Free Republic

BREWSTER, Wash. — The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers. Guest workers, like those above, have replaced more than 500 undocumented workers fired in December from Gebbers Farms in Brewster, Wash. While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported. Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Rhode Island's Roman Catholic bishop is calling on U.S. authorities to halt mass immigration raids and says agents who refuse to participate in such raids on moral grounds deserve to be treated as conscientious objectors. Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin asked for a blanket moratorium on immigration raids in Rhode Island until the nation adopts comprehensive immigration reform. Tobin made the requests in a letter sent Tuesday to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston.

A federal lawsuit filed yesterday charges that agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement unlawfully force their way into the homes of Hispanic families in the New York area without court warrants or other legal justification, sometimes pushing down doors in the middle of the night, in search of people who do not live there. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court in Manhattan as a class action, accuses the immigration agency of conducting the raids in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable searches, harming citizens and legal residents of the United States as well as foreigners...

WASHINGTON – Immigration officials sharpened their message a day after being coy about whether they would agree to halt enforcement raids during the 2010 census. “We won't entertain any request to scale back our efforts,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Kelly Nantel said Friday. Census officials had planned to speak with immigration agents about curbing enforcement during the population count, the Census Bureau's second-ranking official said in an interview earlier this week. Raids during the population count would make an already distrustful group even less likely to cooperate with government workers who are supposed to include them in the headcount,...

(EXCERPT) WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau wants immigration agents to suspend enforcement raids during the 2010 census so the government can better count illegal immigrants. Raids during the population count would make an already distrustful group even less likely to cooperate with government workers who are supposed to include them, the Census Bureau's second-ranking official said in an Associated Press interview. Deputy Director Preston Jay Waite said immigration enforcement officials did not conduct raids for several months before and after the 2000 census. But today's political climate is even more volatile on the issue of illegal immigration. Enforcement agents "have...