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Fingerprints to go to feds to flag illegal immigrants

Published on Tue, May 15, 2012

New Hampshire quietly fell under the realm of Secure Communities last week, the federal program looking for potential immigration violations that checks the fingerprints of anyone who has been arrested.

According to the website of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Secure Communities was activated throughout New Hampshire on May 8. On Tuesday, the program went into effect in Massachusetts and New York, where some political leaders have said it is not needed and unwanted. Read more...

Published in the New Hampshire Union Leader

Our Litigation & Advocacy

The American Immigration Council's Legal Action Center engages in impact litigation to protect and advance the rights of noncitizens. The LAC frequently submits briefs as amicus curiae (friend of the court) before administrative tribunals and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and files affirmative lawsuits in limited circumstances.

Our Priorities

Immigrant Integration: How Foreign-Born Workers Compare To U.S. Citizens (INFOGRAPHIC)

Published on Tue, Aug 28, 2012

An article in the Huffington Post yesterday cited IPC statistics in an article about immigrant integration.  Check out the interesting graphic by the National Immigrant Integration Conference at the bottom of the article: Read more...

Published in the The Huffington Post

2012 Creative Writing Contest Honorable Mention

Working Toward a Dream

By: Aedra Li

San Francisco, CA


I remember being confused, so many why’s and not enough because’s. Why did we leave Saulita? Where were we going? My parents didn’t say a word to me or my brother. All they said was, “We are going to a better place. You will understand later.” Was a twelve year old girl too young to know the truth? If I got a penny for every question I had, I’d be a millionaire. Then I’d have enough money to go back to Saulita and see my bestfriend, Pablo.

 

During one part of the trip, my brother and I had to hide under a blanket. We heard a gringo speaking, but we couldn’t understand him through the blanket. He asked a lot of questions. After three days, we finally stopped driving. We got out, stretched our aching legs, and looked cautiously around. We saw many other immigrants working in the fields, picking strawberries. In front of us was a house that you could tell used to be white, but was now an ugly cream. It used to be a single-family house, but now it housed for families of five. Everyone that lived in that house had to work in the fields to live there and put food in their families’ mouths. We worked 15 hours a day under the hot California sun. All of our backs ached, all of our hands turned ugly with calluses. As the seasons changed, we moved from farm to farm, but the work was the same. We worked for six hard, intense years harvesting crops that would feed the lucky people who didn’t have to work like us.

 Read more...

IPC Report Featured on Huffington Post

Published on Thu, Jun 06, 2013

An article in the Huffington Post highlighted a recent special report done by Cecilia Menjivar and Olivia Salcido in cooperation with the Immigration Policy Center.  The report, titled "Gendered Paths to Legal Status:  The Case of Latin American Immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona," focused on inequalities within U.S. immigration law over how men and women are treated. The article said:

"Gender inequalities seep through immigration law in the United States, making women go through a different experience than men when attempting to gain a legal status in the U.S., a new study reveals.

"'Immigration law, which on its face appears gender neutral, actually contains gender biases that create barriers for many women trying to gain legalization within the current immigration system,' stated the authors of a study released last week by the Immigration Policy Center."

Published in the Huffington Post

Jhoon Rhee

The Father of American Tae Kwon Do

Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee, a 10th Degree Black Belt, is considered the "Father of American Tae Kwon Do." Grandmaster Rhee's first trip to America was on June 1, 1956, for a short military training program soon after the Korean War. In 1957, he returned as a freshman to Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas with $46 in his pocket. English was his biggest obstacle. It took him half an hour to read a single page. Through perseverance and discipline, Grandmaster Rhee has become one of the most prominent motivational public speakers in the world today, encouraging individuals to achieve self-discipline, self-esteem and self-defense through the development of academic, moral, and physical excellence.

Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee has been involved in every aspect of Tae Kwon Do. He has opened schools in order to teach not only the physical techniques of Tae Kwon Do, but the inseparable mental aspects, as well. His Martial Arts philosophy calls for building true confidence through knowledge in the mind, honesty in the heart, and strength in the body. His philosophy and seminars center around rediscovering the vision of America's Founding Fathers by restoring mental discipline in America and in the world.Read more...

Ben Johnson Featured in the State Journal Register

Published on Sun, Oct 27, 2013

The AIC's Executive Director, Ben Johnson, was recently featured in an op-ed piece in the Illinois newspaper, the State Journal-Register.  The piece focused on what the cost of congressional inaction on immigration reform would be for the state of Illinois.  It was based off of a recent fact sheet released by the IPC titled, "The Cost of Doing Nothing:  Dollars, Lives, and Opportunities Lost in the Wait for Immigration Reform."

In the piece, Johnson writes:

"Immigrants make up 14 percent of Illinois’ population, and 20.3 percent of all business owners in Illinois are foreign-born. The state has everything to gain from a smoothly functioning immigration system and much to lose from a system that is not in tune with current economic and social realities.

"Yet, two-and-a-half months after the Senate passed immigration reform legislation (S. 744), the House of Representatives continues to dawdle. Other than giving speeches and mulling over a few backward-looking, enforcement-only bills, the House has done nothing to revamp the broken U.S. immigration system or put forward any vision of what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants now living in the United States — 525,000 of whom call Illinois home."

Published in the State Journal-Register

Richard T. Herman

Richard T. Herman is the founder of Richard T. Herman & Associates, an immigration and business law firm in Cleveland, Ohio which serves a global clientele in over 10 languages. He is the co‐founder of a chapter of TiE, a global network of entrepreneurs started in 1992 in Silicon Valley. He has appeared on National Public Radio, FOX News, and various affiliates of NBC, CBS, and ABC. He has also been quoted in such publications as USA Today, InformationWeek, PCWorld, ComputerWorld, CIO, Site Selection and National Lawyers Weekly.

CIS Adds to Falsehoods about Health Care Reform

Released on Mon, Sep 07, 2009

It would seem that the Center for Immigration Studies has decided to jump on the talk-radio bandwagon of far-right commentators who are loudly attempting to derail substantive health care reform through fear-mongering and falsehoods. Although CIS has so far steered clear of the baseless rants about "death panels" and "socialized medicine," it has issued a new report that seeks to buttress an equally farcical claim: that health care reform will leave American taxpayers footing the bill for millions of unauthorized immigrants who will receive federally subsidized health insurance.

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Michael Tan, Esq.

Michael Tan, Esq. is a Skadden Fellow at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project (IRP). Michael is a graduate of Harvard College and the Yale Law School, where he served as a legal intern in the Workers' and Immigrants' Rights Advocacy Clinic and a director of the Immigration Legal Services clinic of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization (LSO), and was awarded the Stephen J. Massey prize for best exemplifying the values of LSO. He previously worked at the IRP as a Liman Public Interest Fellow. Michael recently completed a clerkship with the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He also holds a Masters' Degree in Comparative Literature from New York University.