Los Angeles City Council delays vote on exemption to Arizona boycott

The Los Angeles City Council postponed a vote Tuesday on a plan to send four police officers to attend a conference in Tucson and lifting its ban on city-related travel to Arizona to give officials time to find someone else to pay for the trip.

Councilmen Greig Smith and Bernard C. Parks had asked for the first exemption to the city’s Arizona boycott, which was passed as a protest against that state’s law dealing with illegal immigration. Doing so would allow the LAPD officers to attend the five-day Airborne Law Enforcement Assn. Conference, which will be hosted by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Smith asked for the delay after some of his colleagues  including Councilwoman Janice Hahn  voiced opposition to the exemption. A delay would give the LAPD time to see if the nonprofit Los Angeles Police Foundation would be willing to foot the bill, he said.“Janice Hahn was going to make a big stink,” said Smith, who represents part of the west San Fernando Valley. “I was willing to fight it out, but then the department said it was going to try to work this out.”

Smith was the lone opponent of the boycott, which was enacted last month as a response to passage of the Arizona law requiring police in the state to determine the citizenship status of people they stop for other reasons and suspect are in the country illegally. In response, the council imposed a boycott that bars travel to Arizona on city business and the award of new contracts to Arizona companies — unless doing so would harm the city’s interests.Hahn, one of the original proponents of the boycott, said sending the LAPD officers to Tucson  even at another group’s expense flies in the face of the council’s stance.“It’s not taxpayer money, but it’s somebody’s,” said Hahn, whose district stretches from Watts to San Pedro. “And I think it undermines the spirit of what the council did.”

After reviewing Smith’s request, Councilman Richard Alarcon said he agreed with the plan to send the officers. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa dropped hints that he was unlikely to oppose the exemption. “What I’ve said to Councilman Smith is, that issue, the issue of police officers going to Arizona, was decided a long time ago,” the mayor said.

Feds may sue over Arizona immigration law

Washington Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday that the Justice Department was considering a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s new immigration law. “We are considering all of our options. One possibility is filing a lawsuit,” Holder told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Possible grounds for the lawsuit would be whether the Arizona law could lead to civil rights violations, he said. The recently enacted Arizona law initially allowed police to ask anyone for proof of legal U.S. residency, based solely on a police officer’s suspicion that the person might be in the country illegally.

Arizona lawmakers soon amended the law so that officers could check a person’s status only if the person had been stopped or arrested for another reason. Critics say the law will lead to racial profiling, while supporters say it involves no racial profiling and is needed to crack down on increasing crime involving illegal immigrants. In Arizona , the city councils of Tucson and Flagstaff have decided to challenge the new immigration law in court. Holder told ABC’s “This Week” program that one concern about the Arizona law is that “you’ll end up in a situation where people are racially profiled, and that could lead to a wedge drawn between certain communities and law enforcement, which leads to the problem of people in those communities not willing to interact with people in law enforcement, not willing to share information, not willing to be witnesses where law enforcement needs them.”

“I think we could potentially get on a slippery slope where people will be picked on because of how they look as opposed to what they have done, and that is, I think, something that we have to try to avoid at all costs,” Holder added. Holder said comprehensive federal immigration reform is the best approach for the problem of illegal immigrants crossing U.S. borders. His stance echoed the approach favored by President Obama, who last week criticized the Arizona law and said he wants Congress to work on the issue this year.

Comprehensive immigration reform would include continuing government efforts to secure borders from illegal immigrants, as well as steps to crack down on businesses that employ them, Obama said at a Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House. In addition, he said, those living illegally in the United States would have to pay a penalty and any taxes they owe, learn English and “make themselves right with the law” before starting the process of gaining U.S. citizenship.(CNN)

PHOENIX,Lawsuits challenge new Arizona immigration law

PHOENIX  Anger mounted Thursday over an Arizona law cracking down on illegal immigration as a police officer filed one of the first lawsuits challenging the law and activists gathered outside an Arizona Diamondbacks game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, chanting “Boycott Arizona.”The lawsuit from 15-year Tucson police veteran Martin Escobar is one of two filed Thursday, less than a week after Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law that’s sparked fears it will lead to racial profiling despite the governor’s vow that officers will be properly trained.U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the federal government may challenge the law, which 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.Escobar, an overnight patrol officer in a heavily Latino area of Tucson, argues there’s no way for officers to confirm people’s immigration status without impeding investigations, and that the new law violates numerous constitutional rights.

Tucson police spokesman Sgt. Fabian Pacheco said Escobar is acting on his own, not on behalf of the department.The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders also filed a lawsuit Thursday, and is seeking 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 letting police detain suspected illegal immigrants before they’re convicted.

“Mexican-Americans are not going to take this lying down,” singer Linda Ronstadt, a Tucson native, said at a state Capitol news conference on another lawsuit planned by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Immigration Law Center.At least three Arizona cities  Phoenix, Flagstaff and Tucson are considering legal action to block the law. In Flagstaff, police are investigating a threatening e-mail sent to members of the city council over their opposition to the law. The author said council members should be “arrested, tried in court, found guilty of treason and hanged from the nearest tree!”

About 40 immigrant rights activists gathered outside Wrigley Field in Chicago Thursday as the Cubs open a four-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. A small plane toting a banner criticizing the law circled the stadium, and activist George Lieu said they’ve sent a letter to Cubs management asking them to stop holding spring training in Arizona.A Cubs spokesman declined to comment. Arizona manager A.J. Hinch says the team is there to play baseball.

On Wednesday, a group filed papers to launch a referendum drive that could put the law on hold until 2012, when voters could decide whether it is repealed.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.

Meanwhile, the effect of the law continued to ripple beyond Arizona.A group of conservative state lawmakers in Oklahoma are considering pushing a bill similar to Arizona’s. In Texas, Rep. Debbie Riddle, a Republican, said she will introduce a measure similar to the Arizona law in the January legislative session. 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.

Denver Public Schools is banning work-related travel to Arizona. Even though school employees are in the country legally, DPS spokesman Kristy Armstrong said officials don’t want them to be “subjected to that kind of scrutiny and search.Retired South African archbishop Desmond Tutu also chimed in, saying he supports the idea of a boycott of Arizona businesses, according to a letter he wrote that was posted Wednesday onTheCommunity.com, a website for Nobel peace laureates that promotes peace and human rights.

“I recognize that Arizona has become a widening entry point for illegal immigration from the South … but a solution that degrades innocent people, or that makes anyone with broken English a suspect, is not a solution,” Tutu saidColombian singer Shakira planned to visit Phoenix on Thursday to meet with the city’s police chief and mayor over her concerns that the law would lead to racial profiling.(Ap)

Kim Jong Il An American Christian missionary for South Korea,seoul

Kim Jong Il

SEOUL, South Korea  An American Christian missionary slipped into isolated North Korea on Christmas Day, shouting that he brought God’s love and carrying a letter urging leader Kim Jong Il to step down and free all political prisoners, an activist said.Robert Park, 28, crossed a poorly guarded stretch of the frozen Tumen River that separates North Korea from China, according to a member of the Seoul-based group Pax Koreana, which promotes human rights in the North. The group plans to release footage of the crossing Sunday, he said.”I am an American citizen. I brought God’s love. God loves you and God bless you,” Park reportedly said in fluent Korean as he crossed over Friday near the northeastern city of Hoeryong, according to the activist, citing two people who watched Park cross and filmed it. The activist spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.No information has emerged about what happened next to Park, who is of Korean descent. The communist country’s state-run media was silent. The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said they were aware of the incident but had no details.

“The U.S. government places the highest priority on the protection and welfare of American citizens,” said State Department spokesman Andrew Laine.The illegal entry could complicate Washington’s efforts to coax North Korea back to negotiations aimed at

its nuclear disarmament. Park’s crossing also comes just months after the country freed two U.S. journalists, who were arrested along the Tumen and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for trespassing and “hostile acts.” They were released to former President Bill Clinton on a visit to the isolated country in August. North Korea and the United States do not have diplomatic relations.

Park, from Tucson, Ariz., carried a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il calling for major changes to his totalitarian regime, according to the activist from Pax Koreana.”Please open your borders so that we may bring food, provisions, medicine, necessities, and assistance to those who are struggling to survive,” said the letter, according to a copy posted on the conservative group’s Web site. “Please close down all concentration camps and release all political prisoners today.”North Korea holds some 154,000 political prisoners in six large camps across the country, according South Korean government estimates. The North has long been regarded as having one of the world’s worst human rights records, but it denies the existence of prison camps.

The activist said Park, who he described as not belonging to Pax Koreana, also carried a separate written appeal calling for Kim to immediately step down, noting starvation, torture and deaths in North Korean political prison camps.North Korea’s criminal code punishes illegal entry with up to three years in prison. But that could be the least of the missionary’s problems in a country where defectors say dissent is swiftly wiped out and the regime sees all trespassers as potential spies.

Kim wields absolute power in the communist state of 24 million people where he and his late father – the country’s founder Kim Il Sung – are the object of an intense personality cult.Other activists said Park had become known over the last year in Seoul human rights circles. They suggested that his passion for helping North Koreans may have blinded him to the consequences of his actions.