illegal immigrant college student hopes case helps reform

ATLANTA When Jessica Colotl, an illegal immigrant college student, got arrested for a minor traffic violation at her suburban Atlanta campus, she became an accidental poster child for immigration reform.On Friday, after getting arrested and released from detention for the second time in just over a month, she told reporters at a news conference she hopes her ordeal can help persuade leaders to work for an overhaul of the country’s immigration laws.

“I just hope for the best and I hope that something positive comes out of this because we really need a reform to fix this messed up system,” the 21-year-old told reporters inside a shopping center that caters to metro Atlanta’s growing community of Hispanic immigrants. Colotl, who came close to deportation after the traffic arrest, looked overwhelmed by the crush of reporters shouting questions at her.Colotl is among hundreds of thousands of young people who have been brought into the U.S. illegally by their parents. She was 11 when her parents crossed the border with her from Mexico. Eventually, she graduated from high school in Georgia and entered Kennesaw State University in the fall of 2006. A sorority member who dreams of becoming lawyer, she was set to graduate with a degree in political science this fall.

Her first arrest came on March 30, the day after getting pulled over by university police for a minor traffic violation. She was charged with driving without a license and impeding the flow of traffic.Then, the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office turned her over to officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who sent her to a detention center in Alabama. After lobbying by Kennesaw State officials and her sorority sisters, ICE released Colotl last week. Federal officials deferred action on her case for a year, allowing her to complete her classes.

But Cobb County Sheriff Neil Warren obtained a new warrant for her arrest on Wednesday, saying she lied about her address when she was booked into jail following her initial arrest. Making a false statement to law enforcement is a felony under Georgia law.Colotl turned herself in Friday morning and was released on $2,500 bond, according to sheriff’s office records.

Her criminal defense lawyer, Chris Taylor, said Friday that his client’s case is a perfect example of why U.S. immigration law needs reform.”Jessica may not have the documents that show that she’s an American citizen, but she’s an American,” Taylor said. “She’s an American in her heart because she believes in the values of this country.”U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which granted the deferral on her case last week, decided not to detain her again following Friday’s arrest, the agency said in a statement.

Taylor said he believes there is no merit to the sheriff’s charge that Colotl gave an incorrect address. The address she gave is a former address and her auto insurance and car registration still list it, he said. She also gave her current address to immigration officials and the sheriff’s office had access to that information, he said.Warren did not return calls Friday seeking comment and a spokeswoman for his office referred questions to a statement released Thursday. In it, the sheriff said Colotl knew she was in the country illegally and “further complicated her situation with her blatant disregard for Georgia Law by giving false information.”

The deferred action on Colotl’s case does not imply legal status but does authorize her to seek a work permit, ICE said.Colotl’s immigration lawyer, Charles Kuck, said he intends to seek an extension of that deferred status.

If Colotl is convicted on the felony charge of making a false statement, it will be virtually impossible to get a judge to agree to extend the deferral, Kuck said. But he said he is almost positive that the district attorney will dismiss those charges.Cobb County District Attorney Pat Head did not immediately return a call Friday seeking comment.Colotl is evaluating whether to return to Kennesaw State, but said she is certain she will graduate from college.

“I really believe that something positive should come out of this, probably an immigration reform or at least the DREAM Act,” she said.The DREAM Act, or Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors, would apply to illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16, have a high school diploma and have shown high moral character, among other requirements. The bill has been introduced many times in Congress but has yet to make it through.

It’s unclear how many people would qualify under the most recent version of the act, which could be folded into a larger immigration reform bill or pushed on its own.Both Taylor and Kuck are representing Colotl without charge.

Colotl and her lawyers were flanked by about a dozen representatives from civil liberties and immigrant rights groups at Friday’s news conference. They called for ICE to revoke the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office’s participation in a program known as 287(g), which allows local law enforcement agents to help enforce federal immigration laws.

“We are calling for an immediate termination of the 287(g) agreement in Cobb County,” said Azadeh Shahshahani of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, adding that her office has contacted the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, and the U.S. Department of Justice, asking them to look into Cobb County’s use of the program.DHS spokesman Matt Chandler declined to comment and U.S. DOJ did not immediately return a call seeking comment late Friday. (AP)

Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.

Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.The state resisted adopting Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on.Now, after passing the nation’s toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.

The law drew not only the threat of a challenge by the Justice Department and a rebuke from the president, but the snickers of late-night comedians. City councils elsewhere have called for a boycott of the resort-driven state; one trade group of immigration lawyers has canceled a conference planned for Scottsdale at a time when the state is broke and desperate for business. Meanwhile, a continuous protest is taking place at the State Capitol.

Bruce D. Merrill, a polling expert here, is tired of picking up his phone. “Usually it is somebody asking me, ‘What the hell is going on in Arizona?’ ” Mr. Merrill said.But while Arizona may have become a cartoon of intolerance to much of America, the reality is much more complex, and at times contradictory. This state is a center of both law and order and of new age om. Red-meat-loving. Red-rock-climbing.

Arizona is home to some of the toughest prison sentencing laws in the country, and one of the cleanest campaign finance laws, too. Voters overwhelmingly re-elected Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, as governor the same year they returned the conservative senator Jon Kyl to Washington. The current Republican governor signed this law, but is also pushing for a tax increase.

Further, while Arizona may seem on the fringe with its immigration law, the measure mirrors the 1994 battle in California over a voter-approved law that Gov. Pete Wilsonsigned barring illegal immigrants from getting health care, public education and other services. Like California then, Arizona is taking its own tack instead of waiting on the federal government to change policies.

“The political and emotional landscape is almost identical,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, who served as an aide to Mr. Wilson. “History doesn’t repeat itself, it just moves east.”

The table was set for the passage of the new law by a confluence of factors, say residents, political scientists and businesspeople in Arizona. Those factors include shifting demographics, an embattled state economy and increased violence in Mexico, as well as the perception that the federal government has failed to act. Arizonans find that particularly irksome, given that Ms. Napolitano is now head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hispanics make up 30 percent of the population here, up from roughly 25 percent in 2000, according to census data. As the state’s economy, largely dependent on construction and development, has slumped, hostility toward illegal immigrants has increased in recent years. “More people now seem to think Hispanics are taking jobs from Anglos,” said Mr. Merrill, the polling expert.

Further, laws like the immigration statute and another new law requiring political candidates to prove citizenship are generally written by the hard-right lawmakers who dominate the Legislature — with far-left-of-center minority members opposing them — but neither side reflects the relatively centrist political views of most residents.

More than 30 percent of registered voters here are independents, double the proportion in 2000. “People have been leaving both political parties, which leaves the remainders in the party much more ideological,” Mr. Merrill said.

Residents are unnerved by the violence in Mexico and the heavy drug trade and illegal immigrant trafficking in Arizona. Most studies have shown illegal immigrants do not commit crimes in a greater proportion than their share of the population, and Arizona’s violent crime rate has declined in recent years. But in this state any crime tied to illegal immigrants gets notice.

Half of the drugs seized along the United States-Mexico border are confiscated in Arizona, and it is a major hub for human smuggling. Last month, Robert Krentz, 58, a member of a prominent ranching family, was killed on his property 20 miles from the border, and the police said the gunman was probably connected to smuggling.

“People outside of Arizona are not living in this state and don’t understand the issue,” said Mona Stacey, a computer technician from Mesa. “Most of them coming across are mostly good, Catholic families getting over here. But you also have the drug lords and the smugglers. It makes the good guys look bad, and you don’t know who is who.”

Conversations here about the new law tend to begin or end with a reference to Ms. Napolitano, who personified the state’s blended politics. As governor, she backed the posting of National Guard troops on the border, expanded the use of the state police in antismuggling operations, and pressed Washington for an overhaul of immigration law.

When it came to the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, however — a staunch supporter of immigration enforcement and one of the highest profile figures on the issue — she took a largely hands-off approach.

Now, as Homeland Security secretary, she has played up the administration’s devotion of resources to the border, while resisting pressure to put National Guard troops there.

This, too, is an echo of California circa 1994. There, Proposition 187, the measure limiting services for illegal immigrants, was struck down by the courts (a possibility here, too, say legal experts). The Clinton administration responded with Operation Gatekeeper, an effort to strengthen the border in California. It ended up pushing trafficking east, and as a result, Arizona posts the highest number of people arrested for crossing along the 2,000-mile border.

The former director of Operation Gatekeeper has just been appointed President Obama’sCustoms and Border Protection commissioner.

With more rallies opposing the law set for Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio has planned another of his controversial sweeps to net illegal immigrants.

“Arizona is the most unpredictable political patch of earth I’ve ever seen,” said Chip Scutari, a former political reporter who now runs a Phoenix public relations firm. “It’s the land of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tough-as-nails Tent City, and super-liberal Congressman Raul Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state. That’s Arizona.”

Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Arizona because of the law

PHOENIX Many of the cars that once stopped in the Home Depot parking lot to pick up day laborers to hang drywall or do landscaping now just drive on by.Arizona’s sweeping immigration bill allows police to arrest illegal immigrant day laborers seeking work on the street or anyone trying to hire them. It won’t take effect until summer but it is already having an effect on the state’s underground economy.”Nobody wants to pick us up,” Julio Loyola Diaz says in Spanish as he and dozens of other men wait under the shade of palo verde trees and lean against a low brick wall outside the east Phoenix home improvement store.

Many day laborers like Diaz say they will leave Arizona because of the law, which also makes it a crime to be in the U.S. illegally and directs police to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants.Supporters of the law hope it creates jobs for thousands of Americans.”We want to drive day labor away,” says Republican Rep. John Kavanagh, one of the law’s sponsors.An estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants have left Arizona in the past two years as it cracked down on illegal immigration and its economy was especially hard hit by the Great Recession. A Department of Homeland Security report on illegal immigrants estimates Arizona’s illegal immigrant population peaked in 2008 at 560,000, and a year later dipped to 460,000.The law’s supporters hope the departure of illegal immigrants will help dismantle part of the underground economy here and create jobs for thousands of legal residents in a state with a 9.6 percent unemployment rate.

Kavanagh says day labor is generally off the books, and that deprives the state of much-needed tax dollars. “We’ll never eliminate it, just like laws against street prostitution,” he says. “But we can greatly reduce the prevalence.”Day laborers do jobs including construction, landscaping and household work for cash paid under the table. Those jobs have been harder to find since the housing industry collapsed here several years ago.

Standing near potted trees and bushes for sale at a Home Depot in east Phoenix, Diaz, 35, says he may follow three families in his neighborhood who moved to New Mexico because of the law. He says a friend is finding plenty of work in Dallas.Diaz says he has too much to lose by staying – he’s supporting a wife and infant son back home in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas.”They depend on me to survive,” he says. “I’m not going to wait for police to come and arrest me.”Jose Armenta, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico’s western coast, is already planning to move to Utah within the next 20 days because of a combination of the economy and the new law.”A lot of people drive by,” he says as he watched nearby cars speeding past, “and they yell, ‘Hey, go back to Mexico!'”

Analysts say it’s too soon to tell what lasting effects the law will have on the state’s underground work force, which also includes baby sitters, maids and cooks.A study of immigrants in Arizona published in 2008 found that non-citizens, mostly in the country illegally, held an estimated 280,000 full-time jobs. The study by researcher Judith Gans at the University of Arizona examined 2004 data, finding that they contributed about 8 percent of the state’s economic output, or $29 billion.Losing hundreds of thousands of unskilled laborers wouldn’t hurt the state’s economy in the short term, but it could limit the economy’s ability to grow once it recovers, says Marshall Vest, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management.Legal workers who are willing to take any available job now will become more choosy if the unemployment rate falls back to low levels seen before the recession hit.

“That’s really the question, as to whether the existing population is willing to work those (low-level) jobs,” Vest says. “I think economics provides the answer. If job openings have no applicants, then businesses need to address that by raising the offered wage.”Some illegal immigrants, however, intended to stick around.Natalia Garcia, 35, from Mexico City, says she and her husband – a day laborer – will stay so their daughters – both born in the U.S. – can get a good education and learn English. The couple have been living in Arizona illegally for the last 10 years.”Mexico doesn’t have a lot of opportunities,” she says. “Here, we work honestly, and we have a better life.”Olga Sanchez, 32, from southern Mexico, lives in Phoenix illegally with her two brothers, who are 21 and 17. While the youngest boy is in high school, all three work and send money back home to their parents.

“This law is very bad for us,” says Sanchez, who gets about $250 a week cleaning three houses. “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.”She says the family is going to wait and see if the law takes effect and what the fallout will be before deciding whether to leave. The law is certain to be challenged in court; Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff already are considering lawsuits.”All I ask from God is a miracle for us to stay here and work,” she says.(AP)

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano talk about the "Calls to boycott Arizona grow over new immigration law "

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that she had “deep concerns” with the law and said it could siphon resources needed to target criminals. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said he was considering “the possibility of a court challenge.”

“I think that that law is an unfortunate one,” Holder said. “It is, I fear, subject to potential abuse. And I’m very concerned about the wedge that it could draw between communities that law enforcement is supposed to serve and those of us in law enforcement.”The law makes it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally and requires police to check suspects for immigration paperwork. The legislation also bars people from soliciting work or hiring day laborers off the street.Gov. Jan Brewer cast the law in terms of public safety, saying, “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels.” Brewer said she would order the state police training agency to formulate guidelines for law enforcement officers.

But critics said the law will result in racial profiling and discrimination.Calls for boycotts spread throughout California this week after the bill was signed by Brewer on Friday. The law is scheduled to take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends this week.On Tuesday, seven members of the Los Angeles City Council signed a proposal for a boycott, calling for the city to “refrain from conducting business” or participating in conventions in Arizona. Councilman Ed Reyes, who coauthored the proposal with Councilwoman Janice Hahn, said he wants city officials to spend the next 90 days assessing the financial relationships that exist between various city departments and businesses based in Arizona.

“If Arizona companies are taking our money, I want to sever that,” he said.Hahn acknowledged that a boycott would be logistically complicated but said the city should not remain silent. “When people are asked to show their papers, it brings back memories of Nazi Germany,” she said.

A spokesman for City Controller Wendy Greuel identified at least 12 city contracts with Arizona companies that are worth an estimated $7.2 million.San Francisco supervisors introduced a similar resolution Tuesday, and Mayor Gavin Newsom imposed an immediate moratorium on city-related travel to Arizona, with limited exceptions. Newsom also announced the convening of a group to analyze how a boycott would affect city contracts and purchasing.

City Atty. Dennis Herrera said he hoped the city’s resolution would “be an impetus to others taking an aggressive stand in terms of scrutinizing the services they have with Arizona companies.”The leader of the California Senate, Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), called the law a “disgrace” and said the state also should consider a boycott. He sent a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asking for an inventory of Arizona businesses and government agencies with which California does business.

“The Arizona law is as unconscionable as it is unconstitutional, and the state of California should not be using taxpayer dollars to support such a policy,” Steinberg wrote.Already, several organizations have canceled planned conventions in Arizona. The American Immigration Lawyers Assn. announced that it is moving its fall convention, originally scheduled for Scottsdale in September.

“We just felt that given this new law signed by the governor that it would not be right for our association to meet and convene there and take on the issues of immigration in a state that passed such a misguided bill,” said George Tzamaras, spokesman for the group.Arizona was already reeling from a decline in tourism because of the recession, and the fallout from the law has taken hotel owners by surprise, said Debbie Johnson, president of the Arizona Hotel and Lodging Assn.”Obviously our members are concerned,” Johnson said. “I thought there would be political issues. It has become so tourism-focused and that, to me, is the unfortunate side.”

Johnson said 200,000 people, many of them Latinos and legal immigrants, depend on a paycheck from the tourism industry. “They don’t want to lose their jobs,” she said.Barry Broome, president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Development Council, compared the boycott resolutions to the aftermath of Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigrant measure passed by California voters in 1994.”You didn’t see people in Arizona trying to leverage political gain from California’s issues,” he said.

Brewer said at a meeting in Tucson on Monday that she wasn’t worried about possible boycotts. “I believe it’s not going to have the kind of economic impact that some people think that it might,” she said.But Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who himself called for companies not to plan conventions in the state, said in an interview Tuesday that he expected the state to see declines in business and leisure travel, the trucking industry and retail shoppers from Mexico.

“There are political, legal and economic consequences that are going to hit the state,” said Grijalva, who has received death threats since speaking out against the law. “The disgust goes across state lines.”The concern about the law crossed international borders, with a travel warning posted by the Mexican government Tuesday. The post, on the Mexican Foreign Relations Ministry website, urged Mexican citizens to be careful in Arizona and to expect harassment and questioning.