'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The Senate immigration bill cleared the Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan vote Tuesday night, ducking — for now — big fights on guns, gay rights and how broadly the legalization is drawn, and leaving the 867-page overhaul mostly unscathed by conservative attacks.
The Senate's immigration bill will raise national security risks and the Obama administration will do little more than "rubber-stamp" illegal immigrants into the program, endangering Americans, says the labor union representing the 12,000 employees who will have to approve the applications.
The Homeland Security Department has granted legal status to 99.2 percent of all illegal immigrants who have applied under President Obama's new non-deportation policy for young adults, according to the latest numbers released Friday.
Even as the Senate is pushing its massive immigration bill, the House is beginning to move pieces of the puzzle through its committees with a vote Wednesday to force the Obama administration to stiffen border security.
Sen. Marco Rubio's office circulated a list this month of ways to toughen security in the immigration bill he helped negotiate, including potential amendments to cut down on chain migration, to require newly legal immigrants to show financial self-sufficiency and to build 700 miles of double-tier fencing along the border.
The yardstick used in the immigration bill to determine border control may produce too rosy a picture of how well the Border Patrol is doing in cracking down on illegal crossings, according to an independent study released Monday that threatens to upend the immigration debate.
The Senate immigration bill survived its first tests Thursday as a core group of Republicans and Democrats held together, killing efforts to require full border security requirements before legalizing illegal immigrants.
The Senate immigration bill would put about 8 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, boost the economy and stop about 2 million would-be illegal immigrants — about half of the expected total over the next decade — from entering the U.S., according to the first government evaluation of the proposal released Wednesday.
Trying to head off a potentially devastating court defeat, the Obama administration said Monday that ICE agents' lawsuit to overturn the president's non-deportation policy should be thrown out because the agents themselves initially wanted to handle the matter in collective bargaining.
As Republicans continue to raise questions regarding the Obama administration's handling of intelligence leading up to the Boston bombings, the House this week will hold the first of what is expected to be many congressional hearings on the issue.
The debate is raging over whether the latest immigration bill is an amnesty for illegal immigrants, but one part is clear: The legislation would forgive businesses that have employed those immigrants illegally.
Three-quarters of voters say the Boston Marathon bombings should make Congress pause before pushing ahead with immigration reform, according to a new poll that seeks to gauge Americans' feelings as lawmakers begin debating the hot-button issue.
The Obama administration has set records for deportations, but the types of immigrants it is kicking out of the country has changed dramatically over the past four years, according to numbers the Homeland Security Department has had to turn over as part of a pending court case.
The immigration bill senators introduced Wednesday bans racial profiling by federal law enforcement officers in most routine encounters, such as traffic stops.
