Free Republic

Carrying American flags and chanting "Si, se puede" ("Yes, we can"), several thousand Latinos rallied at the seat of Prince William County government yesterday to denounce the Board of Supervisors' plan to curb services to illegal immigrants. Protesters from as far as Minnesota converged ... for speeches and a two-mile march, organized by Mexicans Without Borders and other immigrant advocacy groups. "We come in peace," said Karla Makris, 26, a paralegal born in Nicaragua. "We're not stealing. We're not criminals." On July 10, the Prince William board thrust the county into the middle of the Northern Virginia immigration debate, adopting...

MEXICO CITY -- The 8-year-old son of deported immigrant activist Elvira Arellano was reunited with her Friday at Mexico City's airport. Arellano said she wants her son, Saul, a U.S. citizen, to go to school in her home state of Michoacan so he can learn Spanish. Saul, whose first trip to Mexico was in November to ask the Mexican Congress to lobby Washington to stop his mother's deportation, received a Mexican passport from his mother as proof of his dual citizenship. They plan to renew the boy's U.S. passport, something he could not do in the United States in the...

...a boycott called to protest proposed restrictions on illegal immigrants in Prince William County appears to be having minimal impact on the national chain stores that are its chief targets... But the week-long boycott has sharpened the contradictory emotions and opinions among county residents, highlighting the complexity of a fast-changing region that has experienced the burdens and benefits of immigration. Some established Latino immigrants, for example, say they sympathize with illegal newcomers but fear the boycott will provoke hostility... In a hardware store, the non-Hispanic co-owner said he had a "strictly neutral" position on the boycott and the county resolution...

The Bush administration has decided to sharply scale back its plan to screen U.S. foreign aid contractors around the globe for potential terrorism connections, deciding instead to begin with a pilot program involving aid recipients in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip... The decision... was made after lawmakers and several large aid organizations said that the global screening requirements were onerous and unwarranted. An official of the U.S. Agency for International Development had earlier promised to defer the program, which was to have taken effect Monday. The global screening program...would have required that all nongovernmental organizations seeking funds from...

The federal government yesterday announced the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against conditions at a government detention center for illegal immigrant children and families in Taylor, Tex. The deal averted a trial set to open in U.S. District Court in Austin, and it was made after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began improving education, recreation, medical care and privacy standards at its first large holding facility for illegal immigrant families, the 512-bed T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility... ... the Service Employees International Union plans to file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore.,...

Twelve years ago, Ricardo Juarez was an unemployed government clerk standing in the dark on a riverbank outside Eagle Pass, Texas...Juarez washed up in Woodbridge two weeks later. His brother Alex helped him find work in construction...But Juarez was more eager to organize immigrant laborers than be one. Now 40, Juarez has become one of the Washington region's most visible Latino figures. His organization, Mexicans Without Borders, claims more than 3,500 regional members...the biggest test of Juarez's leadership begins today. Juarez and his group have organized a week-long boycott in Prince William in protest of an anti-illegal immigration resolution unanimously...

lvira Arellano, an activist who was recently deported for being in the United States illegally, visited the Mexican congress Tuesday in hopes of building support for an immigration reform between the two countries. In a video broadcast by Spanish-language network Univision, an emotional Arellano says at a press conference that the United States “broke the law first” by allowing people to enter the country without documents and allowing them to pay taxes. She also says, “For me it has been very difficult, but I know that I am not alone.” The case has garnered massive attention in the Spanish-language media....

I was watching CNN's Inside Politics today (no transcript up yet) and they had a panel on - someone from the Washington Post, LA Times (Ron Brownstein) and Time magazine (Karen Tumulty). They were discussing our response to the disaster and the host of the program mentioned that the UN called our response "stingy". Then the panel went on to talk about how we "fumbled" this and were basically AWOL for one day. This just really made my blood boil. What have other countries done? The Brits say over 10,000 of their citizens were on holiday in that area. It's...