouching, feet on the floor, using their beds as backless chairs. The men, most in their 20s to 30s, were wearing tan and orange uniforms, color-coded to match their criminal histories; many in Varick have no arrest record. (No one locked up in an ICE facility is charged with a crime. Any criminal sentence has been served; most are pursuing claims in immigration courts.)

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NY Times
Nina Bernstein 

WEST BABYLON, N.Y. — Elizabeth Drummond was a single mother from a hardscrabble family whose roots go back to the Mayflower and an American Indian tribe. The man she married, Segundo Encalada, was a relative newcomer to the United States, sent illegally by his parents from Ecuador when he was 17.

He soon became “Daddy Segundo” to her little boy, coached her through the Caesarean births of two daughters, and worked construction and landscaping jobs here on Long Island to support them all.

In an earlier era of America’s immigration history, they could have stayed together, and Mr. Encalada might still be alive. But in July 2006, when Mrs. Encalada was pregnant with their third daughter and immigration crackdowns were sweeping the country, her husband was ordered by immigration authorities to take “voluntary departure” back to Ecuador.

They thought of hiding, she says, but chose to follow the rules, accepting the wrenching separation that has become the only path to a legal family life for hundreds of thousands of such couples. Under laws affecting those who married after April 2001, foreign spouses who entered without a visa must leave and seek one from a United States Consulate in their native land.

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NY Times
Julia Preston

Responding to pleas from immigration judges and lawyers who say the nation’s immigration courts are faltering under a crushing caseload, the American Bar Association called Monday for Congress to scrap the current system and create a new, independent court for immigration cases.

In a vote at its semiannual meeting in Orlando, Fla., the lawyers’ organization endorsed a recommendation for a separate immigration court system that would be similar to federal courts that decide tax cases.

Behind the seemingly arcane proposal was a portrait of the nation’s immigration courts besieged with new cases arising from an intensified federal crackdown on illegal immigration, and challenged by critics who doubt the courts’ impartiality. The lawyers described the courts’ condition in a report of more than 1,500 pages released last week.

The immigration courts are not courts at all in the way Americans generally think of them. They are part of the Department of Justice, not the federal judiciary, and the judges, although they wear robes and sit in formal courtrooms, are employees of the attorney general.

While Congress has debated since 2006 an overhaul of the immigration system that would include measures to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, proposals for fixing the courts have been largely ignored.

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