The Tucson Police Department plans to begin collecting information about its calls to immigration authorities in a format that would allow for analysis.
Chief Roberto Villaseñor said Tuesday that TPD will create a database and revise the form it uses to collect details of each call.
Officers are required under SB 1070 to call immigration authorities each time they develop reasonable suspicion that a person they have lawfully stopped is in the country illegally. TPD also checks the immigration status of everyone arrested.
The data-collection shift is partly a response to a settlement between the American Civil Liberties Union and South Tucson last month. TPD will likely incorporate ideas from South Tucson’s new form and add additional information, Capt. Ramon Batista said.
The timeline for the database launch is not yet clear. Spokesman Sgt. Chris Widmer attributed delays to the city’s information technology department.
Some members of the City Council wonder why it’s taken so long.
“We requested it in November, and I requested an update in March, and we’re still waiting for that update,” Councilwoman Regina Romero said Tuesday.
Councilman Steve Kozachik said the data is imperative to know how many people are detained and how resources are spent. “They were told seven months ago, and they’ve been ignoring it.”
Migrants wait along the shore of the Rio Grande River in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Monday, Dec. 11, 2006, with milk jugs full of water used throughout their long journey to the border crossing. They plan to wait for a good time to cross the river into the U.S. | RJ Sangosti via Getty Images
Last month, in the face of growing pressure from immigrant rights activists, Hispanic politicians and Democratic allies, President Barack Obama ordered the Department of Homeland Security to review the policies that drive the administration's record-setting pace of deportations.
It remains to be seen what kind of changes will come as a result. Last week, the White House delayed the announcement of possible changes for two months in an effort to keep alive the debate over comprehensive reform. Activists have long demanded that Obama use his executive power to curtail deportations dramatically. But while the president supports a pathway to citizenship and has exempted from deportation many undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, he has maintained that he must enforce existing immigration law unless Congress passes comprehensive reform.
However, the White House does appear to have the power to stop a program reviled by immigration activists and criticized by legal scholars that has helped inflate the percentage of deportees with criminal records in recent years.
Begun under the George W. Bush administration, the program, known as Operation Streamline, charges people en masse with the crime of illegal entry (a misdemeanor) or illegal re-entry (a felony) after they have been caught illegally crossing the border. The detainees are given a jail sentence and then deported. Immigration activists and civil rights defenders have long opposed the program, citing concerns about due process and arguing that it diverts the courts' attention from more serious crimes.
The Border Patrol first developed the idea for Operation Streamline in South Texas, according to the California Law Review. Amid growing numbers of illegal immigrants from Central America, who, unlike Mexicans, could not be immediately repatriated, the area was running out of bed space in detention centers, and authorities often had no choice but to allow apprehended immigrants to leave detention with a notice to appear in court.
The Border Patrol suggested that the federal government prosecute non-Mexicans to create a deterrent for crossing illegally in the area and to funnel undocumented immigrants into the criminal justice system, where more bed space was available. The zero-tolerance program quickly spread to other jurisdictions and expanded to cover Mexican nationals.
Today, under Operation Streamline, judges hear dozens of cases within hours, often convicting migrants in groups to save time. In an article published in February, New York Times reporter Fernanda Santos described the daily scene in a courthouse in Tucson, Arizona:
Men and women arrested along the border, the chains around their ankles and wrists jingling as they move, are gathered to answer to the same charges -- illegal entry, a misdemeanor, and illegal re-entry, a felony. They have not had an opportunity to bathe since they set off to cross the desert; the courtroom has the smell of sweaty clothes left for days in a plastic bag. Side by side in groups of seven as they face the bench, they consistently plead guilty to a lesser charge, which spares them longer time behind bars. The immigration charge is often their only offense.
Things weren't always this way. Tucson attorney Isabel Garcia worked as a federal public defender in the 1980s, when the crime of illegal entry was rarely prosecuted. She says she won several of those cases by challenging the admissibility of the immigrant's confession.
"In Tucson, it's the daily bread for those who work in this court system," Garcia said. "Why are we doing this? We know there's violations of law everywhere. So don't give me this 'we prosecute every violation of the law,' because we don't."
Maintaining a program that leads to greater criminal prosecution of undocumented immigrants would seem to be at odds with a presidential administration that has called for comprehensive immigration reform and used prosecutorial discretion to make it more difficult to deport some undocumented immigrants. But the president of the National Immigration Judges Association, Dana Leigh Marks, says the current mandate to prosecute large volumes of illegal-entry and re-entry cases ultimately rests with the executive branch, rather than with Congress.
"If it's a policy, it's not mandated by law," Marks told HuffPost. "These prosecutions occur in a criminal context. They could choose to place people in immigration proceedings and not choose to prosecute them criminally in addition."
The White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorney's Office did not return requests for comment.
Immigration-related crimes now make up the most-prosecuted category of crimes in federal courts, at 41 percent of the caseload in the 2012 fiscal year, according to the most recently available statistics from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Drug crimes took second place, at 22 percent, followed by violent crime at 19 percent.
In April, the Blue Ribbon Commission, a group made up of undocumented and formerly undocumented activists, issued a call for the Obama administration to end Operation Streamline. The group called the proceedings "dehumanizing" and pointed out that in many cases those convicted are "trying to return home to their families or flee prosecution."
Despite such criticisms, the program still has its supporters. Bernardo Velasco, a judge in Tucson, told The Huffington Post he hears about 350 Streamline cases every week.
"Everybody that appears before me has a lawyer appointed to represent them at no cost to them," said Velasco. "Everyone that appears before me has had a chance to speak to their lawyer in the morning, to talk to the Mexican consulate at noon and to talk to me. So I'm satisfied that due process is more than dealt with."
Critics say that under the Streamline program, many people end up with a criminal offense on their record when they wouldn't otherwise have any. But Velasco told HuffPost that virtually everyone who appears before him is a repeat crosser, often with a previous conviction for illegal entry.
"That criticism is no longer valid because the people that are being prosecuted now have criminal records, and they're being offered a plea agreement that offers them less time than they could possibly get if they went through a felony proceeding," Velasco said. "Every country in the world has the right to secure its borders."
In its annual report on deportations this year, the Department of Homeland Security highlighted that 59 percent of the 368,644 immigrants deported in 2013 had been convicted of a crime, the highest percentage in the last five years.
But critics point out that many of the people labeled as criminal offenders in those statistics are guilty only of crossing the border illegally -- a crime that does not set them far apart from others who were apprehended outside the border zone or who fell out of lawful immigration status while overstaying a visa.
Immigration offenses accounted for 54,812 of those crimes in 2013, according to TRAC -- 25 percent of the total. The number of deportees with an immigration conviction rose 167 percent between 2008 and 2013.
At times, authorities have seemed almost comically enthusiastic about prosecuting immigration crimes. NPR reports that Mexican migrants have been stopped at legal ports of entry while they were trying to return to Mexico. Instead of simply being allowed to leave, they were detained, convicted of illegal entry and then deported -- all at taxpayer expense.
"It's fully under the purview of the administration whether to prosecute these cases," Vicki Gaubeca, director of the ACLU's Regional Center for Border Rights in New Mexico, told HuffPost. "It's just a colossal waste of resources."
President Barack Obama has asked the head of the Department of Homeland Security to hold off on completing a review of the administration’s deportation policies until the end of the summer, a White House officials announced Tuesday evening.
The move is intended to save any hopes for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass immigration reform legislation before the August recess.
“The President’s priority is to enact a permanent solution for people currently living in the shadows and that can only come with immigration reform,” a White House official said in an email. “He believes that there is still an opportunity for legislation to be considered in the House this summer.”
The White House official added that Obama has asked DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson to hold on the review of the administration’s deportation policies in order to give the House “space to fix the broken immigration system, and to deny the Republicans any excuse for further inaction.” SEE ALSO:Obama looks for ways to handle deportations ‘more humanely’
In March, amid calls from immigration advocates to stop deportations, Obama directed Johnson to review deportation policies in order to find “more humanely” ways to carry out enforcement efforts.
The move fueled House Republicans to argue that they can’t trust Obama to enforce the law. Other Republicans argued that taking executive action to stop deportations would kill any chances of passing immigration reform legislation in Congress this year.
According to the White House, Johnson has said that he will seek “a fresh start” on Secure Communities, a federal program that allows local police and immigration officials to share fingerprints data of individuals who are arrested or booked into custody in order to identify undocumented immigrants. There is also speculation that Johnson will update the enforcement priorities that DHS established in 2010.
Tuesday’s announcement to delay the review of deportations comes several days after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid warned that the Obama administration will move to provide relief from deportation if the House doesn’t act on immigration reform by August.
“We’ve waited 329 days,” Reid said last Thursday, referring to the number of days since the Senate passed its own immigration reform bill. “We’re willing to wait another six weeks. But at the end of six weeks, if something hasn’t been done, then there’s going to have to be a move made.”
UC president says academic exchanges with Mexico improve 'lives on both sides of our national border'
Napolitano in Mexico for two days of talks, will expand exchange of students and faculty
UC system President Janet Napolitano on Wednesday began two days of meetings in Mexico about expanding academic and research cooperation with Mexican universities and scientific and cultural organizations.
Among other steps, Napolitano was meeting with officials from Mexico's departments of education and foreign affairs and was expected to sign an agreement that extends cooperation in exchange of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty, UC officials in the system's Oakland headquarters said.
Napolitano formerly was the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and dealt with issues of illegal immigration from Mexico.
Julian Castro is getting a seat in President Barack Obama’s cabinet. Democrats are getting much more, including a potential 2016 candidate for vice president.
Obama has picked Castro -- the San Antonio mayor known for his youth, telegenic appeal and inspiring keynote address to the Democratic national convention in 2012 -- to serve as his next secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He made the choice official at the White House yesterday and asked the Senate for speedy confirmation.
Castro “has been focused on revitalizing one of our most wonderful cities,” Obama said. “He has become a leader in housing and economic development.”
Castro, in turn, recounted that he’d grown up living in rental housing.
“Just because you are of modest means does not mean your aspirations or your opportunity ought to be limited,” he said.
Castro’s HUD nomination can help Democrats in several ways. It deepens the party’s bench of potential candidates for the national ticket while soothing Hispanics upset over Obama’s failure to win a revamp of immigration laws. And should Castro land on the 2016 ticket, the party may have a chance of winning Texas and its 38 electoral votes for the first time since Jimmy Carter won there in 1976. Photographer: Stan Honda//AFP via GettyImages
President Barack Obama has chosen Julian Castro -- the San Antonio mayor known for his youth, telegenic appeal and inspiring keynote address to the Democratic convention in 2012 -- to serve as his next secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Close
President Barack Obama has chosen Julian Castro -- the San Antonio mayor known for his... Read More
“Castro would be a good pick if he was from Mars,” said Mark McKinnon, a onetime senior adviser to President George W. Bush. “He just happens to be from Texas.”
Cabinet Shift
If confirmed, Castro will replace current HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, who Obama named to serve as the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. Obama nominated last month his current budget chief, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, succeeding Kathleen Sebelius, who oversaw the troubled rollout of his health-care law.
White House officials declined to comment on the strategy behind Castro’s selection. Several Democratic strategists said it’s too early to talk seriously about whether Hillary Clinton, the early frontrunner for the party’s next presidential nomination, might pick Castro as a running mate.
One person who is close to the Clintons said the former first family has been aware of Castro since he delivered the convention speech, a springboard for Bill Clinton in 1988 and Obama in 2004. Castro would probably be on a short list for vice president for any 2016 Democratic nominee, that person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because Hillary Clinton has yet to announce a decision on her candidacy.
No Guarantee
Having a Texan on the ticket is no guaranteed path to win the state for the Democrats. Even though presidential nominee Michael Dukakis selected then-Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 as his running mate, 56 percent of Texans voted instead for the Republican ticket of George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle.
Regardless of how the 2016 calculus evolves, Obama will benefit for the next two years by having a strong Hispanic ally in his inner circle.
“It’s like in sports,” Paul Begala, the chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, said of why Obama might have picked the 39-year-old Castro. “Draft for talent first. Castro’s the best available talent.”
Bill Frick, a Maryland state representative who went to Harvard Law School with Castro and later worked with him at the firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, said the San Antonio mayor has “a rare combination of talents.”
“This is someone who is comfortable in the impoverished Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of San Antonio and he’s comfortable in the C suites, talking to executives,” Frick said.
HUD Challenges
Castro would inherit a job with challenges beyond politics. HUD’s $50 billion budget for economic development and housing programs is being stretched by a skyrocketing need for subsidized rental homes. He’ll also be in charge of the financially troubled Federal Housing Administration, which has been struggling with a wave of defaults in the $1.1 trillion portfolio of home mortgages it insures.
“It’s a very special challenge, because you combine the budget pressures and the great need with the fact that HUD is simply not the sexiest cabinet agency out there,” Julia Gordon, director for housing finance and policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, which has ties to the Democratic Party. “Someone needs to bring their best game.”
Financial Crisis
He’ll be taking over after Donovan has helped guide the agency through the financial crisis and its aftermath. Now, the focus will be on ensuring that lenders act responsibly while “lending as broadly as possible to as many families as possible,” said David Stevens, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Donovan, 48, came to HUD after a career in preserving affordable housing for low-income families, including serving as New York City housing commissioner in the administration of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
Donovan worked to stabilize FHA’s finances and served as the White House point person on issues including a legal settlement with big banks over foreclosure abuses and congressional efforts to remake the nation’s housing-finance system. He put a new emphasis on spending HUD money to shore up the infrastructure of neighborhoods beyond just housing.
Donovan “is eminently qualified to be OMB director,” Stevens said. “He’s run a very complex budget at a very complex time at HUD.”
Federal Aid
In San Antonio, Castro has been on the receiving end of more federal development aid than many mayors. The city was one of only five selected by the White House in January for extra support in applying for and securing federal grants. It was one of only two cities nationwide that secured funds from both the Department of Education and HUD for local revitalization efforts, a total of $54 million.
“He lobbied hard, and both the Department of Education and HUD wanted to find a place where there was someone on the ground who could make it work,” said Henry Cisneros, a former HUD secretary from San Antonio who now runs a property development company.
Castro could face questions as he undergoes the confirmation process about the way his city spent HUD funds. A HUD auditor found in 2012 that San Antonio misused portions of an $8.6 million grant it received to refurbish and sell abandoned homes and renovate apartment buildings.
Contract Monitoring
Some of the construction contracts weren’t monitored correctly and some of the housing wasn’t set aside for poor families as required, the auditor found. The city fixed the problems and appointed a new compliance officer to monitor the grant.
Democrats acknowledge that there is risk involved for Castro. HUD has long been beset by troubles including the misspending of funds by local housing authorities. And no president since Herbert Hoover previously served in the Cabinet.
Still, the job could be a springboard to national stature, as it has been for several of his predecessors. Republican Mel Martinez left the agency in 2003 to win a U.S. Senate race in Florida. Jack Kemp, a HUD secretary under President George H. W. Bush, went on to become the Republican nominee for vice president in 1996. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, served as HUD secretary during the Clinton administration.
“HUD has long been a troubled agency, but despite that, you certainly have had a number of secretaries go on to bigger and better things and not be weighed down by that,” said Mark Calabria, who worked at HUD under Martinez and now is director of financial regulation studies at the Washington-based Cato Institute, which promotes free markets.
Guilty Plea
One politician whose career was derailed during a stint at HUD was Cisneros, whose trajectory mirrors Castro’s. Cisneros served as mayor of San Antonio before he was tapped to run the housing agency by Clinton in 1993. He left in 1997 amid accusations that he lied to the FBI about payments he made to a former mistress. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was later pardoned by Clinton.
That was a problem largely of Cisneros’s own making and didn’t have much to do with the agency, Calabria said. “There is the potential for something really kind of bad to blow up, but it’s only going to happen if you do it yourself,” Calabria said.
Civil-rights groups have been urging Obama to appoint a Latino to his cabinet since the resignations of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis last year. Rafael Collazo, director of political campaigns at the National Council of La Raza, said the organization is “very excited” about Castro’s selection.
“Not only is it important for the Latino community to have qualified Latino candidates, but it is also important for the country to have the best minds,” Collazo said.
(An earlier version of this story was corrected. Dukakis and Bentsen ran as the Democratic national ticket in 1988, not 1998.)
To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Allen in Washington at jallen149@bloomberg.net; Clea Benson in Washington at cbenson20@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeanne Cummings at jcummings21@bloomberg.net Steven Komarow, Don Frederick
Despite three unsuccessful previous efforts, UCLA officials again are proposing that most undergraduates take a class in racial, cultural, gender or religious diversity.
Most UC campuses and many other universities have such a requirement. But UCLA's largest faculty group, which has authority over curriculum changes, has repeatedly rejected the idea, most recently in a low-turnout vote in 2012.
Now, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block is trying again for what he said is an important academic goal.
"We owe it to our students," Block said in a recent interview. "Many of our students have wanted this for several years. I think the faculty owes it to the students to pay attention, even though I understand there are intellectual arguments on both sides of the issue."
Although Block said he knows that cultural diversity topics are infused in many classes, he said that "there is value to an explicit class that deals with the multiple cultures in the United States living together and the conflicts."
Past proposals sparked arguments about whether students were overburdened with other requirements, particularly in the sciences, and whether a budget-strapped university could afford extra classes. Additional questions about whether these classes improve ethnic relations and whether they usually skew left politically were also raised at UCLA and other campuses nationwide that had similar debates.
UCLA is an ethnically diverse campus, but the small number of African American undergraduates continues to be an issue. Among the nearly 25,300 U.S undergraduates there, about 39% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 31% are white, 20% are Latino and 4% are black, according to last fall's statistics.
Discussion about the proposed diversity class is focused at UCLA's College of Letters and Science, which enrolls about 85% of undergraduates. The Arts and Architecture school began such a requirement six years ago, while other divisions such as engineering have not.
Under the 2012 proposal, called "Community and Conflict in the Modern World," students in the Letters and Science college would have had to select one course, lasting one quarter, from an estimated 100 mainly pre-existing courses across many departments. Eligible classes included World Geography, the Holocaust in Film and Literature, Women's Studies and the History of Africa.
The goals included "awareness and understanding" of conflicts about race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation and religion. But supporters said classes needn't stress those factors and could study, for example, how transportation and technology affect various communities.
Supporters also said that about 80% of students would not need an extra class since other courses they took fit the bill; in addition, the "Community and Conflict" class would fulfill one of the 10 general education course requirements, not add one.
But the College of Letters and Science faculty, in a vote that attracted fewer than 30% of eligible voters, rejected the measure 224 to 175. Efforts in 2004 and a decade earlier also failed.
Now faculty leaders are preparing another attempt, perhaps with revisions to include more community internships and more science courses, according to Jan Reiff, a UCLA history and statistics professor who is chair of the campus-wide faculty Academic Senate. She said she hopes it will be approved for students entering in fall 2015.
"This is a major issue for us," she said.
Reiff said she thinks "the climate may be more favorable now" because of increased student activism and Block's strong support. In addition, she cited the October report by a panel headed by former California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno that urged UCLA to better respond to faculty complaints of bias. Other professors point to a recent UC system survey about campus climate, which found significant shares of minorities reporting some discrimination.
Janay Williams, a student activist who is working to get the class requirement approved, said many of her classmates were "very much disappointed" with the last vote and felt the low turnout was an important factor to reverse next time.
Williams, who is black, said she attended a diverse high school in Riverside but that many students come to UCLA unprepared to live and study among such a mix of ethnicities and religions, and that some minority students feel marginalized.
A required diversity class "helps people to learn about someone different from you, to be able to understand where they are coming from," said Williams, who majors in microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics. She said a course will not ease all tensions, but "it's a step in the right direction."
Criticism remains. UCLA anthropology professor Joseph Manson, who wrote an opposition statement for the 2012 ballot, said many faculty felt the course descriptions were too vague and could have fit so many classes that the requirement seemed unnecessary.
Now, he said he wonders why Block is pushing the matter so soon after its last defeat. "The administration's call for yet another vote will strike some faculty as a sign of disrespect for the principle of shared governance and for the democratic process," Manson said in a recent email. Many faculty will wonder "whether it's appropriate to change the curriculum in the service of non-academic (i.e. political) goals."
The UCLA College Republicans, a student group, said in a statement that it values diversity but considers the new proposal "a guise by university leadership to push an otherwise unwanted and offensive political strategy. We believe there are more effective ways — such as expanding free speech zones on campus — to promote tolerance and understanding among students."
The UCLA debate is being renewed as UC Berkeley is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the adoption of its "American Cultures" requirement, a mandate that all undergraduates take a least one of more than 300 semester classes that explore U.S. diversity.
Some schools took action more recently. UC San Diego in 2011 adopted its "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" classes after racially inflammatory incidents the year before, including an off-campus party that mocked Black History Month. In February, Cal State Los Angeles faculty approved a graduation requirement for two diversity-related courses, including at least one focusing on race and ethnicity
“Castro would be a good pick if he was from Mars,” said 
