Interesting Newspaper Article from Utah - "Activist makes app to help ‘dreamer’ undocumented immigrants"

Utah immigration activist, Deyvid Morales, 24, is using his often-in-Utah-headlines immigration battles to write free smartphone apps to help fellow undocumented immigrants.

His latest one seeks to help "dreamers" — immigrants who, like himself, were brought to the United States without papers as children by their parents — to find college scholarships.

It was inspired by a translating job he had at West Valley City's Granger High School, where he saw too many immigrants drop out "because they figure what's the point if college is not an option." But he knows college is possible because he managed to attend despite his own high-profile deportation fights.

It is his second smartphone app.

The first was designed to help undocumented immigrants who face detention and deportation. He developed it after he was pulled off a bus and detained by the Border Patrol in New Mexico — after he had received permission to remain in the country — and shouted out instructions to others about their rights.

"I can't be in every bus telling them their rights, but I could make something that would be like if I was in the bus and telling them what their rights were," Morales previously told The Salt Lake Tribune.

Now, he says, after developing his second app, "I'm not a writer. I'm not an artist. But there's a couple things that I can do, which is to organize information and make an app — and make it available for everybody. ... I'm looking for how I can help as many people as possible with what I have."

Morales' parents brought him to the U.S. from Mexico at age 9 without papers. His struggles and victories since then fuel his desire to help other undocumented immigrants.

He first landed in Utah headlines in 2011, when he had been traveling to start Bible school in Louisiana hoping to become a pastor. But immigration officials boarded his bus to seek people who were not U.S. citizens, and he was arrested.

He soon became a sort-of poster child for the plight of "dreamers," and was featured in several news conferences and news stories.

He tried to file a complaint against a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent for allegedly violating his civil rights by telling him not to speak publicly about his case or he would have his bond revoked and would land back in jail pending his deportation hearing.

Just before he expected to be deported, President Barack Obama issued an order to defer deportation of "dreamers" like him with clean criminal records — called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Morales's new app is called DACA Scholars.

In 2012, after receiving official deferral from deportation, Morales was pulled off a bus and detained by immigration agents again in New Mexico — an incident that provided inspiration for his first app.

Meanwhile, Morales has been attending Salt Lake Community College. His experiences changed the focus of his studies from becoming a pastor to hopes of eventually becoming a civil-rights lawyer.

He is also working full time at the Mexican Consulate in Salt Lake City — doing such things as working with the U.S. Border Patrol to help find missing Mexican nationals. "With my history, it's a little bizarre that I'm now often working with the Border Patrol."

He had worked as a para-educator for a couple of years at Granger High, which included translating for families of troubled immigrant students. He said he was disappointed that students and parents alike "just felt like college was not an option for them because of their status," so "it didn't matter if they dropped out."

But he believes "education is essential for Latinos. It is the way to a better life."

The Constitution Has An Asterisk on It - The New War To Replace Iraq and Afganistan

The U.S. borderlands are today ground zero for the rise, growth, and spread of a domestic surveillance state. On June 27th, the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. Along with the claim that it offers a path to citizenship to millions of the undocumented living in the United States (with many stringent requirements), in its more than 1 ,000 pages it promises to build the largest border-policing and surveillance apparatus ever seen in the United States. The result, Senator John McCain proudly said, will be the “most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

This “border surge,” a phrase coined by Senator Chuck Schumer, is also a surveillance surge. The Senate bill provides for the hiring of almost 19,000 new Border Patrol agents, the building of 7 00 additional miles of walls, fences, and barriers, and an investment of billions of dollars in the latest surveillance technologies, including drones.

In this, the bill only continues in a post-9/11 tradition in which our southern divide has become an on-the ground laboratory for the development of a surveillance state whose mission is already moving well beyond those borderlands. Calling this “immigration reform” is like calling the National Security Agency ’s expanding global surveillance system a domestic telecommunications upgrade. It’s really all about the country that the United States is becoming — one of the police and the policed.

Low-Intensity War Zone

The $46 billion border security price tag in the immigration reform bill will simply expand on what has already been built. After all, $100 billion was spenton border “enforcement” in the first decade after 9/1 1 . To that must be added the annual $18 billion budget for border and immigration enforcement, money that outpaces the combined budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies. In fact, since Operation Blockade in the 1990s, the U.S.-Mexico border has gone through so many surges that a time when simple chain link fences separated two friendly countries is now unimaginable.

To witness the widespread presence of Department of Homeland Security agents on the southern border, just visit that international boundary 100 miles south of Border Security Expo. Approximately 7 00 miles of walls, fences, and barriers already cut off the two countries at its major urban crossings and many rural ones as well. Emplaced everywhere are cameras that can follow you — or your body heat — day or night. Overhead, as in Afghanistan, a Predator B drone may hover. Y ou can’t hear its incessant buzzing only because it flies so high, nor can you see the crew in charge of flying it and analyzing your movements from possibly hundreds of miles away.

As you walk, perhaps you step on implanted sensors, creating a beeping noise in some distant monitoring room. Meanwhile, green-striped Border Patrol vehicles rush by constantly . On the U.S.-Mexican border, there are already more than 18,500 agents (and approximately 2,300 more on the Canadian border). In counter terrorism mode, they are paid to be suspicious of every thing and everybody . Some Homeland Security vehicles sport trailers carrying All Terrain Vehicles. Some have mounted surveillance cameras, others cages to detain captured migrants. Some borderlanders like Mike Wilson of the Tucson-based Border Action Network, a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation (a Native American people and the original inhabitants of the Arizona borderlands), call the border security operatives an “occupying army .”

Checkpoints — normally located 20-50 miles from the international boundary — serve as a second lay er of border enforcement. Stopped at one of them, you will be interrogated by armed agents in green, most likely with drug-sniffing dogs. If you are near the international divide, it’s hard to avoid such checkpoints where you will be asked about your citizenship — and much more if any thing you say or do, or simply the way you look, raises suspicions. Even outside of the checkpoints, agents of the Department of Homeland Security canpull you over for any reason — without probable cause or a warrant — and do what is termed a “routine search.” As a U.S. Border Patrol agent told journalist Margaret Regan, within a hundred miles of the international divide, “there’s an asterisk on the Constitution.”

A New Immigration Fraud Ring Busted in Los Angeles - Charges Include Fraud and Bribery

The Los Angeles Time reported yesterday that Attorney Kwang Man "John" Lee was arrested for being the ring leader of an immigration fraud ring. The authorities reported that he was a man who could make things happen — for a price. For a pound of marijuana and $44,000, the Koreatown attorney allegedly said, he could get an immigrant client a U.S. citizenship. "Price is OK for the risk," Lee told an associate, according to federal authorities.

Mr. Lee was a silver-Corvette-driving attorney, also a former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent. He allegedly had associates at various stages of the immigration process willing to take bribes and provide favors for his clients. At Los Angeles International Airport, he had Customs and Border Protection officer Michael Anders, according to prosecutors. At Citizenship and Immigration Services, they alleged, he had officers Jesus Figueroa and Paul Lovingood. At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he had special agent James Dominguez, according to court documents.

And he apparently had a long list of clients from across the globe, from Japan to Morocco to the Czech Republic, willing to pay the tens of thousands to cut a corner or two in the process for a permanent residency or citizenship in the U.S.

On May 8th, federal prosecutors announced charges against Anders, Figueroa, Lovingood, Dominguez and a client of Lee's, Mirei Gia Hofmann. The current and former immigration officials were indicted May 7th on charges including conspiracy, bribery, fraud and misuse of government seals. Hofmann faces a single count of immigration fraud.

Lee, who became an attorney in 1997, was previously charged in a separate criminal complaint of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government.

According to affidavits filed in the case, Lee plied the officials with lavish gifts and cash bribes in exchange for immigration benefits including forged admission stamps with a false date of entry into the U.S. and rubber-stamping fraudulent permanent residency or citizenship applications. Anders, who at one point lived with Lee, provided the attorney with a specialized security ink used by Border Patrol officials to stamp passports at airports, according to court papers.

In exchange, Lee bought round-trip tickets to Thailand for Dominguez and a 47-inch flat-screen TV and a computer for Lovingood, and gave thousands of dollars in cash to Figueroa, authorities allege. Anders was paid $50 each time he falsified an entry record, according to the indictment.

Lee complained to a confidential informant that he gets "headaches entertaining them, taking them out to dinner," according to an affidavit. He secured illegal immigration benefits for at least several dozen clients over the years, prosecutors said.

"It looks like this goes back at least 20 years," Assistant U.S. Atty. Meghan Blanco said. "By and large, it involves people who entered the country legally and then overstayed their visa."

CBP "Self-Deportation" Program Ends After Only Two Months

A U.S. pilot program, operated by Customs and Border Protection ("CBP") designed to deport illegal immigrants by flying them to Mexico City will operate for only two months this year and involve 20 flights, a significant scaling-back of what was billed as a humanitarian effort to avoid deporting people to violent border regions, or the Romney "Self-Deportation" Plan.

The first flight, which carried 131 immigrants, on October 2012, landed in Mexico City, six months after the originally scheduled start date of the program. Slated to run from April through November, the Interior Repatriation Initiative will operate only in October and November.

When the program was announced in February, Mexico's interior secretary, Alejandro Poire, said the flights would improve border security and make it easier for illegal immigrants to return to their hometowns by taking buses from the capital.

Deportees also would no longer be "systematically placed at the mercy of criminal groups in border areas," Poire said in a statement. The flights serve U.S. interests by making it harder for deportees to cross back into the U.S.

Under terms of the agreement, the U.S. pays for the flights, which depart from El Paso, and the Mexican government provides bus fares for the migrants' trips home.

U.S. and Mexican officials did not give specific reasons for the initiative's delay and limited duration.

"Given the complexities and logistics involved with this initiative, the length of time needed to launch the inaugural flight was not unreasonable," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

The Mexican Interior Ministry confirmed the arrival of the first flight at Mexico City's international airport in October, and said the program would continue through Nov. 29, transporting more than 2,400 people.

"Once in national territory, they will be given food and ground transportation to their communities of origin and-or residence in Mexico," the ministry and the National Migration Institute said in a statement. It said the arriving Mexicans would be given a list of social services available to them and allowed to request medical attention, as well as a phone call to their families.

If there are outstanding criminal charges in Mexico against any of the passengers, they will be investigated for possible prosecution, the ministry said.

Repatriating illegal immigrants has become problematic in recent years as deportations reach record highs and besieged border areas struggle to provide security and housing for people who often arrive penniless and without any contacts.

In the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, where deportations have surged fivefold in recent years, criminals prey on deportees, sometimes abducting them from streets, bus stations and migrant shelters. Many are held for ransom, and others are recruited into criminal networks that have seized control of much of the region.