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BOSTON (AP) — A small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts is offering a new scholarship to illegal immigrants. Hampshire College officials say the endowment and scholarship will finance one student's education every four years. The student will get at least $25,000 in scholarship annually, beginning this fall.

ATLANTA — Illegal immigrants who are granted permission to stay in the country under an Obama administration policy announced in June will be eligible for driver’s licenses in Georgia, the state’s attorney general wrote in a letter to the governor. “While I do not agree with the actions of the President in issuing the directive, it has been implemented by the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS, and state law recognizes the approval of deferred action status as a basis for issuing a temporary driver’s license,” Attorney General Sam Olens, a Republican, wrote in a letter obtained Thursday by The Associated...

Saying they’re fed up with being told they can’t do their jobs, 10 immigration agents on Thursday sued the Obama administration to try to halt the president’s new non-deportation policy and an earlier memo instructing them not to go after rank-and-file illegal immigrants.

Governor Jan Brewer has put the kibosh on Barack Obama’s unconstitutional, Dream Act “end run” around the US Congress by signing an executive order which will keep an estimated 80,000 illegal aliens off of Arizona welfare rolls. In June, Barack Obama directed the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS)—a division of Homeland Security–to provide illegal aliens the means of deferring federal deportation orders. With this Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the president allows illegals who claim to have come to the United States as children to both avoid deportation and apply for US work permits in their state of...

THE GOAL of attrition through law enforcement for illegal immigrants — or, to use the term Mitt Romney favors, “self-deportation” — has suffered a series of setbacks. The latest came Monday when a federal appeals court blocked major parts of Alabama’s draconian immigration law, including one that required public schools to collect information on pupils’ immigration status. It is increasingly clear that Republican state lawmakers and governors have gone too far in their campaign to harass and bully the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants in the hope that they will simply disappear. Alabama has the distinction of having enacted the nation’s...

Illegal immigrants could receive more than $7 billion this year in federal tax credits, according to one estimate, thanks to a loophole in the law that allows people not authorized to work to reap the government payments with no questions asked. Sen. Jeff Sessions' office calculated that, based on recent trends, illegal immigrants could receive roughly $7.4 billion through a provision known as the Additional Child Tax Credit. That's more than quadruple what the payout was four years ago, but the payments have been steadily increasing over the past decade. Though illegal immigrants are prohibited from receiving similar tax credits,...

(CNSNews.com) – Mexican cartels “increasingly” are involved in the “systemic corruption” of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) workers as the cartels attempt to expand their drug and human smuggling operations -- including the trafficking of aliens from terrorism-linked countries into the U.S., the DHS acting inspector general told lawmakers earlier this month.

EDINBURG — Linda Medrano and Elida Perez set out each day with clipboards, stacks of brochures, and practiced eyes for spotting chronic yet often treatable ailments. As promotoras, paid part-time workers tasked with bringing health care basics to the rural poor, their destinations are the colonias of Hidalgo County — unincorporated Texas-Mexico border communities divided into low-cost plots and populated largely by immigrant families. Of late, the mix of literature that promotoras carry has included applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known here as “estampillas,” Spanish for food stamps. The push, fueled by state and federal grants, mirrors...

For the first time in months, 21-year-old Milena Diaz is speaking publicly, in tears –and not afraid of being deported. "I'm going to have more opportunities," Milena Diaz said. "I can study. I can get a good job." Diaz is not wearing an ankle bracelet. The South Florida woman is the first undocumented immigrant to have it removed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano are mum on why the legal requirements that immigrants and visa applicants not be reliant on government assistance have been watered down, according to some lawmakers. The deadline for Clinton and Napolitano to respond to a letter regarding admission of immigrants on or likely to be on assistance programs from senior Republicans on the Budget, Judiciary, Finance, and Agriculture Committees came and passed Monday. On Tuesday Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, blasted the pair for their failure to comply. “It is...

NEA VYSSA, Greece (AP) -- Border police jeeps hurtle along hot, dusty tracks past potato fields on their way to the river that marks the Greek-Turkish border. Sirens blaring, the convoys have been repelling wave after wave of migrants. ... In Athens, the operation is being bolstered by mass roundups of suspected illegal immigrants. They are seen lined up on the streets of the capital every day, many in handcuffs, waiting to be put in detention until they can be deported. In the first week of the crackdown in early August, police said they apprehended nearly 7,000 people for identification...

Immigration is one of the toughest issues for the Republican Party to navigate. Getting tough on undocumented workers appeals to the party's sizable law-and-order contingent. Yet easing the borders so that workers from other countries can perform low-wage or high-tech jobs is popular with the party's business-minded members. These two sides clashed this week as more than 100 delegates met at the Marriott Waterside to draft the Republican platform, a document that sets general policy guidelines for the party as it heads into its national convention next week. Immigration is such a contentious issue that it provided one of the...

HIDALGO COUNTY, TEXAS — In Part One of our exclusive Border Conspiracy series, we went inside the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department. We watched as a crime analyst admitted on hidden camera to changing the crime codes in the Uniform Crime Reporting system. Downgrading the nature of the crimes that the sheriff’s office reports to the federal government makes the Texas county appear safer than it really is. The statistics also help the Obama administration argue that the border is now safer than it was just a few years ago, despite the drug war raging across the Rio Grande in Mexico....

It’s a curious thing. The ACLU is famous for hauling folks into court to battle this issue or that. The Michigan chapter, for example, is battling the state over the fact that kids can’t read. It's also in court trying to restore health care benefits for same sex partners, and it is not happy with the GOP Secretary of State over the so-called U.S. Citizenship check box on voter registration forms. Yet on that one, the group’s CEO says it’s unlikely they will summon Ruth Johnson before a judge. Instead, in what amounts to a waste of breath, the ACLU...

Michael Bloomberg, the independent mayor of New York City, is no one's idea of a hardline Republican conservative. Media titan Rupert Murdoch, whose empire includes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, is no one's idea of a squishy Republican moderate. And Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, a lifelong Democrat, is no one's idea of a Republican at all. It isn't every day that three men with such disparate ideological profiles find common cause, let alone on a high-profile issue that has been roiling American politics for years. But there they were at Boston's Seaport Hotel one evening last week, jointly...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Brian Gottstein, Director of Communication bgottstein@oag.state.va.us (best contact method) 804-786-5874 U.S. Department of Justice clears new Virginia voter ID law - Statement of Attorney General Cuccinelli RICHMOND (August 21, 2012)- Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli issued the following statement after the U.S. Department of Justice granted preclearance (had no objection) to Virginia's new voter identification law. The new law will not only introduce additional forms of acceptable identification when voting, but also will change the procedure for those who vote and do not present identification. The law requires those people to vote provisionally and later present approved...

A small group of immigrants gathered in Woodbury Monday to protest the use of the word "illegal" to describe those who have entered the United States without documentation. "By saying illegal, they're assuming that we broke a criminal law," said Jackeline Saavedra, 27, of Bay Shore, a Touro Law Center student who identified herself as undocumented. "Not everybody enters illegally." Coordinators said they prefer the phrase "undocumented immigrant."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The Ohio State Highway Patrol and the Delaware County Sheriff's office are working on a joint investigation after a man was struck by a car and killed after he was dropped off at Taco Bell. Investigators have put a state trooper on desk duty and two deputies on paid leave while they look into what happened on July 28. Just after 9 p.m, six 911 calls were made indicating that Uriel Juarez Popoca, 22, was driving erratically along I-71 in Delaware County. Two Delaware County deputies found him sitting in his vehicle in the median and when...

Brewer is the Arizona empress who has now defied a directive from the Obama administration, whose easing of deportation rules took effect last week. The federal ruling allowed more than one million people to qualify for the temporary program, which enables certain younger illegal immigrants to apply for work permits, Society Security cards and driver’s licenses. Unless they live in Arizona. The almighty emperor Brewer says no way. ANd if she is breaking federal law, well, hey, she's the empress. Nobody tells her what to do. Last week, she signed an order barring illegal immigrants who qualify from getting any...

What happens to children when their parents are deported? How do these deportations, now more numerous than ever, affect families and the communities in which they live? This report (see sidebar) looks at how immigration enforcement shapes family life in the United States, both among immigrant and mixed-status families, and in their wider communities. Even as the United States has failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the past decade, it has increasingly taken a hardline stance on immigration enforcement, particularly in targeting unauthorized immigrants living in the country. The number of immigrants removed has steadily risen, from close to...