enforcement

DENVER (AP) — Immigrants living illegally in Colorado will be able to get driver's licenses under a bill signed Wednesday by Gov. John Hickenlooper, adding the state to a handful of others that provide a legal way for immigrants to use the roads.

The issue has picked up momentum this year, with Oregon and Nevada passing laws in recent weeks, and Connecticut's governor expected to pass a measure that lawmakers approved last week.

Hickenlooper said he saw the proposal as a step toward changing the nation's immigration laws.

"I'm not trying to tell Congress what form that takes, any of the details, but we are moving in that direction, and this is something that's a first step," the Democratic governor said.

The bill was signed in private, before the governor signed several other bills in front of lawmakers and the media. But Hickenlooper's office said the private signing was simply because one of the lead sponsors was out of town.

"We weren't trying to downplay it," spokesman Eric Brown said.

Supporters of the bill argued that everyone on the roads should know the rules and be insured, regardless of their immigration status.

The licenses would be labeled to say they are not valid for federal identification and can't be used to vote, obtain public benefits or board a plane. Hickenlooper said immigrants should have licenses that allow them to drive to work, get insurance, and be identified in car accidents, while at the same time making clear they are not U.S. citizens.

New Mexico, Illinois and Washington state already grant driver's licenses to immigrants who are in the country illegally. Utah grants immigrants a driving permit that can't be used for identification. Nevada's bill, signed into law last week, requires immigrants to prove their identity with a passport or birth certificate, and the "driving privilege cards" must be renewed annually.

In Colorado, immigrants pass a driver's license test and prove they're paying state and federal taxes. They also must show an identification card from their country of origin. The licenses would be renewed every three years.

But opponents argued there's no way to verify the identities of immigrants with certainty, and they worried the licenses wouldn't necessarily lead to more people having insurance. Republican Sen. Kevin Lundberg said he worried the proposal would encourage more people to come to Colorado illegally.

Colorado's bill takes effect Aug. 1, 2014. Legislative analysts who worked on the bill estimate that more than 45,000 immigrants will apply for licenses the first year. Read more about Immigrant driver's licenses signed in Colorado

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Tuesday vetoed a bill that would have required Florida hand out driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, a sign he is taking a stand against the left in favor of conservatism.

“Florida is home to immigrants of many nationalities, who add to the cultural fabric of our great state, and whose productivity and hard work have contributed to our economic turnaround,” Scott said in his official letter to Florida Secretary of State Kenneth Detzner announcing the veto. “Still, our nation struggles with immigration issues every day, as Americans seek to reconcile the fact that at one point our families were immigrants who came, as many do today, to work and live the American dream with the fact that the federal government has failed at enforcing the nation’s laws on this topic.”

Scott went on to detail the inconsistencies of immigration policy coming out of Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security and President Barack Obama’s administration at large.

“Despite the federal government’s inability to enforce the nation’s current immigration laws or to find common ground on how to change them, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in a June 2012 memo the immediate establishment of a ‘Deferred Action Process for Childhood Arrivals,’” Scott wrote. “Through this process DHS provides that a young person illegally brought to the United States as a child will not be subject to removal if the individual meets certain criteria."

"Qualifying for deferred action status does not confer substantive rights or lawful status upon an individual; it does not create a pathway to a green card or citizenship; nor does it extend to any family members of the person granted the status either," he explained. "Deferred action status is simply a policy of the Obama Administration, absent Congressional direction, designed to dictate removal action decisions using DHS agency discretion. It was never passed by Congress, nor is it a promulgated rule.”

The institutional left and Florida Democrats are furious that Scott would make such a move. Democrat state Sen. Darren Soto called Scott’s veto an “anti-Hispanic bomb.”

“Make no mistake about it: This will be an anti-Hispanic bomb if he vetoes this bill,’’ Soto, a sponsor of the legislation, said before Scott officially vetoed the bill according to the National Journal. “The vast majority of my peers understand we need to encourage immigrants to become working members of our society. It makes no sense that the Scott administration would veto something it’s already doing.”

The Florida House Democrat who also sponsored the bill, Rep. Randolph Bracy, tried to argue Scott’s veto foils plans to move the national Republican party as a whole toward amnesty. “I thought the party was moving in that direction and was behind this bill, and then the governor just comes out of nowhere and does this,” Bracy said according to National Journal. “Republicans have been talking as a party about Hispanic outreach, and this was only a small step.” Read more about Rick Scott Vetoes Bill to Give Illegal Immigrants Driver's Licenses

Nineteen people suffered drug-related deaths in Marion County in 2012 — nearly double the number from 2011, according to statistics released from Oregon’s state medical examiner.

That makes the county one of three in Oregon where drug-related deaths rose last year, while the state as a whole saw a 7 percent drop.

Heroin deaths in Oregon climbed 2.5 percent to 147, the highest number on record. In Marion County, heroin deaths doubled from five to 10 in 2012.

The rise in heroin overdoses is due in part to Oregon’s crackdown on prescription drug abuse, police said.

In 2009, the state legislature passed a law that created a database for doctors and pharmacies to track prescriptions for drugs such as Oxycontin, Vicodin and Methadone. Doctors started uploading information to the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in July 2011.

By 2012, prescription drug overdose in Oregon dropped by 12 percent.

The problem is that some prescription holders have switched to heroin.

“A lot of people get on (opioids) legitimately from an injury or those types of things,” Salem police Lt. Mark Keagle said. “If people become addicted to Oxycontin, and they cannot get it, then it pushes them to find some medicine or some substance that will keep them from going through withdrawals.”

Prescription Oxycontin commands a street price of up to $60 per pill in Salem, Keagle said. That makes heroin a cheaper alternative.

Unlike prescription pills that stay potent for years, heroin, which is harvested from poppy plants twice a year, loses its potency over a period of months, Salem police Lt. Steve Birr said.

“We can tell when there is a new harvest because we will suddenly have people dropping dead from overdoses,” Birr said. “What got them high one day will kill them the next.”

Also out of sync with state statistics is the number of deaths associated with methamphetamine use in Marion county. Half of the deaths in Marion County were connected to methamphetamine, but the statewide percentage was at 40 percent.

In Multnomah County, where about half of the state’s drug-related deaths occur, methamphetamine accounted for 27 percent.

Dr. Karen Gunson, the state’s medical examiner, thought the proximity of the county’s major cities to Interstate 5 could be one reason why methamphetamine use was higher.

I-5 is a major highway for drug traffickers smuggling methamphetamine from Mexico, which is where most of the meth sold in the U.S. is manufactured, Gunson said. The proximity of cities such as Salem, Keizer and Woodburn to the interstate make them easy points of distribution.
  Read more about Marion County drug deaths up in 2012

In a video to constituents, Sen. Marco Rubio has raised the possibility that he could abandon the immigration reform bill he’s been pushing if political “horse trading” waters down his priorities in the bill.

Though he defended the idea of comprehensive immigration reform, Rubio warned that if the individual components (such as E-Verify and border security) aren’t treated “as separate issues even though they are dealt with in one bill, then I won’t be able to support that anymore.”

Read more: http://conservativebyte.com/2013/06/rubio-raises-the-possibility-of-jumping-off-immigration-reform-push/#ixzz2VCYt1tiy
  Read more about Rubio raises the possibility of jumping off immigration reform push

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cannot find 266 potentially dangerous foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

According to testimony from Rebecca Gambler, director of the Homeland Security and Justice for GAO, on May 21, 2013 before the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, DHS identified 1,901 illegal overstays of concern in 2011. As of March 2013, 14 percent remain missing.

Of those that pose security threats, 266 could not be located, and nine individuals had been arrested.

  Read more about MISSING: 266 Illegal Overstays that ‘Pose National Security’ Risks

An immigration group looking to overturn a recently passed law that allows residents without proof of legal presence to get driver’s cards ramped up their efforts Tuesday to bring the issue before Oregon voters.

Beneath a canopy outside the state Capitol, Oregonians for Immigration Reform officials passed out manila envelopes that included signature sheets for a referendum on Senate Bill 833.

The driver’s cards under the bill, which Gov. John Kitzhaber signed in May, would last four years instead of the standard eight years. Driver card applicants must meet other requirements, including knowledge of traffic laws and driving skills.

Sponsors of the referendum efforts would have to gather 58,142 valid signatures and file them by Sept. 26, which is 90 days after the targeted adjournment of the 2013 Legislature. The law would be suspended instead of taking effect in January if enough signatures were gathered to force a statewide election on the bill.

“It’s a herculean task but I think that Oregonians are really angry that this (bill) was rammed through,” said Cynthia Kendoll, the president for Oregonians for Immigration Reform.

The group was also protesting a federal immigration bill that would provide undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. Buttons that read “Stop Illegal Immigration” were scattered on a table.

Supporters of the short-term driver cards argue the bill is about increasing public safety on the state’s roads not about immigration. But opponents say the new law would just condone illegal behavior.

Republican Reps. Sal Esquivel of Medford and Kim Thatcher of Keizer, and Richard LaMountain of Portland, recently filed the referendum papers for the bill with the secretary of state.

Esquivel told about two dozen people gathered on the Capitol steps in the rain that he doesn’t think the bill will help increase public safety and lawmakers who voted for the bill aren’t upholding the law.

“We are a country of laws. If you break the law to come here. Why would we allow that?,” Esquivel asked.

He unrolled a lengthy list of requirements residents have to meet to get a standard driver’s license, arguing that U.S. citizens were being treated as second rate.

Thatcher also announced the introduction of House Bill 3535, which would direct the Oregon Department of Transportation to report annually on the effects of implementing the driver’s card bill.

If the driver’s card bill is overturned, House Bill 3535 would not take effect.

By about 12:30 p.m., the group had distributed about 40 packets to those interested in gathering signatures for the referendum efforts.

If their measure qualifies for a statewide election, it would appear on the November 2014 ballot, although lawmakers can provide for a different date.

Luis Guerra, acting executive director of Causa, an immigration rights association that pushed for the passage of Senate Bill 833, said the group is keeping a close eye on the referendum efforts.

Guerra said that the driver’s card bill got bipartisan support in both legislative chambers and should be viewed as a public safety issue.

“We realize that they have a lot of signatures they need to collect so we’ll prepare as we need to based on how much work we see them accomplish,” he said. Read more about Immigration group gears up for referendum on driver's card bill

Just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, stands a dormitory-style shelter filled with people recently deported from the U.S. and other migrants waiting to cross the border.

The long rows of bunk beds offer immigrants a place to rest on their long journey. But the shelter is no safe haven in a town controlled by the Gulf cartel. Armed men once showed up and took away 15 men, who were probably put to work as gunmen, lookouts or human mules hauling bales of marijuana into the United States.

As Congress takes up immigration reform, lawmakers may have to confront the reality of this place and others like it, where people say the current system of immigration enforcement and deportation produces a constant flow of people north and south that provides the cartel with a vulnerable labor pool and steady source of revenue.

"This vicious circle favors organized crime because the migrant is going to pay" for safe passage, said the Rev. Francisco Gallardo, who oversees immigrant-assistance efforts for the Matamoros Catholic diocese.

If Congress sends more resources to the border, the government will also need to account for shifting patterns in immigrant arrests.

The cartel controls who crosses the border and profits from each immigrant by taxing human smugglers. At the shelter, the cartel threat was so alarming that shelter administrators began encouraging immigrants to go into the streets during the day, thinking they would be harder to round up than at the shelter.

There have been record numbers of deportations in recent years and tens of thousands landed in Tamaulipas already this year, the state that borders Texas from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo. Arizona is often singled out as the busiest border crossing for immigrants entering the U.S., but more and more migrants are being caught in the southernmost tip of Texas, in the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector.

Apprehension statistics are imperfect measures because they only capture a fraction of the real flow, but the arrest numbers are definitely shifting.

Arrests in the Tucson, Ariz., sector dropped 3 percent last year, while Rio Grande Valley arrests rose 65 percent. In March alone, the Border Patrol made more than 16,000 immigrant arrests in the Rio Grande Valley sector, a 67 percent increase from the same month last year, according to the agency.

Immigrant deaths are also up. The sector reported last month that about 70 bodies were found in the first six months of the fiscal year, more than twice as many as the previous year.

The makeup of the immigrants apprehended here is changing, too, driven by people flowing out of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The Border Patrol made 94,532 arrests of non-Mexican immigrants along the Southwest border last year, more than double the year before. And nearly half of those came in the Rio Grande Valley sector.

The Border Patrol is responding by redirecting personnel, including sending most new graduates from its academy to the Rio Grande Valley, according to senior Border Patrol officials.

When immigrants from Central America and Mexico arrive in Matamoros ahead of their trip to America, they are met by smugglers who have to pay the cartel tax for every person they take across the border.

Attempts to cross alone are met with violence. Some immigrants are kidnapped and their families extorted by the organization.

Reported murders in Tamaulipas, the state that borders Texas from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo, increased more than 250 percent in the past four years, according to the Mexican government. Official statistics are generally thought to undercount the real toll. Soldiers recently killed six gunmen in a clash in Matamoros.

And yet, even with the high-degree of danger for immigrants crossing this part of the border, they keep coming.

Central American migrants continue to use the route up the Gulf Coast side of Mexico and through Tamaulipas because it's the shortest to the U.S., said Rodolfo Casillas Ramirez, a professor at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Mexico City. The smugglers choose the route, and even if immigrants have heard about the violence in Tamaulipas, "they trust that the premium they've paid includes the right of passage," he said.

They continue to leave their home countries for economic reasons. Although the U.S. economy has provided fewer jobs for immigrants during the Great Recession and a long, slow recovery, opportunities south of the border have been even more limited, Casillas said.

That's why the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a Roman Catholic priest who founded a shelter for immigrants in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, said the answer is in regional development, not increased border security.

"This situation has grown because ultimately the migrants are merchandise and organized crime profits in volume," he said during a recent visit to Matamoros.

Rep. Filemon Vela, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee whose district includes Brownsville, said the immigration-reform debate has so far left out discussion of the security and economic development in Mexico.

"The incentive for people to cross over illegally from Mexico will never subside until these individuals feel safe and until they are able to feed themselves and their families," Vela said.

At the 150-bed shelter, more than half of the immigrants have just been deported from the U.S., Gallardo said. The others are immigrants preparing to cross. He said shelter workers constantly chase out infiltrators who are paid by smugglers to recruit inside.

At Solalinde's shelter in southern Mexico, threats from organized crime forced them to bring in four state police officers and four federal ones, who have lived at his shelter for the past year as protection. Solalinde now travels with bodyguards after having fled Mexico for a couple of months last year following threats.

One immigrant at the Matamoros shelter was a 48-year-old man who would only give his name as "Gordo" because he feared for his safety. He said he had arrived two days earlier after traveling from Copan, Honduras. Gordo said he had lived in Los Angeles for 10 years but had been in Honduras for the past four. He was trying to make it back to California, where he has a 15-year-old daughter.

Asked about his prospects for successfully crossing the river, he said: "It's difficult, not so much for the Border Patrol" but for the cartels.
___

Associated Press Writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. Read more about Cartel towns pose challenge for immigration reform

On Tuesday, May 21st, state and local groups around the country will hold a series of press conferences to highlight their opposition to S. 744, the Senate’s comprehensive amnesty bill. The goal is to call attention to the bill’s many failings and to promote an immigration-enforcement approach to reform.

An Arizona-based coalition called Remember 1986 took the lead in coordinating the press conferences. The coalition’s press conference web site page contains a list of planned events. In many instances, participants will be delivering to Senators NumbersUSA petitions that have been signed by a state's citizens.

The events will especially spotlight three key factors about the Gang of Eight immigration bill:

• It won't stop the next amnesty: Its format of amnesty first and enforcement later is the same as the 1986 amnesty in which "later" never came and enforcement promises were all broken.
• It is an attack on the 20 million Americans who can't find a full-time job: The bill doubles legal immigration to meet the desires of a gang of corporate lobbyists to continue to hold down wages. All-told, the bill offers 33 million lifetime work permits to 11 million illegal aliens and 22 million new immigrants in the first decade alone.
• It adds a massive unfunded mandate to government spending and debt: The Heritage Foundation studied the costs of the bill only for the 11 million illegal aliens who would get the amnesty. It projected $9.4 trillion in government services over their lifetime, but only $3.1 trillion in taxes, leaving a net cost of $6.3 trillion.

  Read more about National Press Day Opposing Comprehensive Amnesty Bill