RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events The Minutemen (& other names guaranteed to NOT get you laid)

Mayor Gavin Newsom vowed Sunday to maintain San Francisco as a sanctuary for immigrants and do everything he can to discourage federal authorities from conducting immigration raids.

The mayor cannot stop federal authorities from making arrests, Newsom told about 300 mostly Latino members of St. Peter's Church and other religious groups supporting immigrants. But no San Francisco employee will help with immigration enforcement.

The 100 leaders of the nation's 11,000 U.S. Border Patrol's rank-and-file agents on Monday are releasing a no-confidence resolution against Chief David V. Aguilar for his failure to back up two agents now serving time for shooting a drug-smuggling illegal alien.

In a unanimous decision agreed to on Sunday, the top leadership of the National Border Patrol Council lambasted Aguilar for his silence on behalf of Ignacio Ramos, 37, and Jose Alonso Compean, 28. The two are serving 11 and 12 year prison sentences, respectively, as a result of testimony given by a a drug-smuggler who claimed his civil rights were violated when he was shot in the buttocks trying to run across the Mexico border after dropping 743 pounds of marijuana during their pursuit of him.

NBPC President T.J. Bonner said Aguilar's lack of support for field agents has caused attrition among the ranks, plummeting morale and a growing disconnect between field agents and leadership.

Among other clauses, the resolution accuses the chief of "shamelessly promoting amnesty and a greatly expanded guest-worker program as key elements of the solution to the illegal immigration crisis" despite intense opposition from front-line agents "who risk their lives enforcing our nation's immigration laws." It also criticizes the agency's willingness "to cut corners in the hiring and training" of new agents.

Quote:

---

the G-man said:

Two Texas Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting a Mexican drug runner in the backside while on duty turned themselves in to U.S. Marshals Wednesday.

Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean began serving 11- and 12-year prison sentences, respectively, for the February 2005 non-fatal shooting of Osvaldo Aldrete Davila.

---

Quote:

---

PJP said:
>

---

Quote:

---

the G-man said:
Texas Town Kicks Illegals to Curb: Voters in Dallas suburb approve city ordinance prohibiting landlords from renting to most illegal immigrants

---

Less than a week after touting a breakthrough on a new immigration reform bill, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle on Tuesday started tearing apart the original proposal on how to handle the 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

The bill's future is unclear after the Senate test vote late Monday garnered the 60 votes needed for lawmakers to begin debating the 1,000-page document but Senate leaders agreed to postpone finishing the legislation until next month.

Opposition to the bill, which many senators complain has only just made it in final form into their inboxes, is coming from the right and left. Normal allies of comprehensive immigration reform, pro-immigrant groups and many business consortiums are looking askance at the legislation. Not one union group has voiced support for it.

Some Republicans call the bill amnesty with a renewable visa system while some Democrats oppose the proposal that makes skills and education more important than family ties.

The Senate on Tuesday will take up a handful of amendments to the bill from Republicans and Democrats.

In a nod to that opposition, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded that the Senate won't be able to complete the bill before a hoped-for Memorial Day deadline.

Negotiators who hammered out the deal behind closed doors after months of meetings with Bush administration officials said they will meet each morning the Senate is in session during the debate to review the slate of amendments for the day and decide a strategy for supporting or defeating those amendments.

The negotiating group has about a dozen members and could easily be thwarted if liberal Democratic critics join opposing Republicans to pass any given measure. A number of the original negotiators have already left the group in opposition, including Cornyn, Leahy and Menendez. Still others in the group are withholding their support for now, like Georgia Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson.

The bill beefs up border security and employer verification, sets up a temporary worker program, legalizes the vast majority of the approximately 12 million illegals currently in the United States and sets up a merit-focused point system that still heavily weighs family connections for earning a green card.

Currently, about two-thirds of legal permanent residency cards are family-based, while one third are employment-based. Legislative experts agree that current ratio would not substantially change, though family migration is drastically curtailed. Only minor children and spouses can accompany green card holders, with a limited number of visas granted to "grandparents." Others would have to apply for their own green card.

Illegals, once they come out of the shadows and register, receive a temporary card and eventually a special "Z visa" to work indefinitely in the U.S, a process that takes a minimum of eight years. They are not required to return to their home country unless they wish to become U.S. citizens.

In a nod to that opposition, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded that the Senate won't be able to complete the bill before a hoped-for Memorial Day deadline.

"It would be to the best interests of the Senate ... that we not try to finish this bill this week. I think we could, but I'm afraid the conclusion wouldn't be anything that anyone wanted," Reid, D-Nev., said.

Negotiators who hammered out the deal behind closed doors after months of meetings with Bush administration officials said they will meet each morning the Senate is in session during the debate to review the slate of amendments for the day and decide a strategy for supporting or defeating those amendments.

The negotiating group has about a dozen members and could easily be thwarted if liberal Democratic critics join opposing Republicans to pass any given measure. A number of the original negotiators have already left the group in opposition, including Cornyn, Leahy and Menendez. Still others in the group are withholding their support for now, like Georgia Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson.

The bill beefs up border security and employer verification, sets up a temporary worker program, legalizes the vast majority of the approximately 12 million illegals currently in the United States and sets up a merit-focused point system that still heavily weighs family connections for earning a green card.

Currently, about two-thirds of legal permanent residency cards are family-based, while one third are employment-based. Legislative experts agree that current ratio would not substantially change, though family migration is drastically curtailed. Only minor children and spouses can accompany green card holders, with a limited number of visas granted to "grandparents." Others would have to apply for their own green card.

Illegals, once they come out of the shadows and register, receive a temporary card and eventually a special "Z visa" to work indefinitely in the U.S, a process that takes a minimum of eight years. They are not required to return to their home country unless they wish to become U.S. citizens.

In a nod to that opposition, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded that the Senate won't be able to complete the bill before a hoped-for Memorial Day deadline.

"It would be to the best interests of the Senate ... that we not try to finish this bill this week. I think we could, but I'm afraid the conclusion wouldn't be anything that anyone wanted," Reid, D-Nev., said.

Negotiators who hammered out the deal behind closed doors after months of meetings with Bush administration officials said they will meet each morning the Senate is in session during the debate to review the slate of amendments for the day and decide a strategy for supporting or defeating those amendments.

The negotiating group has about a dozen members and could easily be thwarted if liberal Democratic critics join opposing Republicans to pass any given measure. A number of the original negotiators have already left the group in opposition, including Cornyn, Leahy and Menendez. Still others in the group are withholding their support for now, like Georgia Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson.

The bill beefs up border security and employer verification, sets up a temporary worker program, legalizes the vast majority of the approximately 12 million illegals currently in the United States and sets up a merit-focused point system that still heavily weighs family connections for earning a green card.

Currently, about two-thirds of legal permanent residency cards are family-based, while one third are employment-based. Legislative experts agree that current ratio would not substantially change, though family migration is drastically curtailed. Only minor children and spouses can accompany green card holders, with a limited number of visas granted to "grandparents." Others would have to apply for their own green card.

Illegals, once they come out of the shadows and register, receive a temporary card and eventually a special "Z visa" to work indefinitely in the U.S, a process that takes a minimum of eight years. They are not required to return to their home country unless they wish to become U.S. citizens.

Conservative Heritage Foundation President Robert Rector estimates the total cost of the bill to be in the trillions of dollars, warning, "This $2.5 trillion cost is going to come smashing into the Social Security and Medicare systems at exactly the point those systems are already going bankrupt. So the bottom line is that these individuals will make no net contribution in taxes while they are working. They will be a deficit. But when they hit retirement, they will be an astonishing cost on the taxpayer."

• An undocumented immigrant pleaded not guilty Friday to murder and related charges in the execution-style slayings of three college students in a schoolyard.
  
  The crime shocked residents of Newark, New Jersey, galvanizing them to express their outrage at the city's street violence.
  
  Jose Carranza, 28, was formally charged in Essex County Superior Court with murder, attempted murder, robbery and various conspiracy and weapons offenses.

• Wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, Carranza spoke softly through a translator. He had surrendered Thursday to Mayor Cory A. Booker, who attended the arraignment.
  
  "He knew maybe if he turned himself in to me he would be safer, but my focus was to get him off the streets," Booker said Friday morning during an appearance on CNN's "American Morning."

• Carranza had been scheduled to appear in court Monday to answer two previous indictments. One accuses him of sexually assaulting and threatening to kill a 13-year-old, a girlfriend's child. Another charges him with an array of assault and weapons offenses.

• A federal transportation agency yesterday defended President Bush's plan to open the border to long-haul Mexican truck traffic in a response to overwhelmingly negative public views of the proposal.
  
  The 27-page defense appearing in the [url=http://www.access.gpo.gov su_docs/fedreg/ a070817c.html]Federal Register[/url] advances the controversial cross-border trucking pilot program one step closer to implementation.
  
  Bush has sought to conduct the program as part of his effort to comply with a provision of the North.

• Giuliani is "committed to not repeating the mistakes of the past." He says that "we didn't come close" to keeping the promises of the 1986 Act to build up border forces and increase staffing, noting that the level of roughly 4,000 border enforcement agents remained roughly constant throughout the Clinton administration
• "You have to have a commitment to control the borders. We are a sovereign nation. That's what sovereign nations do." He says that it is absurd to pursue a plan to fence just 700 miles of the border. He is emphatic that we "need a fence that extends the entire 2,000 miles."
• In regards to the illegal immigrants already here, we should focus "on first things first." He says: "If the boat is leaking, you need to plug the leaks. If you don't, why bother with the rest of it?" He does offer that "we are not going to give special benefits to people who have broken the rules."
• Giuliani "is the only candidate who has articulated a plan and the only one with leadership skills to get it done." Giuliani's CompStat program for reducing crime in New York City [would be adapted] "for holding people accountable for crime and apply it to the border, which is an enforcement issue." He says Giuliani sees enforcement of the borders as "100%, not 70% and not 80%" attainable.
• Giuliani places great weight on a "biometric fraud proof ID card" for foreign workers. He terms the present system, which allows employers to accept without question any two of 29 types of identification, rife with "massive fraud." Under the system Giuliani is recommending, employers would have a single biometric card and would be required to "query a database." The aim is to "make it difficult for employers to look the other way." In short, he says that by changing the employer verification system and greatly increasing penalties you will "turn off the magnet" that attracts illegal immigrants.
• aside from the issue of illegal immigration the loss of border security is a national security danger. He says "in a post-9-11 world and in an era of Islamic terrorists it is essential" to control who is entering the country. "no one knows it better" that Giuliani, who has made it his second commitment. Giuliani has the "most credibility on counterterrorism," which includes border control, and he reiterates that Al Qaeda contemplated a plot for "infiltration" of America through the Mexican border.
• the Giuliani camp clearly will seek to characterize immigration as a law enforcement and national security issue.

• Islamic terrorists with the assistance of Mexican drug cartels might have been planning an attack on the U.S. Army base Fort Huachuca in Arizona, forcing the nation's largest intelligence training center to change security measures back in May.
  
  as many as 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists would attempt to enter the United States via underground tunnels that have sprouted underneath the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years under funding by drug- and human-smuggling operations. The terrorists were said to be planning to use high-powered weapons to mount their attack.
  
  "A portion of the operatives were in the United States, with the remainder not yet in the United States," according to a confidential document, an FBI advisory that was distributed to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, Customs and Border Protection and the Justice Department, among several other law enforcement agencies throughout the nation. "The Afghanis and Iraqis shaved their beards so as not to appear to be Middle Easterners."

• [In 2004] border agents from Arizona and Texas [reported] encounters with dozens of Arab men, who have made their way across the 2,000-mile Mexican border.
  
  Patrol agents told one Arizona newspaper that 77 males "of Middle Eastern descent" were apprehended in June in two separate incidents. All were trekking through the Chiricahua mountains and are believed to have been part of a larger group of illegal immigrants. Many were released pending immigration hearings. According to Solomon Ortiz, the Congressman for Corpus Christi in Texas, similar incidents are "happening all over the place. It's very, very scary".
  
  The two groups of Arab males were discovered by patrol guards from Willcox, Arizona. "These guys didn't speak Spanish," said one field agent, "and they were speaking to each other in Arabic. It's ridiculous that we don't take this more seriously. We're told not to say a thing to the media." A colleague told the paper: "All the men had brand-new clothing and the exact same cut of moustache." Local ranchers have also reported a rise in the sightings of large groups of young males.
  
  Last month, border patrol agents at McAllen airport, Texas, arrested a woman believed to be Pakistani, who was carrying a false South African passport. The woman, Farida Ahmed, is still being questioned by the FBI. She was travelling to New York, and admitted to having illegally crossed the Mexican border. She was still carrying a pair of wet jeans in her travel bag.