Immigrant Rights News - Monday, August 17, 2009

Immigrant Rights News – Monday, August 17, 2009

 

1. New America Media: The Other Town Halls: Labor Unions Sell Members on Immigration Reform

2. Arizona Daily Star: Death sought for 3 in Arivaca case

3. USA Today: More lawmakers tackle rise of wage-theft complaints

4. AlterNet: Immigrant Detainees Staging Hunger Strikes to Protest Deplorable Confinement

 

 

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New America Media

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=c24c4ee98938367fe622594200edb25a

 

The Other Town Halls

 

Labor Unions Sell Members on Immigration Reform

New America Media, News Report, Elena Shore, Posted: Aug 17, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO -- As U.S. senators hold town hall meetings across the country to sell Americans on health care reform, another series of town hall meetings is taking place. The stakes are just as high and tensions run just as deep.

The issue is immigration reform. Representatives of the two largest national labor organizations in the country, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, are trying to sell their local union members on a joint statement calling for immigration reform. But not everyone is buying it.

They made the hardest sell in San Francisco. […]

 

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Arizona Daily Star

http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/304881

 

Death sought for 3 in Arivaca case

 

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.14.2009

 

Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against the three people accused of killing a man and his 9-year-old daughter on May 30 in Arivaca.

 

Deputy Pima County Attorneys Rick Unklesbay and Kellie Johnson filed a notice of their intent this week in the cases against Shawna Forde, Jason E. Bush and Albert R. Gaxiola.

 

The three are accused of breaking into the home of Raul Junior Flores and his wife, and killing Flores and his daughter, Brisenia. Flores'wife was shot three times but survived and, in an exchange of gunfire captured on a recording of her 911 call, managed to hit Bush and injure him slightly, according to Pima County Sheriff's Department investigators.

 

The prosecutors listed six legal bases for seeking the death penalty. […]

 

 

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USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-08-16-wagetheft_N.htm

 

More lawmakers tackle rise of wage-theft complaints

 

By Emily Bazar, USA TODAY

 

Agustin Gonzalez became a casualty of the real-estate bust in 2007 when he lost his construction job in the Florida Keys.

Since then, he says, he has become another kind of casualty: a victim of wage theft.

Gonzalez now works as a day laborer in the Miami area, waiting on street corners or in front of Home Depot for pickup jobs. He says he has been cheated of pay three times, including twice this year on landscaping and construction jobs that cost him at least $2,600.

"I feel like a slave," says Gonzalez, 38, who entered the USA from Panama in 2006 on a work visa that has expired. "I feel like day laborers are just here to be used without respect."

As the economy falters, lawmakers are taking action on the increase of wage-theft complaints. […]

 

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AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/rights/141840/immigrant_detainees_staging_hunger_strikes_to_protest_deplorable_confinement/

 

Immigrant Detainees Staging Hunger Strikes to Protest Deplorable Confinement

 

By Aura Bogado, AlterNet

Posted on August 7, 2009

 

When more than 60 prisoners at the South Louisiana Correctional Center in Basile, LA, began a hunger strike last week, in protest of the facility's deplorable conditions, guards at the immigrant detention center placed at least six of them in solitary confinement for 60 days. The planned 72-hour strike was the fifth of its kind in one month at the facility, whose parent company, LCS Corrections Services, holds a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to manage the detention center.

 

Last week, the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, along with other human rights and civil liberties groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, urging her to address the mounting complaints at the detention center. "Over the past one month this center has become a symbol of all of our national concerns about ICE's widespread failure to ensure its facilities … meet ICE's own minimum detention standards," wrote Saket Soni, Executive Director for the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. Detainees, he wrote, are "risking their own health to call attention to ICE's violation if its own minimum standards and to demand permanent improvements."

 

This move came one day after the Obama administration issued its own letter on July 27, 2009, in response to a federal court petition, stating its refusal to create lawfully enforceable rules for immigration detention. […]

 

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