General Immigration

Mon Nov 18, 2013 9:27 AM

Maria Quiring’s son was just months old the day the deportation notice arrived at her El Mirage home. Despite her marriage of five years to a U.S. Air Force serviceman, Quiring was ordered back to her native Mexico.

“I was so afraid of the door,” Maria said. “My little one was a baby. You see all this on the news, so I thought they would come to my door with guns and take me and leave my kids.” Read more >

Following the footsteps of University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the student government at the UC Berkeley has also banned the use of the term 'illegal immigrant,' in academic writing or in communications between faculty, students and staff. The government labeled the term as racially derogatory, offensive and unfair. Read more >

If there were any doubts that comprehensive immigration reform efforts were dead on Capitol Hill this year, House Speaker John Boehner eliminated them on Wednesday. Read more >

Now that the federal government is up and running again, President Obama has announced that immigration reform is his highest priority. The country's biggest for-profit prison companies already pull in hundreds of millions of dollars a year locking up immigrants in federal custody. They stand to pull in even more money if the new laws generate lots of new prisoners.

And that, in a nutshell, has always been the private prison business model. Mass incarceration leads to massive profits. Read more >

October 21, 2013

Dave Weigel reads the tea leaves from Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue this morning, and concludes that the business community isn't going to press for comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon: Read more >

October 17, 2013

Immigrant rights activists in Oregon are asking the city of Portland to stop buying bonds from Wells Fargo, which has a mutual fund with shares in a company that operates immigration detention centers.

The request is part of a nationwide campaign to get investors to divest from private prison companies. Most recently, the campaign has focused on local institutions such as cities, counties and universities. Read more >