Mediaboss Marketing

Immigrant-rights organizations are cheering a federal judge who blocked enforcement of a Florida law criminalizing transportation of undocumented immigrants into the state.

U.S. District Judge Roy Altman of the Southern District of Florida ruled Wednesday that federal law preempts that language in the state law, SB 1718, because federal authorities hold exclusive power to regulate immigration.

He issued a preliminary injunction against the measures enforcement pending further proceedings.

Renata Bozzetto, deputy director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, noted that Altman was appointed by former President Donald Trump.

It is a relief to see a judge rule impartially and fairly to uphold the laws of our country which our state is working so hard to break, she said in a written statement.

Our state government cannot pose itself as one of law and order while bending the Constitution or breaking federal laws. Furthermore, the clarity of Judges Altmans ruling, understanding the irreparable injury that Floridians with an irregular immigration status would suffer at the hands of this unjust and unconstitutional law, is spot on, Bozzetto continued.

The court was right to block this callous and patently unconstitutional law, which had threatened Floridians with jail time for doing the most ordinary things, like going to work, visiting family, and driving kids to soccer games. This ruling is an important victory for Florida communities, said Spencer Amdur, senior staff attorney with the ACLUs Immigrants Rights Project, in his own written statement.

In his 12-page ruling, Altman noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide the full scope of the federal preemption over state laws like SB 1718, which in its Section 10 criminalizes anyone who knowingly and willfully transports into this state an individual whom the person knows, or reasonably should know, has entered the United States in violation of law and has not been inspected by the federal government since his or her unlawful entry from another country.

Still, Altman wrote, he was bound by a precedent established by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, whose jurisdiction includes Florida.

Without express guidance from the Supreme Court we remain bound by the pronouncements of our circuit, which has held that the unlawful transport and movement of aliens is a fully preempted field, he concluded.

Overall, though, the Supreme Court has made clear that, where Congress occupies an entire field even complementary state regulation is impermissible. This is because field preemption reflects a congressional decision to foreclose any state regulation in the area, even if it is parallel to federal standards, Altman wrote.

There was no immediate response from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the law a little more than one year ago.

The measure, which the governor at the time described as the most ambitious anti-illegal immigration laws in the country, also barred state and local officials from issuing IDs to any undocumented person or recognizing those issued by other states. It restricts their ability to work and requires law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration officials, among other provisions.

Altmans ruling doesnt affect those provisions.

The Farmworker Association of Florida, an affiliate of the Immigrant Coalition, filed the lawsuit last July, along with individuals belonging to mixed-status families, churches, and communities who feared being prosecuted under the law.

The action originally named DeSantis as a plaintiff, although Altman dismissed him from the case, leaving Attorney General Ashley Moody, Statewide Prosecutor Nicholas Cox, and Floridas 20 local state attorneys to defend the law.

The judge cited discrete injuries both to the Farmworker Association, which was forced to divert resources to avoid violating the law, and the individual plaintiffs, including a nonprofit operator who transports immigrants from Georgia to medical and immigration appointments in Jacksonville and the grandmother of an undocumented immigrant who feared to drive him to visit family in Georgia because of the risk of arrest upon their return to Florida.

As for any damage to the interests of the states from enjoining the law, if a state law is preempted, then the state can suffer no harm from a court order that enjoins that law. Indeed, [t]he United States suffers injury when its valid laws in a domain of federal authority are undermined by impermissible state regulations, Altman wrote.

In other reaction:

Emma Winger, deputy legal director of the American Immigration Council, said: This ruling means freedom from fear and increased safety for families and communities of color in Florida. As states across the country are increasingly passing unjust and unconstitutional laws that target people because of their immigration status, its critical that our courts set a precedent for protecting these families at risk.

Evelyn Wiese, litigation attorney at Americans for Immigrant Justice: Todays decision marks an important victory for Floridians, visitors to Florida, and for the U.S. Constitution. We are gratified that the court recognized the harm that Section 10 does and temporarily blocked this unconstitutional law from remaining in effect, and we will continue to fight against it. But for now, this unjust and illegal law cannot be used to criminalize our clients or the community at large for transporting family, friends, or coworkers.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

SUBSCRIBE

See the original post here:
Praise for U.S. judge who blocked FL's restriction on transporting undocumented immigrants Florida Phoenix - Florida Phoenix

RICHLAND COUNTY, S.C. Lexington police that there could be more charges coming in this case against Giovanni Mendoza Jimenez.

Police say they'll be reviewing phone data to see if he was distracted during Monday's crash.

RELATED| Maximum bond set for driver in crash that left one dead and student injured

Meanwhile, some who have faced a situation like this, wonder how this case will be handled because Jimenez was in the country illegally.

Tasha Kirton told WACHFOX News about the devastating loss of her son, Stevie, who was killed in a motorcycle crash after a van driven by a man who was here illegally collided with her son on Percival Road in Columbia.

Kirton says the driver of the van ran away.

The owner of the van told investigators who the man was but he has never been found.

A crash in Lexington that killed motorcyclist Jon Ratcliffe when he was pinned to the back of a school bus brings up painful memories for Kirton.

The driver charged in the case, Giovanni Jimenez, told a judge he was in the country illegally.

Columbia attorney, Taylor Bell, says safety and training is just one concern with illegal immigrants driving without a license.

Jimenez faces three charges including driving without a license, traveling at a speed greater than reasonable, and failing to stop when approaching a school bus.

The 20-year-old is being on the maximum bond allowed by law, and the Lexington County jail is also holding him for the feds.

According to Bell once Jimenez resolves the charges in Lexington County, he will be taken to Georgia for a deportation hearing where he will stand before a judge.

A federal detainment order has been placed on Jimenez. Lexington police say if he's able to post bail he will be turned over to u-s immigration officials.

RELATED| One dead, one arrested, student injured in Lexington bus crash

For now, he's being held at the Lexington County jail and is due back in court on June 5th.

Read the rest here:
Lexington crash suspect may face more charges, held for immigration review - WACH.com

Trump, who made a similar pledge during his first presidential campaign, has recently repeated this promise at rallies across the country. Trump was referring to Operation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Wetback was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.

Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troops, to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S.

As a migration scholar, I find Trumps proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhowers policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.

Operation Wetback

In May 1954, U.S. Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, in a special program to apprehend and deport aliens illegally in this country from areas along the southern border. Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border control, now handled by multiple federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Swing ramped up a decade-long practice of using special task forces composed of INS agents who could be rapidly deployed where needed in order to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then spread to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods and saloons where immigrants were working or socializing. The INS also built a vast wire-fenced security camp, according to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain apprehended immigrants in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.

Captured immigrants were put on hot, overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to cross back into Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert just over the border. In one incident, 88 migrants died of sunstroke before the Red Cross arrived with water and medical attention. Others were delivered to Mexican authorities, who loaded them onto trains headed deeper into Mexico.

By mid-August, INS agents had deported more than 100,000 immigrants across the U.S. Southwest. Fearing apprehension, thousands more reportedly fled back to Mexico on their own. Most of these immigrants were young Mexican men, but the INS also targeted families, removing nearly 9,000 family members, including children, from the Rio Grande Valley in August. There is also evidence of U.S. citizens getting caught up in the INS sweeps.

Operation Wetback wound down its operations a few months later, and Swing declared in January 1955 that the day of the wetback is over. The INS disbanded its special mobile task forces, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants plummeted over the next decade.

Not just about deportation

Operation Wetback made the headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more show than substance when it came to deportation. The governments claim to have deported more than 1 million Mexicans during the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. The 1.1 million figure was for the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a sizable share of these apprehensions were repeat arrests, sometimes in a single day.

Moreover, over 97% of these deportations occurred without a formal order of removal. Instead, migrants agreed, or were coerced, to leave the country after being apprehended. Despite Trump-like rhetoric decrying a wetback invasion across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetbacks main objective was not to remove Mexican immigrants but rather to frighten U.S. farmers, especially in Texas, into hiring them legally.

This tactic largely worked. A crucial but often overlooked detail about Operation Wetback is that it happened at the same time as the Bracero Program, a massive guest-worker program between the U.S. and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, U.S. employers issued over 4.6 million short-term contracts to more than 400,000 Mexican farm workers. Nearly three-quarters of these contracts were issued between 1955 and 1964 after the INS carried out Operation Wetback.

Operation Wetback is unlikely to have led to a dramatic decline in undocumented immigration had Mexican workers not had a legal option for entering the United States. As one immigrant caught up in Operation Wetback commented, I will come back legally, if possible. If not, Ill just walk across again.

The INS explicitly recognized the connection between the Bracero Program and the decline in undocumented immigration in a 1958 report, stating that should a restriction be placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.

It is no coincidence that the lull in migrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border after Operation Wetback did not last once the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to migrate, but now they had to do so without visas or work contracts, contributing to a steady increase in border arrests after 1965 that surpassed 1 million in 1976 and reached nearly 2 million in 2000.

Real lessons

If he were to win the presidency again, Trump would have the legal authority to deport undocumented immigrants, but the logistical, political and legal obstacles to doing so quickly and massively are even greater today than they were in the 1950s.

First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigrant sweeps are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback shifted from the largely rural Southwest to urban areas in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and using similar tactics, INS agents produced far fewer apprehensions as they struggled to find and detain immigrants.

Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s. Today, Mexicans are no longer in the majority, and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major hubs for immigrants California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

Third, most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. did not sneak across the border. An estimated 42% entered the country legally but overstayed a visa illegally. Another 17% requested and received a short-term legal status that protects them from immediate deportation.

Finally, mass deportations are likely to spark a more broad-based resistance today than happened in the 1950s. Once staunchly opposed to undocumented immigration, most labor unions and Mexican-American organizations are now in the pro-immigrant camp.

Likewise, the Mexican government, which helped with Operation Wetback, is unlikely to allow massive numbers of non-Mexicans to be deported to its territory without the proper documentation. Trump has not supported a way to provide undocumented immigrants with a legal alternative, which means that migrants will keep finding ways to cross illegally.

Read more:
Why Trump's revival of Operation Wetback is more than just deporting all undocumented immigrants - Milwaukee Independent

The Biden administrations Department of Justice (DOJ) is threatening to sue the state of Oklahoma over a new law that would criminalize illegal immigration at the state level.

The threat from the DOJ comes after Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law that allows law enforcement agents to arrest suspected illegal immigrants who may be guilty of committing impermissible occupation in Oklahoma.

First and second time convictions carry different penalties, though both would require the illegal immigrant to leave the state of Oklahoma within 72 hours of being released from custody. The Biden DOJ now claims that the law is unconstitutional.

The United States intends to file suit to enjoin the enforcement of HB 4156 unless Oklahoma agrees to refrain from enforcing the law, a letter from DOJ Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney Brian Boynton to the Governor of Oklahoma reads. The United States is committed to the processing of noncitizens consistent with the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). HB 4156 is contrary to that goal.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond fired back in a statement of his own, asserting that Oklahoma has a sovereign right to defend its people, and we have a legal obligation to defend our people, to protect our citizens, going on to argue that the Biden administration has abdicated control of the border.

Oklahoma is just one of the several states that has recently passed legislation intended to respond to the unprecedented crisis on the southern border that the Biden administration has presided over.

The DOJ recently sent a similar threat to Iowa, which passed a law designating illegal reentry into the state as an aggravated misdemeanor, thereby allowing the state to arrest illegal immigrants. Those who come into our country illegally have broken the law, yet Biden refuses to deport them, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said while defending the legislation.

Texas has also been locked in legal battles with the federal government over legislation that allows state officials to detain and charge illegal immigrants. The Lone Star state also met the federal governments ire when state authorities took control of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas on the banks of the Rio Grande, asserting that the federal government was allowing illegal immigrants to enter the country by way of the park.

Georgia has also passed legislation requiring jails to check the citizenship status of inmates, a reform largely inspired by the brutal killing of 22-year old Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.

While the Biden administration continues to threaten lawsuits against states that attempt to curtail illegal immigration, the Democrat president has presided over an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis, with authorities recording over 9.5 million nationwide encounters and 1.7 million estimated illegal immigrant gotaways since Joe Biden took office. There were only 445,000 total reported gotaways for 2018, 2019, and 2020 under the Trump administration.

The Democratic incumbent is now under water with voters on the critical election year issue, with one poll finding that just 20 percent of voters across the country believe that the United States has control over its borders, while a separate survey revealed that only 36 percent of voters approve of Bidens handling of the issue.

Read this article:
Biden Administration Threatens To Sue Oklahoma Over Law Criminalizing Illegal Immigration - The Daily Wire

In the last year, President Biden has allowed 1.2 million illegal aliens into our country through parole. For comparison, the Obama and Trump administrations paroled 5,600 people on average per year. The current administrations refusal to secure our southern border has far-reaching consequences. Its killing our young people by allowing fentanyl to pour into our communities. Its risking our national security as border encounters with known terrorists soar. Its also going to have major ramifications on our elections.

Right now, illegal immigrants are counted in the Census. That data is used to decide how many congressional districts and Electoral College votes a state gets. The Electoral College is how we elect the president. The number of congressional seats can impact which Party controls the House of Representatives. The data is also used for the formula that determines where federal dollars get spent across the country.

By counting illegal immigrants in the Census, were rewarding cities and states that break our immigration laws. States like Nebraska that follows our immigration laws are punished. We would have less representation in Congress, less of a say in who is elected president, and less federal funding. Democrats know this. In fact, they openly admit they are rigging the system. Earlier this year, a video surfaced of Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York, blatantly calling for more illegal immigration to her district. She said she needed more people for redistricting purposes.

The Census policy must change. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. So it is only right to count citizens in deciding how these Congressional seats, Electoral College votes, and federal funds get divided. To do that, I introduced the Equal Representation Act. It would restore common sense.

I co-led the bill with Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. It would require the Census Bureau to include a citizenship question on any future census. It would also require them to tell the American people how many citizens there actually are. Our bill would also prohibit non-citizens from being counted for the purposes of congressional district and Electoral College apportionment.

Ensuring that congressional representation is based on citizenship shouldnt be a partisan issue. Its a matter of fairness and respecting the law. Our bill recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives. But in the Senate, every Democrat voted to block it. Every Senate Democrat voted to protect an unfair system because it benefits their party. Every Senate Democrat voted to punish states like Nebraska that follow the law. Thats disgraceful. Im going to keep fighting. Republicans need to have enough votes in the Senate to make this a reality.

Without these changes, the number of illegal immigrants flowing across our border will have a major impact on the next Census. The data will then determine the next decade of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. The border crisis has made it clear that fair elections are at risk. We must stop counting illegal aliens in the Census.

My team and I are here to serve you. Contact us anytime by phone at 202-224-4224. You can also view my website at http://www.ricketts.senate.gov/contact.

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

The rest is here:
Farm Bill extension welcome - York News-Times