But, many posters here have been saying that they love legal immigrants, and that the legal immigrants have all the rights because they pay taxes, etc. And many would love to push a wedge between the legals and the illegals, so that the legals would be the battering-ram that they could use against the illegals! Well, there you have it in clear print. When it comes to being fair to immigrants they forget all their high-minded values, and they just go forward trying to legalize discrimination and racism. Fortunately there are still people in congress that will not allow that to happen.

Tranquil, I think I get your point about what we're not hearing, regarding the companies that are encouraging and profitting from ilegal immgration.

This should be "National Stop Hiring Illegals" month
Just dont' hold your breath

I don't have a choice! I will have to hold my breath. I am not going out to organize the militants of the anti-illegal patriotic front and form the vigilante squadrons. I am too afraid that they would easily become an uncontrolled mob eager to get their hands on that "surplus of everything imaginable, from the cars they drive to the furniture they keep, to the houses they've been allowed to purchase."

Proof is in the pudding...just check my favorites!

Yeah! I'm registered to vote and so what!!

I would not be at all surprised if those guys in power blame the "illegals" for the current financial crisis...And I would not be at all surprised if people believes what they say..... AGAIN...!

I would not be at all surprised if those guys in power blame the "illegals" for the current financial crisis...And I would not be at all surprised if people believes what they say..... AGAIN...!

Metropolitan Financial Services in Silver Spring, told the Post that about 10 percent of her mainly Latino clientele qualify for home loans using a TIN instead of a Social Security number.....

A Department of Homeland Security investigator informs me that an ongoing federal probe of FHA/HUD-backed loans found that "a staggering number were approved to persons with false Social Security numbers." The Denver metro area alone accounted for 20,000 to 40,000 of the FHA-approved loans for suspected illegal aliens.

Community torn apart by SC immigration raid
Published: 10/8/08, 11:06 PM EDT
By MITCH WEISS and JEFFREY COLLINS
GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) - When Magdalana Domingo Ramirez Lopez moved to this South Carolina city nearly two years ago to work at the chicken processing plant, she felt at home.

On weekends, the neighborhood near House of Raeford's plant was filled with the sounds of salsa music and the scents of Guatemalan cooking. She would shop with her three young sons at nearby businesses that catered to the immigrants - some in the country legally, others not.

While the sights and sounds reminded Lopez of her native Guatemala, she said she was happy living in the United States - a place that offered a better life for her family.

But those hopes were shattered Tuesday when federal agents swooped into the plant, arresting 330 suspected illegal immigrants, six of them juveniles, effectively shutting down the factory and tearing apart the close-knit community.
Lopez was arrested and could be deported, as her husband was two years ago.

"My whole life has changed," she said as tears rolled down her cheeks. "I don't want to go back. My sons are better off here. The country is so poor. There's nothing there."

In response to requests Wednesday for comment on the raid, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman said only that those arrested were violating immigration law.

A day after the raid, families waited to hear from loved ones at detention centers. Meanwhile, businesses and streets were vacant because those not rounded up stayed home, afraid agents would return.

Just days before, poultry workers visibly filled the neighborhoods around the plant.

The community's transformation was slow but steady over the last 15 years as the newcomers replaced working-class whites and blacks. Neighborhood residents who knew about federal charges against plant supervisors accused of helping illegal immigrants forge documents didn't think the trouble would trickle down to them.

After all, they were only here to give the plant long hours of joint-aching work and local officials didn't seem to mind. That thought was likely shared by immigrants in communities nationwide including states throughout the South, Iowa and New York who have been caught in similar raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Lopez, 29, believed she was safe. But she spent most of Tuesday being fingerprinted and questioned by federal agents and a day later was coming to grips with being sent back to Guatemala. Her sons - ages 4, 5 and 6 - were all born in the U.S.

"The whole time I was there with police, I cried. I kept thinking about my sons. That I wouldn't see them again," she said.

She left Central America because she didn't want her family to grow up in a place where she was so hungry at times that she had to eat grass and dirt.

"I came to the U.S. for work. I came in peace. My goal was to help my sons grow up in a better place. Now that's gone," she said.

House of Raeford processes chickens and turkeys in eight plants in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan. The Greenville plant and its nearly 900 workers have been under scrutiny for almost a year as authorities looked into allegations the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Eleven supervisors and the plant's human resources director have been arrested, mostly for falsifying immigration documents.

The company has issued a statement saying it never knowingly hired illegal immigrants and was cooperating.

Many workers say they had no idea about the legal troubles or that a raid was imminent.

"We never thought they would come in and start arresting everyone," said 35-year-old Jorge Mendoza, who missed the morning raid because he works second shift. "That would be like shutting down the plant. They wouldn't do that, we thought. The plant is too busy."

Mendoza said he plans to move his family because it's too dangerous to stay.

Greenville County deputies couldn't do much about illegal immigrants because no provision in South Carolina law makes it illegal to be in the U.S. without permission. Instead, deputies who thought they arrested or spoke to an illegal immigrant were told to contact federal immigration officials, said Master Deputy Michael Hildebrand.

Those arrested in the raid face various charges, including re-entry after deportation, counterfeit documents and false statements. All are in the U.S. Marshal's custody and have been processed for deportation.

Luis Garcia, an interpreter in the area, said removing so many people will devastate the community.

"They're breaking families. Everyone is worried," said Garcia, who visited Lopez to see how she was doing.

Lopez is under house arrest and has to wear an ankle monitor until her deportation hearing Nov. 14. She has no money to hire a lawyer.

Her 4-year-old son, Issias, is recovering from surgery she doubted he would get proper medical care in Guatemala, where she plans to take her children to rejoin their father.

When immigration officials asked her to sign a deportation order, she said she refused, replying: "First you kill me, then I'll sign it."

Several miles down the road, Emilio Espinoza manages the Guatemala Restaurant in a strip mall with a grocery store, bakery and nightclub, all catering toward Hispanics.

His usually packed restaurant was empty at lunchtime Wednesday for the first time since he opened seven years ago. Half his employees didn't show up because they were scared immigration agents might be in the area.

"People are afraid to leave their homes," said the 35-year-old Espinoza.

David Wynn said he has watched the neighborhood change around his heating and air conditioning supply store across the street from the plant.

Everyone knew the plant hired illegal immigrants, said Wynn, who added no one wanted to do anything about it because they figured the workers were doing jobs no one else wanted. With the economy getting worse, that's probably no longer true and he worries what is going to happen to all the people caught up in the raid.

"We need to pray for them," Wynn said.

Armed federal immigration agents have illegally pushed and shoved their way into homes in New York and New Jersey in hundreds of predawn raids that violated their own agency rules as well as the Constitution, according to a study to be released on Wednesday by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The study by the school’s Immigration Justice Law Clinic, backed by several law enforcement experts including Nassau County’s police commissioner, found a widespread pattern of misconduct by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement after analyzing 700 arrest reports obtained from the agency through Freedom of Information lawsuits.

The raids were supposed to focus on dangerous criminals, but overwhelmingly netted Latinos with civil immigration violations who happened to be present, the study said. Raiders mistakenly held legal residents and citizens by force in their own homes while agents rummaged through drawers seeking incriminating documents, the report said.

Acting without judicial search warrants, the agents were required to obtain informed consent from a resident before they entered a private residence. But the study found that in 86 percent of the Nassau and Suffolk County arrest reports that it analyzed, and a quarter of the New Jersey cases, no consent was recorded.

“If any local law enforcement agency in the nation were involved in these types of widespread constitutional violations it would prompt a federal investigation,” said Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau police commissioner, who led a panel that guided the Cardozo report. “Federal immigration agents simply need to play by the same rules as every other law enforcement officer.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded with a brief e-mail statement defending the conduct of its agents and the home raids — the same kind of response it has made to similar criticism since the Bush administration vastly expanded their use in 2006."

In 2007, Mr. Mulvey sharply criticized raids that brought scores of agents from around the country to Long Island, some brandishing shotguns, and rousted many citizens and legal residents from their beds in what Nassau officials called a poorly planned antigang operation.

The report said a similar “cowboy mentality” emerged in many other raids. In Paterson, N.J., last year, legal residents from Guatemala and their 9-year-old son, a United States citizen, were threatened with guns by immigration agents who had entered their home while the boy’s mother was in the shower.

In a Staten Island case, an immigration judge recently ruled that the conduct of agents acting without a warrant was an “egregious violation” of fundamental fairness; they had entered a man’s bedroom armed with pistols, “forced him into the hall and required him to stand in his underwear before his brother, sister-in-law and their children.”

In an e-mail message obtained under a Freedom of Information request, a federal immigration agent in Connecticut invited a state trooper to join a scheduled set of raids in New Haven, writing: “We have 18 addresses — so it should be a fun time! Let me know if you guys can play!”

The report also found a strong suggestion of racial profiling in the difference between the ethnicity of the named targets — 66 percent Latino — and of the “collateral” arrests — 87 percent Latino in New Jersey and 94 percent on Long Island.

Such concerns have surfaced repeatedly around the country in news articles and lawsuits since 2006, when the Bush administration raised the arrest quota of each raiding team eightfold, to 1,000 a year.

Six months into the Obama administration, with the same spokesmen in place from the Bush years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to the Cardozo report with a general defense of its agents.

"The men and women of I.C.E. are sworn to uphold the laws of our nation,” the agency said in an e-mailed statement. “We do so professionally, humanely and with an acute awareness with the impact enforcement has on the individuals we encounter. While I.C.E. prioritizes our efforts by targeting fugitives who have demonstrated a threat to national security or public safety, we have a clear mandate to pursue all immigration fugitives."

The Cardozo report said that Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had changed some policies that contributed to the abuses it found, like eliminating the arrest quota. But the report recommended more drastic steps.

Home raids should be “a tactic of last resort, reserved for high-priority targets,” and then only after agents have obtained judicial warrants, the report urged. A high-level supervisor should be on site, and home raids should be videotaped, it recommended.

Agents should have to note why they initially seized and questioned any person, the study said. “That’s the bread and butter of any arrest report,” said Peter L. Markowitz, who teaches at Cardozo and is one of the report’s authors. Such a note was missing from two-thirds of the arrest reports analyzed in the study.

The total cost is a whopping $338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR!!

The cost of the war is a constant democratic theme, but they never complain about the cost of the massive illegal invasion into our country.

The cost of the war keeps us free from terrorism,

but the cost we endure from illegal immigration only provides us with cheap lettuce.

At a cost of 338 billion dollars I think we could combine that with the money wasted on welfare and put the idle to work.

Again, Lets start out with why the republican administration did not address this issue for 8 years, 8 years x $338.3 BILLION= 27,006,400,000,000

Well, probably because when the economy was good and everyone was working there was no problem with it (you know, see no evil, here no evil, etc).

Or could it be that bleeding heart liberals would never let the discussions get off the ground in the first place in the political arena with shouts of discrimination, accusations of heartlessness, denial that it is a problem, and all the other things like they still do on the threads that cover the subjects on these forums?

Excuses excuses excuses mommy, daddy those bad liberals didn't let me do it, you had all the marbles and you did nothing, now it's the fault of the bleeding heart liberals. Please give me a break and own up to your parties failure to act