President Barack Obama will deploy up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border and request $500 million

President Barack Obama will deploy up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border and request $500 million for enhanced border protection, an administration official said on Tuesday.The troops will provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support, intelligence analysis, immediate support to counternarcotics enforcement and training capacity until Customs and Border Patrol can recruit and train more officers and agents to serve along the frontier.The funds will be used to enhance technology at the border and share information and support between law enforcement agencies as they target illegal trafficking in people, drugs, weapons and money.

The immigration issue has been a subject of intense focus in Washington, with Obama calling for comprehensive reform, and speaking out against a tough new law in the border state of Arizona.The issue also was a focus of a state visit to Washington last week by Mexican President Felipe Calderon.(Reuters)

Mexican migrants head for Arizona despite crackdown

NOGALES, Mexico Kidnapped by bandits, and caught and repatriated three times by the U.S. Border Patrol,  migrant Roberto Santos says Arizona’s tough new immigration law is the least of his worries.”I don’t care if they tell me they’re going to give me life in jail. I’m still going to keep on trying,” Santos, 30, said as he sat on a bench outside a migrant welfare project in this bustling city just south of the border from Arizona.”There’s no other option, Mexico’s dead — I just don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t have a life here anymore,” added Santos, who spent more than a decade in Los Angeles, before being recently deported.

Last month, Arizona passed a tough new law to drive 460,000 illegal immigrants out of the desert state, which straddles one of the principal corridors for human and drug smugglers heading up from Mexico.But despite the looming crackdown which will require state and local police to check the immigration status of anyone they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally when it comes into effect in late July — migrants remain undeterred, authorities on both sides of the border say.

The U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson sector said they had arrested 148,000 people in southern Arizona between October and April, around 8,000 more than in the same period last year.In Mexico, migrant welfare agency Grupo Beta says staff have continued to attend to some 150 to 200 migrants a day, either headed north from some of Mexico’s poorest states in search of work stateside, or sent packing over the border by U.S. authorities who have stepped up deportations.

“People are leaving, others are being repatriated, so I don’t see any change,” said Enrique Enriquez, the director of Grupo Beta’s center, which stands a few blocks south of the rusted border fence in Nogales.The controversial new law is supported by almost two thirds of Arizona voters, and a majority of American adults.

‘NO FOOD IN THE HOUSE’

Opponents charge the measure is unconstitutional and a mandate for racial profiling, and have launched legal challenges and an economic boycott to try to derail it.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is expected to protest it when he meets with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on Wednesday for a state dinner.

In an interview last week he slammed the state measure as “frankly discriminatory, terribly backward.” His government issued a warning to Mexicans living in or traveling to Arizona, and asked its consulates there to offer Mexicans legal protection.

Among those particularly motivated to cross north despite the state crackdown are illegal immigrants who used to live in the United States and were swept up in deportations, which reached a record 387,790 last year, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security figures.

Standing among a group of two dozen migrants in the Mexican border city, Miguel Lopez said he would risk arrest and deportation as many times as was needed to rejoin his wife and two young children in North Carolina.”We’ll just have to see who gets tired first,” said Lopez, 31, with a shrug.”I have to keep trying, because my family is over there. I have nothing in Mexico,” he added.

Despite the promise of greater vigilance under the law, some first-time migrants added that they were driven by poverty to seek a better life in the United States, and would push on through Arizona regardless.”We heard about Arizona’s new law on the news, but we need work,” said Gerardo Perez, 30, a farmer who said he earned 80 pesos a day   about $6  in his home state of Chiapas in southern Mexico.(Reuters)

road blocks to Arizona's tough new law on illegal immigration that has thrust the state into the national spotlight

PHOENIX A referendum drive and a lawsuit have emerged as potential road blocks to Arizona’s tough new law on illegal immigration that has thrust the state into the national spotlight.The legal action set to be filed Thursday in federal court is aimed a preventing enforcement of the controversial measure, while the ballot question could put it on hold until 2012.

Signed last week by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, the law requires local and state law enforcement to question people about their immigration status if there’s reason to suspect they’re in the country illegally, and makes it a state crime to be in the United States illegally.A draft of the proposed lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press shows the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders will seek an injunction preventing authorities from enforcing the law. The group argues federal law pre-empts state regulation of national borders, and that Arizona’s law violates due-process rights by allowing suspected illegal immigrants to be detained before they’re convicted.

Other Hispanic and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, are also planning lawsuits. And U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the federal government may challenge the law.On Wednesday, a group filed papers to launch a referendum drive that could put the law on hold until 2012 if organizers wait until the last minute to turn in petition signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot.

Opponents of the law have until late July or early August to file the more than 76,000 signatures  the same time the law is set to go into effect. If they get enough signatures, the law would be delayed until a vote.But the deadline to put a question on the November ballot is July 1, and a referendum filing later than that could delay a vote on the law until 2012, officials with the Secretary of State’s Office said.”That would be a pretty big advantage” to the law’s opponents, said Andrew Chavez, head of a Phoenix-based petition-circulating firm and chairman of the One Arizona referendum campaign.The legislation’s chief sponsor, Republican Rep. Russell Pearce, said he has no doubt voters will support the new law at the ballot box, which would then protect it from repeal by the Legislature. In Arizona, measures approved by voters can only be repealed at the ballot box.The clergy group’s lawsuit targets a provision allowing police to arrest illegal-immigrant day laborers seeking work on the street or anyone trying to hire them, according to the draft. It says the solicitation of work is protected by the First Amendment.

State Rep. Ben Miranda, a Phoenix Democrat who will serve as the local attorney on the case, said it was important to file the suit quickly to show local Latinos and the rest of the country that there’s still a chance the law won’t be enacted.”I think there’s real damage being caused right now,” Miranda said. “How do you measure the kind of fear … going on in many parts of this community?”At least three Arizona cities also are considering lawsuits to block the law. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon said the measure would be “economically devastating,” and called on the City Council to sue the state to stop it from taking effect.

The council rejected that idea Tuesday, yet the mayor told reporters he retained legal counsel to prepare a lawsuit to file on behalf of the city.Tucson leaders also are considering their options to block the law, and Flagstaff City Councilman Rick Swanson said the city had a duty to protect its residents who might be targeted.

Meanwhile, the effect of the law continued to ripple beyond Arizona.A Republican Texas lawmaker said she’ll introduce a measure similar to the Arizona law next year. Texas Rep. Debbie Riddle of Tomball said she will push for the law in the January legislative session, according to Wednesday’s editions of the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle.And Republicans running for governor in Colorado and Minnesota expressed support for the crackdown. “I’d do something very similar” if elected,” Former Rep. Scott McInnis, told KHOW-AM radio in Denver.

Mexican government warned its citizens Tuesday to use extreme caution if visiting Arizona

MEXICO CITY  The Mexican government warned its citizens Tuesday to use extreme caution if visiting Arizona because of a tough new law that requires all immigrants and visitors to carry U.S.-issued documents or risk arrest.Two top U.S. officials, meanwhile, criticized the measure and said it may face a legal challenge by federal authorities.A Mexican government-affiliated agency that supports Mexicans living and working in the United States called for boycotts of Tempe, Ariz.-based US Airways, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Phoenix Suns until those organizations rebuke the law.”We are making a strong call to the Arizona government to retract this regressive and racist law that’s impacting not only residents of Arizona, but people in all 50 states and in Mexico as well,” said Raul Murillo, who works with the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, an autonomous agency of Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.US Airways spokesman Jim Olson said “we have had absolutely no customers who have canceled fights” as a result of the controversy. Calls to the Diamondbacks and the Suns were not immediately returned.

The boycott demand came hours after Mexico’s Foreign Ministry issued its travel alert for Arizona, warning “that any Mexican citizen could be bothered and questioned for no other reason at any moment.”The law’s passage shows “an adverse political atmosphere for migrant communities and for all Mexican visitors,” the alert said.

In Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano criticized the law, with Holder saying the federal government may challenge it.A number of options are under consideration, including “the possibility of a court challenge,” Holder said.A citizen effort to repeal the law also is expected. Jon Garrido, who produces a Hispanic website and ran unsuccessfully last year for the Phoenix City Council, said he plans to begin gathering signatures next week to get a repeal referendum on the November ballot. If successful, the effort would block the law from taking effect until the vote.

U.S. politicians also weighed in on the growing controversy, with election season looming.In California, Meg Whitman, the Republican front-runner in the California gubernatorial primary, said Arizona is taking the wrong approach.”I think there’s just better ways to solve this problem,” Whitman said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, seeking re-election, told CBS’s “The Early Show” that his state needed such a law because the Obama administration has failed to secure the borders, resulting in drugs pouring into the southwestern United States from Mexico.Arizona’s law – slated to take effect in late July or early August – makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally. State lawmakers said the legislation, which has sparked huge protests and litigation, was needed because federal officials aren’t enforcing existing U.S. laws.

Mexico’s alert says that once the law takes effect, foreigners can be detained if they fail to carry immigration documents. And it warns that the law will make it illegal to hire or be hired from a vehicle stopped on the street.

Each day, more than 65,000 Mexican residents are in Arizona to work, visit friends and relatives and shop, according to a University of Arizona study sponsored by the Arizona Office of Tourism. While there, the Mexican visitors spend more than $7.35 million daily in Arizona’s stores, restaurants, hotels and other businesses, the researchers found.

Bimbo Bakeries, one of many Mexican companies operating in Arizona, said Tuesday it doesn’t expect Arizona’s new immigration law to affect its employees.”We carefully screen all associates to ensure they are authorized to work in the United States,” Bimbo spokesman David Margulies said.At the Mexico City airport Tuesday, Mexicans heading for the U.S. said they were very troubled by the new law.”It’s humiliating,” said Modesto Perez, who lives in Illinois. “It’s really ugly.”(AP)