As it poises for further immigration initiatives, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling with festering internal divisions between political appointees and career officials over how to enforce laws and handle detainees facing deportation.

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security has shifted its focus away from the worksite raids and sweeps employed during George W. Bush’s presidency to deporting more criminals and creating less prisonlike detention settings. But ICE, a branch of DHS, is facing intensified resistance from agency middle managers and attorneys, and the union that represents immigration officers.

The internal conflict has grown increasingly public over ICE’s plans, among them to expand a risk assessment tool to guide agents on detention decisions, cut down on transfers of detained immigrants, and open more “civil” detention facilities — what field directors call “soft” detention.

Immigration officers say the new measures limit their enforcement efforts and the revamped lockups will compromise their safety. In June, their union took the unprecedented step of issuing a vote of no confidence in the agency’s director, John Morton, and the official overseeing detention reform, Phyllis Coven.

Months before that, the 24 field managers who oversee detention and deportation sent a memorandum to Morton that challenged a number of recommended changes. Current and former ICE attorneys in New York, Houston and other offices nationwide say they are angry that they have been instructed to drop efforts to deport some immigrants.

“We can’t find a supervisor or manager that supports Morton or his initiatives,” said Chris Crane, president of the American Federation of Government Employees’ National Council 118, the union that issued the no-confidence vote.

Many of the measures, set to be implemented in the coming weeks and months, may not require a conversation with the union, but ICE leadership seeks the union’s viewpoint on issues tied most closely to immigration reform, said Beth Gibson, ICE’s assistant deputy director.

Read more at thewashingtonpost.com……

Bwaaaaaa Haaaa Haaaa!! OMG, irony of ironies! The Mexican government says Arizona’s new policy of actually using it’s police to enforce existing immigration laws might affect U.S./Mexican tourism!

We currently have upwards of 20,000,000 Mexican “tourists” in the United States who broke our laws to get here and who are breaking our laws to stay here and are helping to bankrupt the country in the process. I would say that it’s a good thing if Arizona negatively affects that kind of “tourism” with it’s new law enforcement policies.

Does the Mexican government have a clue on how ridiculous their statement is? Do they actually believe anybody buys their spin?  I can only hope not.

My whole point is that we welcome legitimate tourism from anywhere in the world.  What we object to is the kind of “tourism” that takes place when people tunnel under our borders, get smuggled into the country inside cargo trucks and cut holes in fences to get in. 

We need to make sure we only elect politicians who will pledge to enforce our border and immigration laws before this wave of illegality results in more tragedy like we witnessed recently in the murder of a Arizona rancher by a “tourist.” 

~~John Cronin~~

Immigrant rights groups on Monday demanded that President Obama impose a full moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants, arguing that his policies have been worse for their cause than those of his Republican predecessor.

Saying they’ve been “betrayed” by and lost patience with Mr. Obama, the advocates suggested that the president could regain their support by leading a fight on Capitol Hill for a bill to legalize illegal immigrants. Mr. Obama took the first step toward legalization during a meeting Monday at the White House with two lawmakers working on a bill.

But a bill could take months to pass. In the meantime, the immigrant rights groups say, Mr. Obama must end deportations altogether.

“We demand an immediate stop to all deportations, because each one of these deportations, each one of these numbers, equals a life destroyed and a family devastated,” Angelica Sala, executive director of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said at a news conference in Washington.

The government reported 387,790 deportations in fiscal 2009, which spanned the last few months of the George W. Bush administration and more than eight months of the Obama administration. That marked a small increase over fiscal 2008, when deportations totaled 369,221.

The Obama administration insists that its enforcement policies target unscrupulous employers and stop abusive practices that target illegal immigrants.

“This administration is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that focuses first on those dangerous criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately,” said Homeland Security Department spokesman Matt Chandler.

Legalization versus enforcement has driven tense debate for years.

Read more at washingtontimes.com